For the Common Defense
Page 18
Congressional goodwill toward the Army evaporated during the Panic of 1819. In 1820 the House told Calhoun to prepare a plan for reducing the Army to 6,000, and in response he submitted one of the most important military papers in American history. Declaring that reliance on militia was foolhardy and that the nation must depend on regulars, Calhoun proposed a peacetime “expansible” Army that could readily expand in war without diluting its capabilities. His fundamental principle was that when war came, “there should be nothing either to new model or to create.” In peacetime the Army should maintain a complete organization of companies and regiments and full complements of both line and staff officers but a reduced number of privates. In wartime preexisting units would be augmented by recruiting privates, who would be trained by experienced officers. The transition from peace to war, wrote Calhoun, could “be made without confusion or disorder; and the weakness and danger, which otherwise would be inevitable, be avoided.” Calhoun suggested an Army of 6,316, expansible to 11,558 without adding a single officer or company. With only 288 additional officers the Army could expand to more than 19,000. Calhoun’s proposal made no headway against congressmen such as Charles Fisher, who said he “always thought, that one of the best features of our Government is its unfitness for war.” In March 1821 Congress rejected Calhoun’s expansible Army concept, slashing the Army’s strength to 6,183 by eliminating regiments and reducing the number of officers. Yet the idea lived on, advocated by those who believed regulars should be the foundation for war planning.
Several postwar trends were clear. The armed forces enjoyed a few years of unprecedented peacetime support before economic ills and fading memories of the war led to cutbacks. Both services experienced bureaucratic growth in an effort to give civilian secretaries ready access to professional advice; to ensure long-term institutional stability in technical and logistical functions; and, in the Army, to impose centralized command on a previously decentralized system that had been a breeding ground for disaster. Although the bureau system represented an important administrative development, it ushered in new problems. Extreme specialization within the bureaus and lack of cooperation among them often hamstrung effective management, staff-line squabbles afflicted both services, and the commanding general’s ambiguous position created turmoil in the War Department.
Technology and War
“What hath God wrought?” asked Samuel F.B. Morse in May 1844 in the first message transmitted over the telegraph, a device he had invented. Whether the invention was God’s creation or man’s was debatable, but what had been wrought was a communications miracle that diminished time and distance in the transmission of information. Military communications—for centuries tied to a messenger’s uncertain speed—became almost instantaneous. Dramatic as it was, Morse’s telegraph was only one of the technological innovations that so profoundly influenced warfare as to constitute a military revolution, inducing acute anxiety among strategists needing to discern the impact of a bewildering range of developments. Not the least of the policymakers’ problems was the tremendous expense involved in keeping pace with new technologies. So rapidly did innovations appear, wrote one secretary of war, that a mere decade marked “an epoch in the onward progress of modern invention and improvement. Even five years may modify, materially, plans of defense now reputed wisest and most indispensable.”
During the first half of the nineteenth century armies harnessed the Industrial Revolution’s technology, resulting in dramatic increases in mobility and firepower. Enhanced mobility came from the steamship and the railroad. In 1789 John Fitch built the first successful steamboat, in 1807 Robert Fulton’s Clermont began commercial operations, and by the 1830s hundreds of steamers plied inland waters. Steamboats could defy currents and wind, but low water or ice brought them to a halt, and they had to go where rivers went. Neither drought nor winter stopped the railroads, which had the additional advantage of going anywhere people chose to lay tracks. A group of New Yorkers organized the first railroad company in 1826, and by 1860 there were 30,000 miles of track traversing the United States. Although developed for commercial purposes, steamboats and railroads had benefits equally important for commerce and war: Travel was faster and cheaper.
