Word: wickham
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...world, and, of course, there remain all the other armed services of the nation to be drawn ons But a pair of widely separated major confrontations-a Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf oilfields, say, and a blowup in Korea-would pose a real problem. General John A. Wickham, the Army Chief of Staff, fears that U.S. commitments "probably exceed the force capabilities...
...weapons system whose testing has recently caused the most embarrassment to the Army is the Pershing II missile, which is scheduled for deployment in West Germany four months from now but has failed in five of its 16 experimental firings. Every one of the misfires, Wickham charged, was the result of quality-control problems. Pershing's contractor is the Martin Marietta Corp., with headquarters in Bethesda, Md. Army officials familiar with the program explained that the most recent test, on July 27, was botched because of improperly placed shims, or washers, in the hot-thrust section of the missile...
...Army's agreement with Avco contains no penalty clauses for late delivery, a loophole Wickham called "a contract deficiency." Moreover, the Army waited so long before even considering the possibility of going to a second supplier that, given the two to three years start-up time, it may now be too late...
Turning to Congress, Wickham accused the legislative branch of having "aggravated" problems surrounding another of the Army's headache projects, the M-1 Abrams tank. Deliveries of the AGT-1500C turbine engines for the huge (120,023-lb.) vehicles have been so slow that the Army has been forced to cannibalize the power plants of field-tested units and use them on tanks coming off the production line. Under Secretary of the Army James R. Ambrose estimates that this rip-out process has cost "well over a million dollars so far." Yet a House-Senate conference committee refused...
Noting that both Wickham and Ambrose were appointed by the White House, one Army officer summed up: "The Administration is shooting rubber bullets at Congress and the contractors. Nothing very lethal is involved...