Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [45]
Medaris was convinced that his in-house team had more experience and a more proven track record. But the air force had better political connections, along with the deep-pocketed support of the defense industry. So despite the fact that an early prototype of the Jupiter had just flown 3,000 miles, breaking every U.S. record for distance, height, and speed, it was ABMA that was going to be sacrificed to pay for bombers that could be rendered obsolete by the time they rolled off the assembly line. For this, Medaris partly blamed Eisenhower. “In all honesty, I do not think that the situation has been helped by having a soldier in the White House,” he complained. “Anyone whose personal experience ended shortly after [World War II] cannot hope to be abreast of today’s military needs. Yet having been immensely successful as a theatre commander in a major war, the President is necessarily impressed with his own military knowledge, and less inclined to listen to the advice of today’s military professionals.”
Eisenhower, however, was more attuned to rocketry’s deadly potential than Medaris believed. “Can you picture a war that would be waged with atomic missiles?” the president had asked reporters at a February 8, 1956, press conference. “It would not be war in any recognizable sense.” War was a “contest,” a battle of wits, strategy, and attrition. Missile warfare, Eisenhower lamented, “would just be complete, indiscriminate devastation.” Ike understood the impact of fully developed missiles on any future conflict with the Soviet Union. He was simply in no hurry to rush headlong into what he labeled “race suicide.”
The president was far from the only military man with doubts about modern rockets. The air force itself viewed missiles with extreme skepticism, and the bomber generals who dominated the service preferred the proven over the uncertain. In August 1956, for instance, the air force’s top research and development commander, General Thomas S. Power, warned of a “somewhat distorted and exaggerated picture” of missile capabilities and complained that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies.” And General LeMay openly opposed rockets, which he put at the bottom of his list of military priorities. Missiles, he argued, would gain only a “satisfactory state of reliability” after “long and bitter experience in the field.” Meanwhile, they would draw away funds from badly needed bombers. Another general, Clarence S. Irvine, groused that missiles didn’t have much of a deterrent effect. “I don’t know how to show . . . teeth with a missile,” he scoffed.
Nor were these isolated views. Virtually all of the air force’s top officers were former bomber commanders or fighter pilots, who saw little glory in sitting in a bunker with a slide rule, pushing launch code sequences. Resistance to missile development within the service was becoming such an issue that Vice Chief of Staff Thomas D. White, in a 1956 speech to the Air War College, warned his subordinates to get with the program.
We see too few examples of really creative, logical, far-sighted thinking in the Air Force these days. It seems to me that our people are merely trying to find new ways of saying the same old things about air power without considering whether they need changing to meet new situations and without considering the need for new approaches to new problems.
And so the air force was getting missiles it didn’t even want, while the army, which desperately wanted them, was being left out in the cold. If Medaris thought the system cynical and