Increased firepower came from innovations that made infantry weapons dramatically more lethal. The flintlock mechanism gave way to percussion caps, cylindro-conoidal bullets replaced spherical lead balls, rifles superseded smoothbores, and breechloaders and repeaters competed with single-shot muzzleloaders. The development of fulminates in the 1790s led to a replacement system for the notoriously unreliable flintlock mechanism. By 1820 Joshua Shaw of Philadelphia had perfected a copper percussion cap containing mercuric fulminate. An infantryman placed a percussion cap on a hollow cone connected to the breech; when the hammer struck the cap, the fulminate exploded, sending flame through the cone to the main charge. The percussion cap, being simpler and more reliable than the flintlock, meant infantrymen fired at a faster rate than ever before.
Rifles had greater range and accuracy than smoothbores. Yet in 1815 no army had more than a few elite rifle units because rifles were slower to load than smoothbores. In a smoothbore the ball did not have to fit tightly in the barrel, but for a rifle to work, the bullet had to “grip” the rifling inside the barrel. The only way to achieve this “grip” in muzzleloading weapons firing round lead bullets was to force the projectile down the barrel—sometimes by pounding a steel ramrod with a mallet—so that it fit snugly against the rifling. The perfection of the elongated cylindro-conoidal bullet by a French army captain, Claude E. Minie, made it feasible to load rifles quickly. The so-called “Minie ball” slipped easily down the barrel but had a hollow base that expanded under the impact of the powder charge’s explosion, causing the projectile to grip the rifling. In the mid-1850s the Army adopted as its standard weapon a .58-caliber, percussion-cap, muzzleloading rifle firing cylindro-conoidal bullets. Smoothbores were accurate to only about fifty yards, but the new weapon could be deadly at ten times that distance.
By 1861 arms makers had developed breechloaders and repeaters. In 1811 John H. Hall patented a breechloading rifle, and in 1819 he signed a contract to produce his guns at the Harpers Ferry Armory. In manufacturing these rifles, Hall attained the goal Eli Whitney popularized but never achieved: Mass production using precision machine tools that resulted in interchangeable parts. Hall’s production system rapidly spread, spurring America’s economic growth, but his rifle had a fundamental problem. Gas and flame leaked from the breech, which detracted from the bullet’s velocity and endangered the soldier. The self-contained metallic cartridge, developed during the 1850s, solved the difficulty. The thin metal shell casing possessed the property of obturation (when the powder detonated, the casing expanded, sealing the breech). The new cartridge made possible effective breechloaders and repeating rifles. Prior to the Civil War, Samuel Colt, Christopher M. Spencer, and others had patented repeaters; and in 1862 Richard Gatling produced the first machine gun.
Railroads, steamboats, and rapid-fire rifles transformed land warfare. Strategically, armies could be transported long distances with unprecedented speed and be supported logistically with relative ease at a reasonable cost. They could also be controlled from afar by telegraph. At the same time the tactical system utilized by Napoleon lost its ability to achieve decisive battlefield results. Napoleon generally concentrated his artillery close to the enemy lines and, following a furious barrage, sent his massed infantry and cavalry forward in frontal assaults. By 1860 these tactics were suicidal. The longer range, better accuracy, and increased rate of fire of infantry weapons made it difficult to bring artillery near the enemy lines, potentially converting mass attacks into mass butchery.
Changes in naval warfare were no less startling, as steam and iron began to replace sails and wood. Indeed, naval technology seemed to be changing so swiftly that one congressional committee even suggested building a throw-away Navy. Instead of expensive iron construction, the Na
vy should rely on cheaply built vessels of white oak, sell them when they decayed, and build new ships “so as to keep the Navy up with all the improvements of the day, and in a condition to introduce, without sacrifice, any new invention.”
Robert Fulton built the world’s first steam warship, Fulton, completed in 1814 to defend New York harbor. Although entrepreneurs quickly adopted steam for commercial purposes, the Navy did not rush to embrace it. During the reign of the Board of Navy Commissioners the Navy built only four steamships. In the mid-1830s Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson partially implemented the 1816 congressional authorization for three steam batteries when he ordered construction of one steamer, a new Fulton, completed in 1837. Two years later Congress authorized three additional steam warships. One of these never performed well, but the other two, Mississippi and Missouri (both completed in 1842), were seagoing paddlewheelers representing a high state of technical proficiency.
