i ntroduction 15Th e presidents who would face two world wars still depended on
legislative action to bring the armed forces to a war footing. Apart from
the U.S. Navy, the resources at the disposal of a commander in chief
remained modest. When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare
war on Germany in April 1917, as I explain in Chapter 2 , the United
States could contribute no troops. Mobilization eventually put a sizable
American army into the fi eld in the fi nal months of the confl ict, giving
Wilson the place at the peace table he sought. What had been created
in a mad rush was then dismantled almost as quickly, much as after
previous wars.
Frantic mobilization became necessary again a generation later, at the
outset of the Second World War. As before, the nation scrambled to
build a huge army for global confl ict and to expand the navy so that it
could wage full-scale war in two oceans. As warfare had become more
complex, however, the time needed to train and equip militaries had
increased. Th e United States required two years to mobilize fully, a
delay that postponed the decisive Allied invasion of Europe until 1944,
resulted in untold additional military and especially civilian deaths, and
allowed the victorious Soviet army to advance deep into Central
Europe.
Yet even that sobering experience, joined to the postwar threat posed
by an increasingly hostile Soviet Union, did not entirely uproot the old
habit of shrinking the military in peacetime. Weary of wartime sacri-
fices, Americans demanded the quick return and discharge of the
troops. Confi dence that peace would become the norm extended all
the way to the White House: after World War II ended, Harry S.
Truman approved a redesign of the presidential seal in which the eagle’s
head was turned toward the olive branch as a symbol of the new era.
Th e outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 caught the U.S. Army once
more at a low level of readiness.
Nonetheless, important changes had already occurred that marked
the birth of a new era in American security policy. Americans drew a
lesson from Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima: lost forever was the luxury of
time and distance that had permitted the United States to arm itself at
leisure when a threat loomed. American leaders now spoke of national
security as a constant concern. Further, the vast “military-industrial
complex”—as Eisenhower later termed it—spawned by the Second