Between 1945 and 1948, as we have seen, Truman had tried to strike a balance between the warfare state and the welfare state. He wanted to equip the country for its new role as the global defender of democracy, but on terms that squared with American tradition and with his own domestic agenda, including a balanced budget and a modest expansion of the social programs that had grown out of the New Deal. With these goals in mind, he had begun to redirect resources from wartime to peacetime purposes and had made some progress in unifying the armed forces and creating a national security organization that dovetailed with the principle of civilian leadership. But progress had been slow, some ground had been lost after the Czech crisis, and the same issues would have to be refought in the years ahead. Nor were they the only issues. The Truman administration also had to mobilize the military manpower and the economic and scientific resources needed to sustain a credible deterrent. The story of American state making included major battles in these areas, too, and of these battles none was more hard fought than the one over universal military training (UMT).

Truman waged this battle, the subject of little scholarship thus far, even as he was struggling to reduce the defense budget and bring the armed forces under better control, and the battle itself revealed themes that were also evident in these concurrent struggles.