Would you make any further comment on that, Admiral Radford? Admiral RADFORD. No, sir. I will ask General Twining about it. I think it has been mentioned up here that all of the services have had trouble in keeping their trained men. We have had a tremendous turnover. Last year we requested and you gave us a pay increase and certain bonuses to attract personnel to remain in the service, to get them to re-enlist, and to retain the young officer specialists. So far as I know the actions taken last year are showing an improvement in that situation. Of course, some of the difficulty comes with new equipment and new aircraft. Before you get the bugs out you have extraordinary diffiulties in keeping them going. The Air Force has had, since the Korean war, a great deal of trouble in retaining their trained electronics personnel, and so have the other services. Mr. MAHON. Well, it is difficult to accomplish anything worth while without considerable trouble. It is unfortunate, it seems to me, that this kind of condition exists. If we are maintaining and feeding billions of dollars into this defense program in an effort to deter gression, when we are limping along without airplanes for which there are crews and maintenance, it is a pretty serious situation. Admiral RADFORD. We have the total manpower, but we have trouble In keeping the trained manpower. Secretary WILSON. In that connection, there is a matter that is not up before this committee, but which I would like to tell you about. I am very anxious to get some legislation through to integrate into our Regular officer group a great many more of our Reserve officers. If I remember the figure correctly, only 18 percent of our Air Force officers are Regular officers, while in the Navy it is about 45 percent. That means that 82 percent of the officers in our Air Force in their own minds have not made the military career their life's work, and they do not have the assurance that they will be kept on as Regular officers. I believe that providing that assurance would greatly improve the situation, because as long as a man is a Reserve officer he keeps looking around to see, "Well, maybe I have a greater opportunity in industry or somewhere else." Or some little thing happens and he gets discouraged, and off he goes. I am very sure that this legislation will be a great help. There is another thing that I would like to point out-and some of you perhaps know it as well as I do-and that is that some of the smartest and brightest young men I have ever met in our country are these top aviators. They are a wonderful group of young men. If you ake one of these planes and look it over, you will come to the conclusion that it takes a superman to fly it. If you take the speeds they fly at and the conditions they fly under and consider all of the mechanical and technical aspects, they must be perfect. It is a terrific job. SOVIET ARMY Mr. MAHON. The American people are being told through the press recently that The Kremlin has secretly remodeled the Red Army into the world's most powerful ground force, equipped with the latest weapons for fast-moving atomic offensives in Western Europe, competent military sources asserted yesterday. They said 2.5 million men have been almost completely equipped with new weapons and it gives a description of the weapons. This modernization, the sources said, clearly indicates the Red Army is being fitted for offensive atomic-type warfare in areas with well-developed hård road systems. Russia has mostly dirt roads. The battle order of the Red army, it was said, continues at a total of 175 divisions, 30 of them assigned to East Germany and satellite states in Western Europe. Sixty more can be moved quickly to back up those on the western front. I do not care to participate in considering scare headlines and things of that type, but I do think that we must be aware of the fact of this great danger to us. BRINK OF WAR Secretary Dulles-and I admire Secretary Dulles, usually-comes out and talks about our dancing or balancing on the brink or the precipice of war three times, stating that this is a necessary art and all of that business, and yet while Mr. Dulles is on the brink, "Ground crew shortage cuts Air Force flights," and all of these sad stories are given us. That is no way for the Defense Department to be run, while we are swaying right there on the precipice, Mr. Secretary. Do you agree? Secretary WILSON. I think that you are overstating one side of the matter. Mr. MAHON. All right, discount it by 50 percent. Secretary WILSON. Still, while some of these people are afraid you gentlemen will be too tight with the money, they may want to scare you a bit to make sure we get the budget we are asking for. Mr. MAHON. We have been frightened many times before. Secretary WILSON. Somebody in the Air Force not doing his job may try to explain why his particular fighter group is not operating well, by claiming he has not got enough good mechanics or something similar. None of these things you are talking about is too