New Books In National Security

The U.S. Air Force had to struggle to establish itself as an independent branch of the American military, and originally was an extension of the Army. The experiences during World War II (1939-1945) and the beginning of the Cold War afterwards helped propel the process towards becoming a separate branch in 1948. An important but less studied aspect of this process was the necessity for the Air Force to have its own special intelligence branch, which would later become the Security Service. Undertaking painstaking operations to decipher enemy communications and intentions, the Security Service thought of itself as the first line of defense for the United States and its NATO allies. The hard-won struggle for the Air Force to be an independent branch of the military marked the Security Service as having a certain maverick status within the larger American military intelligence community. The story of this lesser-known branch of U.S. military intelligence is the subject of Philip C. Shackelford's Rise of the Mave