(2) The corollary to the assumption of military command by the Secretary of War was the extension of the control of the Chief of Staff over the administrative bureaus of the Department. In return for the demotion in his level of authority, the military chief received a widening of his scope of authority. The original proposals, drafted by General Carter, for a General Staff Corps and a Chief of the General Staff assigned to these units purely military functions connected with war planning, thus providing for a balanced organization. Root, however, urged that it was necessary to give the military chief the “immediate direction of the supply departments, which are now independent of the Commanding General of the Army and report directly to the Secretary of War.” This view, requiring a vertical organization, was embodied in the General Staff Act which gave the Chief of Staff power to “supervise” but not “command” the staff departments. This choice of words was a conscious one, Root’s view being that “supervision” meant overseeing in the interests of a superior, whereas “command” implied independent and inherent authority. Thus, the wording was designed to insure the subordination of the Chief of Staff to the Secretary, as well as establishing the authority of the Chief over the bureaus.
(3) The third key element in the General Staff theory was the necessity for mutual confidence between Chief of Staff and Secretary. Under the nineteenth-century organization, the independence of the Commanding General had made conflict with the Secretary inevitable. This system could only prevail, however, so long as the responsibilities of the military chief were purely military. The Chief of Staff, with authority coextensive with that of the Secretary, had to reflect the same interests and thinking as the Secretary. The Chief had to “have the entire confidence of his commander.” Consequently, the President was authorized to choose the Chief of Staff from the entire corps of general officers for a four-year period only. Furthermore, because of the necessity of absolute confidence between President, Secretary, and Chief of Staff, the latter’s term would “in every case cease, unless sooner terminated, on the day following the expiration of the term of office of the President, by whom the detail is made.” Moreover, the Chief was under obligation, if he found that he could not loyally serve his civilian superiors, to ask to be relieved from his position.26 Under this system, the Chief of Staff became a part of the administration in power. He was not simply the spokesman for permanent military interests. He was also political, and if his sentiments did not coincide with those of the administration, he was expected to resign. His position was, in effect, that of an undersecretary in an executive department. Root’s reorganization thus was from the viewpoint of military professionalism and civilian control only a minor improvement over the coordinate system. The General Staff, under the Chief of Staff, did undertake the professional work of military planning. But the reduction of the technical bureaus one level in the departmental hierarchy had been achieved only at the expense of broadening beyond their professional scope the responsibilities of the Army’s military chief. While naval organization subsequently evolved into a fully professional balanced system, Army organization remained frozen in this semi-professional, Neo-Hamiltonian form.
SUMMARY. By the First World War both services had achieved a broadly professional set of institutions. In only three areas did American militarism deviate significantly from the professional pattern.
(1) A professional system of preliminary education requires liberal and basic military education separately offered by institutions specializing in these tasks. West Point and Annapolis, however, attempted to crowd into a single four-year course both these elements of professional training.
(2) A professional system of promotion requires advancement according to merit. The fear of politics, however, led the Army to cling to the seniority system.
(3) A professional system of organization requires a military organ devoted exclusively to the performance of the highest level professional tasks and the representation of the military viewpoint. The Army’s vertical organization, instituted in 1903, fell short of this, however, mixing, as it did, the political and military responsibilities of the Secretary and Chief of Staff.
THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY MIND
The American professional military ethic is peculiarly a product of the years between the Civil War and the First World War. Prior to 1860, its essential elements had been grasped and expressed by the writers of the Military Enlightenment. But these were exceptional individuals, ahead of their times, and it was not until after 1865 that their ideas became the common property of the bulk of the officer corps. During the post-Civil War decades the officers as a whole developed a uniquely military outlook, fundamentally at odds with business pacifism and the rest of civilian liberal thought. By World War I this corporate military viewpoint had hardened into a stable pattern of belief and a fixed way of looking at the world. While the Army and Navy differed, of course, on their strategic concepts, the fundamentals of this professional ethic were the same for both services. The emergence of the ethic was the necessary corollary to the isolation of the military and the rise of military institutions. Sherman, Upton, Luce developed professional ideas; these led them to create professional institutions; and the institutions, particularly the schools, associations, and journals, fostered the further acceptance and articulation of a professional ethic. The evolution of this ethic may be traced in the articles and books by officers during this period.*
War as Science and Purpose. In viewing the evolution of human knowledge, the military writers emphasized the emergence of war as a distinct field of study. The science of war was the peculiar habitat of the military man. “War has become a specialty,” declared an Army captain in 1883. “It has developed into an abstruse science.” The importance of developing a doctrine of war was emphasized. “The Conduct of War” became the focus of professional interest. The naval officer corps was reminded that “the study of every officer should be the science of naval warfare, and his watchword ‘preparation for battle,’ for war is his profession.” The substitution of steam for sails should free the sailor from concern with seamanship and permit the development of abstract and general principles of naval strategy such as Jomini and Clausewitz had already formulated for land operations. The science of war was separated into its permanent and variable elements. Strategy had “underlying principles which have always existed, and will continue to exist” but new conditions and new technological developments affect the application of these principles through tactics and logistics.
