General BOOTH. It is a question of decision as to whether you want to, or not, as far as they are concerned.

Mr. BLANDFORD. The reserve who has had any active duty at all would not bother me, because that service is going to count for retired pay. But it is the individual who does not have any prior active Reserve service that bothers me, because you are just giving him a gift of 25 percent retired pay. That is what it amounts to. Mr. BATES. That was one of the points I wanted to get at. If we are going to integrate Reserve officers, and particularly those who are on inactive duty at the moment, would it not be better to have a requirement that they must have kept their points up to date? Those. are the people who have manifested an interest in the service, and therefore have already during a partial requirement of that particular program, the cost would not be as great, and you would then get people who have actually indicated a love and a desire for military service.

Someone like myself that was in and got out-I don't see why I should collect points for the time just because I happened to get older. General BOOTH. We had not contemplated putting in the requirement of being up on your points in the thing at all.

Actually, we do not expect a very large integration from the Reserve not on active duty.

Where we expect to get the great bulk of our Regular officers in the augmentation is from those on active duty who have demonstrated their interest. There may be here and there a selection made. But we did not think we should bar the door completely to the Reserve and National Guard officer who is not on active duty.

General KILDAY. General, on that point, you say your present plan would be not more than 60 colonels. How about lieutenant colonels?

General BooтH. About 1,600.

Mr. KILDAY. How many majors?

General BOOTH. 1.250.

Mr. KILDAY. Captains?

General BOOTH. 2,450.

Mr. KILDAY. First lieutenants?

General BooтH. 1,440.

Mr. KILDAY. Second lieutenants.

General BooтTH. 450.

That is an increase over the present planned authority appoint

ments.

Mr. KILDAY. On this constructive service thing, isn't the problem that you are getting at there, not to have men in rank in excess of age? In other words, the thing that happened after World War I was that integration took place at second lieutenants, so when it came to 1939, we found a good many men on active duty in grades far below those appropriate to their age, which resulted in Secretary Woodring's Army revitalization bill, that we had here.

I don't know whether you can go back that far or not. It was reported out by the committee and there was a minority report signed by, I think, 11 members of the committee, and of course it never came to the floor.

But your purpose here is to avoid what happened after World War I, and the bad effects of it became evident about 1939, when we began our expansion.

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Now, is that not about the situation; is that correct?

General BOOTH. That is the intent so that we do not have to integrate officers who are too old for their contemporaries, based upon purely an active Federal commission service requirement.

Mr. KILDAY. And you are proposing to do that by granting constructive credit.

Have you considered any alternative to constructive credit?
General BOOTH. No; I haven't.

Mr. KILDAY. Do you think there might be any alternative other than just not taking the man?

General BOOTH. I think that is the only alternative and there is a number of officers of such high quality that we would like to have them in the Regular service.

Mr. BLANDFORD. I was going to say the other alternative was to keep the Reserve on active duty. If an officer is over age in his permanent grade, he is probably right where he belongs in his temporary grade.

Your problem is only in permanent grade, where it comes to mandatory elimination.

General BOOTH. Right.

Mr. BLANDFORD. But I suggest one way to keep those people, the thousand that you would not otherwise get, is to allow them to continue on in their Reserve status, because I don't believe your statistics will justify your claim that they are leaving you.

General BOOTH. Well, those of the high quality that we want, we certainly are going to continue, as long as they will stay with us. Mr. BLANDFORD. Sure.

General BOOTH. Their feeling of security is the question that is going to determine whether they are going to leave us or whether they are not going to leave us.

Mr. BLANDFORD. Of course, if that man is that capable, all he has to do is resign, and go out, and you will commission him from civilian life, which you probably are not going to do.

The only point I am making is when you started handing outthe other day I looked at the retired list. We have 201,000 people on the retired list, at a cost in excess of $500 million. We used to run the Government for that amount. That is what it costs for retired people today. When you start giving free retirement for practical purposes up to as much as 25 percent to any substantial group whatsoever, you are just increasing that retired cost, at a time when there is another alternative.

That is my whole point. I am afraid someday it is going to come back to haunt all of us.

General BOOTH. I have no way of determining that very tough problem that you say, how much additional it will cost. Because all of these officers had certain retirement credits and maybe are getting just as much under one situation as under another.

Mr. BLANDFORD. I would just like to know how many people are involved. I don't know what the answer to that is. That is all.

Mr. KILDAY. Are you ready to go on with your charts now, General? General BOOTH. Yes, sir.

Mr. KILDAY. Go right ahead.

General BOOTH. We have Colonel Woodman here, to present the charts.

Mr. KILDAY. Go right ahead, Colonel.

Colonel WOODMAN. I am Lt. Col. Ernest A. H. Woodman, Chief of the Regular Army Officers Procurement Section of the Procurement Branch, Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel.

The Army's plan of implementation is based upon an initial goal of 35,640 male and WAC officers. This strength is to be attained within 2 years of enactment of the bill by appointment of approximately 7,000 to 7,250 new Regular officers. The Department of the Army plans to do this in such a manner as to develop and maintain a balanced officer structure. The Army, in striving to develop a balanced officer structure with its augmentation plan, found that in the upper portion of the officer structure there is no source of officers without granting of constructive service credit similar to that granted in the post World War II integration.

Another way of stating this fact is that there are thousands of highly competent Reserve officers who have been on active duty for some years, whose age would make them too old for appointment into the grades where their active service performed would place them thereby preclude their being considered by appointment unless constructive service is granted.

Since it is planned to take close to 2 years to implement the program, the Department of the Army charts are, for the purposes of this presentation, designed to show the officer structure as it will be at that time, July 1, 1958. In order to accomplish this task the Army proposes to implement the following plan (chart). On the first chart is shown from bottom to top, the scale in thousands, the numbers of officers. From left to right is shown the years of completed service for promotion purposes from 0 to 30 years.

The black lines that you see traced on the chart are what we call the optimum distribution lines. This particular line is for 39,600 officers, and this is for 49,500 officers. Development of such an optimum line is based on several factors, including the authorized strength of Regular officers, the authorized percentages in each grade, and the known attrition rates for all reasons, i. e., death, resignations, forced attrition to include promotion and retirement.

It may be dese ibed in another way as the distribution which would result if a constant input at the bottom of the structure, and only at the bottom, were maintained for 30 or more years.

The break in the bottom portion of the structure is occasioned by the fact that medical officers and other professional categories are appointed into the structure with 3 years service credit, accounting for the jump in the third year.

For any given strength using the above factors, an optimum distribution for the authorized strength of the Regular officer corps can be developed. Having arrived at this distribution we can plot our actual structure against it, and determine where augmentation should be made.

Inasmuch as we are faced with two ceilings, one a statutory authorization of 49,500 proposed in this bill, and the other an interim goal as mentioned by Colonel Holliday of 39,600, beyond which we do not expect to augment without further approval by the President, we have optimum lines showing the distribution for both strength figures. Army planning has been based on the 39,600 ceiling, and the following remarks are made in light of this fact.