We must have a more effective
We must have it.

General EISENHOWER. Yes, sir. elimination law than we now have. Mr. MARTIN. Now that Congress has so generously extended the 24 (b) elimination group three-quarters pay for being unusable in the Army, don't you think you will have a little more success in inducing the unfit to get out on that generous schedule of retirement pay?

General EISENHOWER. I did not know 24 (b) went up to that.

Mr. MARTIN. That passed Congress here a few years ago. The average retired pay of the 24 (b) eliminated officers was increased from $123 a month to $227 a month at the beginning of World War II. Their average length of service was 14 years, and they were not retired for physical disability, and they were in the prime years of life, and they were unusable and unused during World War II. That law still stands on the books.

General EISENHOWER. I did not know of that change of law, Mr. Martin. Was that the one they called Law 190?

Mr. MARTIN. I believe it was 190. I have forgotten the number, though.

General EISENHOWER. As a matter of fact, from our viewpoint, it is a splendid law, but it is so arbitrary in its action that we have felt there must be some modification of the thing. I did not know that they got 75 percent.

Mr. MARTIN. Would you recommend that the pay of the class B officers eliminated from the service because of their not being usable be left at 75 percent of their base pay and longevity?

General EISENHOWER. I certainly do not recommend that they get the same pay as the fellow who goes out because he lost a leg in combat. Mr. BROOKS. General, I would like to ask you this: In your problems here in scaling down the officer personnel of the Army, would not a liberalized law covering Reserve officers, giving them some credit for inactive service, assist you some?

General EISENHOWER. We have already taken up this matter, sir, and we have had to, of course, pass it to the Bureau of the Budget.

Now, I can say only this: That as a matter of principle and after listening to the National Guard Association and their presentations, and the Reserve Officers Association, I came to the conclusion that some decent recognition of that inactive service, if coupled with such provisions as would protect the Government and did not let a bunch of people carry along and do nothing, would be satisfactory.

In other words, if a man met the standards of the Secretary of War, laid down through the years, and performed a certain amount of active duty, he should get something for it. That is not, as I understand it, before the House in due form, because the Bureau of the Budget, I beliece, has it under consideration.

Mr. MARTIN. I have just one more question: Have you given any further thought to the matter of promotion by selection as an incentive to greater performance by the officer personnel?

General EISENHOWER. Very definitely. The promotion scheme that we will bring before the Congress will have a reasonable and modified form of selection that I think every single one of you will approve. We have been studying it for months.

The CHAIRMAN. The Chair wants to be just as liberal with the members of the committee as he possibly can, but I think this question of promotions, and so forth, is a little irrelevant to this discussion.

General EISENHOWER. Of course, Mr. Chairman, this is true: There is no single thing you can take up about personnel that does not affect personnel in every possible respect. I have the greatest sympathy with such questions.

The CHAIRMAN. That is true, but our issue here is whether you can get this number of officers, regardless of how you get them.

Mr. JOHNSON. The matter of promotion is very important. The CHAIRMAN. I know it is. It is not something we are trying to shut you off on.

General EISENHOWER. I would like to say this for the benefit of the committee: That coming down here as soon as the committee has the necessary time to consider it will be a promotion bill in which we will bring down every chart and figure and statistic and show you what we want to do to get rid of the unfit, something that will bring us an officer corps that will meet the test when it comes.

The CHAIRMAN. I am sure this committee will be with you on that when you do.

Mr. ELSTON. General, I just wanted to clear up one thing for the record. If you maintain you ratio of 1 officer for 10 enlisted men, and you get to the place where you are going to have an Army of say, 850,000, and the emergency is over, and you do not have temporary officers, you will need approximately 85,000 officers.

General EISENHOWER. That is right.

Mr. ELSTON. Since this bill authorizes 50,000, I am not sure the record is clear as to the status of the additional 35,000.

General EISENHOWER. The additional 35,000: What we want to do, of course, is to make continuing use of the Reserve officer and the National Guard officer, even in higher grades, through the Army, for certain short tours, when he can come in, to keep him refreshed. But the bulk of them will be those just graduated from ROTC, and maybe at that time our laws will even say: Those who come to OCS, first come to the Reserve Corps. But we will have these fellows that we will want to test, and from them we shall draw as a source for keeping this 50,000 built up, and they will be replaced each year by a number of graduates.

