Making the Military American: Advertising, Reform, and the Demise of an Antistanding Military Tradition, 1945–1955 1

AFTER World War II. Americans—for the first time in their history—embraced the idea of a large peacetime military rather than the traditional “mass army.” Many were convinced of the need for a large standing military by promilitary spokesmen, who asserted that with the rise of a global communist threat and nuclear technology, there would be no more “personal” wars involving long mobilization periods and large civilian armies. The next war would be fast and atomic and would strike the American homeland.