This is solely the administrative office supplies. They have about 850 line items, they estimate. Senator CASE. Well, is this for items that the Army itself is using or is it a store for the purchase of various things by personnel? General SEEMAN. No, sir. The post exchange would be the razor blade, shaving soap type of items. Senator CASE. On page 251 I note this description for the post exchange: Unit is now occupying 1,260 square feet of improvised space in former warehouse area which does not provide adequate heating and ventilating facilities. The post exchange services approximately 2,500 military personnel in the St. Louis area. Additional space in the amount of approximately 1,260 square feet of area is required for proper display and storage of bulk items. Does that mean that the post exchange of St. Louis would become a department store? General SEEMAN. No, sir. This is just a small post exchange for items such as sundries for the military personnel in that area, Senator. This Mart Building is in a location where it is some distance away from the shopping area of St. Louis, and this is a provision for military personnel, similar to that provided on a small Army post. Senator CASE. Are you asking authorization anywhere for the Army to build post exchange facilities that will create what will be the equivalent of a small department store? General SEEMAN. No, sir. Senator CASE. Not anywhere in the bill? General SEEMAN. No, sir. We have a small post exchange for one of our surface-to-air missile installations at a remote station out in the country; outside of Chicago, as I recall, but these are only for the-as I categorize it-shaving soap, razor blade, cigarette type of post exchange operations, Senator. Senator CASE. You will not be selling television sets or air-conditioners or refrigerators? General SEEMAN. Not to my understanding; no, sir. Senator CASE. Well, you say not to your understanding. I would like to know as a matter of fact. General SEEMAN. We will provide it for the record. Senator CASE. All right. General SEEMAN. It is awfully hard to be completely honest. The chairman is asking me for my personal knowledge, and I do my best to cover the ground. Senator CASE. I do not object to your stating to your knowledge, but if we are going to get a definitive answer we should have a flat statement on some of that. General SEEMAN. Yes, I appreciate your feeling. Senator CASE. I would say, Mr. Chairman, I think we ought to have a clear record on this. I was very much surprised to read a letter in a newspaper very sharply criticizing and blaming me because a number of air conditioner units and refrigerators were being purchased in bulk by the Air Force for placing at an installation. I think they said there were some 200 or 300 refrigerators which were being bought and being placed in the Air Force-in some housing that would be modernized or adapted, and I was blamed for not see ing to it that all the local merchants had a chance to sell these as individual items, which I knew nothing about. Senator STENNIS. Yes. Senator CASE. I am not entering into the merits of the thing, except I think we ought to have the record show whether or not we are setting up stores to compete with the local merchants. Senator STENNIS. Certainly. I thought your question went to the entire bill, too, and I am interested in the general supply. I was diverted here a minute. Did you give a complete answer to that, General? If not General SEEMAN. We are going to give a categorical answer to Senator Case as to whether or not we intend to handle refrigerators or air conditioners at these small post exchanges. Senator CASE. If this is going to get into the so-called discount store type of item. General SEEMAN. Yes, sir; we will provide the answer for the record. Senator STENNIS. Your question was: Did the bill anyplace carry anything approaching the department store concept? General SEEMAN. And I replied to the best of my knowledge that it did not. Senator STENNIS. Well, you are going to check it though? General SEEMAN. Yes, sir. Senator STENNIS. All right. (The information referred to follows:) Refrigerators and air conditioners are not authorized items for resale in: domestic exchanges. Such items may not be sold unless exceptions based upon local existence of particular hardship are specifically approved by the Secretary of the Army. No requests for exception to this policy have been received from, the U.S. Army Support Center. FORT LEONARD WOOD, MO. General SEEMAN. The next item is Fort Leonard Wood. General SEEMAN. This installation is responsible for directing and administering a replacement training center including the conduct of various enlisted training courses and directing, training and administering troop units, including the reception station. There are seven line items at this station at a total cost of $9,087,000. The first item is for a 300-bed hospital at a cost of $4,891,000. Senator STENNIS. Just a minute on that, if you do not mind an interruption at this point. This morning we covered in part that all the hospitals in this bill came within the ground rules or the formula that was finally written into the appropriation bill in 1960 General SEEMAN. Yes, sir. Senator STENNIS. Fiscal 1960; that is correct, is it not? General SEEMAN. That is correct. Senator STENNIS. All right. What size hospital is this one now? This nearly $5 million of money. I think you ought to give us: details on it. General SEEMAN. This is a 300-bed hospital, sir. Senator STENNIS. Is that large enough to take care of this huge installation here since you are going to have 18,000 enlisted men there? General SEEMAN. Our original request was for a 400-bed hospital, Mr. Chairman. Senator STENNIS. How did it get down to 300? General SEEMAN. In review, in the process of reviewing it in the Department of Defense and the Bureau of the Budget, this was the determination. Senator STENNIS. Was that due to a review of the patient load and they found out that was too high? If we are going to build an annex to this hospital next year, then we had better put it all in just now. General SEEMAN. I have Colonel Hastings from the Medical Service. Senator STENNIS. All right, Colonel, if you will speak up on this one, please. Come around where we can hear you. Colonel HASTINGS. Sir, from January 27, until the 30th of March the beds occupied by patients in the hospital at Fort Leonard Wood, have been well over 300. Senator STENNIS. How many? Colonel HASTINGS. Well, starting on the 27th of January, there were 341 patients. It worked up to a peak on the 2d of March when there were 538 patients in the hospital. It is now decreasing from that point where as of the 30th of March there were 372 patients in the hospital. Senator STENNIS. Well, you are running well over now. Is this the place where the Secretary, Secretary Short, claims you almost fell through the floor because it was about to fall down? Colonel HASTINGS. Yes, sir. Fort Leonard Wood Hospital is in horrible condition. Senator STENNIS. Well now, what about this, Colonel? You do not