Throughout the twenties and thirties, the Secretaries consistently fought the efforts of the CNO’s to expand their powers over the bureaus. The most colorful defense of direct dealings between Secretary and bureau chiefs was made by Secretary Daniels in 1920. The most logical defense was made by Secretary Edison in 1940. “Now, there are,” he said, “two distinct professions, you might say, in the Navy. There is the military profession and there is the technical or supporting profession.” Rivalry between these two is natural and even “splendid,” providing that there is an umpire in the form of the Secretary “to settle any controversies, and to make final rulings.” Under no circumstances, however, should one profession be subordinated to the other. This would violate the limits of professional competence and the division of labor.18 The views of the Secretaries, supported by the President, generally prevailed during the 1920’s and 1930’s. At times the seesaw tipped in the direction of the Chiefs, at other times in the direction of the bureaus. But the essential balance was maintained: the Navy came out of World War II with fundamentally the same organization with which it had gone into World War I.* While there was constant conflict among the three elements of the Department, civilian control and military professionalism were both maximized. When Secretary Meyer turned his office over to Josephus Daniels in 1913, he had pointed down to his desk and offered one word of advice to his successor: “Power lies here, and it should remain here!”19 The organization of the Navy Department down through World War II was calculated to fulfill Meyer’s dictum. The one deficiency in the system, the administrative weakness of the Secretary’s office as an instrument of coordination and control, was corrected by departmental reforms in 1940. The line officers performed their military duties; the bureaus ran the shore activities; and the Secretaries stayed on top. The continuing friction between the military and civilian elements produced in each a distinctive viewpoint. The line officers carried on the characteristically military outlook of the naval profession which had originated with the generation of Luce and Mahan. Compared to the broad approach of the Army Chiefs of Staff, the Navy CNO’s appeared to be narrow military men continually at odds with the civilian Secretaries. As Secretary Stimson once remarked, the admirals were wrapped up in a “peculiar psychology” in which “Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church.”20 The payoff of the system, however, was in war. Realizing Mahan’s, and Calhoun’s, organizational goal — that peacetime structure should meet wartime needs, “The order of sailing is the order of battle,” in Nelson’s phrase — the United States Navy went through both world wars without drastic alteration of its system of civil-military relations.
THE AMERICAN MILITARY ETHIC, 1920–1941
LOYALTY. The fundamental values of the American military profession between the wars did not change significantly from those developed during the previous period. The unfavorable view of human nature, the lessons to be learned from history, the persistent likelihood of war and conflict, the necessity for order and subordination in human affairs, all continued to be emphasized. The single most significant change in tone from the prewar years was the stress on loyalty as the cardinal military virtue. The prewar outlook held up the value of objective obedience; the postwar, that of subjective loyalty. Routine obedience was not enough. It was necessary, as Brigadier General MacArthur put it, to substitute “subjective for objective discipline.” For the Navy, loyalty, said Sims, was “always indispensable”; loyalty plus initiative was to be preferred to unthinking obedience. The four values asserted by Navy Regulations — virtue, honor, patriotism, subordination — all rested on, and were embraced in, the basic value of loyalty. Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, no other virtue rivaled loyalty for the central place in the military hierarchy of values. Its critical role was stressed again and again, in almost monotonous fashion.21
The significance of this concern with loyalty is twofold. First, it indicated the development from the prewar years of a more sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of an efficient military organization. Previously, unthinking obedience, the mere response to orders coming down from on high, had been the keynote. Now, however, the desirability of initiative was recognized, and initiative was reconciled with obedience through loyalty. Superior commanders should restrict themselves to general directives; subordinates should have the skill and the loyalty to apply these to varying situations. The exercise of initiative must reflect the loyal identification with, and understanding of, the desires of the superior. Underlying this changed attitude was a feeling that as the officer corps came to think alike, to adhere to the same body of doctrine, subjective cohesion would replace objective restraints. The new emphasis reflected mutual confidence in each other’s professional ability. Also present was a more realistic appreciation of the Moltkean system of trained initiative in the German Army.
