Volunteer Business Executives Prepare for War : Management Specialists Would Keep Nation Operating in Conflict, Emergency

Behind U.S. lines in World War III would stand 2,646 volunteer management specialists assigned to run the United States and save it from falling to the enemy.

As soon as the White House declared a national emergency, including a war, plans call for mobilization of a private industry group virtually unknown to the public--the National Defense Executive Reserve--whose job would be to keep the factories working, trains and planes moving, the roads open and the country calm.

Biennial Meeting

About 600 members of this group met in Washington recently for a biennial meeting devoted to preparedness.

“We’re here like the Minutemen at Concord to grab the musket off the wall,” said True Davis, a former ambassador to Switzerland and prominent businessman.

Because the analogy of the American Revolutionary War volunteers who fought the British on a moment’s notice at Concord, Mass., may be far-fetched, Davis also compared his role as an executive reservist to that of a fireman.

“You sure don’t want to have a fire, but. . . . “ he said.

Although many believe that all-out nuclear war would destroy civilization, American emergency plans assume considerable human survival and seek to bring order out of chaos. They provide also for the possibility of conventional war or for natural disasters of national emergency scope, on the scale of Mexico’s devastating earthquake.

Know-How Needed

“If the balloon goes up, we will need your private business know-how to save our country from an enemy takeover,” Rep. G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery, a Mississippi Democrat, told the group at its recent conference. “It’s that simple.”

Woodrow Wilson was the first President to summon top executives for crisis duty, during World War I. In 1918, he named financier Bernard Baruch to run the War Industries Board, with the help of 750 managers from around the country.

Franklin D. Roosevelt did much the same in World War II. Among others, he recruited Lamont du Pont of the Delaware chemical empire, Edsel Ford of the Detroit car firm and Alfred Sloan, the architect of General Motors’ rise to its position as the world’s largest industrial company.

Like their current-day successors, they worked for the nominal annual “salary” of $1, earning them the nickname “Dollar-a-Year Men.”

Had Postwar Role Also

When those wars ended, the men who had charted the biggest airlifts and sealifts in history, kept shortages to a minimum and got the economy back to normal.

The National Defense Executive Reserve was regrouped about two years ago at the Reagan Administration’s behest, as part of its overall program to improve the country’s defense preparedness.

The recruits’ average age is 56. They come from all over the country, scattered from Vermont to Hawaii, and hold meetings around the country in order to provide regional expertise and to avoid concentration in a single area that would provide an easy target in time of war.

Since reorganization, they have been immersed in meetings with officials and exercises in being on the alert.

‘Mobilization Scenarios’

They are asked to consider “mobilization scenarios,” such as this one drawn up for response at a practice session:

“A Middle Eastern war has damaged oil refineries and wells crucial to the U.S. and other NATO economies . . . . NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the U.S. have sent a small force to the area to protect the oil fields. Affected Arab nations are protesting angrily to the United Nations and have appealed to the Soviet Union for aid.”

In hypothetical preparation, recruits from transport firms are sent to train with the Navy in controlling ship movements. Others help run ports or study barge, train and truck use.

Another standard scenario developed to test the group’s reaction capabilities involves a hypothetical earthquake that shatters much of the West Coast in much the same manner that the Sept. 19 quake ravaged the Mexico City area.

Special Exercise Planned

Taking a cue from Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast that frightened people into believing Martians had invaded in the 1930s, a training firm has devised a special exercise for later this year.

It will feature videotaped “newscasts” of increasing gravity as the United States plunges into a conventional war with the Soviet Union.

Luckily, this “war” will last only two days, its planners say, but it is designed to give the reservists a taste of the real thing, just in case.