ABSTRACT

The notion that the American military tradition rejected the concept of war as a continuation of politics has been central to the dominant image of the American way of war. As we shall see, this image became widely influential in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Yet, as an all-encompassing generalization about American military culture, this apolitical characterization was most valid for the period in which it emerged – that is, the period from the beginning of the Cold War up to the mid-1960s. Moreover, it depicted some elements of the US strategic community – above all the Strategic Air Command – more accurately than others – for example, the group of ‘neo-Clausewitzian’ civilian strategists discussed in the next chapter. Ironically, the latter group played no small part in tarring the traditional American way of war with the brush of apoliticism. Cold War realists and Limited War theorists interpreted earlier periods of US military history through the prism of the American strategy adopted in World War II, in an era when the logical culmination of that strategy appeared to have been realized in the terrifying prospect of ‘Massive Retaliation’.