‘Our Efforts Have Degenerated into a Competition for Dollars’. The ‘Revolt of the Admirals’, NSC-68, and the Political Economy of the Cold War

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe ‘unification’ of the United States Army and Navy under the 1947 National Security Act, combined with efforts to cut expenditures after the Second World War, spawned vicious inter-service competition that undermined civilian control of the military. The nastiest feuds were between the Air Force and Navy, and then the Navy and civilian leaders of the fledgling Department of Defence. What appears as an esoteric dispute over the utility of bombers versus aircraft carriers was merely the tip of a larger struggle over the future of American military strategy. Civilian efforts to end this destructive inter-service rivalry and force the military to live within its budgetary constraints provoked open defiance during the so-called ‘Revolt of the Admirals’ in 1949. National Security Council Paper 68 offered a way out of this predicament by outlining a quasi-Keynesian fiscal policy based on rearmament that would stimulate the economy enough to offset the additional defence spending.