Military, The

Military, The. The military exists principally to counter external threats to the nation, although on occasion it may react to domestic unrest such as civil disorder. The American military has often mirrored other nations’ armed forces, but unique circumstances have led to significant differences as well. Two influences account for these variations. European rulers often used their armies to exploit the citizenry. Many immigrants abhorred such treatment and harbored antimilitarist sentiments, which tended to limit the military and denied it an influential societal function. Moreover, the American colonies did not require a large military. To provide local defense and maintain order, voluntary (although sometimes conscripted) militia performed temporary, part‐time service.

Colonial Era to 1900.

Colonial militiamen often served under British commanders during the colonial wars. The inadequacy of colonial militia as a defense against French and Spanish incursions, however, led to the stationing of British regular army units in the colonies, especially during the Seven Years’ War. The militia tradition, together with the growing dislike for British professional troops, reinforced the antimilitary bent in the colonies and encouraged a tradition that demanded the subservience of military to civil authority. The Revolutionary War confirmed the main lines of defense policy. The nation relied on volunteers to augment the regulars in the Continental Army, which demobilized rapidly after the war. The War of 1812 did not significantly alter this policy, and for more than a century after the 1814 Treaty of Ghent ending the Napoleonic wars, the United States maintained a small regular army and navy, augmented with volunteers when necessary. In addition to the army and the navy, the post–revolutionary U.S. military also included the Marine Corps, established by Congress in 1798 under the command of the secretary of the navy, with responsibilities for carrying out all land operations essential to naval campaigns. Under their motto “Semper Fidelis,” the Marines have seen service in every American war.

Nineteenth‐century America enjoyed a high level of security stemming from the restored European balance of power after Napoleon's defeat. Secure behind oceanic moats, the United States, while maintaining economic and cultural ties to the Old World, concentrated on domestic issues and continental projects. The army policed the West as the frontier moved to the Pacific. The navy provided coastal defense and “showed the flag” in areas such as the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific, notably in Admiral Matthew Perry's visit to Japan in 1853. The minuscule military, assuming continued peace, neglected preparation for warfare and failed to reach full professional competence.

In addition to the frontier Indian wars, the nation fought only two foreign wars between 1815 and 1914: the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Spanish‐American War (1898). In both these conflicts, the volunteer system produced sufficient manpower to defeat weak opponents at small cost, so no fundamental changes in the military seemed necessary. The creation of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1802) and a U.S. “Naval School” at Annapolis in 1845 (renamed the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850), however, helped professionalize officer training.

The one departure from this lengthy calm was the Civil War. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy gained an early victory, forcing both to mobilize huge war‐fighting military establishments. These forces, consisting mostly of state militiamen, volunteers, and conscripts, endured heavy casualties. Battle deaths were about 140,000 for the Union army and about 65,000 for the Confederates. But while the Civil War had a profound impact on those who fought in it, and on American society and politics, it had little long‐term effect on the military. Confederate units melted away immediately after Appomattox, and the Union's forces quickly shrank to prewar size and influence. Some Civil War veterans were detailed westward to fight the Indian wars, but no foreign nation posed a vital threat. Statistics suggest why the old military paradigm emphasizing a small, quasiprofessional army endured for so long. Casualties for the major wars between 1775 and 1916 averaged but 2,200 per conflict. Expecting peace and eager to avoid expenditures, the nation continued to embrace the ideal of the citizen‐soldier.

The U.S. military protected the insular possessions that the nation acquired in the aftermath of the Spanish‐American War, but this function, analogous to that of frontier police, did not necessitate forces in any way comparable to the powerful military establishments of Europe. Although the foundation of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1884 hastened the development of a modern navy, the army's turn‐of‐the‐century efforts to modernize, including the establishment of an Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1901 and the creation of a General Staff Corps in 1903, to reduce conflicts between the secretary of war and army generals, proved only moderately effective.

1900 through World War I.

All this changed in the twentieth century as the United States emerged as a great power with global interests and responsibilities. The turning point was the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, as vast historical processes such as industrialization, nationalism, and imperialism undermined the balance of power that had underlain America's “free security” since 1815 and launched a violent century in which warfare became almost the norm. The coming of the war did not at first dictate extensive military changes for the United States. President Woodrow Wilson, recognizing that the United States had vital interests at stake, attempted to mediate the conflict. When diplomacy failed and “peace without victory” proved anathema to the warring parties, Wilson realized that he could not influence the belligerents until he possessed a strong military, and he supported the Preparedness movement promoted by bankers, industrialists, and others with an interest in the Allied cause.

Wilson became the first U.S. president to attempt a significant, long‐term upgrading of American military might, which he expected to continue until disarmament and collective security under a new world organization rendered it unnecessary. The Naval Act of 1916 reflected Wilson's determination to build “a navy second to none.” Rejecting the principle of military volunteerism, Wilson in May 1917 pushed through Congress a Selective Service Act, establishing a national draft. Conscription helped amass some 2.8 million men for military service. This rapid expansion foreshadowed a new military paradigm—active defense based on huge and highly professionalized armed forces, with war‐fighting as a primary objective. Although the inexperienced American Expeditionary Forces did not perform well as an independent army in France, its sheer numbers gave the Allies the manpower superiority essential to victory, and the U.S. Navy made an undramatic but indispensable contribution to the antisubmarine campaign against German U‐boats.

