Third, our armed forces must regain maximum mobility of action.  Our strategic reserves must be centrally placed and readily deployable to meet sudden aggression against ourselves and our allies.

Fourth, our defense must rest on trained manpower and its most economical and mobile use.  A professional corps is the heart of any security organization.  It is necessarily the teacher and leader of those who serve temporarily in the discharge of the obligation to help defend the Republic.  Pay alone will not retain in the career service of our armed forces the necessary numbers of long-term personnel.  I strongly urge, therefore, a more generous use of other benefits important to service morale.  Among these are more adequate living quarters and family housing units and medical care for dependents.

Studies of military manpower have just been completed by the National Security Training Commission and a Committee appointed by the Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.  Evident weaknesses exist in the state of readiness and organization of our reserve forces.  Measures to correct these weaknesses will be later submitted to the Congress.

Fifth, the ability to convert swiftly from partial to all-out mobilization is imperative to our security.  For the first time, mobilization officials know what the requirements are for 1,000 major items needed for military uses.  These data, now being related to civilian requirements and our supply potential, will show us the gaps in our mobilization base.  Thus we shall have more realistic plant-expansion and stockpiling goals.  We shall speed their attainment.  This Nation is at last to have an up-to-date mobilization base—­the foundation of a sound defense program.

Another part of this foundation is, of course, our continental transport system.  Some of our vital heavy materials come increasingly from Canada.  Indeed our relations with Canada, happily always close, involve more and more the unbreakable ties of strategic interdependence.  Both nations now need the St. Lawrence Seaway for security as well as for economic reasons.  I urge the Congress promptly to approve our participation in its construction.

Sixth, military and non-military measures for continental defense must be and are being strengthened.  In the current fiscal year we are allocating to these purposes an increasing portion of our effort, and in the next fiscal year we shall spend nearly a billion dollars more for them than in 1953.

An indispensable part of our continental security is our civil defense effort.  This will succeed only as we have the complete cooperation of State Governors, Mayors, and voluntary citizen groups.  With their help we can advance a cooperative program which, if an attack should come, would save many lives and lessen destruction.

The defense program recommended in the 1955 Budget is consistent with all of the considerations which I have just discussed.  It is based on a new military program unanimously recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by me following consideration by the National Security Council.  This new program will make and keep America strong in an age of peril.  Nothing should bar its attainment.