The overriding conviction held by Eisenhower throughout his two terms as president was that the Cold War would be a long-drawn-out contest, where the United States would require a strong and healthy economy to prevail. The continual strain of heavy defence spending, Eisenhower feared, would eventually necessitate the imposition of economic controls by the state which would undermine the core American values of individual freedom that were presumed to differentiate the United States from its principal Soviet adversary. Surveying the landscape of national security policy on arrival in office, the new President, along with his Secretary of the Treasury, George Humphrey, believed that the rearmament efforts of NSC 68 and the demands of the Korean War had transformed the size and shape of the US military establishment in ways which were financially unsustainable and foreshadowed a ‘garrison state’ which would eventually undermine the Republic. Rejecting the notion of preventive war against the Soviet Union, Eisenhower would spend the first months of his presidency trying to inculcate the federal bureaucracy with his parsimonious philosophy and to find a new basis on which to contain the global Communist threat which most Americans discerned.

Just before the Korean armistice, almost 1 million out of America's total military force of 3,555,000 were deployed overseas, compared with June 1950 figures of 281,000 overseas out of 1,460,000 service personnel. Germany, Japan and Korea, the key battlegrounds of the Cold War, were home to the bulk of overseas deployments.