Closely associated with the idea that war existed as an independent science was the idea that the practice of that science was the only purpose of military forces. The Army and Navy existed to fight, not for any other reason. Their organization, activities, and training must be directed to the sole end of efficiency in combat. This teleology of militarism was the theoretical foundation for the assertion of the primacy of the line over the bureaus. The bureaus, representing technicism, existed only to serve the purposes of the line, representing professionalism. The armed services had in the past made many contributions to the advancement of science, exploration, commerce, and navigation. But these “pleasures and satisfactions” must be foregone in order to concentrate upon the single end of military efficiency.27
Self-Conceptions. For the first time American officers began generally to view themselves as a learned profession in the same sense as law and medicine, being consciously aware of the progress they had made in this direction. Their self-conception was rooted in the new view of war as a science. The problems of war,
. . . demand for their solution the highest talents and the most persistent application. Its students are students for life. The profession of arms has become a learned profession. When it was simply a fighting profession everybody belonged to it, and there were no military quacks. That it has changed its character seems to have escaped general observation.
Army and Navy officers alike stressed the need for a “military conscience,” and emphasized the
essentiality of the officer centering his devotion, loyalty, and interest upon his profession. While the military profession resembled other professions in its principal characteristics, it also differed from them in one important aspect: it was an organization as well as a profession. Administration and bureaucracy were essential elements. The unique aim of the military profession — efficiency in battle — meant that, in contrast to the situation of the staff bureaus, there was no profession in civil life analogous or comparable to that of the line officer. The Army and Navy officer corps, moreover, were only different branches of the same basic profession.
The emergence of professional institutions led to the conclusion that genius was superfluous, if not dangerous. Napoleon had been the key to French victory at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was said, but a hundred years later no one would argue that without Oyama Japan would have been defeated by Russia, nor even that Moltke was indispensable to German victory. What was required was a perfected machine, not a brilliant individual. War had become rationalized and routinized. “Nowadays the general staff, ‘the brain of an army,’ can take the place of genius in the commander.” The German system was seriously praised as the “triumph of organized mediocrity,” the personification of teamwork, in which “the efficiency of every part is constantly developed, but subordinated always to the efficiency of the whole.” Individual stars were dangerous because their talents would overflow the niches allocated them in the organized structure. “In any office in the military service, whether of the line or of the staff,” the students at Leavenworth were told in 1907, “search should be made nowadays, not for a brilliant soldier, not for a genius, but for one that knows thoroughly the duties of the office.”28
Conservative Values. Prior to the Civil War, the fundamental values of Army and Navy officers did not differ significantly from those of the bulk of the American population. Undoubtedly the officers were more inclined to conservatism but, so long as the South retained a position of eminence in national politics and thought, there was also a significant civilian conservative strain. After the Civil War, however, the nation and the military moved in opposite directions. As the former became more liberal, the latter became more conservative. Withdrawn from the mainstream of American life, realizing that their existence depended upon the probability or at least, the possibility of war, and that war was only likely if human nature contained a substantial streak of cussedness, the military found little in common with the doctrines of optimism and progress. By the turn of the century, when other professions, such as law and the ministry, had thoroughly adjusted to the liberal climate, the military were alone in their uncompromising conservatism. Those officers who did express themselves at a more thoughtful and less practical level took a distinctly conservative line, and the nature of the more widely articulated military views on other subjects implied a conservative philosophy.
In classic fashion, the military emphasized the evil in man, man’s natural pride, acquisitiveness, and avarice. For the American officer, the duality of good and evil in human nature made war inevitable. The “well-spring of war is in the human heart” as Luce expressed it, and the military writers vented their scorn on the pacifists who based their theory on man as he ought to be, not man as he was. Francis Wayland, David Dudley Field, and E. L. Godkin were popular targets until Norman Angell appeared to be criticized not only for his wishful thinking, but also for his assumption that man was purely an economic animal. To the officers, human nature was unchanging. Man was the same now as he had been at the beginning of civilization, and no institutional devices would alter his basic make-up.
