Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947 in response to the rise of Communism and the Soviet Union's growing global threat. In general, the postwar legislation is credited with having created our modern national security apparatus. The Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council all came to exist to ameliorate the problems that the United States experienced in the early days of fighting World War II, when a lack of coordination and disjointed efforts sometimes hampered our war plans.
In order to prevent that kind of problem from recurring during the Cold War (and to better manage the complex requirements of national defense in the nuclear age), the National Security Act put the National Security Council at the heart of this new national defense system. It was designed to be the mechanism through which all of the various agencies involved in national security met and disseminated their institution's views on a given problem the country was facing.
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