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On July 26, 1947, less than two years after the end of World War II, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947 creating the national military establishment, consisting of a secretary of defense, to be assisted by three civilian special assistants. The act established executive departments of the army, the navy, and the air force, each to be directed by its own secretary. It gave legal recognition to the joint chiefs of staff who had hitherto operated on an ad hoc basis. It provided for a National Security Council charged with overall advisory functions respecting the security of the United States. And it established a Munitions Board, a Research and Development Board, a National Security Resources Board, and a Central Intelligence Agency.

The legislation had been a year and a half in the making-since President Truman first sent to the Congress on December 19, 1945, a message recommending that the armed services be reorganized into a single department. During that period the president's concept of a unified armed service had been torn apart and put back together several times, the final measure to emerge from Congress being a compromise. Most of the opposition to the bill had come from the navy and its numerous civilian spokesmen, including Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. In support of unification (and a separate air force that was part of the unification package) were the army air forces, the army, and most importantly the president of the United States.

As the following three articles strikingly show, passage of the bill did not bring an end to the bitter interservice disputes that had accompanied its progress through Congress. Not even the appointment of Forrestal as first secretary of defense allayed the suspicions of naval officers and their supporters that the role of the U. S. Navy was threatened with permanent eclipse. Before the war of words died

down, Forrestal himself was driven to resignation and then suicide, Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan resigned, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Louis E. Denfeld was fired by President Truman.

Underlying all the bitterness and controversy were two controlling factors, the one fiscal, the other technological. By fiscal year 1948 the U.S. military establishment was forced to make do with a budget approximately 10 percent of what it had been at its wartime peak. The defense budget dropped from $45 billion for fiscal year 1946 to $14.5 billion for FY 1947 and $11.25 billion for FY 1948. Meanwhile the cost of weapons procurement was rising geometrically as the nation came to put more and more reliance on the atomic bomb and its delivery systems. These two factors inevitably made adversaries of the navy and the air force as the battle between advocates of the B-36 and the supercarrier so amply demonstrates. Given severe fiscal restraints on the one hand, and on the other the nation's increasing reliance on strategic nuclear deterrence, the conflict between these two services over roles and missions was essentially a contest over slices of an ever-diminishing pie.

Yet if in the end neither service was the obvious victor, the principle of civilian dominance over the military clearly was. If there had ever been any danger that the U. S. military establishment might exploit, to the detriment of civilian control, the good will it enjoyed as a result of its victories in World War II, that danger disappeared in the interservice animosities engendered by the battle over unification. With two of the armed services at each other's throats and the other two in opposite corners, there could be little likelihood in the postwar years of the emergence in the United States of a monolithic military establishment or a single-purpose military mind.

The goal of unification of the services under a secretary of defense provided for in the National Security Act of 1947 was never satisfactorily met. Rather than unify, the act served to federate the military services. It neither halted the rapid demobilization of the armed forces that followed World War II nor brought to the new national military establishment the loyalties of officers steeped in the traditions of the separate services. At a time when the balance of power in Europe and Asia was rapidly shifting, the services lacked any precise statement of U. S. foreign policy from the National Security Council on which to base future programs. They bickered unceasingly over their respective roles and missions, already complicated by the Soviet nuclear warfare capability that for the first time made the United States subject to devastating attack. Large sums committed in a period of inflation to military aid programs under the Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO, and for China (until 1949), the Philippines, and the American Republics, gave the services low budgets. Thus military strategy was based upon the number of dollars available rather than on national security requirements. As long as this condition continued-until the Korean War-the scramble for dollars was

uppermost in the minds of both civilian and military service leaders, even if that remained unpublicized.

James V. Forrestal, named by President Harry S. Truman to be the first secretary of defense, demanded, with the support of the secretary of the navy, John L. Sullivan, that the defense dollar be split three ways lest the nation have "an unbalanced military organization and an illusory sense of security." 1However, a serious anomaly resulted when the joint chiefs of staff, unable to rationalize the operations of the military establishment and limited to a staff of one hundred officers from all the services, in the fall of 1947 created a board of three "budget deputies" to make the allocations. These included Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, USAF, Vice Adm. Robert B. Carney, USN, and Maj. Gen. George J. Richards, USA, who worked with second-level civilian leaders in the three departments. The anomaly lay in the fact that a military officer, "Little Caesar" McNarney, chaired the group, thereby violating the canon that civilians should control the military.

1 Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951),

P. 396.