tough to overcome. The one that is the tough one is the unlimited arms race to destruction, where you have enough military power on both sides to practically wipe out the world. Mr. MAHON. That is all very well Secretary WILSON. And some people want to build it up to where they make sure we get the birds, too, you know. Mr. MAHON. That is all very interesting and very disturbing, but I am getting now to this point, Mr. Secretary: That there is much evidence to indicate that we are not in the state of readiness with our present forces that we ought to be in. When we are not in a greater state of readiness and when we are teetering from time to time on the brink between war and peace, it looks to me like the situation is not too healthy. Secretary WILSON. I would say this, from my 3 years of experience and I cannot go back any further, because I was not close. enough to know of my own knowledge-we were never in a better state of readiness than we are today. When I first came down here we had a bunch of "paper wings." Mr. MAHON. That is all very interesting, Mr. Secretary, but that is not responsive to this particular situation. When we were at the brink recently three times, enumerated by the Secretary, were you there with the Secretary, and how well were your efforts coordinated? Secretary WILSON. Mr. Chairman, the Secretary did not write that article. When I was asked about it I said, "Well, I never thought we were quite that close." Mr. MAHON. I want to say this: I heard you on television when you said you did not think we were quite so close to the brink. I thought you handled yourself very well. But nevertheless Mr. Dulles came back and stood pat on that article, as I recall it, and particularly as to the quotation. Secretary WILSON. I do not know whether he comes before your committee or not, but I think he should speak for himself. Mr. MAHON. I do, too; but I want you to speak for yourself. Mr. MAHON. I want you to speak for yourself as to what you were doing when Mr. Dulles was at the brink these three times when you were the Secretary of Defense. I do not want to be facetious or partisan, because this is no place for partisanship. This transcends partisanship. Secretary WILSON. I will tell you what I think was the essence of that discussion. It was just the opposite of the appeasement policy. That is what I think Secretary Dulles would say if he were here and you asked him about it, as to what he means by his current approach. Mr. MAHON. That is all very good. We do not want appeasement and we want a firm, strong policy. That is all very well. My question of you, Mr. Secretary, is, "What were you doing when Secretary Dulles was at the brink, whether it was a bad brink, a little brink, or a medium-sized brink. What was the Defense Department doing specifically at that time?" Secretary WILSON. I think you have to take them one at a time. Which one of the so-called brinks do you want to talk about? Mr. MAHON. You talk about any one of them that is fresh in your mind. Take any brink. Secretary WILSON. Well, at the time just before the Korean armistice we sent an additional marine division to the Pacific. We made some other moves to strengthen our military position. We alerted some of Curt LeMay's bombers. I will always think we got the armistice because they thought if they did not really do something, after all of the talking for a couple of years, something was going to happen. In other words, the war was either going to toughen and we were going to dive in and try to win it, or there was going to be an armistice. Mr. MAHON. Well, the armistice was certainly short of a very creditable victory for us, we all agree. Maybe it was the right thing; it would not be for me to say. Secretary WILSON. I suppose history will determine that some day. Mr. MAHON. I doubt it. Secretary WILSON. In regard to Formosa we sent our fleet down there to assist in the evacuation of the Tachens. So that was done without a worsening of the war. We took a strong position on that. The Defense Department has carried out its duties and obligations to support our foreign policy in a firm kind of way. Mr. MAHON. Were you any more alert in these periods of great crisis when we were supposedly at the brink? Secretary WILSON. Certainly. Mr. MAHON. Were you more alert than you are today, for example? Mr. MAHON. Is Dien Bien Phu the other one, now? Mr. MAHON. Did we do anything there militarily? I am talking about militarily, in order to support the Secretary of State in the event the Secretary was not able to withdraw from the brink? Secretary WILSON. We loaned the French some additional airplanes. We even went so far as to send some of our people to help maintain them, which was about as far as we felt we should go at that point. Mr. MAHON. I am thinking more of not just what you did in Indochina but what you were doing anticipating that a big war might break, in the event that our firm position-if it was firm-led us to war. Secretary WILSON. The Joint Chiefs of Staff made a review of those various