The idea for this book came to me as I was finishing an earlier work on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War. In tracking the congressional debates over the Marshall Plan, I was struck by two convictions that ran through the arguments on both sides. The first was the conviction that elements of current policy involved a break with past practice, and not only with the practice of American foreign policy but with related economic and institutional policies as well. The second was the conviction that bad policies could put the United States on the slippery slope to a garrison state dominated by military leaders and devoted to military purposes. Intrigued by these themes, I decided to track them through a variety of related initiatives having to do with military manpower, the modern day defense department, the allocation of resources for defense and international programs, and the mobilization of science and industry behind the national defense.

These and similar initiatives departed from peacetime practice and provoked a good deal of argument among policy makers, politicians, journalists, and ordinary Americans alike. Both sides understood that a peacetime national security state was in the making where none had existed before. Both saw the need to guard against the potentially corrosive effects of this process on the American way of life as they understood it.