The History of American Military. Richard W. Stewart
of a standing military force played an important part in the development of a system based upon a small professional nucleus that could be expanded in time of need by the induction of citizen-soldiers. This initial system took advantage of the ocean barriers favoring the United States and the balance of power existing in Europe. In accord with Washington’s injunction, it held forth the possibility of acquiring greater strength by temporary alliances during extraordinary emergencies but the avoidance of permanent, “entangling” alliances. Since World War II the rise of new foes and the destruction of the balance of power in Europe and the Far East caused a drastic change in the American military system. During the Cold War, the United States maintained relatively large standing air, land, and sea forces around the world, ready for immediate action and for cooperation with the forces of its many allies. Even with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War, American standing forces remained comparatively larger and more powerful than at any other time in our history. The challenge of worldwide terrorism will doubtless see new changes in our military system.
The American Army as it exists today has evolved through a historical process that parallels the social, economic, and political development of the United States. Its evolution may in general be divided into three periods: colonial, continental expansion, and global operations. During the colonial period (1607–1775), the militia of the various colonies defended the settlers while they were establishing themselves in America and helped England eliminate the French from North America. This was the period of roots and origins, of the transplanting of military institutions from abroad, particularly from England, and of their modification in the New World. During the era of continental expansion (1775–1898), the militia and volunteers and the Continental Army and its successor, the Regular Army, played a significant role in bringing the United States into being, in winning important extensions of national territory, in saving the nation from internal destruction, and in exploring, policing, and governing the vast regions of the West. This was the period of national independence and consolidation. In the wars of this era, the Army’s activities were concentrated on problems vital to the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of a nation based on new concepts of individual freedom and representative government. Only once in this period, during the Revolutionary War, did the Army fight with the help of allies and then only on a temporary basis.
The year 1898, which saw the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, the symbol of “looking outward,” was an important turning point. It marked the emergence of the United States as a world power. In the third period (1898 to the present), the Army has carried the flag to the four corners of the earth. Its assigned role has been to serve as a principal instrument for promoting American policies and American interests overseas and protecting the nation against the menace of tyrannical power. In the two great world wars of the twentieth century, as well as in Korea and Vietnam, the United States fought alongside associated or allied nations. In the increasing complexity of modern war, its operations have become inseparably intertwined with those of the Navy and the Air Force. In the history of the nation and the Army of the twentieth century, World War II became an important dividing line whose full implications are still not entirely clear. Since World War II the revolution in the strategic position of the United States, its emergence as leader of the free world and of allies in military combination, the Cold War, the nuclear age, and the Global War on Terrorism have presented unprecedented challenges to traditional American concepts and institutions in national security.
Whatever the U.S. Army’s future contribution, it is as an instrument of force, the primary mission of an army, that it has played its major role in American history. From desperate hand-to-hand engagements with the American Indian to vast battles with motorized and armored forces, from revolutionary war to world war, civil to foreign war, guerrilla to counterguerrilla war, from hot to cold war, and to the war on terrorism, the Army has figured prominently in the nation’s conflicts while continuing to make important contributions to the general welfare and to the preservation of domestic order in peacetime.
One final point must be made about the essence of the American Army. We should always remember that it is the Army of the nation and as such responds to the nation’s elected leaders. The leaders of the U.S. Army have consistently adhered to a principle basic to the American military system, that the Army is an instrument of civilian authority. This principle, which General Washington firmly established in practice during the Revolutionary War, was embodied in the Constitution of the United States as a fundamental safeguard of republican institutions. The supremacy of civilian authority is the American solution to the problem of forestalling any possible danger from a standing army.
Until World War II, American military policy was centered on the maintenance of very small regular forces and reliance on citizensoldiers in cases of national emergency. In the colonial period almost every able-bodied man was a member of the militia and could be called out in case of need; and this system continued in force at least theoretically during the first two centuries of national existence. It was usually, nonetheless, the citizen-volunteer who swelled the Army’s ranks in earlier wars. This changed during the Cold War with the continuation of the idea of universal obligation for military duty under selective service in time of national emergency. The return to the earlier idea of a small professional regular army, backed up by an organized militia, the National Guard and Army Reserves, has changed the equation again. Yet this relatively small professional force undergoes other risks such as being separated physically, socially, and even culturally from society as a whole with all that entails for a nation that values civilian control of the military. It remains to be seen to what degree this return to a regular volunteer force, this time under the pressure of a worldwide struggle against terror, creates tensions between the military and society at large.
In an age when forces in being may determine the outcome of a war or an emergency action in peacetime, the principle of reliance on masses of citizen-soldiers has given way to the concept of small, efficient professional forces supported by a select body of trained reserves. The increasing complications of modern warfare, the great rapidity with which attacks can be launched with modern weapons, and the extensive overseas commitments of the United States have negated the traditional American habit of preparing for wars after they have begun. But whatever the future composition of the Army, it will still have to incorporate the historic principle, ingrained in the nation’s military system, of being representative of the people and subject to civilian control.
To be truly progressive, a military system, like most evolving human institutions, must operate in two planes of time: the present and the future. In the field of national security, the choices in the twentieth century were never easy; those for the twenty-first promise to be even more challenging. The citizen and the soldier cannot know what path to follow unless they are aware of the breadth of alternatives that have been accepted or rejected in the past. Philosopher George Santayana’s dictum that those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes is nowhere more apt than in military history. At the same time the blend of the historical with the military art reinforces the caution that no two periods or operations are precisely alike, that the easy analogy and the false comparison must be avoided, and that the past must be interpreted in proper context and depth. For the fledgling officer, as well as for the citizen, American military history provides a laboratory of experience; an accumulation of continuities and disparities; a rich storehouse of courage, sacrifice, and knowledge; and a source of inspiration and wisdom. It is to the multifaceted story of the American Army, how it originated and developed and what it contributed to the nation in war and peace, that we now turn.
2 The Beginnings
The United States as a nation was in its origins a product of English expansion in the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a part of the general outward thrust of West European peoples in this epoch. British people and institutions, transplanted to a new continent and mixed with people of different origins, underwent changes that eventually produced a distinctive American culture. In no area was the interaction of the two influences—European heredity and American environment—more apparent than in the shaping of the military institutions of the new nation.