Promoting air power: the influence of the U.S. Air Force on the creation of the National Security State.

• Author: Lazarowitz, Arlene

After nearly four years of global war, Americans yearned for a reversion to normality, but the years immediately following World War II brought instead a permanent state of crisis and a perceived need for continual preparedness. This mood led to the creation of a national-security state concerned essentially with the threat from Soviet communism. The United States assumed new responsibilities for the containment of communism in Europe and Asia as well as leadership of the "free world." The pragmatic consequences of a strategy of continual preparedness and an interest in maintaining a preponderance of U.S. global power were increased budgetary and military obligations (Leffler 1992, 13-15; Sherry 1995, 130). The broader consequences influenced public perceptions and U.S. foreign policy.

The limited funds available to the military dictated that in these early Cold War years, each military service would seek to enhance its prominence in the postwar defense establishment, influence the pattern of defense budgets, and determine how best to provide defense and deterrence. Impatient to succeed in the bureaucratic contest with other military services, the United States Air Force influenced the discourse and the political culture of the national-security state in the early Cold War years. It persuaded the American public that creating air supremacy would be the least costly and most effective strategy in the face of a Soviet threat that the air force itself helped to overstate. When combined with forces that focused on an assumed internal communist threat, the debate over air power matched the wartime home-front mentality that had been part of World War II and was becoming institutionalized in American society. My focus in this article is the air force's attempts to sway public opinion to make air power the cornerstone of national security.

The result of this air force strategy was a budgetary and public-relations controversy that influenced public thinking about military security. The budgetary dilemma developed when President Harry S Truman, who was determined to maintain a balanced budget, confronted dissension within his administration, especially from a secretary of the air force intent on creating parity status for the air force with the older services. The air force had been created as an independent service, with a status equal to that of the army or the navy, by the National Defense Act of 1947, which also created a unified service under the secretary of defense. Interservice rivalry, competition, and quarrels over functions grew out of the unification debate (Huntington 1961, 41; Call 1997, 4). Demands for military demobilization and Truman's objective of controlling federal spending clashed with the nation's growing global responsibilities, dissent within the administration, and the military's persistent demands for increased funding.

The air force argued that funding for additional personnel and planes, especially more sophisticated bombers, at the expense of appropriations for the army and the navy, would limit the number of armed forces personnel required to serve around the world and would best safeguard the United States. A capital-intensive military that favored air power over the other, more labor-intensive armed forces had definite public appeal. These efforts continued until the Korean War generated an immediate requirement for increased funding. At that point, Truman submitted a supplemental request for appropriations that included a substantial amount for the air force (Truman 1948-50, 724). The air force had succeeded in laying the groundwork that justified this increase.

These budget debates were intertwined with Cold War considerations in the early years of tense U.S.-Soviet relations, years in which it was accepted that any gain in the world for the Soviets would be a loss for the United States. Much of this friction was part of a public discourse that took place between 1947 and 1950 over the future of U.S. defenses in a world perceived as bipolar and in which the United States had assumed a proactive, even interventionist role. The services agreed that the next war would be a total war (Huntington 1961, 49). They disagreed on how best to prepare for it. The air force used Cold War assumptions, often genuinely grounded in World War II experiences, during the budget process. A multitude of global events appeared to be part of a pattern indicative of a communist quest for global power: Soviet refusal to withdraw troops from Iran in 1946; conditions in Greece and Turkey, which led to promulgation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947; removal from office of the noncommunist-elected Hungarian leader in 1947; European Communist Party electoral victories that preceded the Marshall Plan blueprint for European economic recovery in 1948; the communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948; Russian interference with Western ground access to Berlin in 1948; the communist victory on the Chinese mainland in 1949; and the ominous Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949 that obliterated America's nuclear monopoly and shocked the American public.

The capacity and budgets of the postwar defense establishment, however, were determined by domestic politics as well as by these international events. The Joint Chiefs of Staff identified the Soviet Union as the singular threat to U.S. postwar security, and they speculated that should a war occur, it would result from a Soviet land invasion of western Europe, against which a diminished United States Army would be ineffective. A consensus emerged that atomic weapons, which they considered more powerful and more effective than conventional bombs, were qualitatively distinct from all prior instruments of warfare (Ross 1988, 154-55; S. McFarland 1996, 5). Simply by threatening to strike, a bomber force alone would be unequalled in imposing America's determination (Sherry 1977, 41-42, 110). Many in the administration and Congress, though, were convinced that unrestrained military spending would generate an undesirable inflation. Truman believed that a strong military defense, which would serve as a powerful deterrent to war, depended on a sound economic system with low inflation, and this policy approach entailed holding the line on expenditures (Mrozek 1972, 70; Gaddis 1982, 58).

The Military and the President

Preparedness for war took precedence in these early Cold War years. The new commitments and assumed threats led to a previously unknown peacetime allocation of resources to the military establishment and the national-security state. Prior to 1947, each service had argued individually for its budget before Congress (Snow and Brown 1997, 136; Hogan 1998, 166, 464, 467). Now the Department of Defense was supposed to present a unified budget. The contentious process of unifying the forces, however, continued with the fractious dealings among the military bureaucracies over the allocation of defense dollars. Divided roles and missions further worked against interservice unity. How best to provide defense and deterrence became increasingly contested. The creation of the new position of secretary of defense to administer the national military establishment signaled a change in policy for all the services. Emphasis would now be placed on preparedness rather than reaction and on prevention of rather than engagement in wars (Brynes 2000, 47). Determining how to carry out this policy, with each service retaining substantial autonomy, led to competition. The new law reserved to the service secretaries power not granted to the defense secretary and gave the civilian heads of the services the right to appeal the defense secretary's decisions to the president (Wolk 1997, 395). When the National Security Act failed to provide coordination between the services or consolidation of the defense effort, advocates of air power, together with the secretary of the air force--certain that strategic air power, under air force instead of navy control, would decide further conflicts--sought to fill the vacuum.

Truman believed in a balanced budget and in the values of American political culture it exemplified. At the same time that he accepted the necessity of a national-security state, he did not want to institutionalize military preparedness at wartime levels. Undue emphasis on a garrison state might eventually allow military needs to dictate budgets and even to empower military leaders to challenge civilian authority. Truman's traditional fidelity to a balanced budget and his determination to rein in raucous military-bureaucratic politics contended with the massive cost of national security that prescribed a large military establishment (Truman 1948-50, 272; Leffler 1992, 13; Hogan 1998, 20, 71-72). (1) Truman was skeptical of the military's demands and convinced that it squandered billions of dollars. He complained that Congress could not bring itself "to do the right thing--because of votes." The "air boys" sought only "glamour," and the navy had "the greatest propaganda machine" (qtd. in Ferrell 1960, 34). Actually, it was the air force that had the superior propaganda machine. The wartime glamour of aerial warfare persisted as part of the public consciousness, as did an overly simplified perception of the contribution that military aviation had made to victory in Europe during World War II (Trest and Watson 1997, 413; S. H. Ross 2003, 197).

Truman's anxiety about public resistance to increased taxes in a presidential election year strengthened his determination that the military adhere to a $15 billion budget for fiscal year 1949. He knew that even the Berlin Blockade and airlift of 1948-49, which taxed cargo aircraft, had failed to rouse public opinion to rearm for possible military conflict with the Soviet Union (Kolodziej 1966, 58, 442; Haynes 1973, 120; Kirkendall 1987, 187; Kinnard 1990, 25). Truman allotted an annual defense budget and expected secretary of defense...