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State's LeMay turned out to be a powerful combination. Today, when White spends most of his time in Joint Chiefs planning and budget sessions, it is Curt LeMay who is often operating head of the Air Force —and, good soldier that he is, he operates in White's way.*
The Force-in-Being. Tommy White's day starts at 7:10 o'clock with pushups in the living room of his duplex quarters in Fort Myer, Va., takes him early (8:25) to work in Suite 4E924 of the Pentagon, where he is soon stirring up memorandums and directives—green for LeMay, pink for able Air Force Secretary James Douglas, white for his staff. Around him hangs the sense of illustrious predecessors: husky, flamboyant "Hap" Arnold; sinewy, battle-tried "Tooey" Spaatz; slim Hoyt Vandenberg, the old flyer with a 50-mission crush in his cap; Nate Twining, the wise old pilot who led the USAF from props to jets. There Tommy White does his broad-gauge best with what he has. But nobody in the Pentagon knows better than he that he has his problems too. Among them:
Dispersal: SAC's and TAC's bases are overconcentrated, present big targets to Soviet air and missile power. Item: SAC's March AFB at Riverside, Calif, has 90 6-475 and 40 KC-97 tankers, and only one usable runway to get them all into the air come an emergency. The USAF needs six more bases right now, another 100 as soon as Tommy White can get them.
Tankers: The Air Force is scandalously short of the jet tankers needed for midair refueling at high altitude and high speed. Today SAC's B-525 must come down from 50,000 ft. to 18,000 ft. and from 650 m.p.h. to a stall-warning 250 m.p.h. to hook on to SAC's prop-driven KC-97 tankers (the equivalent of Boeing's old airline Stratocruisers). Remedy: a speedup of supply of the KC-135 jet tankers now dribbling into the Air Force at the rate of about four a month.
Manpower: The Air Force is suffering an erosion of manpower. World War II pilots are aging, and a dismaying number of bright youngsters are getting out. Between 1953 and 1956 SAC lost 90,175 skilled technicians, mostly to industry, at a replacement and retraining cost of $1.7 billion; many of these experts have since returned to SAC as their companies' "tech-reps" (civilian technical representatives), and they do much the same as their old jobs at about the salary level of SAC Commanding General Power's $16,851 a year.
Airplanes. Present delivery of B-523 is at the rate of 17 a month; SAC, still using some 300 obsolescent B-365, considers this painfully slow.
In the long-range department, Tommy White and staff must find time to work out the problems of phasing in the force-soon-to-be. "We must constantly re-evaluate and update our thinking," says White, and he does a first-rate job of re-evaluating and updating his own. In SAC's underground headquarters at Offutt AFB near Omaha, teams of officers are already hatching war plans and weapons requirements for manned aircraft and ballistic missiles for next year and each successive year up to 1961. Out of its complex of laboratories, flight-test centers and missile firing ranges, Air Research and Development Command has let R. & D. contracts to no fewer than 160 universities and 1,520 industrial companies in the Air Force's traditional emphasis on private enterprise.