Now, it was plain enough that industrial mobilization involved mobilization of the resources needed for the Navy, as well as the Army, and yet the National Defense Act of 1920, as an act, is an act relating only to the Army, and I submit that the Navy and the Marines had a place in the National Defense and that stimulating and regulating their activities belong on that act, but just simply due to the fact that the War Department presented its views to the Congress, the National Defense Act of 1920 involves only the Army; and, I think it was a defect in the law that only the Assistant Secretary of War was directed to carry out industrial mobilization. The Navy had a proper concern in that, too.

Until recent time, however, the strain on the two-department system was not severe. Prior to World War II there were not many occasions when teamwork of the land forces and sea forces in combat was imperative. The bulk of the fighting and the bulk of the military effort took place in the land campaigns.

The defects in organization, always inherent in the two-department plan, became plainly visibile in World War II. Amphibious operations became the general rule, not the exception as in earlier wars. In the theaters of war close teamwork of the fighting forces on land, on sea, and in the air was an indispensable requirement. It was recognized almost at once that wthin sound of the enemy's guns we could not get the needed teamwork under the outmoded method of double command and voluntary cooperation between the Army and the Navy, the system in effect on the day of Pearl Harbor.

I wonder if the members of the committee have any idea of all the weird systems that were in effect as to command in overseas areas prior to Pearl Harbor, as between the Army and Navy? The theory of voluntary cooperation is of paramount interest and the shifting of commands, according to where the enemy attacks were going to come from, is another thing that entered into the matter, just as if we knew in advance where the attack was going to come from. If it was going to come from the sea, then in Hawaii the Navy must be in command, but if it was going to come from a landing on the land, the Army should be in command.

The CHAIRMAN. And if it came from the air there would be nobody in command?

Mr. PATTERSON. Nobody, or both. Well, they were very fancy systems, I want to tell you, and it would take a man skilled in semantics and in prophesy to guess who would be in command a single week in advance in one of these overseas posts.

I think in Panama, in general, it was the Army, but if the fleet came in suddenly, it would be the Navy and then go back to the Army. It was a joke, and nothing else. It was no joke for the soldiers and sailors that were there, though.

All hands in the Army and Navy agreed on the sheer necessity of unified command overseas in the various fields, Nimitz in the Pacific theatre, MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, Eisenhower in North Africa, and so on. There can be no question but that recognition of unified command in the campaigns was of prime value in winning the war.

In sharp contrast to the concept of unified commands overseas was the lack of unified command at main headquarters in Washington in World War II. Here we were not under the enemy's guns, and old

traditions die hard, even in war years. Here we persisted in waging war by divided command, by two separate military departments, with no one below the President himself to settle disputes and controversies; and disputes and controversies arising from honest and conscientious differences of opinion were incessant. The diffusion of authority and responsibility between the War Department and the Navy Department was a handicap all through the war years. I was Under Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945, and Secretary of War from 1945 to 1947, and I speak from personal experience. I also refer to the chapter in Secretary Stimson's book "On Active Service," touching on the constant disputes between the War Department and the Navy Department.

We did have the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a joint agency. While I would not minimize the value of the work done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the war days, its effectiveness was seriously impaired by the fact that it had no head. It was a committee of four, and the veto of one was enough to prevent action being taken.

The CHAIRMAN. Who were the four?

Mr. PATTERSON. General Marshall, General Arnold, Admiral Leahy, and Admiral King.

The CHAIRMAN. All right, go ahead.

Mr. PATTERSON. I recall, they had a similar set-up in the National Advisory Committee, which was the agency here in 1940 and 1941 for planning the industrial mobilization of the Nation, in which they called forth the national defense effort. It was a board of seven, and they had the false idea of showing the country that they were unified on every point. They required unanimity of decision. Well, the result was that you would have delays amounting to as much as 6 months in action by the National Defense Advisory Commission, due to that veto power by one man out of the seven. And I recall an instance where we were establishing, in the Ordnance Department, a plant for the production of ammonia. It was for high explosives, of course, and where, after 3 or 4 months of delay, they finally had to yield to the one man, the other six had to yield, to get action as to the location of the ammonia plant. That is the kind of abuse you have where you have no head at all, and you have no single one responsible to take action, but a board at the top and unanimity of opinion required.

