The advent of nuclear weapons sharpened interservice competition for military missions, since all the services wanted to develop forces capable of waging nuclear war while maintaining their ability to handle more traditional short-of-war tasks and general war mobilization. Within the budget ceilings imposed by the Truman administration—one-third of the federal budget, or roughly $10 billion to $13 billion—the military programs could not all be funded. In fact, the money, spread among the services, bought only skeleton forces, meager research and development, and a great deal of bitter controversy. In the War Department the postwar Army Air Forces sought complete service autonomy, built around nuclear weapons and the strategic deterrence/war role. The ground Army sought a comprehensive universal military training law that would allow it to mobilize a trained wartime force for the next war, based on compulsory citizen peacetime training. Both the AAF and the Army thought largely in terms of general war with the Soviet Union in Europe. The Navy and the Marine Corps, on the other hand, tried to integrate general war (nuclear or not) preparation with their traditional conceptions of sea power. The Navy Department sought to hold on to its full World War II force structure (carrier task forces, land-based antisubmarine aviation, the Fleet Marine Force, the submarine force) while adapting it to nuclear weapons. By the late 1940s the Navy had cruise and ballistic missile experiments underway for both its submarines and surface ships. It had introduced the Midway class (45,000 tons) carrier for new attack jets, and in 1948 Congress approved plans for United States, a 65,000-ton carrier that could carry nuclear-capable bombers. In March 1949 Navy pilots flew a patrol bomber with a 10,000-pound simulated bomb from the east coast to California and back again without landing. This project dramatized the Navy’s general war strategy, which was to launch air strikes against land air bases from 500 miles at sea, followed by additional attacks against Russian naval bases with shorter-ranged naval planes. The Marine Corps also looked to new aviation to preserve amphibious landing operations; close air support aircraft and helicopters would overcome the dispersion that nuclear weapons would force upon amphibious task forces.
Military missions joined the related issues of funding, defense organization, and strategy to produce five years of political upheaval in defense policy. The first round of controversy opened when the War Department in 1945 submitted to Congress a JCS-approved plan for reorganizing the armed forces. The Army plan, which granted autonomy to the Air Force, argued that national military policy would be improved by establishing a single defense staff headed by a single military officer, supervised by a single civilian defense secretary. The new organization, which reflected the War Department General Staff system and the World War II theater unified commands, would “unify” the armed forces by giving the single defense chief and defense secretary the dominant voice in deciding roles and missions and preparing annual budgets. The proposal assumed that interservice competition was the most important barrier to more effective defense planning.
The Navy Department, led by the redoubtable James V. Forrestal, fought the Army plan to a standstill in the White House and Congress, for it saw the War Department plan as a blueprint for the end of its maritime security mission. Forrestal knew the unpublished assumptions of the War Department proposal: Cuts in naval aviation, the transfer of land-based naval air to the Air Force, no Navy nuclear weapons, the reduction of the Marine Corps to minor peacetime security functions. A future war, probably with the Soviet Union, would not involve major naval campaigns, since the Russians did not have a global navy. Therefore, so the Army and AAF planners thought, the Navy should finally relinquish its role as the first line of defense, surrendering that function to the Air Force. Forrestal and his staff retaliated with an alternative plan, designed by Ferdinand Eberstadt, an expert wartime mobilizer. For interservice relations Eberstadt’s plan continued the JCS and theater unified command system, which would prevent the arbitrary assignment of roles and missions by a single chief of staff. Moreover, Eberstadt argued that the major planning difficulty was not interservice rivalry but the lack of civilian-military, interagency coordination in the executive branch. He therefore proposed a new set of agencies to centralize broad planning, coordinate intelligence collection and analysis, conduct mobilization resource planning, sponsor scientific research and development, and supervise education and training. Eberstadt’s plan, quickly adopted by Navy partisans in Congress, checkmated the War Department proposal, since it allied serious issues with considerable political emotion.
For almost two years (1945–1947) two coalitions of defense reorganizers battled until Truman and Congress, exhausted by the struggle and anxious about Russia, forged the National Security Act of 1947, the fundamental legislation on postwar organization. In the balance, the law represented a Navy victory. The president would set policy in consultation with a National Security Council, which drew its statutory membership from old and new agencies: The president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the military department secretaries, and the chairman of the National Security Resources Board. Although the latter agency, along with similar R&D and munitions boards, did not last, another new organization—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—prospered. The new defense organization—labeled the “national military establishment”—was not a centralized, “unified” system but a federation on the World War II model. The secretary of defense, aided by a small staff, had only general, coordinating powers. He was held hostage to three military departments (Army, Air Force, and Navy) with separate secretaries and staffs. The law also specified service roles and missions, particularly for the Navy and Marine Corps, which saved all naval aviation functions and the Fleet Marine Force by inspired lobbying with Congress. Interservice relations remained bound to the JCS system of military negotiation; the JCS did not even have a formal chairman. Navy partisans were even more pleased with what had been avoided. Secretary of War Robert Patterson would not accept the new defense post, and Forrestal became the first secretary of defense. General Eisenhower did not become a single, powerful military defense chief and could only function informally as a presidential adviser. Only Congress could approve the reallocation of basic service combat roles and missions.
