This entry is a subentry of U.S. Army.
During the transitional period prior to 1920, the army abandoned its traditional constabulary duties on the Indian frontier to pursue preparation for modern warfare—adapting its organization, training, and doctrine for projection of American power abroad, fighting one world war, and preparing for another.
In the new century's first years, progressive officers convinced Secretary of War Elihu Root that the nation must create a “war army” prepared for conflict with other great powers. The resulting Root reforms included an army war college; a strengthened system of officer education; a fourfold increase in regular forces; improvement of the National Guard; and the General Staff Act (1903).
Although the last seemed to clarify the relation of the commanding general (the line or field forces) and the bureau chiefs (the administrative and technical staffs) to one another and to the secretary of war, traditional line‐staff rivalries persisted in new form as bureau chiefs battled the chief of the General Staff for the right, in the name of the war secretary, to control the army.
Other events during Root's secretaryship—the Philippine War, U.S. military involvement in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the China Relief Expedition—continued the army's constabulary role, if in new locations, as its units overseas reflected the Progressive Era's spirit by keeping order, sponsoring local government, conquering yellow fever, and building roads, sewers, schools, and water systems.
Fear of an expanding Germany and Japan, however, aided advocates of a “war army,” and during the secretaryships of Root and Henry L. Stimson, the army resumed annual maneuvers. Congress appropriated modest sums for modern rifles (the Springfield Model 1903), artillery, and field telephones, and for experimentation with aircraft, motor transport, and machine guns. At the urging of Chief of Staff Leonard Wood, Stimson established the nation's first peacetime divisions: self‐contained and self‐supporting fighting units of approximately 10,000 men.
The Preparedness movement—prompted by the outbreak of World War I—contributed to further land force modernization, which included attempts to resolve the long‐standing debate over how to raise trained manpower sufficient to match the armies of Europe. The resulting National Defense Act of 1916 sought gradually to expand both regular forces and the National Guard, strengthen the latter, and lay the foundations of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps).
The army nevertheless remained unprepared for World War I, and when Gen. John J. Pershing sailed for France in June 1917 at the head of the American Expeditionary Force, he took with him trained personnel sorely needed to manage an 18‐month expansion of the army from just over 100,000 regulars to a wartime force of almost 4 million men, more than two‐thirds of whom were draftees.
The strains of economic mobilization finally prompted Secretary Newton D. Baker to appoint a vigorous new chief of staff—Gen. Peyton C. March—and use the powers granted by the Overman Act of 1918 to strengthen the General Staff, reorganize the supply bureaus under Gen. George W. Goethals, and cooperate with the War Industries Board. Even so, soldiers of the world's leading industrial power went into battle using many French or British weapons.
The postwar National Defense Act of 1920 returned to a peacetime, volunteer army, enlarged the General Staff, and confirmed the authority of its chief. As chief of staff after 1921, Pershing created the structure—personnel, intelligence, training/operations, supply, and war plans divisions—that the General Staff would carry into World War II. The army also studied the Great War's economic demands and produced a series of industrial mobilization plans in the 1930s that improved upon the work of the prewar Council of National Defense.
In 1920, Congress rejected General March's proposal of a half‐million‐man expandable regular force backed by reservists given three months of compulsory military training. Instead, Congress authorized a ready‐to‐fight regular army roughly half that size and a program of voluntary training for an expanded National Guard and organized reserve.
By 1922, a budget‐conscious Congress reduced the regulars to 150,000. The National Guard and enlisted Reserve Corps remained far below authorized strengths. Mistakenly keeping the 1920 act's sprawling organizational structure intact, and abetted by a Congress unwilling to fund new weapons, the army maintained a poorly armed skeletal force incapable of rapid deployment, and, by the mid‐1930s, lacked a single combat‐ready division.
Unwisely assigning its tanks to the infantry rather than the cavalry, the interwar army was hampered by more than a lack of funds from creating a modern armored force. Although the Army Air Corps received funding for new aircraft, doctrinal battles highlighted by the court‐martial of Gen. Billy Mitchell emphasized strategic bomber aircraft, and left it without planes, doctrine, or procedures for tactical close air support of ground troops or even adequate fighters to escort the strategic bombers.
In the interwar years, the army turned to extensive planning and officer education to keep alive skills needed for future warfare. This included joint planning by army and navy officers for war with potential enemies. In addition, at the Infantry School (1927–32), Col. George C. Marshall emphasized education as he revolutionized infantry tac‐tics and troop‐leading procedures. Two hundred of the school's faculty and graduates would become general officers in World War II. Branch schools, the General Service School (Leavenworth), The Army War College, even army posts became scenes of intense activity led by spelling of such dedicated officers as Fox Conner, George S. Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nevertheless, the army did not hold its first genuine corps‐sized maneuver until April 1940.
Beginning in 1935, Congress gradually increased the army's size and soon authorized an ammunition reserve and “educational” contracts—small orders for new weapons to encourage industry to obtain machine tools and develop techniques for a rapid, emergency increase in arms production. Even with the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to implement army plans for industrial mobilization. The German defeat of France in June 1940 led to further expansion of the regular forces, federalization of the National Guard, a reserve call‐up, and the nation's first peacetime conscription, with the aim of creating, by mid‐1941, a better‐armed field force of 1.5 million organized into thirty‐four semimotorized triangular divisions and thirty‐five air groups.
Military planning made a further shift by 1941 when adoption of a “Germany First” strategy, Anglo‐American coordination, the American occupation of Greenland and Iceland, and the navy's escorting of convoys as a result of the Lend‐Lease Act and Agreements (1941) to Britain. These brought the United States to a de facto if still limited military involvement in the European War—a limitation abandoned following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war upon the United States.
[See also Army Combat Branches; Militia Acts; Militia and National Guard; National Defense Acts; Weaponry, Army.]
Bibliography
- Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Education of a General, 1880–1939, 1963.
- Edward M. Coffman, The Hilt of the Sword: The Career of Peyton C. March, 1966.
- Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 1967.
- Allan R. Millett, The General: Robert L. Bullard and Officership in the United States Army, 1881–1925, 1975.
- James L. Abrahamson, America Arms for a New Century: The Making of a Great Military Power, 1981.
- John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America, 1987.
- David F. Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918, 1993.
- Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War, 1995
