American policymakers saw that the world war had not made the world safe for democracy, let alone for narrower American political and economic interests. The disappointments of peacemaking after World War I, however, reduced American will to match the strategic challenges of the postwar world with enlarged, improved military forces. With little popular appetite for “foreign wars” and increased peacetime military spending, the United States, especially the staffs of the Army and Navy, attempted to design a postwar military policy that reconciled the nation’s muted internationalism and its commitment to “normalcy.” For twenty years the United States relied again on its military potential rather than standing forces.
Postwar Defense Policy
Between 1919 and 1922 the United States government tried to digest all the real and imagined lessons of World War I and establish the legislative base of a military policy compatible with both foreign policy and domestic concerns. The period began with the Versailles Peace Conference and ended with the Washington Conference treaties on naval limitation and security in the Pacific. If the policies of the early 1920s did not survive the rise of international military crises in the 1930s and the disaster of the Great Depression, they did, nevertheless, represent a reasonable response to the risks of the 1920s.
The cornerstone—or the keel—of American defense policy remained the fleet. Although the German U-boat war upon Allied commerce suggested that Mahanian specifics on sea power needed some rethinking, neither the Navy nor civilian navalists saw any reason to abandon the Naval Act of 1916, which foresaw a “Navy second to none” capable of meeting simultaneous naval threats from Great Britain and Japan. Even as the Navy Department phased out its wartime building programs and demobilized emergency sailors, Congress agreed to duplicate the 1916 building program in the Naval Act of 1919. The salvaged 1916 program, however, immediately ran aground. Although naval advisers still viewed Great Britain as a potential adversary, the Wilson administration’s civilian negotiators at the Versailles conference suggested to their British counterparts that the United States would abandon another naval arms race if the existing naval powers could negotiate some ceilings on fleet size, type, and modernity. The British proved interested in the proposal. Another restraint upon the Navy came from Congress, which was faced with paying the nation’s war debts and cutting government spending in order to check inflation and end a postwar depression. By 1920 Congress had already failed to appropriate money to continue the 1916 program, justified in part by a Senate investigation of the Navy Department’s performance in the world war. Encouraged by charges from Admiral William S. Sims that the Navy was organizationally flawed and technologically backward, Congress found ample excuse to cut the battleship building program. The impulse to cut naval spending found diverse support among the reborn peace movement, domestic lobbies like organized labor and reform groups, and the advocates of international agreements to control military spending. Even within the Navy, reformist officers wondered if a renewed commitment to the battleship might be an obsolete response to the potential havoc submarines and airplanes might cause the surface fleet. In sum, the concept of sea power remained largely intact. The instrument of that concept—the battleline of the U.S. Navy—might, however, be altered by a combination of international agreement and organizational-technological change.
The Washington Conference, an international meeting held during the winter of 1921–1922, shaped naval policy until the eve of World War II. Led by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, the American delegation hammered out an agreement on capital-ship numbers and characteristics for the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy, assisted by full knowledge of the Japanese position from compromised communications. The Five Power Treaty created a tonnage ratio for battleships and battle-cruisers (a faster, more lightly armored battleship mutant) at 500,000 tons for the United States and Great Britain, 300,000 tons for Japan, and 175,000 tons for France and Italy. The tonnage ceilings were accompanied by a common agreement to limit battleships to 35,000 tons each and main batteries to no larger than 16-inch guns. For ten years the signatories would take a building “holiday” and then replace ships only under treaty agreement.
In more specific terms, the United States fared very well when the tonnage ratios became real battleships. The U.S. Navy battleline would number eighteen vessels, ten of them completed after 1906 and eight of them completed since 1916. The larger Royal Navy battlefleet (twenty ships) was not nearly so modern; the Japanese force numbered only ten battleships. If the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 had remained intact, their combined fleets might have been overwhelming, but the Washington treaties effectively ended the Anglo-Japanese treaty. This strategic uncoupling had been a major American goal and allowed the Navy to preserve a policy it had already adopted. In 1919 the Navy had split the battleline and assigned the most modern battleships to the new Pacific Fleet. Although American commentators made much of the fact that the United States had scrapped fifteen capital ships and stopped work on eleven others, the former were pre-Dreadnoughts of dubious utility, and the latter were battleships and battlecruisers that Congress had proved reluctant to complete. Moreover, the treaty allowed two battlecruiser hulls to be converted to aircraft carriers, Lexington and Saratoga. When the two 33,000-ton carriers joined the fleet, they were the best of their type in the world.
At the insistence of the restive Japanese, the Washington treaty on limiting naval armaments also included a provision that the signatories would not add to their base facilities and fortifications in the western Pacific. Much to the Navy’s dismay, this provision prevented converting any base west of the Hawaiian Islands into a major facility for supporting fleet operations. Japan had already agreed not to develop bases in the mandated islands and now extended this pledge to Formosa, but its geographic proximity gave it an assumed advantage if war occurred.