Mr. ELSTON. They will be serving in a temporary status?

General EISENHOWER. Yes, sir; much like the Air Forces do today. They take men into the service, and they stay in a couple of years, and out of that there comes a great many officers.

Mr. HARNESS. General Eisenhower, I was interested in that question that was just asked you. This 50,000 authorization would contemplate an Army of 550,000 men of you had no other officers.

General EISENHOWER. If you had no other officers, that is really what you would need.

Mr. HARNESS. Now, I understood you to say a minute ago that we had 1,550,000 men in the Army, and 250,000 officers.

General EISENHOWER. Yes, sir.

Mr. HARNESS. Why do we have a greater proportion of officers now than we need?

General EISENHOWER. As a matter of fact, it is just part of the dif ficulties of demobilization and getting straightened out. The job of getting officers back overseas, and the big pipe line-we are trying to go down to nearly the 1 to 10 figure.

Mr. HARNESS. I thought your estimate of 1,070.000 men was very conservative for the next few years anyway. That would contemplate about 100,000 officers?

General EISENHOWER. That is correct, sir.

Mr. HARNESS. And if you get this authorization for 50,000 Regular officers, which I think you ought to have, that will mean that you are going to have to have 50,000 temporary officers on duty to maintain your million men; would you not?

General EISENHOWER. I figure that with the minimum of 30,000 additional, we can get along; we should have for all purposes about 100,000, but with somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 non-regulars that will be all right.

Mr. HARNESS. Suppose after January 1948 you decide you want to continue to maintain an Army of a million men. Where are you going to get these other 50,000 officers that will be required if we declare the war over?

General EISENHOWER. Some of them, of course, you will have to authorize us to keep on duty as temporary officer volunteers.

Mr. HARNESS. Will that require additional legislation?

General EISENHOWER (to General Swift). Will it require any additional authorization?

General SWIFT. No, sir.

Mr. HARNESS. In other words, you can call Reserve officers to active duty for a period of a year under existing law, aside from the emergency legislation.

General EISENHOWER. But in time of peace, you take them only as volunteers, so after you declare the emergency over, you would be limited to volunteers.

But these men, coming out of the ROTC and the OCS and things like that, I am sure will provide a very considerable number.

As a matter of fact, you know, Mr. Harness, that we have taken a lot of favorable assumptions in trying to devise this Army and our security arrangements for the next few years. Now, if some of those assumptions fall down on us, we will have to come back and say that things did not turn out as we had hoped.

But I believe, with a 50,000 solid corps there, and with the opportunities that these others have, with so very many wanting to go into the Regular Army, we will have twenty-five or thirty thousand or so as a group there. Certainly, that is what we are banking on.

Mr. HARNESS. Do you contemplate filling this immediately?

General EISENHOWER. As I explained, the bulk of them will come from the people that are now available with this experience, but I would certainly want to say that there is clearly necessary a block to bring up through this OCS and through the ROTC, so as to spread the age group downward as well as to get a few more majors, so as not to have this unadjustable hump.

Mr. HARNESS. If your attrition shows 4 percent or 3 percent, you are taking this number a year anyway?

General EISENHOWER. I am sure we will have more applications than that, many more applications.

Mr. HARNESS. Well, do you have any idea when the 50,000 will be filled?

General EISENHOWER. I should say we ought to be able to finish it up by, oh, say, next March.

Mr. HARNESS. That is all.

Mr. JOHNSON. General, I was interested in your statement, on page 3. that the number of generals would be increased from a little over a thousand to 2,108 generals.

General EISENHOWER. That is colonels.

Mr. JOHNSON. Then how many generals will there be in the Army when this is allowed?

General EISENHOWER. I will tell you frankly, Mr. Johnson: I have not yet come down to the point of giving you the estimates of the number of permanent general officers and the grades in which we ought to have them, for the simple reason that we have had more important problems to get solved.

Now, as it stands today, the only general officers, permanently authorized, in the Army are 21 major generals and 50 brigadier generals. That is all we have.

