TIMELINES: What Cold War act did President Truman sign into law on July 26, 1947?

Tuesday, July 16, 2011

THEN

On July 26, 1947, U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the National Security Act into law. Following the end of World War II in 1945, with the Soviet Union pushing to spread communism, the United States funds the struggle against communism in war-torn Europe and around the globe. The Cold War is already underway. The United States needs a more structured and efficient foreign policymaking bureaucracy to deal with the communist threat. The National Security Act helps coordinate the nation’s military might by joining the Navy Department and the War Department into the Department of Defense. It also creates the National Security Council to help digest incoming intelligence and diplomatic information and advise the president. The act further establishes the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assist the military and the Department of State with intelligence gathering and to also carry out cover operations overseas.

NOW

Today, the apparatus of the American national security sector is enormous. In July 2010, the Washington Post published “Top Secret America,” an investigative report on the massive growth of the national security, intelligence, and counterterrorism operations funded by the U.S. government since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Post’s investigation counted some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies doing work related to counterterrorism and homeland security. All told about 854,000 people have top-level secret security clearance. And the amount of new real estate in the D.C. area devoted to intelligence work since 9/11 is equivalent to roughly three Pentagons. The report also documented the tremendous redundancies in the work of these agencies, and the massive reams of intelligence reports they generate—“a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”