For the Common Defense by Allan R. Millett Peter Maslowski & William B. Feis

Author:Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski & William B. Feis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

Rearmament for Hemispheric Defense

After more than a decade of limiting its armed forces through international agreement and unilateral fiscal action, the United States in 1933 began to rearm. The course change was slight and the increase in speed modest, for the nation still regarded the fleet as the first line of defense and viewed its maritime security system as a bulwark against foreign troubles, not a tool for interventionism. The strategic focus of rearmament remained a minimal effort to deter Japanese adventurism in Asia and the western Pacific and the defense of the Western Hemisphere against foreign military incursions. As always, nonstrategic factors influenced military policy. Coping ineffectively with the Great Depression, the federal government wanted to reduce spending. Yet it also had an inclination to assist some embattled businesses with government orders. One of these industries was shipbuilding, another was aircraft production. Another influence was that the coalition of disarmament advocates and noninterventionists continued to argue that international agreements and congressional action could keep the United States out of another war. Until 1936 the nation participated in international conferences on arms limitation, and between 1935 and 1939 Congress passed five different neutrality acts inhibiting official and unofficial participation in “foreign wars.” Only toward the end of the decade did military policy bear any direct relationship to the threat of war.

Naval rearmament required a change of attitude in Congress and a new face in the White House. Unlike Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt did not boast that he had never approved a new vessel and had purposely kept the Navy well below treaty strength. Like his cousin Theodore, FDR had grown up close to the sea, ships, and Navy social circles, and he had few illusions about the force of good intentions in world affairs. Roosevelt, however, promised in his first two presidential campaigns that he would cut government spending, including the military budget. The initiative for naval rearmament rested in Congress, especially Carl Vinson’s House Naval Affairs Committee. But at least congressional navalists could depend upon a more sympathetic president. The first test came with the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, a modest attempt to stimulate economic recovery by giving businesses increased freedom for self-regulation. A provision of the act allowed the president to use public works funds to build naval vessels, and Roosevelt soon issued an executive order that allocated $238 million for warships. The thirty-two-ship, three-year program provided for two carriers, four cruisers, and twenty destroyers as well as smaller vessels. Congress, however, changed its mind about military public works when the Army and Navy requested more “welfare” spending and forbade similar presidential initiatives.

Undeterred by the protests of critics that the United States had started another naval arms race, Vinson, a legislator of consummate skill, designed another shipbuilding program in 1934. Although it did not meet specific Navy recommendations, the Vinson-Trammell Act authorized the Navy to build up to treaty strength by 1942. Under the act the Navy could build 102 warships, which brought the new authorizations up to 134 vessels.

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