American Post-war Global Strategic Planning

Abstract

The quest for a world-wide chain of bases, which gave rise to the initial proposals for a security agreement for the Pacific, was only the first of the American post-war planning issues. Before the Second World War had ended, Pentagon planners began to raise matters which would have to be faced by a nation which had previously held aloof from ‘entangling alliances’, had basked securely in hemispheric isolation bolstered by the Monroe Doctrine and the Royal Navy, and had maintained a comparatively small peacetime military establishment. Now, the Americans contemplated an entirely new environment. It included atomic bombs, a rapidly declining British Empire, devastated ex-enemies in Germany, Italy and Japan, newly achieved dominance for the United States and the Soviet Union and an untried United Nations organization. How could a coherent approach be found to face this unfamiliar new world? Military policy, overall strategy, national objectives and the bases network were the four basic ingredients of the strategic debate of the second half of the 1940s as it began to focus on the production of coherent plans to prevent, or wage, a future war. The process was, however, complex and long drawnout, immensely complicated by the Cold War, and was still in a state of flux on the eve of the Korean War, which induced a rapid acceleration.