The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  While separated from civilian influence, the professionalizing core cut across service boundaries. The fundamental institutions and ideas of military professionalism were the same for Navy and Army; consequently, there was much room for mutual interaction and stimulation by the officers of the two services. Having imbibed the basic ideas of professionalism from Dennis Hart Mahan, Sherman, in turn, inspired Admiral Luce to devote his life to the reform of the Navy by demonstrating in practice the meaning of the professional approach to war. In January 1865, Luce, then a lieutenant commander, reported to Sherman at Savannah to plan the cooperation between Navy and Army for the drive northward into South Carolina. Listening to Sherman describe his plan of campaign, Luce had what Mahan was later to call an “illumination,” and what was, in truth, a sudden insight into the meaning of military professionalism. In Luce’s own words:

  After hearing General Sherman’s clear exposition of the military situation the scales seem to have fallen from my eyes. “Here,” I said to myself, “is a soldier who knows his business!” It dawned upon me that there were certain fundamental principles underlying military operations which it were well to look into; principles of general application whether the operations were conducted on land or at sea.9

  This vision enabled Luce to see the need for reorganizing the Navy Department, creating a professional military head for the Navy, and instituting a naval war college. Subsequently Upton became a close friend of Luce and encouraged him in these projects. While Upton was superintendent of theoretical instruction at the Artillery School of Fort Monroe, Virginia, he and Luce exchanged ideas on the means of improving American military education. It was at this time that Luce, citing the Artillery School as a model, first urged the Navy to offer a postgraduate course of instruction “in the Art of War.” After securing the establishment of the Naval War College in 1884, Luce brought to it as instructors the son of Dennis Hart Mahan and also an Army lieutenant, Tasker H. Bliss, who at the turn of the century took the lead in organizing the Army War College. Thus, the line of influence ran from D. H. Mahan to Sherman, Halleck, and Upton; from Sherman to Upton and Luce; between Luce and Upton; from Luce to A. T. Mahan and Bliss; from A. T. Mahan to the younger naval officers; and from Bliss back to the Army.10

  THE INSTITUTIONS OF PROFESSIONALISM

  Virtually all the institutions of American military professionalism, except the service academies, originated between the Civil War and the First World War. The common theme in their emergence was the replacement of technicism and politics by military professionalism. They reflected the slowly growing awareness of the science of war distinct from those other sciences existing outside it and from those subordinate sciences contributing to it. The evolution of this recognition may be seen in the areas of education, personnel, and organization.

  EDUCATION: COMPLETION OF THE BASIC STRUCTURE. The only national institutions of military education existing in 1865 were the military and naval academies at West Point and Annapolis. Their courses combined elements of liberal, military, and technical education, with the technical component predominating. The three great steps forward in the following half century were: (1) the reduction in importance of technical instruction at West Point and Annapolis; (2) the institution of postgraduate technical schools in the Army and Navy; and (3) the creation of war colleges for advanced military study. In 1865 the United States hardly possessed any professional military education. By 1915, it had a comprehensive system complete in almost all its elements.

  Immediately after the Civil War both Annapolis and West Point began to shift away from technicism, in a more military and professional direction. In 1866 the Military Academy was removed from the control of the Chief of Engineers, and its superintendentship was opened to officers of all branches of the Army. In the following years, the proportion of graduates pursuing engineering decreased markedly. “The military schools,” as one report put it, “do not serve the profession of civil and mechanical engineering any longer.”11 Military critics of the Academy were still unsatisfied, however, with the heavy emphasis on mathematics, and argued that a broad, liberal, cultural education was as necessary for American officers as for German officers. They consistently urged that technical courses be transferred to postgraduate schools and that more time be allotted to English, history, and foreign languages, on the one hand, and to tactics and military history on the other. By 1902 about 31 per cent of the cadet’s time was devoted to strictly technical subjects, about 30 per cent to military instruction, and about 39 per cent to the liberal arts or basic science. The reduction of technicism at the Naval Academy was hampered by stress upon the new technology of steam which replaced the earlier emphasis on sailoring and seamanship. From 1871 until the 1890’s, there were two types of cadets at Annapolis: the regular cadet-midshipmen, who were trained for the line of the Navy, and cadet-engineers, who received a special engineering education. Emulating West Point graduates of a previous era, many of the cadet-engineers went out into the civilian world to teach and practice their speciality. This division among the midshipmen, eliminated in part in 1890, was done away with entirely with the amalgamation of the line and engineering corps in 1899. In the first decade of the twentieth century, liberal arts subjects were receiving increased emphasis in the Academy curriculum.

