In the closing year of the American independence war, Washington wrote his views of a proper military (land forces) policy for the new United States of America. Washington's ‘Sentiments on a Peace Establishment’, completed in May 1783, not only reflected the experiences of the colonial period and the war for independence, but also identified the enduring factors that would shape American armies well into the 20th century. From his experience in two North American wars, Washington did not believe that Americans would ever tolerate the cost or political threat of a large regular army raised and commanded by a strong central government. ‘Altho' a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of the Country, yet a few Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably necessary. Fortunately for us our relative situation requires but few.’ Washington knew that the state governors and assemblies jealously guarded their control of the militia, the citizen-armies of white male homeowners-voters-taxpayers that had defended their villages and farms since the early 17th century. He also knew that the state forces and his own Continental Army had great difficulty using any sort of conscription system. Such drafts usually meant opening service to ‘the lower sort’ and offering them rewards of land, money, and political rights.
Washington also recognized that militia-based land forces had one military function: the defence of localities and states from direct attack, whether from the sea by Europeans or from Native American warriors, often abetted by Europeans. With a vast new nation to defend, thinly populated away from the Atlantic seaboard, no conceivable national army could protect the western settlers by itself. Even if Congress provided some sort of army to police and protect the national domain, most conspicuously the Northwest Territory beyond the Appalachians and north of the Ohio river, this army would be too small to replace the militia. The difficulty with any militia force was that it included the males who formed the backbone of America's agricultural population, the largest and most important part of its free labour force. Thus, state authorities—let alone a national officer—were unlikely to call out the militia for greater than a 30-60-day period of compulsory service; expeditions that left a state and/or remained in the field for a longer time would have to be raised as volunteers under either national or state authority. These volunteers would insist, like the militia, in selecting their officers (meaning gubernatorial appointment) and establishing their own regulations. They also presented the same problems as the militia in terms of discipline and effectiveness.
Like Washington, the other military experts and political leaders of the post-independence period agreed in principle that (1) the USA still faced threats of internal unrest and foreign invasion and (2) the nation's economic health and political liberties demanded a mixed force of long-service volunteer ‘regulars’ called the US army and state-controlled militia organized for emergency ‘calling forth’ by national and state authorities. Like many other aspects of the American federal system, embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10), the power over the use of military force and the creation of military institutions rested in the hands of many levels of political sovereignty and (in one interpretation of the Second Amendment) in the hands of citizens themselves, who retained the ‘right to bear arms’. This ‘right’ in Great Britain had rapidly disappeared in the face of laws designed to disarm Celtic rebels and disgruntled rural mobs. While the national government had the power to form armies (granted to the Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution) and command these armies through the President as C-in-C (Article 2, Section 2), the states bore the principal responsibility for maintaining their own defence forces as they saw fit.
As the land forces developed in the Federalist and Jeffersonian periods (1789-1816), the US army and the militia forces of the states and federal territories exhibited the very strengths and weaknesses that Washington and other nationalists predicted in the 1780s. The US army performed four major functions: expanded the western frontier; manned coastal fortifications with heavy artillery around major harbours or estuaries; developed and produced military ordnance like cannon and muskets; and provided officer-experts in exploration, cartography, and civil engineering, all essential to westward settlement. The territorial and state militias had the duty of mounting an immediate response to invasion, whether by a British army or a Shawnee war party, and of suppressing rebellion, whether it came from slaves, a new immigrant urban working class, or unhappy farmers. Any major conflict, dignified by Congress as a ‘war’, would probably force an expansion of the US army, the formation of volunteer units under national and state authority, and the compulsory call-up of the militia for federal (limited to 90 days a year) or state service. The Militia Act of 1792 expressed this concept, amplified by further legislation in 1808 that promised that the states could share an annual appropriation of $200, 000 for the purchase of muskets if the states could prove they had an organized militia.
