Tracy not only introduced battleships into the Navy but also formed a “squadron of evolution” in 1889 that was the precursor of a concentrated battlefleet. Comprised of the ABC cruisers and a steel gunboat, it practiced steaming in formation and tactical maneuvers, which were faster and more complex than under sail. In 1892 the Navy Department merged the squadron into the North Atlantic Squadron, which by 1897 developed into a fighting fleet. With good reason Tracy could claim in 1892 that progress made during his tenure marked “an epoch in the naval development, not only of this country, but of the world.”
A well-defended coast was an essential adjunct to a strong navy. Both Army and Navy officers realized that “the navy is the aggressive arm of the national military power.” However, it could undertake an offensive mission only if it had secure home ports and if relieved of defensive duties. The Chilean bombardment of Callao, Peru, in 1880 and the British bombardment of Alexandria, Egypt, in 1882 were vivid reminders of an undefended port’s fate. American cities must be secure from similar attacks and from the prospect of a squadron holding them ransom, extracting money and exerting diplomatic leverage in return for immunity from shellings. In 1883 President Arthur called congressional attention to the obsolete coastal defenses, and the next year Commanding General Schofield’s annual report spoke of “the perfectly defenseless condition of our seaboard cities.” Sparked to action, in the Fortifications Appropriations Act of March 1885 Congress directed the president to appoint an Army-Navy civilian board, headed by Secretary of War William C. Endicott, to investigate the problem.
The Endicott Board report of 1886 painted a grim picture of the seaport defenses and proposed a massive fortress program estimated at $127 million. It recommended large numbers of breechloading rifles and rifled mortars, supported by floating batteries, submarine mines, torpedo boats, rapid-firing guns, machine guns, and electric searchlights, for twenty-six coastal localities and three Great Lakes sites. In 1888 Congress created a permanent Army Board of Ordnance and Fortifications to test weapons and make proposals for implementing the program. Funding for construction began in 1890, though at a more modest level than the Endicott Board had suggested. The work fell behind the original projections from the start, yet new defenses to match the new Navy were underway.
Building the ships and ordnance inextricably linked the government, the military, and industry. When the new Navy began, a fundamental question arose: How should the nation acquire the tools of war? Should it rely upon the private economic sector, which might lead to monopolies with respect to designs and prices? Or should it depend on government arsenals, an arrangement that smacked of socialism and might be less efficient than profit-motivated private enterprise? Or would some combination of private and public facilities be better? To study this problem, the Naval Appropriations Act of 1883 created a Gun Foundry Board composed of six Army and Navy officers. After investigating arms manufacturing in Europe, the board recommended a mixed system. The government should offer contracts to private firms to supply basic steels and forgings, which government-owned plants would fabricate into finished guns and ships. The officers suggested the Army’s Watervliet Arsenal and the Washington Navy Yard as excellent assembly plants.
The government accepted the Gun Foundry Board’s report. The 1886 law authorizing Texas and Maine stipulated that they be built with domestic steel and machinery, and that at least one of the ships be constructed in a navy yard. To entice firms to bid, the secretary of the navy pooled orders for Texas, Maine, and four monitors into one $4 million contract, and in mid-1887 awarded it to the Bethlehem Iron (later Steel) Company. Subsequent contracts also went to Carnegie, Phipps and Company (later Carnegie Steel).
By the mid-1890s construction of the Navy and the coastal fortifications had intertwined private and public policy in a mutually beneficial relationship. Manufacturing armor and ordnance required expensive plants employing skilled workmen; to cease construction would idle the factories and create unemployment or disperse the workers into other endeavors. Thus economic depressions no longer meant decreased government expenditures but increased expenditures to keep factories operating and workers employed. This motive may have influenced the 1895–1896 battleship authorizations during the depression that began in 1893. Military contracts certainly allowed the Bethlehem and Carnegie firms, and their supporting subcontractors and shipbuilders, to survive while other establishments went bankrupt. In short, armed forces modernization bound together the public welfare, private interest, and national security.
Reforming the Armed Forces
“History does not countenance the idea that an untroubled assurance of peace is a guarantee that war will not come,” wrote a naval essayist in 1879. “Lessons” drawn from history often rest upon feeble analysis and faulty analogy, but the writer had a point. Sooner or later, war came. To military reformers viewing the global great power rivalry, progressively involving the United States, a big war against a powerful adversary was not impossible. Indeed, the central theme in late-nineteenth-century military theorizing was that in peace the armed forces should prepare for war against even the most formidable potential enemy. While seemingly a truism, this postulate represented a rejection of past policy.
