Although the Navy watched the often comical and futile efforts to fly with detachment, its interest increased after the Wright brothers’ flight in 1903 and flowered in 1910 when Captain Washington I. Chambers and inventor Glenn Curtiss formed an effective coalition of naval aviation enthusiasts. In terms of mission, the aviation champions thought of airplanes as reconnaissance and naval gunfire scouting craft. Technically, this role meant that some method had to be found to fly an airplane off a ship and then recover it. In 1911 Congress gave the Navy $25,000 for its first three experimental planes after a civilian test pilot successfully flew a Curtiss aircraft off a warship the year before. With pontoons and a hoist, an airplane could also be recovered. Nevertheless, the “hydroaeroplane” force developed slowly because aircraft themselves were expensive, and the development of a force of pilots, bases, and supporting establishment suggested costs that naval planners and Congress were not willing to pay. Part of their reluctance stemmed from the fact that the airplanes of the day did not have the power to drop bombs that would sink a warship. Although experiments with the electric torpedo (used by both surface ships and submarines) suggested that an airplane might someday have an attack capability, aviation enthusiasts did not have much success in selling the airplane as the future ultimate weapon of naval warfare. Even though they proved that an airplane could land on a warship with the help of arresting gear, which suggested that heavy bomb carriers could be developed free of the seaplane-hoist mode, naval aviators could muster support only for an aviation force linked to the reconnaissance mission. On the eve of World War I the Navy had only eight aircraft and thirteen officer-pilots. In fact, public and official interest supported the use of dirigibles for naval aviation tasks. With the responsibility for aviation policy divided between several of the traditional technical bureaus, the future of Navy flying ranked well below other Navy Department concerns.
In 1915, however, the Navy’s aviators and their civilian colleagues had made sufficient progress to win General Board and congressional support for a more ambitious commitment to naval aviation. Its interest heightened by the world war, Congress appropriated $1 million to create and support a force of fifty airplanes and three dirigibles. This program was still in its earliest stages when the U.S. Navy went to war in 1917.
The U.S. Navy between 1898 and 1917 increased its capability to engage the fleet of any other major power, but it could do so only if the decisive fleet action occurred north of the equator, close to the Navy’s bases in the continental United States. The United States did not have the resources to conduct major wartime naval operations in the western Pacific, and its dominance in the Caribbean might be secure in peacetime but not, perhaps, in wartime. Holding the Panama Canal remained critical to operations in either ocean. In addition, the Navy retained its battleship orientation, since naval politics within the service and the federal government produced no other consensus. The fleet-in-being was not balanced for wartime needs and required augmentation with merchant vessels and wartime construction in order to provide sufficient numbers of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliaries. Neither submarine nor aviation development had yet reached the point of challenging the great fleet engagement as the essence of naval warfare. While the Navy’s line officers, whose principal interest was war preparedness, had gained some influence in the Navy Department, they did not yet dominate policymaking. The Navy of Manila Bay and Santiago had changed, but so had its potential adversaries and missions.
Reforming the Land Forces
Despite its victory in “the splendid little war” against Spain, the U.S. Army entered the new century conscious that its campaigns in 1898 were “within measurable distance of a military disaster,” as Theodore Roosevelt characterized the siege of Santiago. For the public, the press, and much of the Army officer corps the war felt like a defeat, for it had revealed all the flaws of American land force policy and had dramatized the institutional weaknesses of the regular Army and the militia (or National Guard) of the states. Both major components of the wartime Army showed they had not made the transition from frontier constabulary and strike police. Nor had the War Department yet reorganized in order to make the wartime mobilization of citizen-volunteers more efficient. Although the War Department’s failure, investigated by a special presidential commission headed by railroader and former general Grenville Dodge, seemed worse than it really was, most War Department officials and critics believed that some reform was necessary. Over the content of the reform movement there was continuous disagreement. Nevertheless, by 1917 the reform movement had worked fundamental changes in American land force policy.
Assisted by a close group of Army officer-advisers, Secretary of War Elihu Root (1899–1904) led the reform movement, which rallied sufficient congressional and Army supporters to give it momentum beyond Root’s tenure. Upon taking office, Root accepted the key concept of military professionalism: “The real object of having an army is to provide for war.” This axiom became the basic measure of land force reform. Giving this idea institutional expression proved far more difficult, for the American political tradition remained hostile to increased military preparedness and professionalism. An astute negotiator and corporation lawyer, Root knew and the Army was to learn that the sense of disaster was short-lived. Before the impetus for reform ebbed, only to be stimulated again by World War I, the reformers had scored several limited victories in the name of mobilization readiness.