The War of 1812 demonstrated the best and worst of the characteristics of America's armies. The regular US army was too small and too dispersed to deter Great Britain; it was too ill-equipped and poorly commanded to either wage offensive operations or even hold its own posts along the Canadian border in 1812. It could, however, expand from 6, 000 to 33, 000 by 1815, and it performed on a few occasions up to European standards against British regulars along the Canadian frontier in 1813 and 1814. Yet the regular army alone could not meet all the military challenges. State governments, usually those most directly threatened, could and did form volunteer units to take the field. Some of these units of infantry, cavalry, mounted infantry, and artillery reached ‘professional’ standards, but they seldom served for longer than six to twelve months. Their effectiveness almost always depended on the charismatic leadership of a local warrior-hero like Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, Richard H. Johnson of Kentucky, or Samuel Smith of Maryland. At one time or another almost 500, 000 citizen-soldiers served in the 1812-15 war, and they contributed to some notable successes like the Creek campaign of 1813 and the defences of Plattsburg, Baltimore, and New Orleans in 1814-15. They also suffered their share of defeats, the sack of Washington (1814) being the most dramatic.
For the rest of the 19th century, American land-force policy endured despite fundamental changes in the conduct of war like the development of breech-loading ordnance and steam-powered transportation as well as the institutional growth in Europe of professionalized officer corps and general staffs. The regular army and the state forces continued to perform their traditional missions with relative effectiveness; their only major failure in maintaining the authority of the national government occurred in 1860-1, and became the American civil war.
The Mexican war had shown how flexible the system might be, especially adaptive to the political realities of a war that divided citizens on party and regional lines. The regiments and batteries of the US army increased in strength through bounty-driven volunteering from 7, 400 to 42, 400; this wartime expansion included the formation of ten brand-new regiments, rich in officer commissions. Nineteen out of 29 state governments provided 61, 000 men in 27 volunteer regiments, enlisted for one year's service or more. The War Department later concluded that 12, 600 militia had also served under involuntary call-up, but these Texas and Louisiana units were probably volunteers in state service and served for very short periods. Some entered federal service to cross state or national boundaries as the Texas Rangers did under Taylor in the army in northern Mexico or the Mormon battalion and New Mexico militia who participated in Gen Alexander W. Doniphan's expedition into north-central Mexico. In retrospect, the regular regiments fought and won the war's major battles, three in Texas and northern Mexico under Taylor in 1846 and six under Scott in the campaign that eventually captured Mexico City. In only one battle (Buena Vista, February 1847) did state volunteers bear the brunt of battle. The regular army also endured the preponderance of combat casualties, 1, 100 of 1, 700 dead and 2, 745 of 4, 102 wounded in action. The war demonstrated—as the War of 1812 had not—that the USA could bring most of its wartime army to bear upon the enemy, even in an overseas expedition.
In terms of land-force policy, the civil war proved little except that mass American armies could kill and maim each other by the hundreds of thousands over a four-year period. Despite some creative myth-making during and after the war about the superior generalship of regular officers (West Point graduates like Lee, Grant, and Sherman) and the staunch service of small contingents of US army ‘regulars’—really wartime enlistees—the war from start to finish was a bloodletting inflicted by citizen-armies upon each other. Of the four million officers and men who served in either the Union or Confederate armies, fewer than 100, 000 had seen service in the regular US army, fought in the war with Mexico as volunteers, or participated in pre-1860 military training as volunteer militia, a category of citizen-soldier that had grown after the 1812-15 war. These units protected or attacked urban ethnic groups, provided ceremonial units in state capitols, satisfied the martial urges of upper middle-class gentlemen, and trained expatriate revolutionaries who wanted to free Ireland, Hungary, and various states in Germany. If one counts every man who had a uniform and took part in military training on a regular basis in 1860 (the US army and the volunteer militia), the total land forces of the USA on the eve of its bloodiest war (both in absolute and population-proportional terms) might have been 56, 000.