Traditionally the nation maintained small peacetime constabularies—the Army on the frontier and the Navy on its stations—and then extemporized fighting forces during wartime. Such a policy, professionals argued, would no longer suffice. The potential foes were too strong, the lead time in producing modern weapons was too long, and warfare had become so complex that hastily mobilized amateurs could not master it. In determining the composition and strength of the Army and Navy, the U.S. should look beyond Indians and pirates to the leading European nations, especially Germany and England. Officers also thought that preparing for war required the ability to wage it “scientifically.” In their quest for efficiency they reflected a societal trend. During the initial stages of the Progressive movement in America, captains of industry applied scientific managerial techniques to the problems of production. “Progressives in uniform” sought similar expertise and bureaucratic forms, which would allow them to utilize prewar preparations in the most “scientific” wartime manner.
The reformers’ greatest success was creating a more complete educational system. This success was due in large part to General Sherman (the commanding general between 1869 and 1883) and Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, two men who epitomized the professional spirit. Each was responsible for establishing an important school and both supported other schools, journals, and institutes, all fostering the expertise and corporate spirit essential for professional identity. Sherman and Luce also each nurtured a protégé (Emory Upton and Alfred Thayer Mahan, respectively) whose writings profoundly influenced military affairs.
A man of great intellect, Sherman vigorously pushed for Army education. He believed West Point was only the beginning of military education, envisioning it at the base of a pyramid consisting of advanced schools where officers gained specialized knowledge; at the apex he hoped for a “war college.” Sherman sustained the 1868 revival of Calhoun’s old Artillery School, encouraged the development of an Engineering School of Application, and, most important, founded the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth. It began as a training school for junior officers that emphasized small-unit tactics, but two outstanding officer-instructors, Eben Swift and Arthur L. Wagner, stressed an analytical approach to learning rather than rote memorization and redirected the school toward a true staff college devoted, as Sherman said, to “the science and practice of war.” Meanwhile, creative officers formed additional schools for the field artillery and cavalry combined, the Signal Corps, and the Hospital Corps, plus an Army Medical School. Sherman was also instrumental in the founding of the Military Service Institution in 1878, a professional society that brought together officers with a common interest in acquiring specialized knowledge. The Institution promoted writing and discussion about military sc
ience by publishing a bimonthly journal. It also spawned the formation of branch associations for the infantry, cavalry, artillery, and military surgeons, each publishing its own journal.
Perhaps Sherman’s greatest contribution to military education was the encouragement he gave to Emory Upton, whose writings dominated Army thought well into the twentieth century. An 1861 West Point graduate, Upton had a meteoric Civil War career. Beginning as a second lieutenant, he was a brevet major general before his twenty-fifth birthday. Yet the war disturbed him. “I am disgusted with the generalship displayed,” he wrote during the Wilderness campaign. Too many men had been “wantonly sacrificed” in frontal assaults. “Thousands of lives might have been spared,” he continued, “by the exercise of a little skill; but, as it is, the courage of the poor man is expected to obviate all difficulties.” In 1867 he published Infantry Tactics, which adapted tactics to rifled and breechloading shoulder arms, and the War Department immediately adopted the book for use in the Army and militia. The book emphasized simplicity in drill, specially trained and more numerous skirmishers, less dense attacking formations, and the need for soldiers to exhibit an intelligent initiative.
Upton, however, believed the major problem was a defective military policy. Appointed commandant of cadets at West Point, Upton developed a close relationship with Sherman, who, in 1875, appointed Upton to a commission assigned to propose Army reforms based upon its studies of foreign military systems. After the world tour Upton wrote two books, The Armies of Asia and Europe and The Military Policy of the United States. The latter, one of the most significant books in American military history, was a clarion call for drastic policy changes.
