Unification of the Armed Forces—The First Year

Extract

Somewhat more than a year has passed since James Forrestal took the oath of office as first Secretary of Defense on September 17, 1947. While it is still too early to pass final judgment on the effectiveness of the National Security Organization, sufficient time has elapsed to take some measure of the vast scope of problems it faces, and of the soundness of the foundations upon which it rests.

The National Security Act of 1947, under which the new organization was created, was one of the most thoroughly studied pieces of legislation to come out of the war. In that act, Congress indicated its purpose as being “to provide a comprehensive program of the future security of the United States.” The act did not merge the Army and Navy into a single Department of Defense as many had hoped, but it did provide administrative machinery for establishing integrated policies and procedures for those agencies of the federal government primarily concerned with the national security.

The most important single fact about the National Security Act was that it did much more than merely reorganize the Armed Forces. Indeed this was the essential difference between the two reorganization plans sponsored during 1945–47 by the Army and the Navy. The Army's plan, drafted by Lt. General J. Lawton Collins and his staff, and frequently referred to as the “Collins Plan,” proposed a single “Department of the Armed Forces” with a Secretary at its head. The Navy's proposal went much farther. A brief description of the two plans may not be amiss, since they explain some of the problems that the National Security Organization has encountered during its first year of operation.