A handful of Union army officers, incorporated back into the post-war US army, saw two major lessons in the American civil war: (1) the wartime army like the peacetime army must be run by professional officers, embodied into a general staff and devoted to wartime contingency planning; (2) efficient and timely wartime mobilization required a federal reserve force untainted by state politics that would enlarge the regular US army quickly and provide new units if necessary. After 1871 the German model attracted great interest, but the Swiss system of universal military training also had its attractions. In the meantime, the post-war army went back to its coast defence and frontier forts, numbering only 37, 200 by 1870 and 27, 300 in 1890.
After a decade of war-weariness and sectional strife, the states rebuilt their volunteer state militias (although compulsory service remained a legal option) in the 1870s, in part as a response to racial and labour unrest. In 1890 the volunteer militia, which had largely adopted the title National Guard, may have numbered 100, 000 in units that drilled once a week for a few hours and sometimes went to the field for a week in the summer, both training periods without pay. (States paid Guardsmen only when called to state duty, usually for riot control and disaster relief.) The national government did little to support the Guard other than transfer and sell arms and military equipment under existing federal law.
Some army and Guard officers thought that greater federal subsidies would improve the Guard as a first-line reserve for wartime mobilization, and some states successfully lobbied to have regular officers assigned as Guard advisers and to get federal funds to build armouries. More wartime soldiers, particularly junior officers, might come from the ‘Land Grant’ universities and colleges, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which required that any state receiving Morrill Act land sales profits had to offer military training for student-volunteers at its new Land Grant university. By the 1890s the students who had received such training might have numbered as many as 100, 000.
Before various military reforms could be established, the USA fought the Spanish-American war, which led to the Philippines insurrection. Waged well beyond the continental USA, the two wars revealed the limitations of the mixed land-force system. Although the War Department wanted to fight Spain with a 64, 000-man all-regular army, supplemented if necessary with federal volunteers, Congress responded to National Guard champions and dictated that state volunteers (under their own officers) be allowed to enter federal service first. The only exceptions were three federal volunteer cavalry regiments, an engineer brigade, some specialist troops, and ten regiments of white and black troops that were supposed to be proof against yellow fever and malaria (‘the Immunes’). The 130 state volunteer regiments (200, 000 officers and men) usually included no more than one-quarter of its soldiers with any sort of prior service, but it was the state governors who commissioned the officers, about 40 for every 1, 000-man regiment. Fewer than half of the state volunteers deployed to the Caribbean or the Philippines; their disease deaths in poorly organized camps in the USA (around 4, 000, compared with fewer than 300 combat deaths) dramatized the fact that the war department had not prepared its support departments and services for wartime expansion.
In the less than twenty years before the USA entered WW I, the military policy of the nation underwent dramatic, but unfinished reform. One factor was the growing appreciation of the impact of new military technology on warfare; in this short period the US army and the National Guard converted to modern magazine rifles, experimented with machine guns, began to use automobiles and trucks, formed aviation units, modernized their artillery, adopted field telephones and primitive radios, and developed motor-powered field engineering. Another development was the awareness that the management of a modern army required extensive pre-war planning and officer education; by 1917 the US army had an officer education system in place to provide European-style commanders and staff officers for large field forces. The greatest challenge was to create a politically legitimate system for raising a wartime army. Just defending the new overseas possessions (Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippines) required far larger regular forces, and the active army reached a peacetime strength of over 100, 000 by 1905, supplemented by Filipino regulars (the Philippine Scouts) and National Guard units in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. To back up this force the War Department and Congress again turned to the National Guard.
In collaboration with the War Department, Congress attempted to reform the National Guard with two major laws, the Militia Acts of 1903 and 1908, and began the ‘nationalization’ of the National Guard as an unlimited federal reserve force, completed by the end of the century. The lever of reform would be federal appropriations for armouries, weapons and equipment, advisers, access to special education and training courses for officers and men, and pay for annual summer field training. The only omitted subsidy was drill pay, and this became a federal responsibility in 1916. The difficulty was some legal uncertainty over whether the federal government could call the National Guard to compulsory service for expeditions abroad for unlimited (‘duration of the emergency’) periods of service. When the War Department examined the issue in 1912, it received an advisory opinion from the US Attorney-General that the federalized National Guard could not be sent abroad unless its members volunteered for such service as individuals. This problem forced the War Department to examine again the feasibility of establishing a federal reserve force, and in 1912 Congress approved a provision that regular enlisted men might volunteer for a reserve corps. The number of soldiers who chose this option would not have formed a company in 1916.