Why was the Navy so reluctant to convert to steam? Part of the answer was naval conservatism regarding innovations. Many officers viewed the noisy, dirty steamships as ungainly sea monsters. Practical problems also delayed the acceptance of steam. Engines were bulky, weak, and unreliable. It took about one ton of machinery to generate one horsepower, and engines consumed coal voraciously, limiting a vessel’s range. The exposed paddlewheels made the vessel vulnerable, since a single shot into them would be crippling. The paddlewheels and the cumbersome steam machinery also left little room for broadside guns, reducing a ship’s own firepower.
Experimentation gradually produced more efficient engines, and the introduction of the screw propeller to replace the paddlewheels solved the problems of vulnerability and firepower. Placed underwater at the stern, the propeller was secure from enemy fire, allowed the ship’s vital machinery to be placed below the waterline, and freed the broadside for guns. The first screw-propeller warship was Princeton, launched in 1843. Its design made steamships equal to sailing vessels in fighting power, with the additional advantage of machine propulsion, and in the fifteen years preceding the Civil War the Navy increasingly converted to steam.
The steam warships built before the Civil War were actually obsolete. They had unprotected wooden hulls that could absorb a terrific pounding from solid shot, but explosive shells splintered the hulls and set wooden ships afire. Shells had long been used in land artillery because howitzers and mortars, fired at relatively high angles, required low projectile velocities. But naval guns required a flat trajectory to hull enemy ships and hence high velocity and breech pressures. In 1823 a French artillery officer, Henri-Joseph Paixhans, solved the technical difficulties in firing shells from naval guns. In the late 1830s France and England adopted the shell gun, as did the United States.
The answer to incendiary shell guns was iron. Two related innovations occurred simultaneously: iron construction and the use of iron plates as armor. The first armed vessel built of iron was Michigan, launched on the Great Lakes in 1843. The previous year Congress authorized Robert L. Stevens to build a “shot and shell proof” ironclad screw-propelled warship, the first modern ironclad9 authorized for any navy. Initially the vessel was to have 4 to 6 inches of armor, but inventors soon built guns that could penetrate it. Designers planned to install thicker armor, but even more powerful ordnance was soon available. The metallurgical advances permitting thicker, more resistant armor could also be used to build stronger guns capable of hurling larger projectiles at greater velocity. Stevens never filled his contract, and France launched the first seagoing ironclad, La Gloire, in 1859. The British countered the next year with Warrior, the first seagoing iron-hulled ironclad. Both ships were theoretically obsolete, since they carried only four and a half inches of armor. The fate of Stevens’s ship and the instant obsolescence of La Gloire and Warrior were indicative of the “race” between guns and armor—between penetration and protection—that lasted into the post–Civil War era.
The ascendancy of steam over sail and iron over wood had not been achieved by 1860. Steam warships carried full sail rigging, and most naval officers considered steam auxiliary to sails. The American Navy boasted no large iron-hulled ships or ironclads. Yet the implications of iron and steam were discernible. Steam completely altered maritime strategy and tactics. Ships could travel in direct lines rather than in sweeping deviations necessitated by prevailing winds and currents. Steam increased travel speed, allowed for a precise calculation of how long a voyage would take, and made in-shore maneuvering easier. However, steam also acted as a tether, binding warships to their coal bases. Previously the wind had been all-important in battle, but now its influence was negligible and speed became a more significant factor. The effects of iron construction were equally profound. It made possible ships that were larger, stronger, and more variable in design than wooden-hulled ships, providing more stable gun platforms capable of carrying enormous weapons. Iron hulls were more durable than wood and could be divided into watertight compartments that contained damage. In terms of initial cost and economy in repairs, iron was also cheaper than wood.
