811.20/11–48
Memorandum by the Acting Secretary of State to the Secretary of State in Paris
On Sunday, 31 October, Forrestal called me for the purpose of discussing his budget problem.1 He said that he and the military leaders had consulted General Marshall regarding the tentative top limit put on the military budget for the fiscal year 1950 since he felt that the 15 billion dollar figure (he referred to it as 14.4 billions actually, available) would be too small to permit the development of defensive forces agreed on last spring. He was aiming to have those ready by July 1, 1949.
Without going too much into the detail, Forrestal said that one of the complications in arriving at a decision was the degree of importance attached to an adequate military establishment in connection with our present foreign policy and the negotiations now taking place.
I told him that that was obviously a very difficult question and that it was not my understanding that the State Department should be put in a position of expressing judgment on the size of the defense forces which this country needed for its national security. I referred to this topic, which I had discussed at lunch with him on 26 October, and he agreed that his questions to you should not be so much on the size of the budget or the amount of military strength needed, but rather should be requests for an opinion as to whether or not the international situation was static or deteriorating as compared with the conclusions reached last spring.
He said he was writing a letter to you enclosing a memorandum and raising several questions along the line mentioned just above and that the most important one related to whether or not matters had gotten sufficiently better internationally to permit a reduction in the military [Page 648] forces previously planned as being ready by the middle of next year.2
He said he had to start talks with the Budget on November 8 and that he realized the time was very short to get an indication of your views. In these circumstances he asked if I would make a guess as to the answer to the principal question. I told him that my opinion would be of little value but that, if he wanted a personal estimate pending receipt of word from you, I would guess that the situation was not changed much since the spring and certainly I could see no substantial improvement in the world situation, particularly in the light of the Stalin speech3 and the growing complications in the Middle East.
I also suggested that one of the elements he would probably wish to take into account was the inevitable requirement for some method of providing assistance to the Brussels signatories in connection with any regional association or otherwise.
Forrestal said that, in order to carry out the targets agreed to earlier this year, he thought the military establishment budgets would have to be increased. Last Tuesday he mentioned a figure of something under 18 billions as a middle figure between the requests from the military establishment and the budgeted ceiling of 15 billions.
The conversation ended in a discussion of the possibility of the urgent need for economies in the overhead costs of the military services and in the avoidance of unnecessary duplication.
- For Forrestal’s account of the discussion, see Millis, The Forrestal Diaries, p. 511.↩
- The letter and memorandum are printed supra. ↩
- Reference is presumably to the interview published by Pravda on October 28 in which Stalin was highly critical of Western policy with respect to Berlin; for documentation on United States policy regarding the Berlin crisis, see vol. ii, pp. 867 ff.↩