Concerned about the possibility of a war with Mexico after the outbreak of revolution in 1910 and anxious about its security in a world now disordered by WW I, Congress in 1916 passed a National Defence Act. This legislation reflected conflicting sentiments: a generalized interest in ‘preparedness’, the Wilsonian pledge to maintain neutrality yet pressure the Allies and the Central Powers into a compromise peace, and a fear that the USA would soon intervene in the European war. The National Defence Act represented the first peacetime effort to deal with organizing wartime armies and to link those forces to the management of military procurement through a Council of National Defence or ‘war cabinet’ whose authority might extend to economic regulation. The legislation recognized the importance of a ready US army, expanding it to 175, 000 in 111 regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The National Guard (planned at 400, 000) would become the first source of trained reserve manpower in tactical units, unleashed from potential legal problems by the requirement that any Guardsman receiving federal money would have to take a federal oath that obligated him to overseas service for such a period as the Congress might determine. The mobilization of the Guard for service on the Mexican border proved that Guardsmen would accept this obligation.
Although the Guard lobby and Congress could block any move to create a federal reserve force of units, they conceded that a wartime army would be likely to require the formation of other citizen-soldiers (volunteers and conscripts) into wartime divisions (roughly calculated at around 20, 000 officers and men) and much-enlarged army service and support units. The National Defence Act of 1916 focused on identifying and training officers in peacetime for wartime service either as combat leaders or staff specialists; the legislation created an Officer Reserve Corps (subdivided by combat arms and staff departments) that would come from graduates of university-based university cadet programmes, the summer training camps organized and run by the army since 1912, and from already-licensed professionals like doctors, lawyers, dentists, and engineers. Another unstated assumption was that the War Department would for the first time create officer-training courses in wartime that would supply combat arms leaders to the expanded army. This concept, which assumed the possibility of forming an army of two million, did not reflect any plan to intervene in the European war, but the possibility of a later war with Japan or some future European enemy.
American entry in WW I in April 1917 tested every aspect of the nation's land-forces policy and found it barely satisfactory. Upon entry into the war, the Wilson administration and Congress accepted with great reluctance the reality that the war would be won or lost on the western front. To influence that outcome the USA would have to form a massive American Expeditionary Force (AEF), which eventually numbered over two million. The only way to conserve on shipping and speed up the American reinforcement was to arm the AEF with French and British weapons and equipment. Such adjustments cut almost a year (from both German and American estimates) from the time required to form an American army in France. In the crisis the US government turned to wartime conscription and Congress passed a ‘Selective Service’ Act in May 1918. This law first stirred volunteering for the regular US army and federalized National Guard in 1917 and later in the same year provided a foundation for the creation of a ‘National Army’ of draftees. The legitimacy of the system rested in the decentralization and civilization of the induction process; the locus of deciding who served and who received exemptions and deferments rested in 4, 648 local boards staffed by civilians, not the despised military officers used by the Union and Confederacy in the civil war. Voluntary enrolment for the draft produced more than 24 million names and fewer than 1 million avoiders. By war's end two-thirds of America's soldiers (2.8 million) had entered the army through the draft.
The performance of the AEF left a set of ambiguous lessons for the post-war review of land-force policy. The AEF had found plenty of brave junior officers and enlisted men in its ranks; both regulars and temporary officers (Guardsmen, reserves, and graduates of the officer-candidate schools) had performed with unexpected expertise, a credit to their own intelligence and the AEF school system. Most of the AEF's problems on the battlefield stemmed from poor staff work, primitive transportation logistics, and the inadequate use of supporting arms. No doubt some of these problems might have been eased had the AEF not existed but had been treated like British Commonwealth and French colonial divisions; that is, amalgamated into a larger national army. Such a solution was not congruent with Wilson's diplomacy nor Pershing's national and institutional pride. The AEF, which suffered most of its 55, 000 dead in a span of only fifteen weeks in 1918, had struggled until the war's last week. If less traumatized than their civil-war forebears, army officers returned from France full of ideas on how to modernize and organize American land forces.