Schools of War
On September 16, 1871, an elderly man committed suicide by leaping into the paddlewheel of a Hudson River steamer. Melancholy for some time, Dennis Hart Mahan became morbid when the Military Academy’s Board of Visitors recommended his mandatory retirement from the West Point faculty. For Mahan, life without the Academy was not worth living. He had arrived at West Point in 1820 as a cadet, graduated first in the class of 1824, and served as an instructor there for two years. Then Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer sent him to France to study military engineering and fortifications. He resumed teaching duties at the Academy in 1830—and left again only in death. During his more than four decades at West Point, no one was more influential than Mahan in the transition of officership from a craft into a profession.
All professions exhibit three characteristics: specialized expertise attained by prolonged education and experience; a responsibility to perform functions beneficial to society; and a sense of corporateness, a collective self-consciousness that sets professionals apart from the rest of society. A professional officer’s expertise is the management of violence, and his responsibility is to provide national security. A sense of corporateness flows from the educational process, the customs and traditions that develop within the profession, and the unique expertise and responsibility shared by group members.
No nation had a professional officer corps in 1800, but all the European powers and the United States did by 1900. The impetus for professionalization came from changes in warfare foreshadowed by the American Revolution but made more obvious by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Fundamentally, as armies became larger, they created new administrative, operational, and tactical problems and possibilities. To deal with these, an ever-larger number of more highly skilled officers was necessary. Thus the magnitude and complexity of Napoleonic warfare gave birth to two elements essential for training such professional officer-specialists: military schools and a literature on warfare to guide officers in their studies. These developments appeared first in Prussia, crushed by Napoleon in 1806–1807. Lacking a genius like Frederick the Great to counter the French genius Napoleon, Prussian leaders established a school system—culminating in the Kriegsakademie—to forge the nation’s officers into collective competence. From the Kriegsakademie and lesser schools came studies dealing with the theory and principles of war. The most important was Karl von Clausewitz’s abstract commentary on the Napoleonic Wars, On War (1831). Although the most profound treatise on war ever written, Clausewitz’s book remained unknown to Americans until translated into English in 1873.
France emulated the Prussian schools, since military genius appeared so erratically that France could not depend on the timely arrival of another Napoleon. But the French and Prussian institutions had important differences. Prussian officers studied strategy and its relationship to policy, while the French emphasized military engineering, fortifications, and tac
tics. The Prussians wrestled with Clausewitz’s metaphysical discourse, while the French studied Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini’s The Art of War (1838). Clausewitz and Jomini, the two major commentators on Napoleonic warfare, tried to discover universal elements in war. They examined the same campaigns but presented different interpretations. Clausewitz understood the bloody, violent, and often chaotic style of war unleashed by the French Revolution and Napoleon. Jomini, however, found unrestrained war repellent and stressed decisive geographic points, speed, movement, and lines of supply and communication. These concerns missed the central point of Napoleonic warfare: the quest for decisive battle.
West Point followed the French example. The most obvious deficiencies during the War of 1812 had been well-trained officers and basic strategy. The two were not unrelated, since able officers could devise appropriate strategy, which required competent officers to implement. Thus postwar Republicans supported improvements at the Military Academy, which was near extinction in 1815. The revival began in July 1817, when President James Monroe ordered Captain Sylvanus Thayer, who had studied French military schools and fortifications, to become superintendent. During his superintendency (1817–1833), Thayer sought to transplant French professional standards to the banks of the Hudson, using Mahan as his conveyor. Mahan was professor of civil and military engineering and—as he insisted on adding to his title—of “the Art of War.” Textbooks were not available for either the engineering or the warfare course, so Mahan wrote his own. Known as Outpost (1847),10 his military text was a pioneering American study of war that relied on Napoleon (as interpreted by Jomini) to convey its lessons. In 1846 Mahan’s former student Henry W. Halleck had written Elements of Military Art and Science, a more original discussion of military theory than his mentor’s book, although still dependent on Jomini’s (and Mahan’s) portrayal of Napoleon. Mahan and Halleck initiated American strategic studies and consciously promoted professionalism, arguing that military science was a specialized body of knowledge understandable only through intense study, especially of military history.