Matthews assumed office at a time of internal turmoil in the Department of Defense resulting from significant post-World War II funding reductions and controversial decisions on pre-Korean War defense priorities by the Truman administration as outlined and executed by SECDEF Johnson. One of the most contentious was that of service unification and the roles and missions of each of the U.S. armed services. In order to fund his postwar domestic spending agenda, Truman had advocated a policy of defense program cuts for the armed forces at the end of the war, and the Republican Party majority in the Congress, anxious to enact numerous tax cuts, approved of Truman's plan to "hold the line" on defense spending. In addition, Truman's previous experience in the Senate during World War II had left him with lingering suspicions that large sums had been, and were continuing to be, wasted in the Pentagon. Impressed by U.S. advances in nuclear weapons development, both Truman and Johnson had initially believed that the atomic bomb had rendered all conventional military forces, particularly naval forces (e.g., the Navy and the Marine Corps), largely irrelevant to the modern battlefield, thus justifying cuts to all but strategic nuclear forces that largely resided in the U.S. Air Force and the Strategic Air Command. Matthews also ascribed to this view and it became the cornerstone of postwar U.S. defense policy prior to the establishment of the communist nation of East Germany by the Soviet Union in its occupation zone of Germany in 1949 and the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950.