Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [44]
With Eisenhower assured of another term in office, the administration no longer had to pander to Symington and the other Air Power hawks. The nearly one-billion-dollar supplemental appropriation for B-52 bombers that the Democrats had pushed through Congress in the run-up to the election had thrown the budget into deficit, and now it was time to balance the books.
Just where the additional B-52 funds would come from became apparent on November 26, when Engine Charlie Wilson announced the Pentagon’s new “roles and missions directive.” The document was aimed at clearly delineating each of the services’ duties and responsibilities, and laying out jurisdictional boundaries for the squabbling chiefs of staff. Bruce Medaris’s heart must have sunk when he read the section pertaining to missile development.
In regard to the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, operational employment of the land-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile system will be the sole responsibility of the US Air Force. Operational employment of the ship-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile system will be the sole responsibility of the Navy. The US Army will not plan at this time for the operational employment of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile or for any other missiles with ranges beyond 200 miles.
The army had been frozen out. Two hundred miles was the range of the existing Redstone missile. The Jupiter, the ABMA project on which the army had rested its hopes, was effectively being turned over to the air force. To add insult to injury, the air force issued a triumphant statement after the ruling, declaring that “it will be better for the country if the ABMA team were broken up and the individuals filtered out into industry and other organizations.”
Not only had the air force won the IRBM sweepstakes, now it wanted Wernher von Braun and his German colleagues as well. ABMA might well turn out to be the shortest command in Medaris’s colorful career. The irony, he might have reflected, was that Stuart Symington, the man who had set the current fiscal crunch in motion, was the very politician to whom Medaris indirectly owed his first general’s star and his belated promotion to brigadier general. It had been during another set of Senate investigations, back in 1953, that Medaris, then a colonel, had learned the power of public relations. Called to testify about the shortages of munitions and equipment in Korea, Medaris brought a grenade to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, which he dismantled before the startled and spellbound legislators, to expose its precision parts. “If we let down our standards to speed production,” he explained, “we do so at the peril of our troops who deserve the safest and most effective firepower we can provide.” When confronted with a damning letter from a soldier who had written his mother pleading for her to send him ammunition in her next care package, Medaris, nonplussed, asked to see the document. Flashing a telegenic and slightly roguish smile, he disarmed Symington, who headed the subcommittee, by pointing out that the request was for .32-caliber rounds, which were used for target practice in recreational handguns, and not for military issue. For deflecting congressional criticism away from the army, Medaris within weeks received the promotion that had been denied him for nearly ten years. Politics could give, but it could also take away. Unfortunately, Medaris now ruminated, the air force was proving far more adept at politics than missile development.
The air force, he fumed, was no match for the team of engineers he supervised at ABMA. In fact, it was so short on qualified technical experts