  By 1900 professional purposes were foremost at both West Point and Annapolis. The military emphasis distinguished both schools from civilian institutions of higher learning and isolated them from the main currents of American education. In teaching methods, curriculum, organization, stress upon character development, as well as in the substantive content of the courses, the service academies trod their lonely path, impervious both to Eliot’s ideas on electives and to Dewey’s pragmatic progressivism. While the rest of American education explored the limits to which freedom might be granted college students to go their own ways, the military academies continued to stress obedience, discipline, and regularity through a prescribed course and daily recitations. Just as the military profession as a whole developed in opposition to business liberalism, the military schools remained relatively untouched by the new ideas in education. While reducing their technical content, the service academies, nonetheless, still tried to combine both a general liberal education and a basic military education into a single course. The effort to achieve both goals caused continuous tension, a crowding of the curriculum, dissatisfaction on both sides, and persistent suggestions for reform.12 Thus, the period after the Civil War made the great step forward of substituting a professional for a technical orientation at the service academies. It left unresolved, however, the relationship of the liberal to the professional elements in the preliminary educational system.

  The reduction in technicism at the service academies was intimately associated with the appearance of special postgraduate technical schools. The increasing complexity and depth of the sciences contributing to the military art which made it impossible to find room for them in the service academy curriculum required the creation of distinct advanced technical institutions. Coincidental with the separation of West Point from the Corps of Engineers in 1866, the Army established an Engineer School at Willets Point, New York. In 1868 Calhoun’s Artillery School at Fort Monroe was revived. In 1881 Sherman established the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth. Congress in 1887 authorized the creation of a practical school for cavalry and light artillery at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1893 the Army Medical School came into being at Washington to train physicians for military careers. The Signal School was set up at Fort Leavenworth in 1904, the infantry School of Musketry at the Presidio, California in 1907, and the field artillery School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1911.

  Technical instruction in the Navy was also linked to the shift in emphasis at Annapolis. In the 1880’s the only postgraduate school for naval officers was the Torpedo School at Newport. During that decade, however, the Navy began to send officers to civilian universities here and abroad for speciali
zed instruction. In 1893 Admiral Luce secured the establishment of a School of Naval Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the training of naval constructors. After the abolition of the cadet-engineer course at Annapolis in 1899, the Navy instituted in Washington its own advanced school in marine engineering, electrical engineering, and ordnance. In 1909 this school was moved to Annapolis and eventually became the Postgraduate Department of the Naval Academy. The Navy continued, however, to rely on civilian institutions to supplement this training.

  The third major development in military education was the appearance of schools exclusively devoted to the higher study of the art of war. The first significant step in this direction was Sherman’s action in 1881 establishing the Infantry and Cavalry School at Leavenworth. In a sense, this was just a branch school, but it was conceived in terms of a larger purpose and ultimately evolved into something more significant. Prior to its establishment, certain elements of the higher science of war — military history, strategy, logistics — under Sherman’s fostering care, and with Upton’s participation, had been offered in the theoretical course at the Fort Monroe Artillery School. The initial two-year course at Leavenworth included general education subjects in its first year, but in time the emphasis was shifted to purely military topics. The Spanish-American War caused the temporary suspension of the school’s activities, but in 1902 it was reopened under Elihu Root with an expanded and more explicit charter. The Army School of the Line instructed officers of the grade of captain or above in the “higher branches of military art and science.” The Army Staff College, also at Leavenworth, trained graduates of the School of the Line for positions upon the higher staffs in war. The dominating figure at the school in these early years was Arthur L. Wagner who, teaching there from 1886 to 1897, insisted upon high standards of instruction and performance. Wagner’s books on the Campaign of Konniggratz and Organization and Tactics, written during those years, were the best military analysis the Army produced between Upton and the First World War. After the Spanish-American War, Wagner became commandant of the Staff College, and by 1904 it was not inappropriate to refer to Leavenworth as a “military university” embodying the basic German premise that war could be taught in school.13

  The instruction in military science at Monroe and subsequently at Leavenworth was a goad to the Navy to produce something similar. Admiral Luce and his associates pointed repeatedly to the inferiority of advanced naval education compared with that of the Army. Luce’s campaign eventually led to the creation of the Naval War College at Newport in 1884. This was a true war academy dedicated like its European counterparts exclusively to the higher study of war. Its early existence, however, was shaky. Many naval officers remained ignorant of its purpose and unconvinced of its desirability. Efforts were regularly made to combine it with the Torpedo School, also at Newport, or to make it a postgraduate course at Annapolis. As Luce and Mahan pointed out, these moves reflected a confusion of technical with military expertise and a failure to recognize the independent existence of the latter.* The support of Admiral David D. Porter, the propagandizing of Luce, and the popularity of Mahan eventually triumphed over the opposition. After the Spanish-American War, the existence of the College was unchallenged. The College pioneered in the development of curriculum and teaching techniques and became a model for similar institutions in the navies of Europe.14