The base provision of the Five Power Treaty took on lesser significance, however, when weighed against two other Washington agreements, the Four Power Treaty and the Nine Power Treaty. The former pledged Japan, the United States, France, and Great Britain not to interfere with each others’ Asia-Pacific possessions. The latter pledged all the nations with some claim to special privileges in China to respect its political and territorial integrity. Presumably these two treaties made the Five Power Treaty acceptable by eliminating the most likely causes of a Pacific war.
For a Navy already becalmed by budget cuts, the Washington treaties allowed ample room for modernization of the remaining battleships and the use of other funds to develop a “balanced” fleet complete with submarines, a naval air arm, and a scouting force of cruisers (limited to 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns by the Five Power Treaty) and destroyers. Since the Five Power Treaty required comprehensive review within ten years, the naval policy could be changed if the political arrangements for Pacific and Asian security collapsed. If the treaty regime later appeared to pave the road to naval inferiority, the source of difficulty was not the Five Power Treaty itself, but subsequent naval budgets.
Like the creation of the “treaty” Navy, the postwar reorganization of the nation’s land forces blended the lessons of the world war and more traditional elements of military policy. The fundamental postwar legislation, the National Defense Act of 1920, created an “Army of the United States,” a force of many parts designed to mobilize and expand in wartime around a cadre of regulars and part-time soldiers. Regardless of the manpower formulas it heard from advocates of peacetime military training, Congress rejected compulsory service. It also rejected any appreciable increase in the standing forces. The law, nevertheless, refined the legislation of 1916 in useful ways and eventually provided a sounder basis for wartime mobilization than existed in 1917.
The core issue of postwar military policy focused on manpower mobilization and the relationship of the elements of the Army of the United States to the federal government and each other. In 1919 the War Department General Staff submitted a plan to Congress that call
ed for a regular Army of 500,000 men and a program of universal military training (administered by the regulars) that would provide a reservoir of 500,000 trained reserves. These reserves would fill the ranks of existing units in wartime. In theory this system—unabashedly Uptonian—would have been the quickest way to reach combat effectiveness in an emergency, assuming a parallel state of materiel preparation. The plan, however, appeared Germanic and militaristic—and expensive—to Congress, one of whose members called it “an outrage.” Another congressman announced that everyone had had “a bellyful of the damn Army.” Searching for an alternative system, Congress borrowed the services of Colonel John McAuley Palmer, historian, experienced staff planner, author, and Pershing protégé. No Uptonian, Palmer was instead Utopian. He urged universal military training on the Swiss model, arguing that a mass army of citizen-soldiers raised by compulsion would be true to American traditions and civilian control of the military. The latter point was dubious and the former point silliness, since the United States had not had compulsory peacetime training since the Militia Act of 1792 had gone unimplemented. Congress, in fact, accepted Palmer’s view that the nation did not need a large regular Army, but it rejected the recommended substitute, a citizen reserve force raised through universal military training. Instead the National Defense Act of 1920 built a multi-tiered system based on voluntary participation and diverse degrees of readiness.
The new legislation envisioned a regular U.S. Army of 280,000 officers and men, whose primary mission was to provide tactical units for overseas defense, expeditionary duty, and border protection. It also trained the army’s civilian components. Heavily influenced by the National Guard lobby and the Guard’s local popularity, Congress designated the Guard the first federal reserve force and strengthened Guard influence on War Department planning. Depending upon citizen interest and federal dollars, the Guard might reach a peacetime strength of 435,000. The next source of soldiers would be the organized reserves, a federal force of officers and enlisted men drawn initially from World War I veterans, who would maintain the headquarters of tactical units as large as divisions. These skeleton divisions would absorb and train wartime conscripts; other federal reservists from the Officers Reserve Corps and Enlisted Reserve Corps would fill the ranks of the active formations in wartime. General Staff planners estimated that the Army of the United States could number 2.3 million men after sixty days of intense mobilization. To manage peacetime training and wartime expansion, the army would be organized into nine corps areas, and each corps would have a regular Army division, two National Guard divisions, and three reserve divisions.
In one particular area the National Defense Act of 1920 proved especially valuable: The provision for commissioning reserve officers on a continuing basis. The War Department and Congress agreed that a critical weakness in America’s wartime armies had been the quality and quantity of junior officers in combat units. Since the World War veterans would quickly age—and those with reserve commissions reach field-grade rank—the legislation institutionalized the peacetime training and commissioning of new lieutenants, primarily through a campus-based Reserve Officers Training Corps and a system of summer training camps for non-ROTC participants. Whether ROTC was compulsory or not remained the decision of individual campuses, but the War Department favored compulsion despite the fact that fewer than 10 percent of ROTC cadets took the four-year program that qualified them for a commission. Presumably, two-year compulsory participants would accept wartime commissions rather than serve in the ranks. When the United States once again mobilized in 1940, the War Department could call 80,000 reserve officers to active duty, most of whom were ROTC products.
