The most important historical influence shaping the armed forces of the United States has been the abruptness of their transition from a merely peripheral involvement in international politics to a center-stage role of dauntingly large responsibilities.
Through most of its history, the U.S. Army and the colonial forces that preceded it were not instruments of foreign policy but tools for the domestic task of protecting settlements against the North American Indians. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the army was still mainly deployed for constabulary tasks, patrolling the Mexican border and policing colonial subjects in the Philippine Islands. Until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, the navy similarly was less an instrument of foreign policy than a device for showing the flag in support of private American business ventures around the world. Although the navy began to take on diplomatic significance sooner than the army, neither of the armed forces was prepared by its history for sudden elevation during World War II to international preeminence.
The military institutions of the United States have their roots in the militia systems of the British colonies before 1776. Because of dangers posed by the Indians and the rival colonial powers, all the colonies that were to form the United States except Quaker Pennsylvania compelled their citizens to become part-time soldiers under universal military service laws applying to males of appropriate age. (Even Pennsylvania created a voluntary militia in 1755 and made military service virtually compulsory in 1775.) The deficiencies of a part-time soldiery for campaigns extended in time or geography led to supplementing the militia with the British regular army, beginning on an important scale in 1755, early in the French and Indian War.
Thus the United States inherited from the colonial era a dual military tradition of citizen-soldiers and regulars. The United States established a standing army modeled on the British regulars, first in the Continental army of the revolutionary war, growing out of legislation of the Second Continental Congress of June 14, 1775. This army was almost completely disbanded by the Confederation Congress on June 2, 1784, but the next day Congress authorized the creation of a new, albeit small force that the government of the Constitution inherited in 1789 and that became the nucleus of the Regular Army. The United States also accepted the compulsory-service militia legacy, particularly with the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which went into effect in 1791.
For defense against foreign enemies, it was intended that the militia would be mobilized to reinforce the Regular Army, which remained small throughout the nineteenth century; it numbered fewer than twenty-five thousand as late as the eve of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Much of the time, however, Americans perceived the Regular Army and the militia less as complementing each other than as rivals. From the military dictatorship that followed the English Civil War, from the English Whig ideology that regarded standing armies as inherent threats to liberty, and from the memory of the vexatious quartering of British regulars in America after the French and Indian War, which helped precipitate the Revolution, American politics derived an anti-standing-army tradition.
But Indian troubles along with friction with Great Britain and France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars prevented the anti-standing-army tradition from prevailing altogether. Furthermore, the compulsory-service militia declined before the Civil War because a rhetorical preference for citizen-soldiers over professionals became an insufficient motive for enforcing universal military training once the Indian frontier had receded westward. The rivalry between citizen-soldiers and professionals remained alive, however, as volunteer militia companies sprang up all over the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. These companies achieved a remarkable vitality, and their drill competitions became a vehicle for expressing rivalries among towns and cities before the heyday of organized athletics.
Possessing such military forces, both the secessionist and the loyal states had the means to begin the Civil War in 1861, the volunteer companies providing the core of both armies. They were later supplemented by conscription, in what became the first American war of mass armies, over 2 million men eventually serving in the Union forces and some 750,000 in the Confederate forces. The Regular Army of the United States, only about 16,000 strong when the Civil War began, found itself playing only an inconspicuous role in the war.
The role was not unimportant, however, for the Regular Army had been growing increasingly professional. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1802, had after the War of 1812 added to what was essentially an engineering curriculum a solid foundation of schooling in tactical practice and strategic thought. The West Point influence encouraged officers to continue their studies after graduation, and some visited Europe to observe armies there. By the Civil War, both armies were commanded, organized, and administered with considerable professional skill largely by officers drawn from the Regular Army.
After the war, the emphasis on educated professionalism as a criterion of officership intensified. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, commanding general of the army from 1869 to 1883, was a vigorous exponent of military education and encouraged the formation of schools for the various combat arms to advance the professional education of their officers beyond West Point's undergraduate curriculum.
The navy also took steps toward refining officer professionalism. At the U.S. Naval Academy, founded at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1845, the technical mastery of seamanship took priority over military study, which the navy had little need for until the Civil War. Its single-ship duels in the Quasi-War with France in 1798-1800 and the War of 1812, its commerce-raiding in the latter war, and its major peacetime function of showing the flag required little strategic or military insight. But the blockading and capturing of Confederate ports and, after the war, the first intimations of American participation in world politics provided the impetus for establishing the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1884.
The War College helped transform the navy from a loose collection of individual ships into coordinated squadrons organized around battleships and designed to contend for command of the seas against potential enemies. Although the navy could not yet challenge the preeminence of the British Royal Navy, its transformation had progressed far enough by 1898 to achieve spectacular successes in the war with Spain.
Although the army had preceded the navy in developing officer professionalism, by 1898 it was lagging behind. After the Civil War, it mostly reverted to its constabulary role and waged occasional small wars against the Indians. The closing of the frontier brought with it a sense of directionlessness. After the war with Spain, Secretary of War Elihu Root strove to reorganize the army for a role in advancing American world power, by improving the command system through the General Staff Act of 1903 and establishing the Army War College in Washington the same year. Nevertheless, the fact that large-scale participation in battle in World War I was delayed until its final six weeks suggests how little the army was prepared for its role on the world stage.
The navy had taken another step ahead of the army when the Naval Act of 1916 set the goal of building a navy second to none. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 gave international confirmation to the parity of the U.S. Navy with the British Royal Navy, with the Imperial Japanese Navy ranking a close third. Japanese dissatisfaction with this rank, however, was among the factors that led the American and Japanese navies to spend the 1920s and 1930s planning for a war for naval mastery of the Pacific. On the American side, a conspicuous feature of the planning was the rise in strategic importance it accorded to the U.S. Marine Corps; to wrest mastery of the western Pacific from the Japanese, numerous islands would have to be conquered to serve as intermediate bases, and to that end the marines made amphibious assault their specialty.
