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TRANSITION TO THE LATER WAR YEARS 189
military objectives. The President and, indirectly,
the Congress were responsible for
maintaining some balance among the legitimate
concerns of all the government agencies
and all the staffs in them, thus achieving
a corresponding balance among the military,
economic, and foreign policy aims of
the United States. Since every national interest
was at stake in winning World War
II, it was an intricate and difficult task to
decide precisely how to win it and assign
specific duties connected with winning it.
Final determination of the balance to
be established among the separate elements
in national policy usually was left to the
President. Nevertheless, he could work only
on the basis of trial balances evolved on the
staff level in the separate agencies whose
chiefs, including Cabinet officers and the
JCS, reported to the White House. For the
most part his option was either to choose
one or consolidate several of the programs
passed on to him. 1
The more that individual
programs showed a serious and responsible
effort to frame recommendations in the
light of the need for a balanced national
policy, the easier was the President's task
of final decision.
The War Department, and especially
OPD, thus became more and more involved
during the later war years in trying to evaluate
from a military point of view all the
elements of the national effort in a total
war. Day after day the staff dealt with
issues that were not conventionally considered
part of the main military tasks of devising
strategy and conducting operations.
Yet military staff work could not proceed
without making some tentative mutual adjustment
of military and quasi-military is-
1 The President had no systematic staff work (in
the Army sense of the term) done at his own level
of authority except for the limited assistance offered
by the Bureau of the Budget. See Chs. VI and XVI.
sues, as raised by staffs both inside and outside
the Army. By making a careful, responsible
effort in this direction, OPD
greatly strengthened General Marshall's
hand in getting approval of basic Army recommendations
that were being considered
by the JCS and the President.
Because they were complex, because they
cut across so many jurisdictional interests,
and above all because there were so many
of them, the new staff problems that arose
in 1943, 1944, and 1945 presented a special
challenge. What they required was not so
much the discovery of definitive solutions
as the invention of techniques for getting
some kind of compromise solutions that
would permit positive, co-ordinated action.
Policy decisions on the issues involved
would affect the permanent relationships
between the armed services of the United
States, not only between the Army and the
Navy but also between the quasi-independent
Army Air Forces and the older services.
They would affect the permanent status of
component parts of the War Department,
particularly the staffs made up of logistics
specialists, who worked with civilian agencies
to get the military optimum in war production
from the civilian economy, and
staffs made up of more traditional "field"
soldiers, whose effort was directed mainly
toward conducting successful military operations
when necessary and with the resources
then at hand. They would even
affect the long-range political relations
among nations, both the nations that were
friendly with the United States and the
enemy nations, which in time would become
defeated, occupied countries. At
these points the problems of war were coming
once more to be major policy issues
which had to be threshed out in the arena
of national political controversy, an arena
in which the Army leaders had not found it