Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The National Security Discourse: Ideology, Political Culture, and State Making
- 2 Magna Charta: The National Security Act and the Specter of the Garrison State
- 3 The High Price of Peace: Guns-and-Butter Politics in the Early Cold War
- 4 The Time Tax: American Political Culture and the UMT Debate
- 5 “Chaos and Conflict and Carnage Confounded”: Budget Battles and Defense Reorganization
- 6 Preparing for Permanent War: Economy, Science, and Secrecy in the National Security State
- 7 Turning Point: NSC-68, the Korean War, and the National Security Response
- 8 Semiwar: The Korean War and Rearmament
- 9 The Iron Cross: Solvency, Security, and the Eisenhower Transition
- 10 Other Voices: The Public Sphere and the National Security Mentality
- 11 Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
2 - Magna Charta: The National Security Act and the Specter of the Garrison State
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 The National Security Discourse: Ideology, Political Culture, and State Making
- 2 Magna Charta: The National Security Act and the Specter of the Garrison State
- 3 The High Price of Peace: Guns-and-Butter Politics in the Early Cold War
- 4 The Time Tax: American Political Culture and the UMT Debate
- 5 “Chaos and Conflict and Carnage Confounded”: Budget Battles and Defense Reorganization
- 6 Preparing for Permanent War: Economy, Science, and Secrecy in the National Security State
- 7 Turning Point: NSC-68, the Korean War, and the National Security Response
- 8 Semiwar: The Korean War and Rearmament
- 9 The Iron Cross: Solvency, Security, and the Eisenhower Transition
- 10 Other Voices: The Public Sphere and the National Security Mentality
- 11 Conclusion
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Looking back from a later day it is tempting to conclude that the great American military behemoth lurched without a limp from World War II into the postwar period, though nothing could be further from the truth. Although the Truman administration never retreated to the sleepy peacetime military establishment of the interwar era, it did authorize a substantial demobilization of the armed forces before reassembling them in an organization more appropriate to the long period of armed truce that lay ahead. More time and thought went into this process than is commonly conceded, and the process itself was marked by intense bureaucratic struggles, by competition between the executive and legislative branches, and by different designs for an organizational framework that would meet political as well as military requirements.
In the background, too, was the new ideology of national security that American leaders brought to bear on the task of state making. Usually reduced to the notion of anticommunism or to the doctrine of containment, the new ideology also envisioned a prominent role for the United States in world affairs and included the conviction that national security in an age of total war required some elaboration of the state's authority to organize civilian and military resources behind a permanent program of peacetime military preparedness.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Cross of IronHarry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, pp. 23 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998