by Theodore Douglas

Created on: August 21, 2009

Historian Howard Zinn once said that "War is the health of the state." When considering the relationship between warfare and society after World War II, the phrase is particularly apt. The demilitarization of the US military, in the face of perceived communist aggression, never quite happened. Not only did it make the cold war a reality-it proved great for keeping the American economy rolling.

While America had partially recovered from Great Depression before the start of World War II, it was really the war, which put millions of Americans to work for the government and created millions of new jobs to produce the weapons of war necessary to defeat the Axis that put the American economy back on sound footing. With well over 10 million soldiers in the military by the end of the war, demilitarization was neither a small nor insignificant task. The government could not afford to keep all those men and women on their payroll, but to discharge them immediately was just as infeasible and dangerous to America's economic future.

It was both a series of circumstance and deliberate action that pointed towards a solution. While the majority of soldiers were being discharged, the world situation was changing rapidly. The Soviet Union was proving, from an American perspective, to be incorrigible. Communists were making headway in Southeast Asia and parts of Europe. With many inside and outside government clamoring that a monolithic communist power was threatening to envelop all the freedom-loving countries of the world (ignoring how many of America's allies were not democratic and how ideologically different communism was from one country to another), the Soviet Union and communism in general came under the crosshairs.

In an age where many had expected the economy to slow and America's military to shrink to meager proportions, fear of communist aggression facilitated the opposite. George Kennan's "Long Telegram" and Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speeches, both produced in 1946, laid the groundwork for a permanent remilitarization of the armed forces. President Truman's famous "Doctrine" speech in 1947 served as a call to arms to all America and her allies against communism. Sixteen times the President called communism a threat or satanic force. It was hardly an attempt to convince the nation, let alone the world, that peace was possible without an ample military force to back it. Military spending grew rapidly.

The Soviet Union's detonation of an

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