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bibliog, Reprinted from Naval War College Review, Feb 1959

Frequent references have been made by President Harry S. Truman and others, to the necessity of maintaining balance among the several services. It has been held that one cannot balance military categories which are unlike in character and in function except in terms of specific predicted needs. There are indeed strong reasons for suspecting that a sound allocation of military appropriations would mean for a long time to come much larger funds for the air force than for the navy. The controversy took the form of a dispute over the carrier versus the B-36 partly because military appropriations are not handed out to each service to do with as its wisdom and technical knowledge direct.

The status of Japan as a major sea power came to an end on October 24, 1944. While U.S. victories at Midway and Guadalcanal were of perhaps equal strategic significance in that they hastened the overthrow of early Japanese naval superiority in the Pacific and thus enabled the U.S. to seize the initiative, the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea reduced Japan to a position where its remaining fleet strength was insufficient to affect materially strategic plans of the U.S. Among casualties of the battle was the recently popular theory that the Japanese navy shunned the Nelsonian tradition of decisive actions for command of the sea, that it regarded itself as merely "a floating wing of a powerful army," existing exclusively for convoy escort.