For the last three weeks the American press has been typographically fighting the next war. Well up in the first wave have been the Luce magazines, but the war reached its climax last week when "Time," "Newsweek," "U. S. News," and "This Week" ran cover stories on the Navy's new chief, Admiral Sherman.

Most of these magazines have stressed one point: that the armed forces' proposed budget of $13 billion for the fiscal year 1951 won't be enough. Some of them have run colorful tabular diagrams, matching up precise little battleship and airplane and infantry-man symbols in two columns--U. S. and U.S.S.R. In every case, the U. S. has come out way second best.

Many of the articles have pointed at more specific troubles in the Defense Department. They have charged, among other things, that:

1.) The active U. S. Air Force includes only 300 modern jet aircraft.

2.) The Air Force has been pared to 50-odd groups, instead of the 70 called for by Air Secretary W. Stuart Symington.

3.) The Army has only one full-strength division, the 82nd Airborne.

4.) The Navy is woefully short on vessels specifically equipped to fight Russia's large force of fast submarines. Most of the Navy's air force is obsolescent.

Some of these statements are valid; most of them are dangerously misleading. Most inaccurate of the lot are the comparative U. S.-Russia military strength tables. The armed forces presumably have accurate intelligence information on Russian strength but magazines can't get at this data--the tables are based on "reliable sources," generally shrewd conjecture. And quantitive figures are mis-leading. Russia's land strength is numerically impressive, for example, but military men point out that most Russian divisions have been more or less inactivated, just like our own. The Russian air force is large but considerably outmoded, and there is a lot of evidence that the Soviets are having plenty of technical troubles with their new submarines.

The other snipings are a bit more accurate. The Navy is way behind in the anti-submarine race, largely because until recently it had been preoccupied with plugging its carriers as strategic bombing bases. The Army is short on personnel, but new equipment has jumped its firepower almost 30 percent over World War II levels. And the Air Force admits that the 58 groups of its new budget will be equivalent to the 70 smaller groups it originally wanted.

But the biggest weakness in the magazine war's battle line seems to be one of omission. Short, again, on accurate information, the publications have been forced simply to mention that both countries can employ atomic weapons, without really being able to say who can use them more often and more effectively. Most military writers think that we can. And these writers, point out something that the magazines may have forgotten. Spending enough to match Russia man-for-man and plane for plane during the cold war might cripple our economy almost as much as if the Great Magazine War erupts into a hot one.