THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR --- Episode 13

IN 1947, THE UNITED STATES PLANTED THE SEEDS THAT BLOSSOMED INTO A POWERFUL WAR MACHINE

In July, 1947, following five months of hearings and heated debate, Congress passed the greatest military reform in U.S. history. The National Security Act created the National Military Establishment [later called the Department of Defense], consisting of the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, headed by a secretary of defense, and a Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS] . Truman appointed the anti-Soviet hard-liner James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense. Creating a new U.S. Air Force separate from the army confirmed the importance of atomic warfare in future military planning. 

The act also created the National Security Council, a War Council, the National Security Resources Board, and the Central Intelligence Agency, all of which General George C. Marshall opposed because they gave the military too much influence over foreign policy and abridged the constitutional authority of the president and secretary of state. Truman himself feared that the CIA could turn into a "Gestapo" or "military dictatorship." The CIA's clandestine nature troubled Acheson, who wrote. "I have the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it." Although the act specifically authorized the Agency only to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence, it also empowered it to perform "other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security." The Agency used that vague wording to conduct hundreds of covert operations, including eighty-one during Truman's second term alone. 

     THE U.S MILITARY BEEFS UP TO BECOME THE 
     WORLD'S BIGGEST BULLY 

In late September 1947, George Kennan urged Forrestal to establish a "guerrilla warfare corps"--- a suggestion Forrestal heartily endorsed--- although the JCS recommended against establishing a "separate guerrilla warfare school and corps." In December, Truman approved NSC 10/2, which called for "propaganda, economic warfare ; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world." These activities were to be done in a way that would always afford the U.S. government plausible deniability. In August 1948, Truman approved NSC 20, which authorized guerrilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

At the end of WW II, U.S.policy makers decided not to allow their booming military machine to erode. In 1948, 62 percent of all federal research and development was military-related. The air force claimed a large share. General Carl Spaatz testified before Congress that "the next war will be predominantly an air war." The The United States began missile research, employing many of the hundreds of scientists it had secreted out of Germany, including almost the entirety of Werner von Braun's rocket staff at Peenemunde. Some of the scientists had been involved in human experimentation and Nazi slave-labor programs. Equally disturbing, during the Tokyo war criminal trials, U.S authorities secretly granted blanket immunity to Japanese officers and reserchers involved with the notorious Unit 731 in exchange for sharing the results of lethal experiments conducted on three thousand prisoners in Manchuria. Meanwhile, the air force, competing with the army and the navy over funding and prestige, employed its own in-house think tank to design strategies that would promote the air force;s primacy. In 1948, this division transformed itself into the independent RAND Corporation. During these years, U.S. war plans became increasingly reliant on atomic weapons and air warfare, which were determined to be far cheaper than conventional military forces. By the middle of the next decade, the air force would consume nearly as much of the defense budget as the army and navy combined. 

MORE TO COME