16 e lusive v ictories
World War had generated powerful political sponsors eager for ongoing
defense contracts to sustain business and employment. Last but not
least, the emergence of the Soviet Union as a rival superpower and the
spread of communism in Eastern Europe and Asia, coupled with the
recognition that other nations such as Great Britain and France could
no longer aff ord to take the lead in a major confl ict, convinced Amer-
ican policy makers to accept a stronger standing military. Force reduc-
tions after the Second World War, then, were not as severe as those
following previous confl icts. Th e years immediately after the war saw
the beginning of the modern national security state: the American
embrace of collective security through establishment of the United
Nations and NATO; passage of the 1948 National Security Act, which
created the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency,
and the National Security Council; and the adoption of a broad com-
mitment to resist the spread of communism.
From that time forward, the president has been able to call upon a
permanent apparatus that can rapidly plan and execute large-scale mil-
itary deployments. No longer does the president have to await the orga-
nizing, equipping, and training of an army before embarking on a
military venture. Th e United States has maintained for decades a mil-
itary that dwarfs any of the nation’s pre-twentieth-century wartime
forces. Even the end of the Cold War did not lead to dramatic reduc-
tions in the size of the U.S. military. And the diff erence is not merely
one of numbers; American armed forces in the postwar era stand apart
from the peacetime military of the past by such other measures as pro-
fessionalism, profi ciency, and speed. Recall the contrast I described in
the opening pages between the clumsy, poorly provisioned assault on
Cuba in 1898 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. American conventional
military capacity is suffi cient today to wage major wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan without recourse to conscription or mandatory economic
mobilization.
Greater military resources, though, tell only part of the story of how
presidents have expanded their means to initiate and wage war. Th e
vulnerability to distant threats that Americans felt at the end of the
Second World War has surged and ebbed, but it has never fully sub-
sided. Partly this is a function of the United States as a global super-
power, fi rst contending with the Soviet Union and later reigning as the