The Sidelong Look

When General Matthew B. Ridgway, the Army's Chief of Staff, sat down before the Senate Military Appropriations Subcommittee one day last week, South Carolina's Democratic Senator Burnet R. Maybank was ready with a question: Was Ridgway "satisfied" with the new defense budget, which increased funds for the Air Force, reduced expenditures for the Army? Paratrooper Ridgway hedged, hesitated and then gave his answer: "When a career military officer receives from proper authority a decision ... he accepts that decision as a sound one, and he does his utmost within his available means to carry it out." Nevertheless, Ridgway proceeded, in highly correct form, to say that he thought the U.S. should have more power on the land.

This sidelong look at the new U.S. defense policy was no sudden thought on the part of Matt Ridgway. When the new military-forces paper was signed last December, both Ridgway and Admiral Robert B. Carney, Navy Chief of Staff, penned their signatures with reservations. They signed because President Eisenhower had said that he did not want split papers coming from the Joint Chiefs. Then both called at the White House to register their personal objection to the emphasis on air power. After that, the brass and the press agents in both the Army and the Navy set out to attack the new policy by land and by sea.

Ridgway's answer was the first time that a high military figure had questioned the new policy in public. But the Navy had stated its case in the March issue of its unofficial voice, United States Naval Institute Proceedings. The issue led off with an essay titled "The Great Debate: 1954," written by Commander Ralph E. Williams Jr., the department's star writer. The essay's theme: the "air-atomic concept" is wrong. "The ultimate weapon is the man, not the bomb."

"Atomic air power deters atomic air power, period," wrote Williams. "If we want to deter anything else, and if we want to have the means of dealing with the situation in case the deterrents fail, we must be able to counter . . . any aggressive movement, whether by a hostile army, navy or air force. We must have weapons and concepts suited to the needs of every level of military operation between the border raid and all-out global war . . . This means a level of conventional armaments adequate to meet the needs of our national security in the absence of atomic weapons."

Both the Ridgway and Williams dissents were inevitable expressions of the views of their respective services. In a sense, however, both were assaulting a strawman. When the Eisenhower Administration departed from the witless "balanced-forces" policy (which meant that Army, Navy and Air Force should get about equal appropriations), it did not substitute a policy of putting all the defense eggs in one basket.

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