Manpower mobilization had always fascinated military policymakers, but the experience of World War I showed that industrial mobilization plans equaled manpower policies in importance. Influenced by civilian and military participants in the World War I economic mobilization, especially Bernard Baruch, Congress assigned the duty of industrial readiness to the assistant secretary of war. The assistant secretary’s office, staffed by both civilians and officers, became responsible for matching the wartime Army’s procurement needs with the nation’s production capacity. Although the law did not give the War Department the specific responsibility for designing a mobilization plan for national economic regulation, the National Defense Act of 1920 implied that military procurement could not be divorced from the more comprehensive problems of wartime economic policy.
Planning for Another War
Although the size and composition of the fleet, the structure of the Army of the United States, and the unanswered questions of wartime industrial mobilization brought a new complexity to strategic planning, no single issue so complicated policymaking as the future role of aviation. The airplane challenged traditional definitions of Army and Navy doctrine and functions and stimulated complex patterns of interservice cooperation and conflict. It also set off sharp internal power struggles within both the Army and Navy, consumed scarce personnel and funds that otherwise would have gone to the land army and the surface fleet, and provided an additional weapon for civilians who wanted to prod the military bureaucracies toward new ways of waging war and saving money. The airplane obsessed technological visionaries, who imagined that air war would deter or decide quickly all future conflicts among the industrialized nations. The airplane bonded together an important new political coalition for policy shaping: Military aviators, scientists and engineers, private airplane builders, and those civilians who saw the potential of the airplane for carrying commercial freight and passengers. In sum, the airplane had a far-reaching impact upon interwar military policy in virtually every way except one: It did not offer a cheap and decisive way to protect America.
Fascinated with the potential of the airplane, only partially exploited in World War I, the military missionaries brought the air power gospel to the government and public in 1919. By 1926 both the Army and Navy had made giant strides in establishing military aviation establishments and creating the basic concepts for the airplane’s wartime use. Within the Army, Brigadier General William Mitchell led the campaign. The Navy had no Mitchell, and it did not want one. It had instead a trio of aging Young Turks—Admirals William F. Fullam, Bradley Fiske, and William S. Sims—for public education, and in Rear Admiral William A. Moffett the Navy had one of the most talented organizers and lobbyists in its history. Both services also had a tightly knit, dedicated cadre of flying officers who firmly believed that national defense required the aggressive exploitation of the airplane, even to the exclusion of other ways of waging war.
The War and Navy Departments did not ignore military aviation. In 1919 the Joint Board of Aeronautics, an offshoot of the Army-Navy Joint Board, issued its first doctrinal statement on air warfare. The board stressed the importance of air operations to land and sea campaigns but rejected the radical notion (associated especially with Mitchell) that air power might itself win wars. In the future the Army would develop air forces appropriate for the support of all phases of land warfare. As Mitchell defined them, these missions were winning air superiority over the battlefield by destroying the enemy’s air force (pursuit), the destruction of ground targets away from the battlefield (bombardment), the destruction of enemy forces on the battlefield (attack), and fire direction and information gathering (observation). The Navy would develop the air forces, based either on carriers or land stations, essential to the conduct of a naval campaign. Naval aviation analysts already believed that future fleet operations would require air superiority. They also recognized that land-based naval aviation might be critical to several phases of a naval campaign, particularly convoying, reconnaissance, and the attack upon enemy naval bases. The knottiest problem, however, was the joint responsibility for coastal defense. The doctrinal statement of 1919 said that both Army and Navy planes might be involved in attacking an invading fleet. Although a seaborne invasion of the United States seemed a remote threat, naval attacks on the Philippines, Alaska, Hawaii,
and the Canal Zone did not appear so unlikely. Whatever the threat, the Joint Board on Aeronautics did not define in any detail the division of labors in aerial coastal defense, thus recognizing (if not solving) an intricate interservice problem.
From his post as director of training and operations for the postwar Army Air Service, Mitchell challenged 1919 doctrine both publicly and privately. Supported by Army and civilian true believers, some of whom were congressmen, Mitchell argued that the airplane would replace the battlefleet as the ultimate weapon of coastal defense. In colorful and unrestrained language, he challenged the government to substitute “Air Power” for “Sea Power” as the nation’s basic security policy. Mitchell also urged the creation of a separate air force and department of aviation within a department of defense that would unify all military aviation. He wanted the Navy to have only those land air stations required to train for carrier duty. Although he had not yet developed a full-blown theory of strategic bombardment, Mitchell thought that only organizational autonomy would ensure the full exploitation of aviation.
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