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145 14. The National Military Airlift Hearings As he recalled a few years later, L. Mendel Rivers, Democratic congressman from Charleston, South Carolina, had had enough of the enemies of the Military Air Transport Service (MATS), whose objective, he charged, was to serve the “so-called patriots” in the airline industry.1 Following years of wrangling between the Army, the Air Force, the airline industry, and Congress over the size, equipage, and operations of MATS, he scheduled hearings in the spring of 1960 to settle the issue. He promised to conduct comprehensive hearings solely in the interest of the national defense. But, from the start, the organization and witness list of the hearings indicated his predetermination to preserve MATS institutionally, modernize its fleet, and tighten its linkage to the mobility requirements of the Army.2 Under Rivers’s leadership, the National Military Airlift Hearings resulted in regulatory and budgetary actions that set the organizational , matériel, and doctrinal foundations of global airlift, the ability to move battle-ready ground and air combat forces to anyplace on the planet by air. In so doing, the hearings would influence the ways in which the United States and its enemies fought wars for decades into the future. Background to the Hearings Several background elements shaped the conduct and outcome of the National Military Airlift Hearings. Most important, the future of American airlift forces, particularly of MATS, had become an issue of Byzantine complexity and great importance to American defense. Every major group and interest involved was unhappy with the state of affairs and uncertainty over the direction of airlift policy. National interest in the issue heightened as it became clear that the composition of the airlift force was linked to the outcome of the broader debate over national strategy. Critically also, the balance of power within the American government shifted in favor of modernizing and expanding MATS to improve its ability to move ground and air forces overseas. When all of these elements came together in the spring of 1960, airlift concepts that theretofore had found little traction in the halls of power suddenly became national policy. As discussed in the preceding chapters, a lot of people and interest groups The National Military Airlift Hearings 146 were involved in airlift policy by 1959, and few of them liked the way things were going. Although the general mission of MATS was to provide commonuser transportation to the whole Department of Defense, the Air Force was resisting all pressure to expand the command beyond what was needed to move the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the early days of war. Most of that pressure was coming from the Army and its supporters. They wanted the Air Force to expand MATS and/or Troop Carrier Aviation and equip them with longrange transports capable of moving ground units and all of their heavy vehicles over transoceanic distances. For the Air Force, the costs of developing such aircraft were staggering in their financial and strategic implications. Compared to the movement requirements of SAC, the Army’s costs were at least an order of magnitude greater. Moreover, building a fleet for the Army would divert resources away from what air force generals considered the all-important buildup of nuclear strike and air defense forces. From their perspective, the airliner and airliner-derived aircraft currently composing the MATS fleet had the virtues of being inexpensive and adequate to the needs of SAC. It was on this point— equipping MATS with airliners—that the actual airlines got involved. If MATS could perform its missions with the same aircraft that their companies flew, reasoned the leaders of the commercial industry and many congressmen, then so could the airlines under contract and probably at less cost. So by 1959 MATS was under strong attack from the Army, which wanted more from it, and the airline industry, which wanted less. By the late 1950s, the debate over the future of airlift was proceeding against a changing strategic backdrop. Since 1954 the template for American defense strategy had been New Look, which was anchored to the unstoppable nuclear striking power of SAC. But by 1958 Army Chief of Staff Maxwell D. Taylor and others were arguing that the emergence of Soviet nuclear parity undermined the credibility of New Look’s reliance on nuclear weapons in response to even minor regional aggressions by the Soviets. Since neither country was likely to risk a nuclear Armageddon to achieve its aims, they reasoned, future Soviet aggressions would be...

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