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Chief of Staff

By 1930, MacArthur was 50 and still the youngest and one of the best known of the U.S. Army's major generals. He left the Philippines on 19 September 1930 and for a brief time was in command of the IX Corps Area in San Francisco. On 21 November, he was sworn in as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, with the rank of general. While in Washington, he would ride home each day to have lunch with his mother. At his desk, he would wear a Japanese ceremonial kimono, cool himself with an oriental fan, and smoke cigarettes in a jeweled cigarette holder. In the evenings, he liked to read military history books. About this time, he began referring to himself as "MacArthur". He had already hired a public relations staff to promote his image with the American public, together with a set of ideas he was known to favor, namely: a belief that America needed a strongman leader to deal with the possibility that Communists might lead all of the great masses of unemployed into a revolution; that America's destiny was in the Asia-Pacific region; and a strong hostility to the British Empire. One contemporary described MacArthur as the greatest actor to ever serve as a U.S. Army general while another wrote that MacArthur had a court rather than a staff.

The onset of the Great Depression prompted Congress to make cuts in the Army's personnel and budget. Some 53 bases were closed, but MacArthur managed to prevent attempts to reduce the number of regular officers from 12,000 to 10,000. MacArthur's main programs included the development of new mobilization plans. He grouped the nine corps areas together under four armies, which were charged with responsibility for training and frontier defense. He also negotiated the MacArthur-Pratt agreement with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William V. Pratt. This was the first of a series of inter-service agreements over the following decades that defined the responsibilities of the different services with respect to aviation. This agreement placed coastal air defense under the Army. In March 1935, MacArthur activated a centralized air command, General Headquarters Air Force, under General Frank M. Andrews.

By rapidly promoting Andrews from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general MacArthur supported Andrews' endorsement of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber and the concept of long-range four-engine bombers. This was controversial at the time because most high-ranking Army generals and officials in the War Department supported twin-engine bombers like the Douglas B-18 Bolo heavy bomber. After MacArthur left his position as Army Chief of Staff in October 1935 his successor Malin Craig and War Secretary Harry Hines Woodring ordered a halt to research and development of the B-17 and in 1939 zero four-engine bombers were ordered by the War Department and instead hundreds of inferior B-18s and other twin-engine bombers were ordered and delivered to the Army. Andrews, thanks to MacArthur putting him in a position of power in 1935, was able to use bureaucratic loopholes to covertly order research and development of the B-17 to the point that when the Army and President Roosevelt finally endorsed four-engine bombers in 1940 B-17s were able to be immediately produced with no delays related to research and testing.

The development of the M1 Garand rifle also happened during MacArthur's tenure as Chief of Staff. There was a debate over what caliber the M1 Garand should use. Many in the Army and Marine Corps wanted the new rifle to use the.276 Pedersen round. MacArthur personally intervened and ordered the M1 Garand to use the.30-06 Springfield round, which was what the M1903 Springfield used. This allowed the military to use the same ammunition for both the old standard service M1903 Springfield rifles and the future new standard service M1 Garand. The M1 Garand, chambered in.30-06 Springfield, was cleared for service in November 1935 and officially adopted in January 1936 as the new Army service rifle just a few months after MacArthur finished his tour of duty as Chief of Staff.