sea power, and that very well may be the fact. I am trying, however, to be objective.

But there is one matter of common course, common sense, about this thing and that is in this tremendous technological revolution the greatest advance is in the atomics, and also the fact that atomic power is carried practically exclusively through the air. That means one thing: That means that all of our planning in military matters must be centered around this air atomic element, with the other services being ancillary; and we are not going to get that kind of planning with this reorganization plan.

We are now in a phase-I am back to my statement, Mr. Chairman-in which the United States dominates in the air-atomic field. The Russians have not caught up with us and unless we slacken our efforts, or misdirect it, they never will; I may say I think we are now misdirecting it.

We are failing to recognize that the core of our military strength, of our force and being must be in air-atomic power.

But the Russians-even assuming, Mr. Chairman, that we do keep up with it will soon reach a point where, although we may be relatively stronger in air-atomic power, they will be at what may be called an absolute point-the point where they can make a devastating air-atomic blow on this country and other centers of the free world.

Now, it is my point that it is for this phase-this time of the future Russian capabilities-that we must now make our plans, and our plans must be entirely different from those that have been made in the past.

We need a totally different policy for our military forces than that which we had before World War I and World War II. Then we relied on our industrial capacity; on the ability of our allies to hold out for a long time while we were getting ready, and on the eventual ability of our industry and manpower to turn the tide of battle-and now, in this revolution in arms, the decision may very well be made in the first days of the atomic-air attack.

Let me say I see signs already that we are now planning with respect to these backward notions of being able to sit back, survive without adequate planning the attack of the early days and again rely on our industrial capacity-and this way lies disaster.

The new principle must be:

(1) To have forces in being capable of winning the battle for air-atomic domination in the first few weeks of the war; and

(2) Of centering these forces in being on air-atomic power, with all the other elements ancillary to it.

Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would like to call your particular attention to that paragraph on page 7 which, with your permission, I would like to read again:

The new principle of our planning, instead of relying on our industrial capacity to come in and win while our allies were holding the line in Europe, must be(1) To have forces in being capable of winning the battle for air-atomic domination in the first few weeks of the war; and

(2) Of centering these forces-planning for these forces-on air-atomic power, with the other elements ancillary to air-atomic power.

Now, this is a drastic thing; a radical thing. It requires the fullest ability to present the air case; and what this committee decides with respect to organization is, therefore, tremendously vital on the subsidy

point of what kind of establishment you are going to have, because the way the establishment is now set up and the way it is going to be increasingly so under this reorganization plan is going to work for compromise, backward thinking and the failure to have the imaginative foresight on which the security of the country depends.

As I have written in this statement, the form of our Department of Defense will have a great deal to do with the question of whether or not we are going to have the right kind of force.

At the moment the Department of Defense is not so organized as to encourage the planning and building of the right kind of force. On the contrary the present organization of the Defense Department works. for compromise and for the looking to past methods as a basis for building our Military Establishment in the future.

Under the present form of organization airpower is likely to be submerged in the vastness of the organization and because of the method of compromise which is natural to the present setup.

Reorganization Plan No. 6 will accentuate the present tendency of overconservative planning looking to the past, and will interfere with the proper presentation of the case of airpower.

We are, indeed, at this moment, I believe, seeing an example in the debate over the budget for the fiscal year 1954 of the failure to provide the proper mechanism for the presentation of the air-atomic point of view.

In my opinion, the cut in the Air Force budget seriously hurts the security of this country.

If we continue as we are, helped along the path by Reorganization Plan No. 6, we will see an accentuation of the principle of compromise in a three-way division of the defense budget, to which, by the way, we seem to be working, the neglect of the greater source of military strength of this country-namely, its air-atomic power-and the consequent failure of our country to have the kind of military establishment it needs.

The solution, I think, is to go back to the 1947 act.

Now, Mr. Chairman, to save time, I would like to introduce into the record the rest of my statement.

Suffice it to say what I have said in the rest of my statement is to object to the enhancement of the power of the Joint Chiefs about which the committee has already heard so much, and is in effect along the lines Mr. Eberstadt has already presented to the committee; and I suggest, very far from enhancing the position of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you should consider abolishing that position entirely.

The British system, which is very much like ours, except they have no chairman, seems to work very satisfactorily.

The CHAIRMAN. You mean fix it the way we had it in the beginning, with no chairman?

Mr. FINLETTER. Yes; I would much prefer to see it with no chairman. I think it would be better.

My reason for that is-Mr. Eberstadt hit it, but my main reason isthis Chairman is a symbol of authority, and even the most self-effacing individual cannot help being the symbol of all the military might of this country and from getting out into questions far beyond military matters, getting out into matter of foreign policy and economic policy.