You do not have to take my word for that.

General Marshall has pointed out the weakness in the structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He testified before the Senate Military Affairs Committee on October 18, 1945, at a time when his wartime experience was fresh in his mind:

Even under the stress of war, agreement has been reached in the Joint Chiefs of Staff at times only by numerous compromises and after long delays, and coordination in material and administrative matters has largely been forced by circumstances arising out of the war, and then only incompletely.

We also had as joint agencies the Munitions Board and hundreds of smaller Army-Navy boards. They did good work, too, in matters where neither Department had pronounced opinions. But these boards collapsed whenever one of the services would not budge. They are merely voluntary associations. The vote would then be a tie vote, and each service would go its independent way.

If we give full credit to the achievements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Munitions Board, and the joint boards down the line, my statement still stands that the conduct of the war was carried on in high headquarters at Washington by two separate departments, each with its own separate programs, policies, procedures, and operations. And it is no exaggeration to say that in World War II the cost in duplication, competition, and disjointed effort directly traceable to the two-headed system ran to billions and billions of dollars. A sizable part of the tremendous public debt that the taxpayers of the United States are now bearing is due to that division of authority and responsibility between the War Department and the Navy Department.

If the committee will bear with me a moment, I will trace briefly the development of effort to get unity in organization of the armed forces. While the war was still being waged, a Select Committee of the House on Postwar Military Policy-generally called the Woodrum committee-held hearings on the subject. I testified in April 1944 before that committee, urging that the War Department and Navy Department be merged into a single executive department. Other witnesses from the War Department testified to the same effect, citing many instances of overlapping, confusion, and waste from the existing two-Department structure.

My own convictions on the point came from two sources. In the first place, I was deeply impressed by the deficiencies inherent and inseparable from the two-Department method of waging war. In the second place, the value of air power in every theater of war was so manifest that the air forces had a strong case for parity with the land forces and the sea forces. That fact meant three branches-Army, Navy, and Air-instead of two. Yet I could not go along with any thought that there should be three independent departments. The confusion and waste, bad enough with two departments, was bound to be worse with three. The remedy, as I saw it, was a single executive department with three branches or divisions in it-Army, Navy, Air. The Woodrum committee recommended that the Joint Chiefs of Staff make a thorough study of the matter of postwar organization. The Joint Chiefs accordingly set up a board to canvass the situation and to get the views of Army and Navy officers in the overseas theaters. The board reported, in the summer of 1945, that the great majority of officers consulted were in favor of a single Department, headed by a single Secretary, who would be assisted by a single Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces.

Developments since the close of the war are a matter of legislative history with which this committee is thoroughly familiar. The War Department recommended legislation creating a single Department, a single Secretary, a single Chief of Staff. The Navy Department was in opposition, favoring continuation of the two-Department structure. Finally, in January 1947, a compromise was arrived at, the terms appearing in a joint letter to the President signed by Secretary Forrestal and myself. It amounted to semiunity. The compromise was along the line that there should be a National Military Establishment and a Secretary of Defense at the head of it; that the executive departments of the Army, Navy, and Air should be parts of it; that the Secretary of Defense should have general powers of control over the three departments for certain specified purposes; that in other respects the

three departments would maintain their autonomy. And there was always, of course, provision for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The main heads of this compromise were enacted into law by the National Security Act of 1947, passed July 26, 1947.

I bear a certain measure of responsibility for that law, having supported its passage in testimony before this committee and also before the House Committee on Executive Expenditures. How the bill got to that committee in the House was a mystery. It did not get to the Committee on Armed Services but went to that committee, which, of course, had never studied its problems.

I urged the passage because I was convinced of the need of unified management of the armed forces and because that particular measure represented a step in that direction. I had misgivings, I will acknowl edge, as to whether the measure went far enough-whether we might not get triplification instead of unification out of it. But it seemed to me that the move was one in the right direction, and that experience under it would furnish the answer to the question whether it went far enough.

