Civil‐Military Relations: Military Government and Occupation

Civil‐Military Relations: Military Government and Occupation. Americans have traditionally been suspicious of military governance, a distrust that stems from their belief in individual liberty, representative government, and civilian control of the military. That view was reinforced during the Revolutionary War when the British army occupied and established military rule in a number of American cities. As the new republic expanded westward, the U.S. government's policy was to put new territory under civilian administration as rapidly as possible. Nevertheless, the U.S. military has often acted as an occupying and governing force.

As the U.S. Army marched through Mexico during the Mexican War (1846–48), Gen. Winfield Scott, faced with the need to deal with Mexican civilians, issued General Order No. 20 on 19 February 1847, providing a code of conduct that emphasized respect for the rights and property of innocent civilians. In his sensible and humanitarian guidelines, Scott ordered U.S. military governors to rule through local officials where possible.

During the Civil War, as it occupied increasing areas of the Confederacy, the Union army had to control a hostile civilian population, protect freed slaves and friendly Unionists, and ensure essential services. The broad aim of military government was to restore the Union by suppressing the secession and establishing loyal state governments. To guide the army, the War Department issued General Order No. 100, 23 April 1863, later published as an army manual, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, the first formal attempt by a national government to codify the “laws of war.”

The Union army became the major instrument of the U.S. government in the occupied South during the war and through most of Reconstruction. In 1867, the Republican Congress divided the conquered South into five military districts. Each state had to guarantee suffrage to adult black males and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before military rule was ended in 1870.

Following the Spanish‐American War, the far‐flung empire obtained by the United States was initially governed by the military occupation forces. The army governed Cuba, 1898–1903 (again in 1906–09); Puerto Rico, 1898–1900; and the Philippine Islands, 1899–1901. The U.S. Navy governed Guam, 1899–1950; and American Samoa, 1899–1951. In the Caribbean, naval and Marine forces governed—sometimes directly, sometimes through local leaders—in Haiti, 1915–34; the Dominican Republic, 1916–24; Honduras, 1924–25; and Nicaragua, 1909–10, 1912–25, and 1926–33. The army's governance of the Panama Canal Zone began in 1903 and was scheduled to end in 2000.

World War I led to the first U.S. military occupation in Europe: after the armistice in 1918, the U.S. Army was assigned an Allied occupation sector in the Rhineland. Despite French pleas to remain, the U.S. force was rapidly reduced and its role ended in 1923.

America's world role during and after World War II was accompanied by unprecedented responsibilities in military occupation and governance. Before U.S. entry into the war, the army prepared two field manuals on the subject: The Rules of Land Warfare (1939) and Military Government (1940). Because of the initial wartime experience, another manual, Army‐Navy Manual of Military Government and Civil Affairs (1943), emphasized assisting military operations rather than winning over the population. U.S. policy, however, continued to insist on “just and reasonable” treatment of civilians and prompt rehabilitation of the civilian economy.

In Europe, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower allowed considerable independence to his field commanders over occupation and governance policies. In Italy, the policy favored rapid reconstruction of local and regional governments and the civil service, drawing upon all except original and clearly committed Fascists. In Germany and Austria, the U.S. Army played a role in aiding millions of refugees, in arranging for reparations, in conducting a denazification program, and in prosecuting war crimes.

Because of the Cold War, U.S. military government continued in Europe long after the German surrender in May 1945. Although the Allied military occupation of Italy ended in 1947 with the signing of a peace treaty there, Germany remained divided into separate military occupation zones. The U.S. Zone was in the south, plus part of jointly occupied Berlin; in 1945–49, it was governed by Gen. Lucius Clay. With the containment policy beginning in 1947, the United States and Britain merged their two zones, first economically, and then, along with the French, entirely in order to create the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. (In East Germany, West Berlin remained an Allied occupation zone.) However, U.S. occupation and governance, under High Commissioner John J. McCloy, did not end until the Federal Republic rearmed and joined NATO in 1955; the occupation of Austria ended the same year.

In contrast to General Eisenhower's decentralized occupation policy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur established highly centralized control of occupied Japan in 1945. The United States was also the sole occupying force in Micronesia (the Carolines, Marianas, and Marshalls), Okinawa, and Iwo Jima.

Supported by President Harry S. Truman, MacArthur planned to “reform” Japan and replace its militaristic roots with centrist Western liberalism. MacArthur's military government expanded civil rights, broadened the franchise, officially emancipated women, established new political parties and labor unions, created land reform, and began antitrust proceedings against giant Japanese conglomerates. Furthermore, an International Military Tribunal tried Japanese war criminals. After the Communists gained power in China in 1949, however, the emphasis shifted to building up Japan as a bastion against communism. A formal peace treaty in 1951 ended U.S. military occupation and governance, although not American military bases.

U.S. military government in Korea south of the 38th parallel (1945–46) was followed by a staunch anti‐Communist civilian government headed by Syngman Rhee. The United States had removed most of its forces by the time of the North Korean invasion in 1950.

The active global role pursued by the United States after World War II led to a number of military interventions, some followed by occupation and governance, and sometimes serious attempts at remolding local government or creating entirely new political institutions. Such attempts in South Vietnam ultimately failed with the North's victory. However, the U.S. military was successful in its intervention and occupations in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989–90).

Although the United States did not set up a military government during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the army did mount its largest military–civil affairs operation since World War II in Kuwait, seeking to restore the shattered country.

Results were mixed in other missions involving U.S. occupation and direct or assisted military governance. As part of a United Nations force in Somalia (1992–93), the U.S. military expanded areas of humanitarian relief and order; but the overall effort to end the civil war was a failure.

Much more effective, at least initially, was the U.S. military involvement in Haiti, beginning in 1994. After the resignation of the military junta, Haiti's elected president, Jean‐Bertrand Aristide, was reinstalled and order restored.

In the Bosnian Crisis, a U.S. force joined a peacekeeping occupation in Bosnia in December 1995, and in early 1999, President Bill Clinton prepared to send another to the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo. It was not clear to what extent the American military would also engage in forms of governance and state building in that region of the former Yugoslavia.

Over the past century, American military occupation, reflecting military and foreign policy goals, has emphasized restrained use of force, and the reliance instead upon local elites, using political, economic, and cultural means to shift occupied populations toward U.S. policies. From the Civil War to the Cold War and beyond, occupation and governance have thus reflected dominant American attitudes and values as well as civil and military policy.
[See also Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Germany, U.S. Military Involvement in; Grenada, U.S. Intervention in; Japan, U.S. Military Involvement in; Kosovo Crisis (1999); Panama, U.S. Military Involvement in; Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Somalia, U.S. Military Involvement in.]

Bibliography

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James E. Sefton , The U.S. Army and Reconstruction, 1967.
John Morgan Gates , Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898–1902, 1973.
Keith L. Nelson , Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923, 1975.
Robert Wolfe, ed., Americans as Proconsuls: U.S. Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944–1952, 1984.
Michael Schaller , The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, 1985.
Thomas A. Schwartz , America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1991.
John T. Fishel , Taking Responsibility for Our Actions? Establishing Order and Stability in Panama, Military Review, 71 (April 1992), pp. 66–78.

John Whiteclay Chambers II