Land-force policy and army politics felt the impact of new forms of warfare: the employment of military aircraft of various types for a wide range of missions. The Air Service AEF, an organizational stepchild of the Signal Corps, performed almost every modern airwar mission except strategic bombardment. Army aviators, flying French and British aircraft, protected their own forces, raided German airbases and installations, bombed transportation systems, took photographs, spotted artillery targets, carried messages, and strafed and bombed front-line positions. At the war's end the Air Service numbered 200, 000 officers and men, one-quarter of them in Europe. One group of army aviators, rallying around the charismatic AEF air combat leader Mitchell, argued that the army's aviation force should be an independent service with strategic bombing its primary mission; other air and ground officers believed that army aviation should be integrated with the ground forces in order to insure rapid, decisive battlefield victory. Although they did not use the term ‘air-land battle’, that is exactly what these moderate reformers envisioned. After 1918 any attempt at military reform invariably had to cope with the contentious issue of the future of army aviation.
Reflecting its understanding of the lessons of WW I, Congress passed the National Defence Act of 1920 on the assumption that the mixed armies it created in 1916 and 1917 needed little change. The regular army and National Guard still would provide infantry-artillery divisions (each about 25, 000 soldiers in 1920) while the Officers Reserve Corps would train peacetime officers for an expanded wartime army. One new concept in the 1920 Act was the creation of army Reserve divisions manned in only cadre status (1, 000 or fewer officers and NCOs) ; these federal reservists would prepare for their wartime role of training divisions of draftees for combat. The continental USA was divided into nine corps areas whose commanding generals would train one US army division, two National Guard Divisions, and three army Reserve cadre divisions. All of the divisions would be organized and equipped the same (at least on paper), which allowed National Guard divisions to form tank companies and aviation squadrons, the latter units eventually becoming the Air National Guard in 1947. The Congress intended that the regular army and the National Guard would number about 715, 000 officers and men in peacetime while all elements of the new ‘Army of the United States’ would be used as the foundation for a wartime army of 5-7 million. Congressional economizing, deepened by the economic depression of the 1930s, reduced the actual strength of both armies by 1939 to only 380, 000.
The failure to man and train the Army of the United States (AUS) in the 1930s reflected two major problems. The first was the lack of equipment modernization, which the war department and combat arms commanders recognized; equipment shortages (and the growing obsolescence of the WW I weapons) meant that much of the army could not be combat-ready for at least two years. One option was to limit investment in new weapons like tanks; another was to develop prototypes of new weapons (like the 105 mm howitzer and the M-1 semi-automatic rifle) but not field them. The army pursued better mobility, especially for its service and supply units, through comprehensive motorization, but the willy-nilly purchase of trucks and cars made automotive maintenance difficult and costly, which made Congress unhappy.
The other problem was the new popularity of the Army Air Corps, established as an equal arm in 1920 and then as a super-arm with special allowances to develop aircraft, train pilots, build airbases, and manage its own affairs, all assured in the Air Corps Act of 1926. The Air Corps may have dominated one-quarter of all army spending in the 1930s, and it enjoyed close and co-operative relations with American commercial aviation. In 1931 the army and navy agreed that the Air Corps had an important role in coast defence, which justified the highest priority development of the XB-17, a long-range bomber. In 1935 the emerging bomber force had its squadrons unified under the commanding general, GHQ Air Force. This change meant that much of the Air Corps no longer supported the ground army (the armies and corps), but prepared to wage war by strategic bombardment, smashing the will and industrial might of any future enemy by direct attack on his cities and economic assets.