Nearly 2 years of operations under the 1947 act have shown that too little was granted in the direction of unity and too much was reserved and conceded to separation of the three services. Interservice rivalry and empire building have not been overcome. And there is no practice in the country more expensive and ruinous to the country than empire building, and it is a very natural thing, Mr. Chairman, where you have separate responsibility and separate direction.

You can take a very simple case: Suppose you, as Secretary of the Army or Secretary of Navy, charge some officer with setting up a certain project. He will always, in setting that up, if he is allowed to— and allowed to arrange for everything to be in that project-arrange for something new rather than borrowing from an existing organization, and he does it for perfectly natural reasons. He wants to be sure that he has the resources committed to that project which would be needed to carry it out, and if he borrows from some other service he is always afraid that right at the critical moment they may be snatched away from him again, so he wants them under his own control and wants his own unit. And it is true that it does duplicate what is already being done elsewhere, but he feels: "I am charged with the responsibility of the success of this project, and I want to be certain that I have the resources in men and in materials that will enable me to carry it through to success. Therefore, I want my own unit."

And, that is the way you get this extremely expensive and pernicious practice of empire building, and it takes the strongest control from the top to prevent that sort of thing from being done. It is hard enough to prevent it within a single service, like in the Army, and under the structure that we had in the war-and I believe we still have it. I believe it is impossible to prevent it, as between the separate departments that we have, the Army, Navy, and Air, at the present time.

I would hesitate to say how much money has gone down the drain just due to that single factor. It is very large.

Senator BRIDGES. Mr. Secretary, I do not want to interrupt, but the point you make-Isn't this true: Hasn't it been going on in the individual Departments of the Army and Navy for years, and we have had the Secretary of War and we have had the Secretary of the Navy, with complete authority down the line? Is there anything hopeful

in the steps that have been taken within individual departments that would lead you to believe that consolidation of authority, other than doing away with overlapping, would accomplish any of these things? Mr. PATTERSON. If there is a man responsible at the head of a service, he can overrule that man who is in charge of a project, and say: "I realize how desirable it may be from your point of view, to have everything under your command here." He can do it. As between the two separate Departments, it is impossible. It is impossible to avoid, because there is no one up at the top to say to the Army, if they are the offender, "No, you can't have that. Borrow those ships from the Navy. They already have them."

It takes a man at the post of proper responsibility to stop it. The trouble was, during the war, you did not have any such men.

Senator BRIDGES. Mr. Secretary, what I mean is: You did not stop it within a single Department; did you?

Mr. PATTERSON. It is a vice that exists in the Departments; that is true. Good control at the top will keep it in check, but it is an unending struggle, I will admit that fast enough, because from the point of view of the man who is doing this empire building, from his point of view, it is generally the right thing to do.

The result has been and still is extremely onerous on the taxpayers. This has been through no fault of Mr. Forrestal, to whom unstinted credit should be given for carrying on a new task with vision, skill, perseverence, and rare administrative ability. He has been a good and faithful servant of his country through nine hard years-always selfless, courageous, equal to any emergency. His place in history is

secure.

There are three main shortcomings in the present law. In the first place, the Secretary of Defense does not have enough in the way of authority. He is not at the head of an executive department, in the sense that the Secretary of State is at the head of the State Department and the Secretary of the Treasury is at the head of the Treasury Department. The authority of the Secretary is also weakened by excessive powers reserved to the Secretaries of the three Departments-Army, Navy, and Air Force-and I know of cases where, if the Secretary of Defense issues an order, people down the line run to look at the law books and run to lawyers to see if he had the power to issue that order.

In the second place, the present law does not give the Secretary of Defense enough help to carry on even the limited powers entrusted to him. There are no Assistant Secretaries allowed to him, and the number of special assistants is held down to three.

In the third place, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have not functioned effectively. It has turned out as General Marshall 3 years ago predicted would be the case. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have no leader or chairman. They are a committee and the members speak for their respective services. The defect is a grave one, and the President, recognizing it, recently appointed General Eisenhower to act as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as chief military adviser to the Secretary of Defense. This was a necessary and prudent step, but if there is any warrant for it in law I have not been able to find it.

The CHAIRMAN. Go ahead, Mr. Secretary; I will ask you a question about that later.

Mr. PATTERSON. I will conclude in just a minute.