The gist of my remarks the main point which I wish to make—if the chairman will allow me to introduce this statement and put the rest of the statement in the record

The CHAIRMAN. We will put the rest of it in the record.

Mr. FINLETTER. You will put the rest in the record?

The CHAIRMAN. That is right.

(The complete statement of Mr. Finletter is as follows:)

STATEMENT OF THOMAS K. FINLETTER, FOrmer SecretaRY OF THE AIR FORCE I am glad to have the opportunity to appear before this committee in connection with the President's Reorganization Plan No. 6, Department of Defense. There should be, I believe, a presumption in favor of any reorganization plan submitted by the President. The responsibility for the management of the executive branch is on the Chief Executive. As a general proposition, therefore, it would seem that the views of the Chief Executive as to the manner in which the executive branch should be organized should receive the very highest consideration.

Reorganization Plan No. 6, however, raises certain fundamental questions as to the future of the Defense Department and of the strength and quality of our military force in being, which are so important, that I shall venture to put forward to the committee certain criticisms of the principles upon which this reorganization plan is based.

Reorganization Plan No. 6 in itself is not radical in nature. The changes it would make are gradual. Nevertheless, it is part of a historical line of development of the Defense Department which, it seems to me, is leading that Department in a direction which is not for the best interests of the country. Reorganization Plan No. 6 would lead us one step further toward a single monolithic establishment, with one service in one uniform, and towards a diminution of civilian control over major military politices.

The provisions which have this effect are (1) the increase in the authority of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in section 1, subsections (c) and (d); and (2) the increase in the number of assistant secretaries from 3 to 9 (section 3). Also, in the negative sense, the reorganization plan holds to the principle of concentration of the operations of the services in the Department of Defense which was started in the 1949 amendment to the Security Act.

The structure of the original National Security Act of 1947 was, I believe, sound. Its theory was coordination, rather than domination of the operations of the services. It was expected that the Department of Defense would be small in numbers, self-denying with respect to the operations of the service departments, and would confine itself to matters of broad policy. Necessarily, the Secretary of Defense had to have the final authority-the power of decision; otherwise the coordination would not have been effective. But it was, I believe, the theory of the 1947 act that the basic control of operations and of specialized policy should be in the three service departments, and that the Department of Defense should not itself dominate the operations of the services.

In 1949 amendments to the act were made, the purpose of which was to strengthen the position of the Secretary of Defense. I believe that these amendments were ill-advised. Briefly, what they did was (1) to create a Deputy Secretary of Defense with rank senior to that of the service secretaries; (2) to convert the service departments into military departments instead of executive departments, a technical change which took away Cabinet status from the service secretaries; and (3) to remove the service secretaries from the National Security Council. This effort to strengthen the legal position of the Secretary of Defense in fact weakened it. It downgraded the position of his principal partners-the civilian secretaries-who should be his mainstays in exercising his authority over the three services.

But the principal effect of the 1949 amendments was to increase vastly the functions which the Department of Defense directly carried on, to make for a great increase in the number of personnel in the Department of Defense, and to work more and more toward the centralization within the Department of Defense of all major decisions relating to the three services.

The effect of Reorganization Plan No. 6 will be to increase this tendency toward a single service in a single uniform. I believe it is probably only a matter of time, with the present trend, before the Department of Defense reaches the position where there will be a single general staff directing the affairs of all three services,

operating directly under the authority of a Secretary of Defense who will not be able to control the operations of such a unified department because of its very size. I believe also that the tendency of Reorganization Plan No. 6 will be to build up military control as opposed to civilian control within the Department. Let me give the reasons why I believe that both of these tendencies are undesirable.

In the centralization of power in the Department of Defense we must, I believe, avoid two extremes—(1) having three service departments who would be too independent and over whose operations there would be insufficient control with resultant overlapping of functions and waste; and (2) the opposite of this-overcentralization of authority in one single department.

A single department running the whole Military Establishment would have two weaknesses: (1) It would be too big for efficient control by civilian authorities; and (2) it would be bad for airpower.

The mere size of a single Department of Defense would be appalling. The proper organization of such a vast enterprise requires a large measure of decentralization. The best decentralization structure would be that which was set up in the 1947 act, namely, three civilian Secretaries each running his own Department, but under the overriding authority and broad policy control of the Secretary of Defense. By this I mean the Secretary of Defense himself directing, with a small staff, the lines of policy to be followed by the civilian Secretaries. I do not mean an establishment whereby the Department of Defense has a large number of Assistant Secretaries and one or more Deputy Secretaries who would operate not through the Secretaries of the services, but would deal directly with the subordinate officials of the three services, thus, in fact, tending to take over the detailed operations of the services.