Concerned with the lack of readiness of all elements of the AUS, Gen Malin Craig, the COS, decided to focus his scarce resources on portions of the US army and the National Guard; after 1935 the army would train and equip a 400, 000-man field army named the Initial Protective Force. Equipment shortages restricted the training of this grouping of ‘minuteman’ divisions; Craig estimated that he needed an additional $4 billion to arm and equip the force. This sum was eight times the army's entire budget in 1935.
The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939 did not change the army except to accelerate some procurement and modernization plans. When the War Department tried to put its plan for more urgent procurement into effect, the Industrial Mobilisation Plan, the Congress rejected the plea for army modernization. The fall of France in 1940 created a new sense of crisis, and the Congress approved the federalization of the National Guard and the enactment of a new Selective Service Act to draft men for peacetime military training. The fundamental concern was to deter Japan from using German successes to seize the European colonial empires in South-east Asia and the Philippines.
The War Department general staff drafted the ‘Victory Program’ of 1941, a blueprint for the creation of a wartime army of 8.8 million officers and men, a force (as planned) that would produce a ground force of 213 divisions, about half of them mechanized or motorized, and an air force of 195 groups, half of them bombers. In the same summer the Air Corps became the Army Air Forces (USAAF), whose operational forces would be assigned to a theatre commander, not a ground forces general. The Commanding General, USAAF, would be the DCOS of the army, answerable only to the COS, US army. Two years later the army's authoritative doctrinal manual on the conduct of operations stated that army aviation had a co-equal role with the ground forces in winning wars. The USAAF planners in 1941 also drafted their version of an air campaign against Germany; this war of strategic bombardment would ensure air superiority and crush the industry that supplied the Axis ground forces. None of these hopes would materialize completely or in quite the way the planners imagined, but the plans represented a dramatic shift away from massing resources in a large ground army to focusing on an élite, technologically advanced, and capital-intensive air force in order to spare lives in conventional ground battles.
The AUS met its greatest test in the two-front struggle with the Axis in WW II. The AUS split into three functional groupings: Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces (USAAF), and Army Service Forces (ASF). In terms of numbers and training quality of personnel, the Army Ground Forces took second place to the USAAF Air Forces and ASF; of the 11 million soldiers who served in WW II, only one-third served in the ground forces, principally the 89 divisions formed and deployed abroad. The USAAF absorbed 2.5 million army airmen, and the ASF, faced with global transportation and base-building challenges, grew to three million officers and men. Early in the war army COS George Marshall pledged that the army would produce the best soldiers, armed with the best weapons, in the world. This goal proved to be beyond the army's means. The massive investment of money and quality manpower in the USAAF remains controversial, but it is hard to imagine the army fighting the Wehrmacht in Europe without the benefits of its strategic bombing campaign and the direct support of tactical aviation. In quantitative terms the army directed two-thirds of its combat power against Germany and Italy and one-third against Japan.
The demobilization after WW II and the subsequent development of Cold War military challenges posed by the USSR in central Europe brought more changes to the army. First, it lost almost all its pilots and aircraft (and the guarantee of close air support) to the US Air Force (USAF) in the National Security Act of 1947. By 1949 its principal civilian official, the Secretary of War, had become the Secretary of the Army, subordinated to the Secretary of Defence and stripped of cabinet membership. The army COS became a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, eventually (1986) subordinated to a powerful Chairman invested with special access to the Secretary of Defence and the President. Fundamentally organized and equipped for a mechanized war with the USSR as part of the NATO collective defence alliance, the army, nevertheless, fought two extended ground wars in Asia, neither of which brought it much public acclaim. Instead the wars in Korea and Vietnam used up lives, morale, money for continued modernization, and a good deal of the public sympathy given the army in WW II. The most positive benefit of the two wars was the re-emergence of army aviation as a helicopter force for airmobile warfare.
