European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - May 5, 1985, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 10 the stars and stripes May James Kilpatrick Lehman frying of crawl out of warm Feather bed fort Odd years As a Young i had occasion to spend a night As a guest in an old mansion in the Virginia there i slept or tried to sleep on a Feather it was a terrify ing i relived it a few Days ago in Reading a speech by Navy Secretary John Lehman lehmans theme was the pentagons he has been struggling with it since he took office in this gelatinous Blob lies beside the Potomac like that Feather mattress of my recollection one sinks into its warm and smothering and sinks Down and Lehman talked about it in a banquet address Early last it would be he for me or anyone at this table to accurately describe to you the system with and within we must there Are thousands upon thousands of officers and entities and bureaus that have been created Over the years to Deal episodically with aspects of Lehman provided the office of the Secre tary of defense was created in the great service reorganization of originally it had 50 persons attached to the office now has the joint chief staff was part of the 1947 then it was to have no More than 100 civilian and military today it has fifty thousand people now labor for the defense logistics there Are 11 separate defense nine joint and specified and scores of subordinate offices and bureaus with staffs of thousand or everywhere in the Pentagon Are senior assistants and lesser confidential personal assist administrative special executive aides to the and All of them have the joint chiefs of staff we have a Small platoon of operations and each of these deputies has a Deputy operations and All of them have these Are the said every one of of each was created in the name of interservice join Ness and Reform what has been created Over the past 40 years is an incredible and unwieldy this vast and Clumsy though Lehman did not say this in so Many creates maddening problems in military there Are too Many commands and too Many head quarters and too much paper to be handled by too Many but it is in the area of procurement that the system embraces and swallows the whole concept of individual As Lehman made Clear in his exasperated it James Buckley it is a herculean task to fix accountability anywhere in the defense is a herculean task to fix accountability anywhere in the defense in the intricate Sticky webs of the principle of accountable flutters and responsibility gets diffused finally it Digap everyone is responsible therefore no one is re it is the the computers did in addition to the pentagons own engulfing by Lehman and his brother secretaries must grapple with a congressional bureaucracy that is relatively As ten years ago a Secretary of the Navy reported to four subcommittees on Capitol now Lehman re ports to 32 committees and subcommittees and All of these committees and subcommittees have directors and Deputy directors and assistant and All of them have Lehman is doing his Best to liquidate some of his he is in the process of abolishing the naval material come and its 450 he has demanded a reduction of 10 percent in the Manning of his various Headquarters he is As he to Roll Back the accretion of layers of centralized bureaucracy and restore a crisper let us wish him All the Luck in the but let us also recall a Maxim of country living its hard to crawl out of a warm Feather Universal press Syndicate we gone to he Ever asked Melq ref Ohton the significance of Jeane detection Jeane Kirkpatrick joining the Republican party is one of those decisive symbolic events the gop would be historically delinquent to so far As one can Tell it is being treated merely As the conversion of a single prominent women to a party already robust in it is More than and ought to be acknowledged As More than the republicans have suffered greatly from historic one of these it May be said to have wished upon namely the preemptive identification of the democratic party with the civil rights an other it inherited from Fate Abraham Lincoln was a and he was president when the South was we have known since roughly the election of Eisen Hower in 1952 that the South would Cross the line and vote for a Republican in the years since southerners Nave gone voting for individual republicans occasionally As governor for instance in and As senator for instance in South but the massive move of White Southern voters to the Republican party has yet to it might have been triggered in 1972 when the democratic convened in selected As its Candi Date George a left Democrat who spurned the spinal column of the democratic which was organized the democrats paid dearly for their and recovered briefly Only because Jimmy Carter was in 1976 identified As the conservative alter native to Ted if George who himself had entered a few primaries in 1972 even in his crippled had taken that Opportunity to announce his defection As a it is Likely that much perhaps even most of the South would have followed him into the but he stood and so therefore did southerners who continue to spouse Republican policies and vote for democratic the great Paradox in Washington is of course that left democrats tend to dominate the House of begin with the raw figures although the House of representatives is supposed to be representative of the Peoples political we have now in the House 75 More democrats than notwithstanding that the mood of the electorate is distinctly conserva Reagan captured 59 percent of the popular vote in but the democratic majority in the House is that happened because of gerrymandering by democrats in but it happened also because of inertial affiliations for voting for democratic congressmen and Republican that is the Paradox Jeane Kirkpatrick defection should massively How to proceed the republicans have successfully opportune sized on the enormities of individual democrats nominated for the suicidal left policies of George Mcgove Walter Ted Kennedy were Well demonstrated by Republican but the posture of the party seemed to be dear Democrat we Are hot asking you to leave your merely to vote against it this one Given the ideological character of your vote for Reagan in and we Promise not to pester you to Cross the surely the time has come to do exactly the time for there is a problem of Pride in these mat in England it is widely accepted that individual members of parliament will Dis affiliate with one party and join it tends to be viewed As an act that Borders on ritual As though one were renouncing ones it is a problem not unlike that of the jew who desires to become a Christian but fears that to do so is in nature of tribal even As the Christian turning to Judaism would face a social cultural prob the tug of ancient loyalties is hard to but it can be one recalls the British orator declaiming before an audience in the North of England and Fin Ishing with the i was born an i have lived an and i Hope to die an in a scotsman from the audience have you no ambition it is a matter of and John con eight years was punished for leaving the democratic if he had stayed in he might have saved the party from its permanent left but since democrats have gotten used to voting Republican at the the time has come to incite a mass o1985 Universal press Syndicate