The National Security Act represented the end of one battle, not the end of a war. Although Congress rejected the Army’s proposal for universal military training (instead it reestablished a limited draft in 1948, mostly to stimulate recruiting), it showed high interest in enlarging the Air Force’s budget. Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington and Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg (whose uncle was a prominent Republican senator) bedeviled Truman and Forrestal with their successful congressional lobbying. Unable to reconcile the JCS’s budget requests, which ran about twice the money Truman would allow, Forrestal gathered the chiefs at Key West, Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island, in 1948 to hammer out a gentlemen’s agreement on roles and missions. The Navy could develop nuclear weapons for all phases of a naval campaign, and the Marine Corps could develop air-ground amphibious forces, but the Navy could not have a strategic air force and the Marine Corps a ground army. Forrestal, however, could not create defense consensus under service and congressional pressure. Suffering from a nervous breakdown that led to his suicide, Forrestal surrendered his office in March 1949 to Louis Johnson, a former Army officer and assistant secretary of war, Democratic national fundraiser, and Truman intimate. Directed to curb interservice dissent and hold the line on the defense budget, Johnson tried to impose a solution to the persistent roles and missions conflict. In drafting the fiscal year 1951 defense budget ($13.5 billion), Johnson struck a deathblow at naval aviation by canceling the supercarrier United States, cutting the active carrier force from eight to four, and reducing carrier air groups from fourteen to six. Another battle, “the revolt of the admirals,” immediately blazed.
For most of 1949 Air Force and Navy partisans, in uniform and mufti, used Congress to conduct an erratic, bad-tempered review of defense policy and organi
zation. The result was an administration victory for its nuclear strategy and low defense budget. A Navy attempt to discredit the B-36 bomber program foundered, for Johnson would not approve a Navy proposal to test fighter-interceptors against SAC’s bomber force. The Navy made some prescient debating points about the dangers of pinning deterrence solely on nuclear weapons, but it could not destroy Johnson’s bare-bones budget or convince Congress that Army and Air Force planners had a limited vision of the military future. The secretary of the navy resigned in protest, and Johnson removed Chief of Naval Operations Louis E. Denfeld in retaliation for the CNO’s aggressive political offensive against the B-36. When Congress finally concluded its hearings in late 1949, the strategic issues remained unresolved.
In organizational terms, however, “the revolt of the admirals” contributed to a consensus that the “national military establishment” needed an overhaul. Even Ferdinand Eberstadt, who led an investigation of defense management in 1948, admitted that his handiwork of 1945–1947 needed refinement. The result was a 1949 amendment to the National Security Act that strengthened the powers of the secretary of defense. The secretary received a deputy secretary and three assistant secretaries to improve his managerial effectiveness. More important, the law created a single Department of Defense with three constituent military departments; the law eliminated the military department secretaries from the National Security Council and the cabinet. In addition, presumably to curb interservice rivalry, Congress approved the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although the chairman did not yet have a vote on the JCS, he became the principal adviser to the secretary and the president. He did not become a statutory member of the NSC, which added only the vice president as a new formal member, but in practice the president could invite anyone he chose, and he often asked the chairman and the director of the CIA to attend and to advise him directly. In terms of influence, the 1949 amendment started a trend to centralize defense policy planning in the office of the secretary of defense. The secretary, presumably, could use his budgeting powers to decide disputes that the JCS could not reconcile as long as he could avoid a presidential or legislative veto.
For the armed forces, the functional and organizational disputes of the late 1940s helped create an environment that encouraged civilian intervention in military affairs, even in matters that might have been narrowly interpreted as “internal, professional” matters. The postwar years opened an era of controversy about the relationship of the armed forces to reform within American society. In 1950 Congress approved the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which extended civilian substantive and procedural legal principles to the armed forces. Influenced by legal reformers, veterans’ groups, and other public lobbies, Congress accepted their testimony that “military justice” was an arbitrary tool to enforce discipline and strengthen the privileges of the officer corps. In concert with a presidential study of officer-enlisted relations and morale by the Doolittle Commission, the reform movement attacked the powers of commanding officers by reducing their disciplinary discretion and enhancing the powers of military and civilian lawyers. The ultimate appeals court, for example, became a three-man, all-civilian Court of Military Appeals. Although the armed forces eventually adjusted to the new, time-consuming jurisprudence, some officers used the UCMJ as an excuse to abdicate their leadership responsibilities, which did nothing to improve the efficiency of the postwar armed forces.
