Evening star., 1948-01-14
Grim but Realistic

The Presidents Air Policy commission
picked a grim but realistic title for its
report on the present status and future
outlook of military and civil aviation in
the United States. Yet Survival in the
Air Age" sums up succinctly the situation
which the commission found to exist in
this atomic and supersonic era. It is a
situation involving grimly real problems
of national security requiring grimly real
istic planning and craftsmanship.
The report cannot be brushed aside as
the product of the military mind" The
all-civilian commission was headed by
Thomas K Finletter, New York lawyer and
included George P. Baker, professor OF
transportation at Harvard University;
Palmer Hoyt, publisher of the Denver
Post; Arthur D. Whiteside, New York
financier, and John A. McCone, West
Coast manufacturer. This group obviously
made thoroughgoing study of the avia-
ton needs of the country in the postwar
years and it admits that it came to some
of it's conclusions reluctantly. Reluc-
tantly or not the commission in the main
part of it's report has presented the coun-
try at large and Congress in particular
with an estimate of security threats and
a plan for meeting them which it will be
risky to disregard.
AS the commission takes pains to point
out, absolute security can be attained only
by the abolishment of war itself. Since
that supreme objective continues to elude
mans grasp, there is no alternative but
to keep ourselves prepared at all times
not only to repel an attack, but to deliver
quick and effective counterattack Any
such attack, the commission declares, will
come by air and the counterattack must
be delivered the same way. Adequate pre-
paredness, 1t was emphasized, will give
pause to designing aggressors and increase
should materialize.
After due consideration of all the evi-
dence placed before it, the commission
decided that this transitional period calls
for two stages of preparedness. Since the
weight of opinion from military and
atomic authorities indicates that no other
nation is likely to develop the capacity for
delivering an effective A-bomb attack
before January l, 1858, the report fixes that
date as "A day"-the imaginary dividing
line between the eras of conventional
and atomic aggression. The commission
justifiably assumes that the United States
will never use the atomic bomb except
for defense against aggression and for
counterattack.
During the present pre-A day period,
therefore, the need for continued mainte-
nance and development of our air power
is seen. The commission strongly supports
the original Air Force request for seventy
air groups Gin being a request which was
reduced to f1fty-five operational and
fifteen skeletonized groups by last years
appropriations. The new budget would
provide for only fifty-fve "in being" air
groups. Military experts say this strength
is dangerously inadequate today. It would
be even more inadequate against atomic
aggression. Furthermore the commission
recognizes the need for maintenance of q
navy and naval air arm strong enough
to seize and hold outlying bases Without
such bases our present Air Force would be
gravely handicapped.
While the security aspects of aviation
are given prime Importance in the report.
civil aviation problems are fully discussed,
with appropriate recommendations. One
of the recommendations calls for re-
organization of the present Civil Aero
nautics setup in the Department OF
Commerce-an idea broached in the recent
report of the Air Safety Board. The
findings and proposals of the Presidents
commission are so far-reaching and so
soundly based that they deserve to be
given the most careful consideration by
the new Congress. For, as the commission
contends, the issue at stake In this age
of aerial advancement is something more
than keeping pace with chronological
progress-it is a matter of actual survival
under conditions of great potential peril