ABSTRACT
National security policy planning since World War II has been beset by two crosscutting sets of problems: one organizational, the other substantive. Organizational problems have been compounded by a second and more substantive cluster of conceptual and practical difficulties: the question of the proper perspective from which national security policy planning should proceed. The containment of the Soviet Union as the proper and central concern of American policy has never been much in question since the end of the Second World War. In the initial containment policy statement, President Harry S. Truman seemed concerned primarily with a global struggle between two antithetical "ways of life." Notwithstanding an attempt during the 1950s to reshape the means for pursuing the primary and secondary national security policy, globalism was clearly the dominant image of containment. Military policy and strategic planning must ultimately come to grips with what the planner understands to be the specific military implications of foreign policy.
