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details of organization and any slippage in implementing the program.

The single major conclusion reached by the Board was terse and emphatic. "The Board has only a single, general conclusion," stated General Howze. "Adoption by the Army of the airmobile concept—however imperfectly it may be described and justified in this report—is necessary and desirable. In some respects the transition is inevitable, just as was that from animal mobility to armor."

The Howze Board accomplished its mission in 90 days, from the original assignment to the finished report. In view of the enormous staffing task involved, and the sheer size of the analytical task, such alacrity has few parallels in staff work in or out of the military service.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense, having received what it had asked for, now turned the report over to its systems analysts in the Office of the Comptroller to study in minute detail all 3,500 pages of the main report. The review by the office of the Secretary of Defense Comptroller was to focus on certain procurement actions and to make certain recommendations of its own which had no relation to the Howze Board's recommendations.

In mid-September 1962 the Chief of Staff directed General Howze, Colonel Norton, and one of the editors of the Board Report to work in his office in preparing rebuttals for the various attacks that were coming from all directions. This "ten-day" TDY mission was to last almost until Christmas (with General Howze being replaced by General Williams when the former had to return to his command at Fort Bragg as commander of the Strategic Army Corps during the Cuban missile crisis).

Throughout the fall of 1962 it appeared, at times, that the work of the Howze Board was going to be studied to death and finally filed away for historians. The fact that it survived attacks by members of Congress, the Air Force, and conservative elements within the Army was a tribute both to the soundness of its basic conclusions and to the dedicated officers within the Army who believed that airmobility was the wave of the future.