In the long run, Wilson envisioned a new world order based on self‐determination and the peaceful resolution of conflict. Rejecting the traditional, European‐based balance‐of‐power system as unstable and inequitable, he called for a new approach, collective security, under a League of Nations. The League, he believed, would preserve the peace by arbitrating disputes and eliminating the underlying causes of war. These ideas lay at the heart of Wilson's promise of a “just and lasting peace” and his hope for eventual general disarmament. The utter exhaustion of the European powers allowed Wilson to dominate the peace settlement and secure the inclusion of a covenant establishing the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles.

The subsequent failure of the United States to lead the way toward Wilson's new system of international‐security arrangements came not from the actions of other countries, but at the hands of the American people themselves. The brevity of the American intervention in World War I, and the shock of the conflict's appalling destructiveness, led Americans of the 1920s to revert to the old military paradigm. While Wilson's dream included eventual general disarmament, he insisted that in the interim the United States must maintain a military capable of assuming an appropriate role in peacekeeping. The postwar American public thought differently, however. Wilson's interventionism appeared unnecessary, the Allied victory having seemingly restored European stability and guaranteed a return to peaceful conditions. America's characteristically rapid postwar demobilization paralleled its refusal to accept international political responsibilities, even on issues that affected U.S. vital interests.

1920 through World War II.

During the post–World War I period, a small military establishment, especially U.S. marines and naval vessels, engaged sporadically in constabulary tasks in U.S. dependencies—notably Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua—but public opinion opposed more extensive engagement in world politics. In the 1930s, unpreparedness, appeasement, and a preoccupation with the domestic economic crisis helped open the door to the rise of dictators abroad, as Germany under Adolf Hitler renewed its aggression, the Japanese invaded China and pursued an expansionist policy throughout Southeast Asia, and Italy under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini staked out imperial claims in Africa. Efforts to curb these threatening developments failed because the antihegemonic nations, including the United States, lacked the will to coordinate their efforts.

German and Japanese conquests finally brought on World War II and U.S. intervention became inevitable after Japan's December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. A huge economic and military mobilization eventually ensured the victory of the Grand Alliance, led by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Massive U.S. ground and naval forces, augmented by the Army Air Force and led by a professional command structure headed by Chief of Staff George Marshall, provided the margin of victory in Europe and then defeated Japan. By war's end, some twelve million Americans had served in the armed forces. A powerful symbol of the military's enhanced wartime status was the Pentagon, a massive, five‐sided structure covering thirty‐four acres across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., completed in 1943 as the nerve center of the nation's military establishment.

The Cold‐War and Vietnam‐War Eras.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision for the postwar world order resembled Woodrow Wilson's grand design. The U.S. decision to join the United Nations, another effort at collective security, came as America stood at the summit of world power, underlined by its early postwar monopoly of atomic weaponry. The Soviet Union soon emerged as a rival claimant for superpower status, however, consolidating its position by testing an atomic bomb in 1949. As the Cold War began, hopes for a new international‐security system faded. The veto granted to the great powers in the UN Security Council hamstrung that organization's peacekeeping capacity, and the United States instead relied on its own military strength and on regional alliances, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949 to preserve security. In building up a powerful military in order to wage the Cold War, however, the United States embraced Wilson's vision of America's military and foreign‐policy role in preserving peace and maintaining a world balance of power in the interim, before new international organizations could assume responsibility for collective security.

Another effect of the Cold War on the U.S. military was the major administrative restructuring brought about by the National Security Act of 1947. Under this law, the War Department became the cabinet‐level Department of Defense; the Army Air Corps became an independent service, the U.S. Air Force; and the heads of the various military services were brought into a single body, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the overall authority of the civilian secretary of defense. The aim of this law (which also created the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency) was to bring greater coherence and rationality into U.S. military and strategic planning, and to reduce interservice rivalries as the nation geared up for a long‐term struggle with the Soviet empire.

The shadow of nuclear weapons hung over the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized that to deter nuclear war, each side's nuclear forces must be credible—that is, capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on the other. A rough balance of threat, summed up in the phrase “mutual assured destruction,” was attained by the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy, while accepting the basic principle of nuclear deterrence, also championed “flexible response,” a strategic posture stressing the nation's capacity to fight not only a major war, but also small‐scale insurgencies. After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy also pursued nuclear arms control and welcomed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter continued this trend, negotiating important treaties with the Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev. Arms control lost steam during the later 1970s, however, when various crises, notably the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the pro‐U.S. Shah of Iran, derailed détente. President Ronald Reagan sponsored an arms build‐up during the early 1980s, but eventually resumed arms control and disarmament negotiations with Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The mutual deterrence that prevented all‐out war between the superpowers did not extend to regional conflicts. In the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1965–1972), the United States intervened to prevent communist conquests of divided countries. Washington gained its objectives in the first of these proxy wars, but not in the second. Successive administrations from the 1950s on endorsed the “domino theory,” which held that communist success in one locale would inevitably lead to a series of further conquests, but this notion proved unreliable as a guide to military policy in Southeast Asia.