have facilities here that are going to take care of your needs according to the present load. Colonel HASTINGS. No, sir. We will have to retain some of the buildings in the old hospital that have been described to take care of the seasonal fluctuation. Senator STENNIS. How much money are you asking for to rehabilitate the old one? Colonel HASTINGS. We are not asking for any. General SEEMAN. None. Senator STENNIS. Well, you will have to later. General SEEMAN. Yes, sir. We have a comparable study, made by the Surgeon General, as to the amount of the old hospital that will have to be continued in service to provide the necessary service in a 300-bed hospital compared with a 400-bed hospital. Senator STENNIS. Well, there never was any objection from this committee or the Appropriations Committee either about hospitals, as such. We wanted you to have one. But it was cutting out the fringes and the administrative facilities, and so forth and so on that. we insisted on, the frills. General SEEMAN. On that score, I might mention, sir, that we have made many cost reductions in what you might call the frills. Senator STENNIS. Yes. General SEEMAN. We reduced the amount of stainless steel equipment-we have put in enameled equipment instead of stainless steel in many cases. Senator STENNIS. I am not complaining about the price of this one. You have this one down, but the question is, is it going to serve the needs? Senator CASE. Mr. Chairman, I would like to invite attention to the figures on personnel strength shown at page 256. There the personnel strength as of June 30, 1959, is shown as a total of 21,049. The second line shows the long-range strength, with an estimated total of 17,624. That would indicate a reduction of close to 3,500 in the long-range personnel strength as compared with what it has been this past year. General SEEMAN. Senator Case, those figures are without the RFA trainees that you were talking about with Secretary Short this morning. If these RFA trainees are to be with us as a matter of our military posture, our estimate is there will be around 30,000 or 31,000 as the long-range strength total. You knock off the civilians and you would get around 29,000. Senator CASE. Whatever your talk about RFA may mean, this is your justification sheet before this committee, and it shows a drop in enlisted strength from 18,593 to 14,590. In other words, you show a drop of 4,000 over the long range. General SEEMAN. Yes, sir, if we exclude RFA trainees. Senator CASE. The figure you gave us on hospital occupancy of 370 in relation to 18,593 of enlisted men would indicate for 14,590, why, a 300-bed hospital would be all that would be indicated. Mr. WESTENBERGER. Senator Case, on the form 1674 which we have, which is the form you are looking at, on strengths, they were put together for publication of this book on the 1st of February in 1960. Recently the Army put out a new stationing plan for permanent construction replacing one published in 1956. This new document shows for Leonard Wood the long-range strength to be 30,860 military personnel as differentiated from what you have on this form here on the 1st of February. Senator STENNIS. Well, that is a new picture, that is altogether different. We General SEEMAN. The question of whether we serve the RFA trainees with hospital facilities is one we are ironing out with Department of Defense and the Bureau of the Budget right now. feel very strongly, as Mr. Short indicated this morning, these are our people, they are part of our military strength, and they must be considered together. Senator CASE. Mr. Chairman, we should get a firmer picture on this than we are getting here. I think we should ask the Secretary of Defense. I do not think this committee should be asked to make a judgment where you present printed justifications and show a drop of 4,000 men in your enlisted strength, and then you tell us that you feel strongly about this RFA business, and at the same time say that is presently under study; that does not give us a very firm fact for basing a judgment on. General SEEMAN. The new long-range stationing plan that Mr. Westenberger referred to was the adjustment of strength following the closing of other posts. Their strengths had to be apportioned among the stations; as you know, the advanced artillery training went to Fort Sill. Senator STENNIS. Well, that is the reason for it, but what Senator Case says is still true, gentlemen, you need not argue about it. I get the idea you need a larger hospital, and certainly these new facts confirm this idea. Your estimate for a heating plant for the hospital, well, if we enlarge the hospital later we will have to enlarge the heating plant, and we are going to have to rehabilitate the old hospital and put in a new heating plant there, perhaps. I do not believe we have a full picture here, gentlemen, of what you need at this place on the hospital. General SEEMAN. At the request of committee counsel we provided, sir, a comparison of the economic advantage of a 400-bed versus a 300bed hospital. If a 300-bed hospital is provided, it is estimated that 62,850 square feet of the old hospital will have to be maintained in service to provide the necessary service; if a 400-bed hospital is provided, the estimates are that 25,180 square feet will have to be maintained in service, and that will have to be rehabilitated to some extent, so that is Senator CASE. There is another angle to this, Mr. Chairman. You will recall a few years ago we were responding, in deciding to build hospitals, with a certain index factor, and then along came Medicare, and we gave the wives of the enlisted personnel the opportunity of choosing whether or not they wanted to go to the military hospital for the care of their children or for OB cases, or take them at the hospital in town, and in many cases we found that the expectant mothers preferred to go to a hospital which was just a few blocks away, that is, if they were living in town, if they were living on the communities, they preferred to go to a hospital near by rather than to take a chance on going to a hospital a few miles away, and I think that is understandable. General SEEMAN. Yes, sir. Senator CASE. I think that in view of the uncertainties attendant upon the arrival of babies, why, it is understandable that an expectant mother might prefer to have a hospital just a few blocks away rather than depending on the hospital that is on station some miles away; there might be other reasons they might prefer it. But in any event, the figures we were given at that time within the year following the making of this Medicare available, indicated that there was a considerable drop in the daily average bed occupancy, and we found that some hospitals were not being used as much as it was anticipated they would be at the time they were built. We had some concrete figures on that, I remember, a year or so ago. I believe the regulations with regard to taking or using outside hospitals were revised. I do not know whether they were in the Army or not, but I think they were in the Air Force. |