CVA-58 NOT Cancelled

The USA ALWAYS takes postwar demobilization too far,

Maaaaaybe. Money spent on the military is basically money on an insurance policy. It is wasted money if war doesn't happen. For most of US history it has been impossible to present an existential threat. The second last time there was one in North America the Brits were paying for the defense.

Historically the US (and UK and other isolated democracies) have had time to rearm which means they can draw down their forces in peace time giving them economic advantages. The question is, is the peacetime boost worth it if the military has to be rebuilt before every war. Given that before 1941 the US was able to mostly survive with two guys and a pointy stick I would have to say it was worth it.
 
Viewed from another perspective, you have a mission with a lot of demanding requirements (long range, big and heavy early nuclear bombs) that the technology of the time can't provide in a smaller package. That combined with the increasing monomaniacal nuclear war-or-nothing trend means that to meet those requirements you need to make some rather serious tradeoffs.

Yes, Korea and the "Moore's Law For Jets" period of technology means that in hindsight, the CVA-58 is as flawed as you say, but at the immediate time, it wasn't quite as bad, and at least more understandable.

CVA-58 came about because the Navy needed to justify its existence in the Atomic Age. A lot of military planners, while yes edging very close to the borders of sanity, thought that since nuclear weapons had been the weapon to end the last war, they would be the weapon to start the next war, not exactly an unreasonable assumption historically speaking. The Air Force had a monopoly for the first couple years after 1945 on nuclear weapons and they parlayed that very well into siphoning off funding. As a result, the Army and the Navy had to come up with new and exciting ways to justify their existence. Just as RanulfC said, the United States was designed to woo Harry Truman. Korea was in some respects a blessing for the Army and the Navy, and the Air Force's Tactical Air Command to be honest, because it showed nuclear arms were not the end all and be all and that conventional forces still had a prominent place in the modern national security infrastructure. If Harry Truman could have been convinced somehow that United States had promise in its intended role, with some common sense redesigns, it could potentially become a useful conventional asset.
 
RanulfC, I have to say, I really didn't realize the Army and Navy's funding difficulties were quite so bad in the post-World War II. And to think, the Navy named a carrier after Truman. No wonder they wanted to forgo refueling her.

Politics and PR... And considering the Navy considers the "Nimitz" class to be a spiritual decedent of the USS United States... ;D

Dewey getting elected probably wouldn't have been all that bad. By 1948, the New Deal was so ingrained in American political culture and generally very beloved by the American voting public, so only the hardline conservatives in the Republican Party like Taft and his ilk (correct me on any of this if I'm wrong, my post-WW2 history is spotty) were really against tearing it down. Dewey was pointedly not an isolationist and he probably would have forgone Truman's "Peace Dividend" mindset. If the Navy could retain United States, perhaps the Army could avoid the pentomic reorganization, with a general refocus on conventional forces. Something like that could lead to a lot of other butterflies involving conventional arms.

Dewey and the incoming Republican's weren't really against the New Deal, as you note by that time it was ingrained and accepted and more so it worked so... Taft-et-al were specifically who Dewey and company were fighting against which is why he proposed Eisenhower as a candidate. Ike straight up told Taft that if he only bent a little on mutual defense, (literally he only had tell him he'd THINK about it) Ike wouldn't run against him. Taft said he would not even consider mutual defense OR international cooperation at a time when it was quite clear the American public would not accept anything less. Taft was sent packing. Now in a Dewey wins timeline of course it's unlikely Eisenhower ever get into politics at all, (I'd say he probably get a nod for a cabinet post but truly at the time he wasn't interested in getting into politics and had to be 'drafted' to run against Truman) but I suspect Dewey would consult and use him as an adviser.

Dewey specifically was against and worried about Truman's military policy and felt, (and argued) that a more balanced defense policy was better for the US. Yes it's likely the Army would have probably moved to a bit of a different strategy and organization but keep in mind the "pentomic" system was a rather logical progression considering how much tactical nuclear weapons had changed the battlefield:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentomic)

The thing was it wasn't actually brought out as an actual organizational strategy until the mid-50s. And THAT was partially in response to new cuts and drawdowns instigated by Eisenhower!

Initially the Army wanted to invest in air-mobility and nuclear battlefield survive-ability which made sense but by the mid-50s Eisenhower had gotten into nearly the same rut as Truman but had admitted that the Navy actually had a viable role to play in future wars. It was actually the utility of the ARMY that he questioned as in his mind the Navy would protect the US at a distance, the Air Force would strike back with overwhelming atomic fire-power and the Army would only be needed to protect 'point' positions around the US (cities and industry) while the USAF and NORAD would protect the overall US.
(He was briefed and convinced that the CIA could handle any foreign situation short of a nuclear war... No really that's what he based the US defense policy on)

My question is though, would the Polaris missile program have come about if the Navy had a growing sea-based nuclear striking arm in the form of United States and her sisters? I think Polaris still would have come about, it evolved in a somewhat independent manner out of the Regulus cruise missiles and the Grayback-class cruise missile submarines. There was interest in developing strike warfare capabilities in the Submarine Force and with Rickover delivering next-level capabilities, the Submarine Force offered real nuclear age possibilities.

Likely because the promised capability of submarine launched weapons was pretty obvious and the dangers of liquid fuel missiles on a Navy ship were well known. (They figured this out by exploding a fully fueled V2 100 feet above a rebuilt carrier deck in Nevada... About a year after they had already LAUNCHED several V2 from a carrier... Apparently no one thought to ask "what could happen" till AFTER the fact :) ) Solid propellant ballistic missiles were a Navy goal from early on and while they'd cooperated with the Army on early Jupiter development they quickly switched to a requirement for solid instead of liquid propellant and then dropped out of the cooperation. The shortcomings of the early cruise missiles, (surfacing to launch, time to launch and the need for intermediate radio guidance by other ships/submarines) pretty much soured the Navy on their deployment but SLBM was pretty much a given. I'd guess that the earlier availability of funds would in fact accelerate the development just as it would Army and Air Force missile development.

The B-36 actually was never in service very long or very extensively. The all-jet B-47 was the primary nuclear bomber for SAC until the B-52 came along and the B-36 was retired at the end of the 1950s. The problem was the capabilities the Air Force advertised for it were blown all out of proportion, not to mention it was a mechanic's nightmare. It wasn't as invulnerable as it was proposed to be and it is doubtful it would have been able to fight its way in and out of an alerted Soviet air defense. It actually did perform fairly well as a strategic reconnaissance bird, when that titanic bombload could be taken up by fuel tanks and much lighter cameras, but as a bomber the B-36 was not worth the trouble.

Honestly though, can anyone say this does NOT give you a bit of a shiver? :)

The B-36 was arguably obsolete before it was deployed and this was a known fact, but at the same time compared to the capability of the B-29/50 airframe it was a world of improvement and had a possibility of being used in a variety of roles when it was originally designed and produced. The pace of technology though really was moving to fast for it to be AS useful as the Air Force claimed. There were options considered but keep in mind not even the Air Force was getting anything that could be called a real budget at the time. It got more than the Army and Navy but it still wasn't enough to actually sustain let alone expand either SAC or the regular Air Force to even then "modern" standards. A bigger budget would have elevated this problem all around. By 1950 the Navy and Air Force OTL were fighting for their lives, by the mid-50s only the players had changed and the Army and Air Force were in conflict.

Randy
 
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