U.S. war‐planning in Vietnam, as well as the development of U.S. nuclear strategy, reflected the increasing use of game theory, mathematically based planning and assessment, and computer‐assisted statistical analyses. Robert S. McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, a business statistician who had served as president of Ford Motor Company before entering government, strongly encouraged these approaches, an aspect of his desire to preserve civilian control of the military.

Despite the debacle of Vietnam, the American military reached its zenith of prestige during the Cold War. The necessity of maintaining a credible military deterrent, involving both nuclear and conventional forces, created a permanent military class, including several million personnel. Military leaders and their civilian counterparts in the defense industry gained extensive influence in national decision‐making, sometimes opposing domestic programs they deemed threatening to the defense budget. This unprecedented development in a nation with a strong antimilitarist tradition raised fears of military dominance in collusion with defense contractors. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the most revered U.S. military commander of the twentieth century, warned in his 1961 Farewell Address to the American people that a “military‐industrial complex” might gain such power as to compromise the democratic process. Scholars who traced the growth and influence of the military and the defense industry in Cold War America lent plausibility to Eisenhower's thesis, as did antiwar activists in the Vietnam War Era, who used it to explain President Lyndon B. Johnson's dogged pursuit of an increasingly unpopular war.

Fears of an all‐powerful military‐industrial complex proved exaggerated, however, largely because of strong countervailing pressures. Various interests resisted excessive military influence in politics, some reflecting traditional antimilitarism, others concerned about soaring budget deficits, and still others competing for scarce resources to fund nonmilitary programs. Further, the military itself proved faithful to the professional credo of civilian control. Military counsel inevitably played an influential Cold War role, but civilian control remained firm, surviving even President Harry S. Truman's unpopular dismissal of the World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur in 1951, for insubordination in his role as commander of UN forces in Korea. Civilian defense intellectuals in foundations such as California's RAND Corporation, although fully committed to the new military paradigm, also reinforced the principle of civilian control.

The Post–Cold‐War Era.

With the end of the Cold War, regional conflicts and crises again came to the fore, initially in the Persian Gulf, where Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait threatened oil shipments to the West. South Korea, where U.S. troops remained to deter possible aggression from North Korea, constituted a potential flashpoint as well. In some areas, the post–Cold War United Nations played a larger role in dealing with regional conflicts. Woodrow Wilson's vision of collective security became feasible whenever unanimity could be mustered within the Security Council. During the 1990s the United States supported UN missions in several areas, including Somalia and Bosnia. The defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War involved the mobilization of a multinational force totaling nearly 500,000 troops, with the U.S. military in overall command. When the UN could not take the lead, the United States still tried to act in some other multilateral framework, as in the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, in response to Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo.

Such operations seemed comparable in some respects to the earlier peacetime work of the army on the western frontier and in the management of the American empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Pentagon planning centered on “low intensity” or “middle intensity” conflicts, the post–Cold War changes in mission portended alterations—and reductions—in force structures. Budget planners of the late 1990s assumed significantly lower annual defense outlays than during the Cold War. President Bill Clinton sought to redress the balance between military and nonmilitary expenditures in favor of the latter. In his second inaugural address, in 1997, Clinton dealt only briefly with national‐security matters—a clear indication of the lower priority accorded to the military in the aftermath of the Cold War. The operations in the Persian Gulf and Serbia also showed a desire to minimize casualities on the ground by the massive application of America's overwhelming superiority in air power and sophisticated military technology.

As a new century dawned, some observers saw in these trends the potential for a turn toward isolationism and a resurgence of the nation's long antimilitarist tradition, but this seemed unlikely. America stood alone as a superpower with extensive international interests and deeply immersed in the world's affairs. Global economic interdependence alone precluded retreat. Despite scaled‐back budgets and objectives, the U.S. military headed into the twenty‐first century with continued high prestige and, after the end of the draft in 1973, an all‐volunteer service. It was also an institution with a very different demographic profile from that of earlier generations. A 1948 executive order by President Truman requiring racial integration was implemented during the Korean War, and opportunities for minorities and women increased substantially as the services worked to recruit volunteers.

Despite the antimilitarist tradition, Americans have always held their military leaders in high regard, as evidenced by the election of a succession of war heroes as president, from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower, and including Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Ulysses S. Grant. The military exploits of other presidents, including Rutherford Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George Bush, proved decided political assets. But Americans have also treasured the principle of civilian control, recognizing its indispensability to the preservation of government of, by, and for the people.
See also American Legion; Antiwar Movements; Army Corps of Engineers; Conscientious Objection; Draft Riots, Civil War; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Foreign Relations; Grand Army of the Republic; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars; Military Service Academies; Pershing, John J.; Preparedness Controversy; Veterans Administration.

Bibliography

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David F. Trask