The armed forces also faced major changes in their social composition in the postwar period. As the World War II veterans left the service, the male enlisted force dropped dangerously in age, education, and class background, which made training it more difficult. The decline in recruit quality helped justify two far-reaching manpower reforms. In 1948 Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which gave women the prospect of a military career, largely in nursing, health services, and administrative fields. Similar manpower and political concerns moved Truman to order the racial integration of the armed forces in Executive Order 9981 (July 1948). The armed services viewed the reform with alarm, fearing that racial integration would further demoralize the troops and reduce white recruiting. Instead the Army, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps maintained token all-black units. The Navy in principle had integrated its enlisted force, but its recruiting and training policies in effect forced two-thirds of black sailors to the Steward’s Branch. The services argued that unrestricted assignments on the basis of individual qualifications and the use of black career officers in integrated units jeopardized military efficiency, despite World War II evidence that at least this was not the case with the former policy. Senior military commanders battled with civilian reformers to retard the execution of 9981 through the use of quotas and slow-paced integration. In sum, the integration of women and blacks further upset the undermanned, marginally effective armed forces.
From every perspective postwar defense policy seemed calculated to widen the gap between military responsibilities and capabilities, a gap that could not be narrowed by nuclear weapons, defense reorganization, and social reform. As the sense of external threat mounted by 1949, the Truman administration sought additional ways to make deterrence work without a major upturn in military spending. After lengthy negotiations the United States committed itself to its most ambitious exercise in collective, forward defense—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO kept the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. In April 1949 the United States joined the signatories of the Brussels Pact and Canada, Iceland, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, and Norway in a pledge that every NATO nation would henceforth regard an attack on one member as an attack on the entire alliance.
The treaty could mean several things, a fact demonstrated when the Senate debated it. Members of the executive branch and the Senate, which approved the treaty by an 82–13 vote, had different conceptions about the extent of America’s NATO participation. One faction argued that extending nuclear deterrence in principle sufficed; conventional forces should be a European responsibility. European leaders argued that their nations could not provide the social reforms demanded by their people and rebuild their shattered economies and still maintain forces that could match the Russians. The JCS led another American faction that took the Europeans’ part. The United States should station conventional air and ground units in Europe as part of a NATO command, if only to secure bases for naval and air action against the Soviets. The only substantial action came in the form of adding arms to the European aid program. In October 1949 Congress approved the administration’s Mutual Defense Assistance Act, which provided $1.3 billion in military equipment and services for NATO. A month later the new NATO Defense Committee approved its first “integrated” defense program, but this plan did little more than ratify the status quo, since it assumed that NATO nations would provide those forces in which they “specialized.” For the United States this concept meant strategic nuclear air forces and naval forces to protect shipping lanes from Russian submarines.
Within the government a coalition of policy planners, led by Secretary of State Acheson, agreed that the Truman administration needed to reassess the military meaning of “containment.” In January 1950 a group drawn from the State Department’s policy planning staff and the JCS strategic planning staff conducted a three-month study and presented its findings to the National Security Council as NSC Memorandum 68 (NSC 68). The study concluded that the Soviet Union presented a long-term threat to the United States and world peace, a threat that would increase with Russian nuclear forces and continued deployments in occupied Eastern Europe. The United States had four choices: Continue its current policies, retreat into unilateral isolationism, wage preventive war, or increase its own and its allies’ military strength in order to deter Soviet expansionism and war. The study group estimated that the latter alternative was preferable, even if it increased the defense budget to $40 billion a year. Without denying the logic of NSC 68, Truman, however, took no action on the memorandum,
for he judged that Congress and the public would not support a more ambitious defense program. Without some additional crisis the United States would have to rely upon its feeble nuclear retaliatory capability. Little did the president realize that Asian Communists half a world away would give him the opportunity to do what he and his advisers already knew had to be done—rearm the United States for an extended Cold War.
A War in Korea
Much to the surprise of the Truman administration, the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) crossed the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950 and opened a three-year war for control of the Korean peninsula. The Korean War brought a major shift in United States military policy, for it provided an atmosphere of crisis that allowed the nation to mobilize for one war in Asia and rearm to deter another war in Europe. By the time the conflict ended in an uneasy armistice in July 1953, the United States had tripled the size of its armed forces and quadrupled its defense budget. It had also redefined the Communist threat to a challenge of global proportions.
Korea had been a backwater of American postwar diplomacy, and it did not loom large as a military concern. Divided in 1945 by an arbitrary line at the 38th Parallel so that occupying Russian and American forces could disarm the Japanese and establish temporary military administrations, Korea had by 1950 become part of the Cold War’s military frontier. In North Korea, the Russians had turned political control over to the Communist regime of Kim Il-sung. The American dilemma in South Korea centered on the lack of a legitimate political movement to turn into a government. The State Department complicated finding a successor by agreeing with the Soviets in December 1945 that Korea should pass through a short trusteeship period that would end in a unified, neutral, lightly armed Korea, an Asian version of the arrangements for occupied Austria. Every political faction except the South Korean Labor Party (the southern Communists) opposed trusteeship. The American zone became a battleground with an anti-occupation revolt in the autumn of 1946. The U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) managed to beat back the center-left labor and agrarian protest movements, but only by forming alliances with Koreans suspected of collaboration with the Japanese, populist fascists linked to the Chinese Nationalists, westernized liberals, regional political bosses, veterans of Japanese military service, and rabid anti-Communist associations of refugees from North Korea. The leftist oppositionists, led by the SKLP, set up a shadow government in North Korea and started an insurrection in the American zone designed to frustrate UN-sponsored elections in May 1948.
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