The Cold War army retained much of its WW II organizational character with an active force that varied between 500, 000 and 1.6 million officers and men formed into between ten and twenty divisions, reinforced with corps troops and separate brigades. The army Reserve and the army National Guard shared the role of providing deployable units with the Reserve stressing service and support units and the Guard combat units, most of which shrank from divisions to brigades by the 1990s. Both reserve components provided units and individuals for the expanded wartime armies of the Korean and Vietnam eras, although the compulsory mobilization of the Vietnam war did not occur until 1968, too late to influence the course of the war. The Korean war mobilization, on the other hand, rebuilt a strategic reserve in the USA, provided veterans for combat service in Korea, in Germany in 1951-2, and allowed the creation of the Seventh Army. The Gulf war also required the army to mobilize Reserves and Guardsmen to strengthen the US Third Army, principally with artillery and support units. Of the 381, 000 soldiers who fought Iraq, 134, 300 male and female soldiers came to the war from federalized reserve units. The subsequent reduction of the active army in the 1990s had one happy benefit, the release of experienced soldiers to reserve units and the equipping of these units with first-line weapons and equipment.
The army also grappled with several manning changes that changed its character. None of the changes came without organizational stress. One fact of life was that the Cold War ground forces could not be manned in sufficient strength without peacetime conscription, enacted in 1948 and continued until 1973. This army of true volunteers, coerced volunteers, and conscripts meant a high turnover, heavy training load, and an irreducible minority of ‘summer soldiers’. The army also tried to balance its emphasis on ready forces, especially in Germany and Korea, with the maintenance of a vast training establishment designed for wartime expansion. By its own admission it retained too many bases, stored too much equipment, supported officer commissioning programmes that could not be justified on cost grounds, and created an active duty officer corps that lacked cohesion and common values. Many army ‘warriors’ sought refuge in élite units: rangers, special forces, attack helicopter squadrons, parts of the armoured forces, and technically advanced artillery and air defence units. The creation of an all-volunteer force in the 1980s and 1990s helped build ‘one army’ in the functional sense, but other factors brought stress from other directions.
One way the army had always justified its existence was to argue that it served as an employer of the American underclass and an agency of assimilation for immigrants, dispossessed farmers, and unemployed, unskilled workers. After WW II this social function, which was real if difficult, received a stern test. First, conscription and (later) the high wages of the volunteer army brought young men into the army with few skills, unfinished education, and no taste for authority and discipline. The drug use of the 1960s and 1970s (pandemic in the army) reflected a rootless youth culture that made training difficult.
This problem was further exacerbated by a presidential decision (long overdue) in 1948 to give African-American soldiers wider opportunities as officers and senior enlisted men, including the command of whites, and to provide meaningful training to black enlistees to the best of their abilities, not just assign them to segregated units with minimal combat and logistical missions. This policy paid real dividends until the 1970s when unemployed black youths flooded the army and went into direct battle with their officers and NCOs and their white comrades. Only by reducing the army and applying higher enlistment standards to all recruits could racial violence be reduced, essential in an army that is now one-third black. Just as this problem subsided, the army found itself accepting the fact that almost 12 per cent of its force would be female, a trend started in 1948. It accelerated in the 1970s when male recruits came in short supply and the Congress accepted the argument that ‘equal opportunity’ had gender as well as racial meaning. The American army of men, women, soldiers of many races and ethnic origins, and even soldiers with unconventional sexual tastes, is a wonder of the world at the end of the 20th century. Optimists believe it will eventually produce the élite androgynous ‘starship troopers’ of the future, adept with wizard weapons and full of traditional warrior virtues detached from old notions of masculinity. Pessimists believe that the army will mirror the experience of the Roman legions, weakened by too-long service abroad, divided by nationalities and deviant subcultures, and devoted to its own comfort and perpetuation, not defence. The past of the American army suggests that it will endure, but that the process will be difficult and test the devotion of those men and women who will try to sustain its honour.
Bibliography
- Hagan, Kenneth J., and Roberts, William R., Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1986).
- Mahon, John K., History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York, 1983).
- Millett, Allan R., and Maslowski, Peter, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (rev. edn., New York, 1994).
- Washington, George, ‘Sentiments on a Peace Establishment’, May 1783, repr. in Walter Millis (ed.), American Military Thought (Indianapolis, 1966).
- Weigley, Russell F., History of the United States Army (New York, 1967)
— Alan Millett
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