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What's the Goal? In pre-Korean days, the public was told what wonderful blueprints for M-day were all drawn in Washington; the U.S. would not be caught napping if another war came. Phantom orders were already written; simple telegrams to machine-tool manufacturers would set off $900 million in orders.
The war for which these neat blueprints were prepared did not come. At the outset of the Korean "police action," presidential aides had a stock answer to any suggestion that the U.S. would have to mobilize: "After all, we are only fighting the North Koreans." Not until the Chinese Communists entered the war in November did the Administration declare a national emergency. General Marshall and his Pentagon planners went to work to design a new mobilization plan, more modest than the old M-day plan. They had congressional authority to mobilize as fast and far as they wanted, but Defense Secretary Marshall, who has said he won his Ph.D. in Mobilization in World War II, put on a cautious brake. His decision: a gradual three-year arms buildup, costing about $130 billion. Goal: to provide weapons & equipment for a U.S. armed force of 3,500,000 men, while also supplying allies abroad.
Basically, the plan called for building up production lines and running them full speed from the time they began operating until mid-1953. At that point, by the Marshall timetable (which assumes no general war until then), production will be allowed to taper off to a rate of perhaps $25 billion to $30 billion a year as a semipermanent part of the U.S. economy. Congress has already appropriated $49 billion for fiscal 1951, of which $41 billion will be spent for military procurement (see chart), and the President has submitted a 1952 budget of $60.7 billion.
How Good Is the Goal? Mid-1953 has become, as M-day once was, one of those magic-sounding dates which Administration speakers like to roll off. Typical was Mobilizer Wilson's crack in April: "If we can stall off a decision by Stalin until after that time, he isn't going to attack in 1953, because he'll be a dead duck if he strikes then—and he knows it."
The less glamorous fact is that even in 1953, the U.S. will not be ready to fight a major war. The present mobilization plan has not pushed production throttles ahead to full speed; they have been set at roughly half speed. Under present mobilization, the U.S. would never reach World War II strength. Even if it went all-out, slammed on full controls and decided to produce arms to full capacity, there is no assurance that it could reach that level by the end