National Security Act
The National Security Act of July 26, 1947 is an important piece of law in US postwar history. With him, the realignment of American security and defense policy after the end of the Second World War was completed at the institutional level.
According to one published by Sapolsky et al. The book published in 2009, the 'National Security Act' is still the basis of global American military power.
history
During the Second World War, interfaces and interactions between the armed forces were essentially limited to the Joint Army / Navy Board . In addition, the United States Army and the United States Navy were each subordinate to independent ministries with cabinet rank (the marine infantry in turn was subordinate to the Navy Department as a non- independent armed forces). They were also responsible to independent committees with rotating staff in Congress . The organizational and operational inefficiency of this military style of leadership based on the division of labor was already revealed during the war.
The reform efforts after the end of the war resulted in two competing proposals. The Collins Plan emerged from an army-dominated working group headed by General J. Lawton Collins , with a strong tendency to centralize politico-military leadership. The Eberstadt plan of a commission under Ferdinand Eberstadt, which came from the pen of an assistant to the Navy Minister James V. Forrestal , suggested much more manageable changes to the command structure.
The background to this alternative proposal was a historically grown predilection of the Navy for direct decisions made by a ship's captain (or squadron commander or fleet commander) at sea compared with general staff-based operational plans on land, and its fear of a bureaucratic superiority of the considerably larger army and air force. The Marine Corps supported the Eberstadt plan because the army questioned its right to exist. At the same time, the army tried to avoid its de facto submission to the emerging doctrine of strategic bombing by hiving off the United States Army Air Forces .
The first version of the National Security Act represented a compromise between the two bills. Nevertheless, he preferred essential aspects of the Eberstadt Plan , which aimed at cushioning centralized military command through the establishment of a plurality of committees and, for example, distributing these to several equal cabinet secretaries. As a result of amendments to the National Security Act in 1949, the latter ceased to exist without replacement, while President Dwight D. Eisenhower, by executive order, replaced several bodies with advisors and state secretaries with permanent staff. The law underwent a last major revision in 1958.
content
The main points were:
- the creation of a Ministry of Defense , the Department of Defense (DoD), through the merger of the previous Ministry of War and Navy Department ;
- the creation of an independent air force, the US Air Force (USAF);
- the retention and institutionalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) established during the war ;
- the creation of the National Security Council (NSC); such as
- the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
With these decisions, the Truman government reaffirmed the course of confrontation with the “communist camp” in the Cold War that followed, which it had announced in May of the same year with the “ Truman Doctrine ” .
Web links
- Full text of the National Security Act (English, source text)
Supporting documents and comments
- ↑ cf. Sapolsky, Harvey; Gholz, Eugene; Talmadge, Caitlin: US Defense Politics - The origins of security policy , London and Abingdon: Routledge 2009, p. 4.
- ↑ cf. Sapolsky, Harvey; Gholz, Eugene; Talmadge, Caitlin: US Defense Politics - The origins of security policy , London and Abingdon: Routledge 2009, pp. 3ff.
- ↑ cf. Sapolsky, Harvey; Gholz, Eugene; Talmadge, Caitlin: US Defense Politics - The origins of security policy , London and Abingdon: Routledge 2009, p. 5.