The performance of the armed forces in World War II was highly impressive, especially given the recency of their preparation for the exercise of first-rank military power. The marines assaulted the Pacific islands with exemplary efficiency. The navy operated effectively at distances no steam-powered navy had ever mastered. The Coast Guard, which in wartime moves from the Department of the Treasury into the navy, contributed much to antisubmarine warfare. The army, embarrassed by its performance in World War I, had engaged during the interwar years in economic mobilization planning that helped American industry become the economic bulwark of the entire Allied coalition.
For all that, the American performance in World War II also displayed difficulties inherited from the nation's military past, some of which still persist. The historic tensions over the appropriate orientation of the army gave it a strategy and a force structure not entirely consistent with each other. The strategy called for an overwhelmingly powerful invasion of German-occupied Europe as early in the war as possible. After that strategy was invoked on June 6, 1944, however, an army still designed primarily for mobility found itself not well suited for prolonged large-scale combat and for absorbing heavy casualties, and the German army was able to hold the Americans and British to lengthy stalemates.
The tendency for ground fighting to degenerate into costly deadlock encouraged experimentation with the Army Air Forces' offer of a cheaper way to victory through strategic bombing of the enemy's economic and urban centers. Such bombing against Germany was remarkably successful when in 1944-1945 it was concentrated on the synthetic petroleum industry, imposing a paralysis that would have compelled Germany to surrender even if it had not been invaded. But strategic bombing inevitably entailed the killing and maiming of civilians, contrary to the international law of war; and it hardened the national conscience, so that attacks on civilians became increasingly acceptable. By March 1945 the Army Air Forces were routinely bombing Japanese cities not only to eliminate particular industries but to wreak total destruction, a process that culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The atomic bombs precipitated Japan's surrender, so that American strategic bombing had produced a second triumph. Thus it is not surprising that when the postwar cry for demobilization rapidly broke up the armed forces that had peaked at some 12 million men and women at the close of the war, national security policy began to rely almost solely on atomic weaponry. In keeping with the resulting emphasis on air power, the U.S. Air Force became a separate service under the National Security Act of 1947, and an Air Force Academy was established in Colorado and an Air War College in Alabama. The three services were federated in the Department of Defense in 1949.
The post-1945 reliance on nuclear weapons yielded to the demonstration in the Korean War of 1950-1953 that such weapons were unsuitable for use in limited wars. Accordingly "conventional" military strength was revived at levels that have been maintained ever since except for expansion during the Vietnam War of 1965-1973. By 1989, the army had 800,000 active soldiers with 850,000 in the National Guard and reserves; the navy, 590,000 active sailors with 200,000 reserves; the marines, 190,000 members with 50,000 reserves; and the air force, 600,000 active personnel with 275,000 in the Air National Guard and reserves.
Yet the conventional forces did not fight either the Korean or the Vietnam War with exemplary success. The army in particular has never resolved its historic dilemma of whether to prepare mainly for large-scale war or for smaller campaigns. After its experience in World War II, it was restructured for a sustained struggle in Europe against the Soviet Union; but the wars it actually fought were of a different kind. Meanwhile the rapid diversification of sizes and varieties of nuclear weapons encouraged planning for their limited, "tactical" use, though this entailed the danger of escalation into a nuclear holocaust.
By 1990 the armed forces were faced with a very different predicament: the cold war seemed to be ending. If it did, there would end also the central purpose that had sustained them for more than a generation, the focus on the Soviet Union as a major military rival. Should this central purpose be lost, it would be only the latest in a series of nearly revolutionary dislocations for the armed forces since the 1940s.
These dislocations had included the full integration of blacks in the armed forces. After serving in the colonial and revolutionary war forces, blacks had been officially excluded from the army and the marines--though tolerated by the navy--until the Civil War. Then they served in segregated units, often relegated to menial labor, until an executive order of President Harry S. Truman on July 26, 1948, integrated the armed services; it was not completely implemented, however, until the Korean War.
The dislocations also encompassed the acceptance of women into the armed forces. Women were admitted as nurses and as navy "yeomen (F)" to the number of 11,000 in World War I, and on a much larger scale but still in auxiliary units in World War II, reaching a peak strength of 271,000 out of some 12 million. By 1989 women numbered 251,000 of the active-duty personnel and were almost fully integrated, although still for the most part barred from combat. The rapid expansion of their numbers coincided with the end of the military draft on January 27, 1973, which signified yet another jarring change. Accustomed since 1940 to drawing men from the compulsory Selective Service System, the armed forces now had to learn how to recruit enough volunteers. This change still causes debate reaching to the fundamental issue of the responsibilities of democratic citizenship.
Amid much change, however, one important fact remains. The fears of the Founding Fathers that the military must be a threat to liberty have never materialized. In the early years, such fears revolved around a military coup d'état. After World War II, the fears were more subtle, envisaging a subversion of democracy through the immensely enhanced influence of a permanently large military establishment in alliance with the industrial interests that supplied it. Throughout, however, the armed forces have remained faithful to an apolitical acceptance of civilian supremacy. Never have they posed a substantial threat to a stable democracy.
Bibliography:
Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States, 1607-1983 (1984); Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam--the Story of America's Rise to Power (1989).
Author:
Russell F. Weigley
See also
Conscientious Objection; Conscription; Draft Riots; Mahan, Alfred Thayer; Nuclear Weapons: Origins and Legacy; and entries for individual wars, military leaders.
