U.S. Army: Overview

This entry is a subentry of U.S. Army.

The principal land force of the United States, the U.S. Army traces its origins to the Continental army of the Revotionary War. That army, a “national” force raised by the Continental Congress, had the mission of engaging British and Hessian regulars in essentially European‐style combat, and was composed, insofar as its leaders could manage it, of long‐serving volunteers. In these characteristics—an orientation toward conventional combat and a long‐serving enlisted force—the Continental army set the pattern for its successor under the U.S. Constitution. The Army of the Constitution—the true United States Army—came into existence during the 1790s, amid bitter political warfare between Federalists and Democratic‐Republicans primarily to meet the needs of frontier policing and defense. From that time, the existence of the U.S. Army has been continuous, although its strength has fluctuated widely.

From the Revolution, the American army included two components: the federally controlled professional “Continental” or “regular” army and the state militias of part‐time citizen‐soldiers. Most debates over American military policy centered on the relationship between these components and what role each should play in peace and war. States' rights and populist parties and movements tended to favor the militia; conservative, nationalistic elements supported the regulars. Complicating the issue was the fact that the militia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not a true army reserve. During wartime, its units turned out only for short‐term local defense while furnishing men to temporary forces of U.S. Volunteers, which campaigned alongside the regulars and in fact constituted the majority of the wartime army in the nineteenth century. During the last decades of the century, the volunteer state militia, the National Guard, began campaigning for the status of a genuine national reserve force, a status regulars were reluctant to concede as long as the Guard remained essentially under state control.

Beginning with the Dick Act of 1903 and especially the National Defense Acts of 1916 and 1920, this issue was resolved through gradual federalization of the National Guard and other reserve components, culminating in today's “Total Army” concept. To some extent during the Civil War, and more thoroughly during the two world wars and most of the Cold War, the United States resorted to conscription to fill all components of the army. In peacetime, however, volunteer military service has been the norm—a pattern reestablished with the end of the Cold War draft and the creation of the All‐Volunteer Force in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Throughout its history, command of the army has been based on the principle of civilian control. During the nineteenth century, the president exercised his constitutional power as commander in chief through a civilian secretary of war who headed a War Department composed of a number of staff bureaus. The army lacked an effective uniformed head until 1903, when Secretary of War Elihu Root persuaded Congress to create a chief of staff subordinate to the secretary of war but with authority over the staff bureaus as well as the line. Root also established a General Staff to provide the army with central planning and operational direction.

This system, although significantly revised and expanded during two world wars, persisted until the National Security Act of 1947. Under that act and subsequent amendments, the War Department lost cabinet status to the new Department of Defense and became the Department of the Army, with the mission of providing forces to multiservice joint commanders reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of which the army chief of staff now was a member. As the army became increasingly enmeshed in a joint defense system, its internal administrative structure also changed, with the old bureaus disappearing into broader functional commands.

Throughout its history, the army has displayed doctrinal and tactical eclecticism and a command of logistics. Strategically, it has tried to adapt effectively to the demands of both limited and total war; indeed, American officers understood the close relationship between policy and military strategy long before they began reading Carl von Clausewitz in translation in the mid‐twentieth century. In tactics and technology, the army until after World War II took its cues from Europe but adapted what it learned to the unique requirements of American campaigning. It kept abreast of and sought with varying success to assimilate the changing technologies of warfare, from the repeating rifle to tanks, airplanes, and missiles. Since World War II, the U.S. Army has led rather than followed in the evolution of military art and science, as attested by its success in complex combined arms warfare in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Faced from its earliest years with the need to support troops across the vast, economically undeveloped distances of North America, the army emphasized logistics and achieved a unique capacity for force projection. That capacity enabled it to discharge truly global missions during two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond.

The U.S. Army prides itself on being a “jack of all trades” among military services, able to do everything from waging continentwide warfare to feeding and housing disaster victims. In fact, it has done all those things and more besides. During most of its history, the peacetime standing army functioned primarily as a constabulary. It policed the frontier, maintained law and order, enforced Reconstruction, governed overseas colonies, and responded to natural disasters. Its officers often were in the forefront of civilian as well as military scientific developments, for example, in engineering, medicine, and surgery. Yet its officer corps always kept sufficiently current in the art of war to be able to raise citizen armies and lead them to victory in the nation's nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century conflicts. During the Cold War, the army received complex global missions, including forward defense and deterrence in Europe and Asia, the waging of major local wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the provision of military advice and support to allies on every continent.

The end of the Cold War brought declining forces and budgets but no reduction in the variety of missions. The U.S. Army today continues to try to balance preparation for war fighting against the demands of international peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention.

[See also Army Reserves and National Guard; Citizen‐Soldier; Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military; Land Warfare; Militia and National Guard; Weaponry, Army.]

Bibliography

• Russell F. Weigley, Towards an American Army: Military Thought from Washington to Marshall, 1962.
• Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1975.
• Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, enl. ed., 1984.
• Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898, 1986.
• Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts, eds., Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present, 1986.
• Robert E. Scales, Jr., et al., Certain Victory: The United States Army in the Gulf War, 1993