This low view of man led to a high stress on the virtues of organization and society. Military writers of both services were vehement in their attacks on individualism, and went to extremes in their glorification of the military values: subordination, loyalty, duty, hierarchy, discipline, obedience. The group was supreme over the individual. The highest glory of the soldier was “obedience, unthinking, instinctive, prompt and cheerful obedience.” “Military discipline,” one officer argued, “is invaluable because it never reasons.” Unquestioning obedience and respect for superiors were the two essentials: “theirs not to reason why,” the motto of the American military man. Individualism in all its forms was severely condemned as a step on the road to anarchy. The military view of the unchanging character of human nature also led to a stress on history, an interest which, except for D. H. Mahan, had been noticeably absent from earlier American military thinking. Only from history was it possible to develop generalizations about human behavior, and only from such generalizations is it possible to lay down guides to the future. History was opposed to progress. Progress could only take place in technique, and at a more basic level, “moral science . . . has made no progress in eighteen hundred years.” To the extent that military writers espoused a theory of history at all, it tended to be a cyclical one.29
Politics, Democracy, and the Separation of Powers. In sharp contrast to the opinions of the officer corps in the 1830’s, after the Civil War officers unanimously believed that politics and officership did not mix. Not one officer in five hundred, it was estimated, ever cast a ballot. In part this was the result of shifting stations and state restrictions. But, to a much larger extent, the abstention of the officer corps, stemmed, in the words of an Army major, “from settled convictions, from an instinctive sense of its peculiar relation as an organization to the Republic.” The teachings of the service academies were now having their effect. “If any convictions . . . were acquired by the cadet,” declared one officer, “they were generally of contempt for mere politicians and their dishonest principles of action.” The concept of an impartial, nonpartisan, objective career service, loyally serving whatever administration or party was in power, became the ideal for the military profession. The military were proud of the extent to which they had realized this ideal, and compared themselves favorably with the more backward and still largely politics-ridden civil service.
The most immediate challenge to the maintenance of a sharp line between politics and the armed forces came from Congress. When Theodore Roosevelt urged Admiral Dewey to use his senatorial acquaintanceship to further his appointment to the Asiatic Squadron, Dewey expressed a “natural disinclination” to do so and only gave in after considerable persuasion by the forceful Assistant Secretary. Dewey’s “natural disinclination” was one manifestation of the professional military hostility to the separation of powers which originated in the years following the Civil War and which has been a latent, but continually present, element in military thinking on government ever since. The new American professional officer had an inbred respect for the integrity of the chain of command stretching from the President as Commander in Chief to the lowest enlisted man. No place existed in this picture for Congress. The legislature could be placed neither above nor below the President; yet it obviously had to be placed somewhere. Congress existed off to the side, an ever present threat to the symmetry and order of the military hierarchy. The officers preferred to simplify matters and stress only their allegiance to the President. “The President is the Army’s Commander-in-Chief, and its duty is to render him strict obedience. Duty is the Army’s highest law, and supersedes all other law.” Military officers at times wished for some mechanism to represent the military viewpoint as a whole before Congress, but they were strong in their condemnation of individual officers who succumbed to the temptation to resort to legislative influence and push special bills. They were equally vehement in denouncing Congress itself for intruding into the military realm. In attempting to ignore or to deny the separation of powers, the professionally minded national officer corps was sharply distinguished from the nonprofessional militia officer corps, which during this same period attempted to make effective its dual responsibility to the states and nation. The militia officers saw the bifurcation of authority as an opportunity for aggrandizement; the national officers saw it as a cause of neurosis. In refraining from
exploiting the congressional escape hatch, the national officers demonstrated the same professional self-denial which characterized German officers before World War I when they remained adamantly loyal to the emperor and did not utilize opportunities to play Reichstag off against Kaiser.
At a deeper level the American officers feared the effects of democratic government on their developing profession: popular rule seemed incompatible with professional autonomy. There was little consistency or realism in military policy; the armed forces appeared to be mere playthings of powerful interests and public opinion. The military officer was “often sacrificed to the fetish of party.” “Penuriousness and over-scrupulousness urged forward by local interests or party spirit,” complained Colonel Wheeler, “seem to be the reasons controlling all plans suggested for the improvement of the present organization.” The conflict between the political and military imperatives could not be avoided. At times, warned Wheeler’s successor at West Point, a democratic government “in order to arouse popular enthusiasm and lead the people to make necessary sacrifices, [must] adopt measures which may or may not have a direct connection with purely military considerations.” Some officers concluded that democracy was implacably hostile to true militarism. Monarchies, with an undisturbed chain of command and a single center of authority, were on this score much to be preferred. The fundamental characteristics of American government made “it impossible to organize and discipline an effective army from the point of view of military experts.”30
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