This entry is a subentry of U.S. Army.
During World War II, the U.S. Army developed into a powerful and flexible war machine. Numbering over 8 million officers and men, its ranks filled by a comprehensive draft, the army fielded ninety‐eight combat divisions, as well as a large tactical and strategic air force and the service troops needed to sustain worldwide deployments. The most highly mechanized of World War II ground forces, the army fought effectively in a wide variety of environments. It also mastered joint operations, culminating in the D‐Day landing in the invasion of Normandy. Backed by American industry, the army established a global logistical system that sustained forces over vast distances with a lavishness unprecedented in history. The U.S. Army accomplished its basic mission: the total defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
After V‐J Day, 2 September 1945, the World War II army quickly melted away. By mid‐1950, army strength totaled about 590,000 in 10 understrength divisions. However, the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the U.S. commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the outbreak of open hostilities in Korea soon brought renewed expansion sustained by Conscription and draft‐induced volunteers. The Cold War army fluctuated in strength from 1.5 million at the height of the Korean War, to 873,000 under the President Dwight D. Eisenhower “New Look,” to just over 1 million under President John F. Kennedy's Flexible Response. After the 1950s, it was no longer a racially segregated force, but integrated African Americans in the military.
Until the Vietnam War, the largest concentrations of army troops were in three areas: Europe, where they formed a major component of NATO's ground forces; Korea, where they guarded against renewed North Korean attack; and the United States, where a pool of divisions was available to reinforce the overseas theaters or respond to new contingencies. Under the National Defense Acts of 1947, 1949, and 1958, the Department of the Army—now part of the Department of Defense and no longer with cabinet status—organized, trained, and supplied these forces for regional joint commands but no longer itself directed combat operations. The army's chief of staff served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the heads of the navy and Marine Corps and of the air force, which had been separated from the army in 1947. The army command and staff meanwhile underwent repeated reorganizations, all tending to eliminate the old War Department bureaus in favor of broad functional commands such as the Strike Command, Continental Army Command, Air Defense Command, and Material Command, all created in 1963.
In the so‐called joint arena, where the services competed for funding, roles, and missions, the army had mixed fortunes. Under Eisenhower's post‐Korea “New Look,” which emphasized nuclear deterrence, the air force and the navy received budgetary priority. The army seemed in danger of being relegated to serving as a nuclear trip‐wire in Europe and dealing with minor “brushfire” conflicts elsewhere. Under President Kennedy, who sought other than nuclear means of preventing Communist inroads, the army moved back to center stage as the principal agency for conventional defense in Europe and for counterinsurgency against Communist revolutionary warfare in the Third World.
These fluctuations of emphasis notwithstanding, the basic tasks of the Cold War army remained throughout forward defense and deterrence in Europe and Korea; conduct of short‐of‐war interventions, as in the Lebanon Crisis (1958) and the Dominican Republic (1965); and the provision of arms, training, and assistance to America's allies around the world. Additionally, during the domestic racial and social upheavals of the late fifties and the sixties, the army repeatedly was called on to help control civil disturbances at home.
Weaponry and tactical organization were in a state of transition in the 1950s and early 1960s. Under the “New Look,” the army developed a family of tactical nuclear weapons and competed with the air force in the emerging field of ballistic missile research and development. It reorganized its divisions on the “Pentomic” pattern of five battle groups, supposedly able to operate effectively on a nuclear battlefield. More productively in the long run, the army experimented with helicopters as a means of both troop transport and fire support. Under Flexible Response, the army modernized its material for nonnuclear warfare. It acquired new models of tanks and armored vehicles, adopted new standard infantry sidearms, and brought air mobile tactics to full development. The service restructured its divisions on the ROAD (Reorganization Objective Army Division) pattern of three task‐organized brigades, a formation adaptable to both nuclear and nonnuclear operations. To assist American allies in counterinsurgency, the army organized its green beret–wearing Special Operations Forces.
When Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson committed the army to the Vietnam War, the service was at a peak in training, administrative efficiency, troop morale, and popular acceptance. The long, inconclusive Vietnam conflict ended this state of affairs and brought the army to the edge of disintegration. Not all was failure. Most of the army's draftee and volunteer soldiers fought bravely; the ROAD division performed well; and the helicopter and air mobility revolutionized the conduct of ground operations. Yet victory proved elusive. The army had to fight a major war without the Army Reserves and National Guard, under budgets inadequate both to sustain the conflict and maintain its worldwide commitments.
As the war absorbed men and materiel, army forces in Europe and the United States became hollow shells, lacking combat effectiveness. The quality of leadership and discipline deteriorated; racial violence, drug abuse, assaults on officers and NCOs, and general defiance of authority proliferated in Vietnam and worldwide. Scandals, such as the My Lai Massacre (1968) and its cover‐up within the chain of command, tarnished the army's public image and undermined its self‐esteem. The war alienated the army from much of the American public. Responding to antiwar, antimilitary sentiment, President Richard M. Nixon ended the draft, leaving the army with a whole new set of manpower procurement problems.
During the two decades after the end of the Vietnam War, a dedicated cadre of leaders pulled the army back together. Accepting the challenge of creating an All‐Volunteer Force with a strength fixed at about 780,000, they overcame the service's race, drug, and discipline problems, and adopted programs to bring well‐educated young people into the ranks. In the process, they integrated women into the service until they could be found in all but the highest general officer ranks and in every specialty except direct ground combat. Helped by the generous defense budgets of President Ronald Reagan's administration, army leaders made up for lost time in securing new weapons and equipment in the 1980s. They radically revamped army training and tactics in the light of the lessons of the 1973 Arab‐Israeli War, evolving the concept of a highly mechanized, fast‐moving “AirLand Battle.” Their objective was to create an army ready to fight and win the first battle against Soviet forces superior in numbers and very nearly equal in technology. The rebuilt army successfully met the test of combat during the U.S. intervention in Grenada (1983) and in Panama. During the Persian Gulf War (1991), it outmaneuvered and outfought what had been thought to be a formidable Iraqi opponent.
Yet victory over Iraq was followed by new challenges. With the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, America's army had to cope with declining budgets and the painful necessity of reducing a force of professionals who had expected to make the service a career. Lacking a dominant threat on which to center their plans and programs, army leaders contemplated a range of new missions and contingencies. Throughout, they expressed their determination to maintain a high level of readiness and retain their technological advantage over any likely enemy.
[See also African Americans in the Military; Army Combat Branches; Strategy: Land Warfare Strategy; Tactics: Land Warfare Tactics; Vietnam Antiwar Movement; Weaponry, Army; Women in the Military; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course.]
Bibliography
- William L. Hauser, America's Army in Crisis, 1973.
- Paul H. Herbert, Deciding What Has to Be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100‐5 Operations, 1984.
- John L. Romjue, From Active Defense to Airland Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine 1973–1982, 1984.
- Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, enl. ed., 1984.
- Ronald H. Spector,
The Vietnam War and the Army's Self‐Image , in John Schlight, ed., Second Indochina War Symposium: Papers and Commentary, 1986. - Geoffrey Perret, There's a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II, 1991.
- Robert E. Scales, Jr., et al., Certain Victory: The United States Army in the Gulf War, 1993
