Word: pentagonals
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Show. With his customary skill, Senate Majority Leader Johnson has placed himself directly on top of the session's key issue. As chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, he will sit as prosecutor and judge while the civilian and military brass from the Pentagon is summoned up to the Hill and cross-examined on U.S. defense shortfalls. The committee's report will have a strong impact on what Congress does about defense. Working closely with Texas' Johnson in the defense area will be the chairmen of the House and Senate Military Appropriations Subcommittees, Texas' Representative George...
...rules the waves, and the Air Force controls the air. The post-Sputnik clamor for "leadership" can have few positive results unless the U.S. moves toward some system of military organization that makes effective leadership possible. The pressures of missile technology and loose handling of missile problems by the Pentagon have given new currency to an old idea, most recently and vigorously expressed by the Air Force's retired Lieut. General James H. Doolittle and the Army's research and development chief, Lieut. General James Gavin (TIME, Dec. 23). Both point to the weakness of the present organization...
...flaws in such a military structure showed up almost immediately, and the Pentagon has undergone a bewildering succession of committee surveys, reorganization plans, and legislative attempts to plug up the holes in the system. But all the efforts to strengthen Defense Department control over the separate services have, in fact, served mostly to make the office of the Secretary of Defense itself an unwieldy, sprawling compromise of an organization, with nine assistant secretaries, about 300 committees and 2,151 staffers. Far from working toward unification of forces, the Defense Secretary's office has virtually become a fourth service...
...General Thomas White, as an example (which applies equally to the other service heads), spends most of his week as Air Force Chief of Staff, working on Air Force problems, expounding Air Force doctrine, fighting Air Force battles. But then comes the moment when he walks into a secret Pentagon room, sits down at a table with the three other members of the J.C.S., and puts on his other hat. As a member of the Joint Chiefs, he is expected to help in taking collective action toward a U.S. war plan that can stand as a guide to budgeting, priorities...
...result was vividly explained by Dr. Vannevar Bush, former chairman of the Pentagon Research and Development Board, in a recent appearance before the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Said Bush: "The services themselves, the three services, have prepared war plans, all different, each one of them the best they can produce. From there on, there has been no means by which those could be brought into a unitary plan. And since there has been no such means, the three plans have been advocated by the three services, and the discussion of them has been in the public press and some...