The tendency of Reorganization Plan No. 6 will be to create a condition which will be unsatisfactory, because it will be neither one thing nor the other. It will be neither an independent administration of each of the three service departments by the civilian Secretary thereof, plus coordination by the Secretary of Defense, nor will it be complete domination of the three services by the office of the Secretary of Defense. It will, therefore, create a relationship which will demand the obvious solution-the putting of all power in the single Department of Defense of the creation of the single service with the single uniform.

But more serious yet, a single monolithic establishment would not produce the proper emphasis on air atomic power.

We are in the midst of the greatest technological revolution in armaments in history. Atomic power is the center of this revolution-its most important element. Atomic power is practically exclusively carried through and delivered from the air.

We are now in a phase in which the United States dominates in the air atomic field. The Russians have not caught up with us and unless we slacken our effort, or misdirect it, they never will. But the Russians will soon reach a point where, although we may be relatively stronger in air atomic power, they will be at what may be called an "absolute" point-the point where they can make a devastating air atomic blow on this country and other centers of the free world.

It is for this phase, when Russia has this great capability, that we must now plan and our plans must be entirely different from those of the past. We need a totally different policy for our military forces than that which we had before World War I and World War II. Then we relied on our industrial capacity; on the ability of our allies to hold out for a long time while we were getting ready; and on the eventual ability of our industry and manpower to turn the tide of battle. Now the decision may well be made in the first days of atomic air attack.

The new principle must be (1) to have forces in being capable of winning the battle for air atomic domination in the first few weeks of the war; and (2) of centering these forces in being on air atomic power, with the other elements ancillary to it.

The form of our Department of Defense will have a great deal to do with the question of whether or not we are going to have the right kind of force. At the moment the Department of Defense is not so organized as to encourage the planning and building of the right kind of force. On the contrary the present reorganization of the Defense Department works for compromise and for the looking to past methods as a basis for building our Military Establishment in the future.

Under the present form of organization air power is likely to be submerged in the vastness of the organization and because of the method of compromise which is natural to the present setup.

Reorganization Plan No. 6 will accentuate the present tendency of overconservative planning looking to the past, and will interfere with the proper presentation of the case of airpower.

We are, indeed, at this moment, I believe, seeing an example in the debate over the budget for the fiscal year 1954 of the failure to provide a proper mechanism for the presentation of the air-atomic point of view.

If we continue as we are, helped along the path by Reorganization Plan No. 6, we will see an accentuation of the principle of compromise in a three-way division of the defense budget, the neglect of the greater source of military strength of this country, namely, its air-atomic power, and the consequent failure of our country to have the kind of Military Establishment it needs.

The solution I think is to go back to the 1947 position in which airpower was much able to present its views for final determination by the President than it is under the present arrangement.

I suggested also that Reorganization Plan No. 6 would make it more difficult than before to exercise civilian control over our military policies. I refer to the increased authority of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under subsection (c) of section 1 of the Reorganization Plan, giving the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the right of approval of the members of the Joint Staff and their tenure, and to subsection (d) of section 1 transferring the functions of management of the Joint Staff and the Director from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The effect of this provision will be to increase very substantially the authority and prestige of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The tendency should, I believe, be in the opposite direction. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is a symbol of military authority, and with this increased power will become a more powerful symbol. Already there is a tendency to regard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as having authority beyond that of his military functions, and to call upon him for views of an economic and political nature. The effect of this tendency will be to further increase the prestige of the Chairman and to this extent to lessen the authority of the civilian heads.

Decisions of the Department of Defense rarely are purely military in nature. They are mixed, in that they contain large elements of economic and foreign policy as well as military policy.

The enhanced power of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be likely to interfere with the prestige and authority of the four civilian Secretaries who should deal with these mixed military, political, and economic matters. Rather than build up the position of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff it would be better again, to move in the opposite direction. The Department of Defense would operate better, and certainly with more civilian control, if the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were abolished.

In summary, it seems to me that Reorganization Plan No. 6 is another step in the direction of a single monolithic establishment, the single service-single uniform set up, with a single general staff, the effect of which will be (1) to enhance military authority on matters which should be the responsibility of the civilian' heads of the four Departments; and (2) to interfere seriously with the development of the kind of air-atomic force in being which in indispensable to the security of this country and to our hopes for preventing war.

Mr. FINLETTER. The main point in those remarks, Mr. Chairman, is the objection to this move toward a single, monolithic establish

Mrs. ST. GEORGE. Well, I was just interested in that last remark. Do you feel having this Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is definitely to mitigate against airpower

Mr. FINLETTER. Well, Mrs. St. George

Mrs. ST. GEORGE. And, if so-you probably covered this in your testimony; I am sorry I couldn't be here I am just wondering in what way you feel it would do so.

Mr. FINLETTER. It wasn't so much the Chairman that does that, as it is the Assistant Secretaries.