What we have actually done: Since the war ended, I think, we had about 1,541 general officers, and we have reduced to 549 as of the present, exclusive of those that by special arrangement are serving other departments; such as Ambassadors, the head of the Veterans' Bureau, and things like that.

Mr. JOHNSON. Now, how many men were advanced one or two grades and made permanent generals.

General EISENHOWER. Everybody that was advanced, if he did not have 28 years' service as a lieutenant colonel, had to come down on a special law. Under this law I think there have been made permanent generals none in the Ground Forces or Service Forces, but about four or five in the Air Forces: LeMay, Norstad, and possibly Vandenberg-about three or four in the Air Forces, and none in the others.

Mr. JOHNSON. It seemed to me that I read about a great group that went before the Senate, who were advanced out of their files, there, and stepped up and made permanent generals.

General EISENHOWER. Early in the war, that happened to brigadiers, I think, but since the shooting stopped, the only men for which any special legislation has been asked are about four or possibly five Air Corps men, nobody else.

Mr. JOHNSON. What I am thinking about is this: Several people that I think know something about the problem have talked to me-I have never written the War Department about it-about the advancement of men into the top brackets there, who might block the way of a good many men below them and take off the incentive they should have to go ahead. Those are the men who make the policy of the Army, really. Have you gone too far, or is there a danger that you will go too far, in that regard?

General EISENHOWER. No, sir. I have talked to the Air Forces very casually about not going too far in this. But you will understand that the Air Force personnel problem is not exactly that of the Ground Forces and of the Service Forces. If you are going to have a man fly combat duty with his wing, and he is a brigadier, he has to be a pretty young fellow.

Mr. JOHNSON. I am not talking about the Air Forces.

General EISENHOWER. Those are the only ones. We have done it nowhere else.

Mr. JOHNSON. Here is another aspect that I was thinking about: A number of combat generals-and I respect them just as much as you do have received these assignments. Yet I am sure you know that a great many of the men in this war never had the chance that they should have had, and they might be wonderful planners and administrators for the civilian Army.

Now, is the door still open to those deserving men so that they can go ahead?

General EISENHOWER. It most certainly is, sir; and the only reason that a number of them have not been brought down to the Congress is that up to the present time I have not been able to put in their proper places all the men that we developed in this Army. I have not had a chance to put them on the regular list. It has been impossible. Mr. JOHNSON. I have no criticism at all.

General EISENHOWER. On the other hand, Mr. Johnson, let me explain that point just one step further. You say a man that is today 60; now, it is very little use for me to come down and ask for him to be made a brigadier, because he cannot possibly go on up now through brigadier and major general and become a fellow who can command one of our Army areas or an overseas region. He is too far along.

Some of them, I think, have been very deserving. One of my grandest friends in the Army went out at 60; one of the most able fellows I knew. Occasionally it happens. But we have not, let us say, gone wild just to get a bunch of 26-year-olds and 28-year-olds and put them up and block everybody else. That has not been done.

I should say that on the permanent general officer list, excluding the Air Forces, there is probably no one below 50. There may be one or two that are 49, but that would be all.

Mr. JOHNSON. Would you be kind enough to put in the record there a statement as to how many generals in the different grades will be contemplated if you get this increase?

General EISENHOWER. Yes, sir; I will be glad to. I will merely give you my idea, because I have not yet been able to bring it to the final step. I will give you my conclusions.

(The information referred to is as follows:)

Question. How many generals will be required in the postwar Army? Answer. The number of general officers, all grades, required in the Army in time of peace equals approximately one-half of 1 percent of the total number of officers on active duty. For an Army of 1,070,000 the number will be approximately 500. About half of the total number of general officers should be in the grade of major general or higher.

Mr. JOHNSON. I want to ask you one or two other questions. Now, the Army Air Forces are not completely autonomous yet. are they?

General EISENHOWER. No, sir; not by law.

Mr. JOHNSON. Is it correct that the officers in the Air Forces are in the general file, and there is only one file of the Army? They do not have a separate file?

General EISENHOWER. They maintain a separate file, but they are included also in ours. They are dovetailed with ours. For example. a man has to be recommended by the Secretary of War in order to be