The other significance of the military devotion to loyalty was in the extent to which it reflected the separation between the military values and popular civilian values. Loyalty had never ranked high in a country where the supreme virtue was individualism, for loyalty implied the subordination of the individual to a goal or standard outside of and superior to himself. It also presupposed an emphasis upon the collective aspect of human affairs, since common loyalty is the basis of group existence. The American tendencies to extol the rights of the individual over the duties of the individual and to see the social benefits stemming from the pursuit of individual self-interest were incompatible with a high value on loyalty. Loyalty never received much attention in American moral philosophy. The one significant discussion of it was in Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty, and Royce himself recognized that his views were in the minority. He could attack the pragmatism of James and Dewey, but he could never compete with it in appealing to the American mind. And probably seldom in their history did the American people feel less inclined towards the syndrome of values associated with loyalty than during the halcyon days of the twenties and the experimental environment of the thirties. While Royce was forgotten by the people, however, he was remembered by the military. The Philosophy of Loyalty was constantly quoted and referred to in military writings on this subject.
POLICY. The military interpretation of the nature of international politics and their prescription for foreign policy remained remarkably static. Every nation, it was held, was motivated not by “any broad abstract principle but by self interest.” When their interests conflicted, the clash might be settled in the first instance by diplomacy, but if that failed, arms were the only recourse. War was the “continuation of policy” and to be expected in the normal course of events. Arbitration treaties, the League of Nations, international law, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, disarmament conferences — none of these could guarantee peace. The only possible way of delaying war was through the maintenance of an adequate balance of power. International politics was a continuous struggle; no sharp line divided war and peace. Foreign policy could extend only as far as the willingness and the ability of the state to support it by force. Military strength, rather than unorganized military resources, was desirable insurance. Actions should be guided by enemy capabilities rather than estimates of their intentions. The military man viewed himself as fundamentally conservative on questions of war and peace; he defended himself against claims that the military were fomenters of strife. Glorification of war by the military was, indeed, conspicuously absent during these years. In the crises of the 1930’s the military urged the statesmen to tread cautiously, warning them of American military weakness.22
This prevailing military outlook on foreign affairs during the twenties and thirties differed hardly at all from the military perspective developed by the American officer corps in the 1870’s and 1880’s. This similarity again suggests that the decisive influence shaping the military outlook was not the actual state of world politics, but rather the level of professionalism achieved by the military. Internal causes springing from the essential character
istics of the profession — the inner logic of professional justification — determined what the military man saw when he viewed the world. The officer looking at international politics in 1930 saw fundamentally the same thing that his predecessor had in 1880 — not because the world was the same, but because he was the same. The constant nature of the American military perspective reflected the constant character of American military professionalism. If, like Ludendorff, the American officer had retreated from his professionalism, he would have followed the German military leader in developing a widely different appreciation of international relations. In the 1880’s the military outlook had little relation to the realities of the American position in international relations. Over the course of the years, however, the military perspective gained relevance and adequacy. The progressive involvement of the United States in international politics by the 1930’s caused the world of American foreign relations to approximate the image which the military had always painted of it.
While the gap between the military perspective and international reality narrowed, that between the military outlook and prevailing civilian opinion broadened. Here, again, the dynamic element was the nonmilitary one. In the 1880’s the military and civilian viewpoints had been widely separated. At the turn of the century, Neo-Hamiltonianism had built a bridge of sorts between the two. With the collapse of the Neo-Hamiltonian compromise after World War I, the chasm between military and civilian thinking widened again. The Neo-Hamiltonian fascination with power politics was replaced by either liberal isolationism or liberal internationalism. Both were far removed from military thinking on international relations. American civilian interest in international affairs had its origins in the peace movement before World War I and after the War focused upon international organization, international law, and the intricacies of the League. It reflected the triumph of form over substance. It assumed a harmony of interests among nations. The analytical model underlying its approach was “a world commonwealth characterized by permanent peace.”23 There could hardly be a sharper contrast with the military model of independent states engaged in continuous struggle. Toward the end of the thirties, civilian thinking began to move in the direction of greater realism. A new appreciation of national interests and the role of force became manifest in the work of Earle, Spykman, Wolfers, and Schuman. They represented the first beginnings of the civilian adoption of the military approach to international affairs which was to characterize thinking after World War II. This, however, was a minor current in the civilian outlook between the two wars. The prevailing philosophy was thoroughly unmilitary, and the military reacted sharply against it, complaining constantly of the unwarranted idealism, pacifism, and altruism of American thinking on foreign policy.24
GOVERNMENT. The perspective of the officer corps on its relations with the government continued and strengthened the professional outlook of the latter years of the nineteenth century. The classic doctrines of Clausewitz became standard gospel in the Navy as well as in the Army. The German theorist was hailed by naval officers as “the master writer on war.” It was said that he appeared so frequently in student themes at the Naval War College that the stenographers could be relied upon to supply the quotation marks.* American officers of both services typically referred to the armed forces as “instruments” of the government and constantly reiterated the dictum that national policy dictated military policy. Wars might be limited or unlimited depending upon the goals of policy. It was, however, the duty of the statesman to formulate a “clear, concise, and unambiguous declaration of national policy” to guide the military. The latter could not operate in a policy vacuum. To furnish this policy guidance, the officers continued to demand the creation of a national defense council modeled on the British Imperial Defense Committee and comparable institutions in major foreign countries.25 As previously, this proposal was frequently advanced, not only as a means of securing a clear statement of policy in the executive branch but also as a way of bridging the continually irritating gap between executive and legislature.