Coached by Adjutant General Henry C. Corbin and Major William H. Carter, Root quickly learned that the War Department had to become a unified center of policy direction rather than three conflicting alliances based upon the office of the Secretary of War, the office of the commanding general, and the heads of the various administrative, technical, and logistical departments and bureaus. Until the War Department had a single “brain of the army,” as British writer Spencer Wilkinson characterized a general staff, the planning for war and the direction of war when it came would continue to be plagued by poor coordination, jurisdictional battles, and inertia. In an ideal sense, the model for military management was the German Grosse Generalstab, or Great General Staff, which military analysts credited for the German victories in the wars of unification in the 1860s and 1870s. Such a staff, dominated by line officers, would advise the president and secretary of war, prepare Army legislation and policies, supervise the activities of the departments and bureaus, and direct training. Politically, however, a general staff conjured up visions of German militarism, regular Army arrogance, and executive branch tyranny.
Outflanking his opponents, Secretary Root advanced steadily toward a general staff until Congress accepted the organization in limited form in the General Staff Act of 1903. Aware that the general staff concept had powerful enemies within the Army, especially Lieutenant General Nelson A. Miles, the commanding general, and Brigadier General Fred C. Ainsworth, chief of the Record and Pension Office, Root moved with caution. First, he had a board of officers study the question of establishing an Army War College; the board’s positive report was endorsed and the war college created in 1900. Root immediately assigned the war college faculty duties much like those of a general staff and used its officers to develop and advocate the general staff concept. Then, mustering support from Roosevelt, a prestigious group of Civil War generals, and reformist civilians, Root persuaded Congress to accept an Americanized version of the Great General Staff. The new law replaced the commanding general with a chief of staff, who would rotate in office every four years, and a staff of forty-five officers. Some of these General Staff officers, who would also rotate, would serve in Washington while others served in the headquarters of the Army’s geographic departments, which supervised the field forces. The law, however, gave the General Staff only “supervisory” and “coordinating” authority over the War Department departments and bureaus, and it did not consolidate the logistical bureaus as Root advocated. In fact, the law and its subsequent implementation and modification gave Ainsworth, who b
ecame the adjutant general, real power equal to the chief of staff’s.
Once established, the General Staff did bring some improvements to the Army’s organization for wartime mobilization, but its power did not increase rapidly enough to please Army reformers. Among the staff’s accomplishments were the improvement of officer education, field maneuvers, contingency planning, intelligence collection and analysis, tactical organization, and theoretical mobilization planning. When the United States sent regular troops to the Mexican border in 1911, the movement was not especially well organized; a similar deployment in 1913 went much more smoothly. An expedition to Cuba in 1906 by 5,000 regulars showed a managerial competence absent in 1898.
Nevertheless, the General Staff suffered many wounds in its early days, some from enemies, some self-inflicted. For example, the bureau chiefs still proved fractious and insubordinate, encouraged by their Army friends and congressional allies. Several chiefs of staff had great difficulty enforcing policy until Chief of Staff Leonard Wood (1910–1914) and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (1911–1913) challenged General Ainsworth’s power in 1912. Maneuvering Ainsworth into retirement with the threat of a court-martial for insubordination, the imperious Wood and Stimson seem to have established the chief of staff’s position as the principal source of professional advice and command authority, but Ainsworth and Congress immediately curbed Wood and the staff with inhibiting legislation. When Wood’s tenure ended, he was replaced by less assertive generals. With the Wilson administration and Congress hostile to the General Staff, the “brain of the Army” did not prosper. When the United States entered World War I, the staff had only twenty-two officers in Washington, mired in routine paperwork and theoretical war plans of limited usefulness.
If the Army’s “brain” needed fresh blood, its body—the tactical units with which it would fight future wars—needed more muscle, principally manpower. Postponing permanent legislation until the end of the Philippine insurrection was in sight, Congress waited until 1901 to enlarge the regular Army to 3,820 officers and 84,799 men, and it did not appropriate enough money to maintain even this force, which fell below War Department estimates. Clearly some sort of reserve force would be required to reinforce the regulars in the early stages of war while the United States mobilized and trained a citizen-soldier army. The reinforcement mission meant that the first-line reserves would have to mobilize quickly and be available legally for expeditionary duty abroad. Ideally, the War Department preferred a reserve force raised, organized, and controlled only by the national government. Its model was the German system, which required conscripts to serve first with the standing army and then in various reserve units for a total of twelve years. Americans, however, thought compulsory service militaristic and foreign to their society and institutions, whatever its military benefits. As Secretary Root and his advisers realized, any reserve system had to rely on volunteers, and the only expression of military voluntarism in peacetime was the National Guard.
As it proved in 1898 when it served as the principal recruiting base for volunteers, the National Guard could provide ardent recruits for wartime service and some existing tactical structure for their training and employment. In 1899 Congress rewarded the Guard by increasing its annual subsidy from $400,000 to $1 million. The Guard’s shortcomings were equally obvious. Politically, there were as many National Guards as there were states and territories, all influenced more or less by state patronage politics, which tolerated aged, infirm, and incompetent officers to a degree the regular Army (at least the reformers) would not. In terms of mission and political theory, the Guard tended to fall into four camps: states’ rights units, “social” units, “law and order” units, and reservists-for-war units. For two decades, National Guard reformers, represented by the National Guard Association of the United States, had attempted to persuade state legislatures to increase Guard subsidies for military training unrelated to state missions, which were principally suppressing labor and racial violence. Although the governments of New York, Pennsylvania, and New England proved supportive, reform at the state level did not flourish. Disappointed at the limits of state support for the wartime reserve mission, the Guard reformers turned to the federal government and found the War Department and Congress sympathetic.
