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.