In classic military fashion, the corollary to the subordination of the military to the political was held to be the independence of each within its own sphere. The line between politics and military affairs, it was emphasized again and again, was sharp and clear and must be maintained. “Politics and strategy,” said a Command and General Staff School publication in 1936, “are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once the policy is settled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from politics . . . The line of demarkation must be drawn between politics and strategy, supply, and operations. Having found this line, all sides must abstain from trespassing.”26 The maintenance of this separation between statesmanship and strategy was menaced, in the military viewpoint, by the tendency of politicians to invade the independent realm of the military. Particularly in a popular government, officers were warned, civilian political leaders might be tempted to interfere with the conduct of campaigns with an eye on the next election. The desire to save money and to win quick victories were constant temptations. The conflict between the statesman and the soldier will be a continuing one, and in the end the latter must simply accept this as one of the difficulties of life. On the whole, the military view of civilian control during this period embodied a highly sophisticated analysis generally absent from civilian writing on this subject.
While the role of the military within the government was clear so far as strictly military operations were concerned, the broadening scope of war raised other questions of delimitation which were not so easily answered. As war became total, it involved economic, political, and psychological factors far beyond the normal scope of military cognizance. Traditionally, the military man had defined war as his peculiar specialty. But the conduct of war now obviously involved many other specialties. Did the military man attempt to encompass all of modern war or did he limit his attention to the military aspect of war? Theoretically, the latter was the right answer, and most military men recognized this. The military man necessarily, of course, had to be concerned with the relation of the military component of war to the other components, but he could not accept responsibility for the other components. In pursuit of this theory, the officer might study procurement and economic mobilization at the Army Industrial College, but this was something different from giving him the authority to direct economic mobilization. American military writing, reflecting this attitude, continued to focus almost entirely on technical military problems.27 Nonetheless, a tendency in the broader direction did exist in the 1920’s and 1930’s. This was due primarily to the lack of interest in the nonmilitary aspects of war by the civilian branches of the government, and the absence of civilian institutions equipped to perform these functions. As a result, the War Department assumed the job of mobilization planning. The civilians imposed a civilian war function on a military agency. In this sense, the national mobilization planning of the War Department in the thirties was a forerunner of the vast civilian abdication of function which was to take place during and after World War II.
SOCIETY. The content and tenor of military communications after the early 1920’s reflected the isolation forced upon the military by the hostility of a liberal society. There was a renewed emphasis upon military values, and a renewed awareness of the gulf between military values and those values prevalent in American society. The military spirit and its core element of discipline have been neglected, complained the Chief of Staff of the Army in 1927. Members of the Army, he declared, must have “pride in being an officer or soldier.” Discipline as well as morale was necessary for the existence of a military force. The military purposes of the armed services must always be kept uppermost. “A technical and mercantile philosophy,” posited another officer, “cannot be supreme in an army that has any fighting value.” The military and civilian ethics were fundamentally incompatible, proclaimed one writer in 1936, in words which would never
have been uttered fifteen years previously:
If a man cannot find satisfaction in living a purely military life, he should get out of the army. The super-imposition of any semi-civilian system will reduce the military consciousness and should not be tolerated. The soldier and the civilian belong to separate classes of society. The code of the soldier can never be the same as that of the civilian; why try to mingle them?
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