  The final step in providing for advanced military education prior to World War I was the establishment of the Army War College in 1901. This was a logical outgrowth of Leavenworth and the success of the Naval War College. The demand in the Army for an educational institution more advanced than Leavenworth had been strong for a decade. Its creation, however, was complicated by Elihu Root’s confusion of the duties of a war college with those of a general staff. Just as the development of the Naval War College was hampered by a failure to distinguish it from a technical institute, the development of the Army college reflected Root’s inability to distinguish the functions of planning and administration from those of education and research. Root wanted the college to be composed of the heads of the staff departments of the Army who would supervise the work of other Army schools, direct the activities of military intelligence, and prepare plans for, and advise the President with respect to, mobilization and military preparation. A more heterogeneous collection of duties could hardly be imagined. When the college itself was established in 1901, under the direction of a board of officers headed by Major General S. B. M. Young, its academic duties were distinctly secondary to its staff and planning activities. When Young in 1903 became the first Chief of Staff, he was succeeded at the War College by Brigadier General Tasker H. Bliss, who had been the first Army instructor at the Naval War College, and who, consequently, was thoroughly imbued with the purposes of such an institution. Under Bliss and his successor, Wagner, who moved up from Leavenworth, the College began to be more concerned with the advanced study of war. But under Root’s influence, its principal duty remained assisting the General Staff in the preparation of plans for national defense. Despite the efforts of the military to put the College on the proper course, its ambiguous start meant that even in 1914 its primary purpose was still “to make practical application of knowledge already acquired and not to impart academic instruction.”15

  If Root was hazy as to the functions of a war college, he did have a clear perception of the essential components of a comprehensive system of professional military education. Earlier, military officers had defined the three stages of such a system, in imitation of German institutions, to consist of West Point, the postgraduate schools, and the general service schools and War College. In a brilliant memorandum dated November 27, 1901, Root accepted the essentials of this scheme and redefined the missions of the existing schools of the Army as parts of a unified whole. Similar imperatives were leading the Navy to recognize the same basic stages in officer education. In 1919, the Knox-Pye-King board, surveying naval education, declared that four steps were involved: first, the Naval Academy; secondly, the postgraduate course at Annapolis; thirdly, the Junior War College Course; and finally, the Senior War College Course.16 Root’s memorandum and the naval board’s report signalize the completion of the fundamental structure of professional military education in the United States.

  Associations and Journals. The new military educational system was supplemented by creation of professional associations and professional journals on a scale unprecedented in the United States.* First in the field was the United States Naval Institute founded by a group of officers at Annapolis in 1873 in conscious imitation of the British Royal United Service Institution and with the declared purpose to advance “professional and scientific knowledge in the Navy.” In 1874 the Institute began publishing its Proceedings which, over the years, was probably the most intelligent and influential military journal in the United States, offering to naval officers a continuing forum for professional discussion. Army officers essayed to follow the lead of the Navy in 1879 by organizing the Military Service Institution, again on the British RUSI model. Both the Institution and the journal it published perished from lack of support during World War I. By this time, however, the Army had many associations and magazines reflecting a variety of professional and technical military interests. Most of these originated at the military schools. The Cavalry Association was formed in 1885 and three years later began publishing the Cavalry Journal. The Journal of the United States Artillery was founded in 1892 at the Fort Monroe Artillery School. It became the Coast Artillery Journal in 1922, the Antiaircraft Journal in 1948, and merged into the Combat Forces Journal in 1954. In 1893 a group of officers at Fort Leavenworth founded the Infantry Society, renamed the following year the United States Infantry Association. In 1904 the Association was reorganized and began publication of the Infantry Journal, which, after the demise of the Military Service Institution Journal, became the leading Army professional organ. In 1950 it was expanded into the Combat Forces Journal by merger with the
Field Artillery Journal, which had been established in 1911 after the founding of the Field Artillery Association at Fort Riley. In 1909 the Corps of Engineers began publishing its Professional Memoirs as a bimonthly journal.* In both services the new magazines fed a continuing demand for the greater general availability of professional literature.17