situations and gave the President and myself the very best military advice in regard to the situation. You will remember, Admiral Radford, when these situations came up, we made an up-to-theminute reappraisal of it. That does not mean that we do not have any plans prepared ordinarily, but they get a little old sometimes. Other people have an effect on our planning, too. You cannot say for sure what anybody else is going to do, so the situation changes all over the world and you have to take a right-up-close look. DISCUSSION OF CONCURRENCE OF JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF IN DEFENSE BUDGETS AND PROGRAMS Mr. MAHON. I would like to pursue that question further, but I do not want to take all that time. A recent article by the former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Ridgway, is as follows: As a combat soldier, I have been shot at from ambush and bombed by planes which I thought to be friendly, both of which are experiences that are momentarily unsettling. I do not recall, however, that I ever felt a greater sense of surprise and shock than when I read in President Eisenhower's state of the Union message in 1954 that "the defense program recommended for 1955 is based on a new military program unanimously recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff." The words "unanimously recommended" are in italics. Now, you probably have read General Ridgway's article. We will not take the time now to go into every detail of General Ridgway's article. Secretary WILSON. I have the second one here that I have not read. Mr. MAHON. I have not read that either. My point is, without going into all the details of the article, I want to know something about the integrity or the lack of integrity of the 1957 budget with which General Ridgway had nothing to do. How unanimous is the 1957 budget which is now before the subcommittee? Secretary WILSON. I think you realize that the Chiefs do not pass on the budget. Mr. MAHON. We have been into that in great detail in previous years. Secretary WILSON. They do not put their approval or disapproval on the budget. Mr. MAHON. They talk about the forces? Secretary WILSON. They talk about the force levels, and I think maybe to straighten out the record, since you have brought up the subject, I would like to say a little bit about the past, if that is all right. Mr. MAHON. All right but why do you not answer the question about 1957 while you are at it? Secretary WILSON. I also made the statement that in 1957 the force levels were the unanimous recommendation of the Chiefs. Admiral Radford is here and he can tell you whether that is so or not. I have every reason to believe they are unanimous. Mr. MAHON. I heard some rumblings. Secretary WILSON. I do not very often sit with the Chiefs, although I have done so at times. All the papers from the Chiefs are not unanimous, but this happened to be. That makes it a little easier for me, especially if it is what I think is right anyhow. The difference of opinion was pretty small as we got on down toward the end of the road this time. Mr. MAHON. Smaller than usual? Secretary WILSON. That is right. Mr. MAHON. In other words, in 1954, at the time General Ridgway said that he was shocked beyond measure when the President said in his state of the Union message that the military budget had been unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs, it is not going to be like that? Secretary WILSON. I would like to get the record straight now. The President never said the budget had the unanimous approval of the Joint Chiefs. He did not say that. I would like to point out to this committee that nearly 2 years ago, on February 1, 1954, I appeared before this committee in support of the 1955 Department of Defense budget. At that time I made the following statement, and I am quoting from your record: These basic concepts that I have just noted are the foundation of the defense program which I am presenting today, and which the Secretaries of the Military Departments, Admiral Radford, and the military chiefs will subsequently be discussing. This program is built around new military plans unanimously recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by the President, following consideration by the National Security Council. It is intended to make and keep America strong and secure in an age of peril. The Secretaries of the military departments, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford, and the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Marine Corps all appeared before your committee to discuss this same program. I have nothing further to add to the testimony that I gave before your committee at that time. In other words, that is, as far as I know, a completely correct state ment. Mr. MAHON. While I do not know that it would do us any good to thresh out in great detail the complaint that General Ridgway has made, of course I know, and I guess you do, that he was very unhappy last year and the year before with the Army's part of the program. Of |