From 1903 to 1912, militia reform flourished in Washington, spurred by Roosevelt (an ex-Guard officer), Root, Assistant Secretary of War William Cary Sanger (also an ex-Guardsman), the National Guard Association, part of Congress, and even regular Army officers. The final laws disappointed uncompromising Uptonian officers, states’ righters, and the antimilitary clique in Congress, but they did provide the foundation for an improved Guard for the reinforcement mission. In 1903 Congress passed a new Militia Act, whose principal legislative sponsor was Representative Charles W. Dick, an Ohio Republican and Guard general. The Dick Act essentially exchanged federal dollars and equipment for increased Army control of the Guard’s training and organization. The law recognized two militias: the Organized Militia (National Guard) under dual federal-state control, and the unorganized mass of males (ages eighteen to forty-five) that retained both national and state military obligations in emergencies. Only the Organized Militia, however, would receive federal monies and then only in relationship to the degree that its units met federal standards in commissioning officers, recruiting enlisted men to Army physical and mental standards, organizing units like their Army counterparts, and undergoing field training. For example, Guard units could increase federal support by going to summer camp and participating in maneuvers with the regular Army. Under a complex funding formula, the more the Guard trained, the more money it received to pay the trainees and the more free arms and equipment it could requisition through the Army. In addition, the president could call up the Guard for nine months rather than three months, but the geographic limitation to continental service remained. As a beginning, however, especially when the Guard subsidy increased to $2 million in 1906, the Dick Act heartened the reformers.
The Dick Act left many issues unresolved, but a second Militia Act of 1908 appeared to address most of the remaining problems. The most important change was that the time and geographic limits for Guard service disappeared, but only in return for a provision that Guardsmen would go to war as units, not individual replacements for Army regiments. One might have interpreted the original Dick Act to mean that Guard regiments might be federalized as units, then reorganized as federal volunteers for overseas service. Guardsmen argued persuasively that hometown officers and local loyalties gave the Guard its peacetime vitality and wartime mobilization potential. To check Guard fears that the General Staff saw it primarily as a pool of individual replacements, Congress established a National Guard Bureau in the War Department, whose chief reported directly to the secretary of war, not to the General Staff.
The Guard reform movement, however, slowed in 1912 when the attorney general ruled that the provision for compulsory overseas service included in the 1908 law was unconstitutional. Ironically, the ruling actually came from the office of the judge advocate general, the Army’s chief lawyer. Reflecting General Staff–bureau antagonisms, the conservatism of the Taft administration, and the Uptonianism of regular officers, the ruling turned attention away from the Guard and back to the issue of an independent federal reserve force. One effort at this alternative, the Reserve Act of 1912, allowed regulars to shorten their obligated active service by joining a federal reserve. Two years later this “force” numbered sixteen enlisted men. Clearly the United States did not have an adequate system for wartime mobilization.
The General Staff and reserve force issues tended to dominate land force policymaking, especially in the civil-military political arena, but the Army at the same time made halting steps to organize itself for modern warfare and to come to grips with the new military technology offered by a mighty host of civilians and its own uniformed inventors. Although America was rich in inventors, the absence of external threat and public urgency limited the Ar
my to experimentation and testing. Spurred by the world war, the European armed forces soon took the lead in finding more efficient ways to destroy each other with new weapons and organizational techniques. The U.S. Army shared the exploration for new ways to wage war.
Organizationally, modernization took many forms. The tactical units of the Army, principally the thirty infantry and fifteen cavalry regiments, gradually shifted to posts that could accommodate a regiment or more in order to improve training. Congressional reluctance to close bases, however, impeded troop concentration. On paper—and occasionally for maneuvers and service on the Mexican border—the Army formed brigades (two or more regiments) and divisions (two or more brigades), and even the National Guard had a theoretical grouping of twelve divisions, organized on a regional basis. The Army school system proliferated in order to accommodate more detailed technical training for regular officers and enlisted men. After much debate and political infighting, the artillery separated in 1907 into two separate arms, field artillery and coast artillery. Field artillery regiments reappeared on maneuvers, while the new Coast Artillery Corps enjoyed its status by establishing a separate staff in Washington and successfully lobbying for increased money for new guns and fortifications. In 1912 Congress finally accepted the wisdom of logistical consolidation and created a Quartermaster Department that absorbed the functions of the Subsistence and Paymaster Departments. The law also provided for a separate Service Corps of 6,000 men for field and base operations.
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