As Upton perceived it, U.S. policy contained near-fatal weaknesses. Excessive civilian control was a fundamental flaw, since most congressmen, presidents, and secretaries of war were inexperienced in military matters. The nation as a whole had an “unfounded jealousy of not a large, but even a small standing army.” Thus America relied upon unreliable citizen-soldiers. Although volunteers and militiamen could be brave, Upton considered their short enlistments, lack of discipline, dual state-federal control, and untrained officers as crushing liabilities, making them useless as a reserve force. Since these defects prevented adequate preparations, the country’s wars usually began with failures, were longer than they should have been, and entailed “enormous and unnecessary sacrifices of life and treasure.” “Ultimate success in all our wars,” warned Upton, “has steeped the people in the delusion that our military policy is correct and that any departure from it would be no less difficult than dangerous.” Nothing, he argued, could be further from the truth.
While in Europe, Upton studied the German military, which offered a stark contrast. The Germans had a General Staff that operated in comparative freedom from civilian restraint. Unlike America’s staff, which was simply an aggregation of the bureau chiefs, the German staff made peacetime preparations for war, gathering information about foreign armies, drawing up war plans, and controlling an educational system that ensured competent collective leadership. The regular Army was large and proficient and organized on the cadre, or expansible, principle. Germany relied on conscription and assigned its veterans to seven years’ service in the reserves, which were under national control. With these sound practices, Upton said, Germany defeated Austria in six weeks and humbled the vaunted French in just three and a half months.
Upton proposed revolutionary reforms to prevent a repetition of America’s past folly. Although he claimed that the United States “can not Germanize” and that it would not be desirable to do so, Upton’s reforms had a definite Teutonic ring. The country should abolish its present General Staff and create a Germanic one, enhancing the powers of professionals relative to the president and secretary of war. An enlarged regular Army, organized on the expansible principle, should be at the center of military planning. To flesh out the Army in wartime, the United States should rely on “National Volunteers” controlled and led by regulars. Although he admired conscription and considered it a “truly democratic doctrine,” Upton only obliquely advocated it, knowing the public would not accept peacetime conscription. The militia would be a force of last resort, used solely to execute the laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.
Upton’s ideas collided with America’s most revered traditions, ran counter to the prevailing aversion to spending more money on an Army already performing its duties satisfactorily, and suffered from problems as fundamental as those he thought existed in America’s policy. In unreservedly praising regulars and denigrating militiamen and volunteers, Upton misused history. Regulars were not uniformly successful, and citizen-soldiers were not always pathetic. As Washington, Jackson, Forrest, Lincoln, and others demonstrated, superb leaders could be created in arenas other than the Army. Nor did Upton understand that policy cannot be judged by any absolute standard. It reflects a nation’s characteristics, habits of thought, geographic location, and historical development. Built upon the genius, traditions, and location of Germany, the system he admired could not be grafted onto America. In essence, Upton wrote in a vacuum. He began with a fixed view of the policy he thought the U.S. needed, and he wanted the rest of society to change to meet his demands, which it sensibly declined to do. Thus, for example, his plan for a large expansible Army faltered for obvious reasons. No peacetime nucleus big enough to avoid being swamped by a wartime influx of citizen-soldiers was politically, economically, or strategically feasible or necessary.
Despite the fallacies in his reasoning, Upton spoke for a generation of officers. He simply presented the ideas in systematic form, buttressed them with “scholarship,” and “proved” the professionals’ case. However, the Burnside Committee of 1878 showed how unrealistic the Upton reforms were within the context of late-nineteenth-century American society. Established by Congress to study Army reform and chaired by former general (now senator) Ambrose Burnside, the committee heard testimony from generals as diverse as McClellan and Sherman. All but one urged the expansible Army plan and other Upton proposals. Yet Congress defeated a bill incorporating these suggestions. Discouraged by his professional failures and suffering from violent headaches (for which doctors could find neither a cause nor a cure), Upton committed suicide in 1881. Many officers, realizing that the United States would not soon change its command and manpower policies, viewed the future pessimistically. But some began searching for sounder policy alternatives that would strengthen the Army without Germanizing it.
While the army had Sherman and Upton, the Navy had Luce and Mahan. Encouraged by Sherman and Upton, Luce was the foremost proponent of naval education and the driving force behind the formation of the United States Naval Institute in 1873. Analogous to the Army’s Military Service Institution, the Naval Institute began publishing its Proceedings on a regular basis in 1879. But Luce’s greatest achievement was persuading Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler to begin the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1884. “No less a task is proposed,” wrote Luce, who was the college’s first president, “than to apply modern scientific methods to the study and raise naval warfare from the empirical stage to the dignity of a science.” Since the Navy had no authoritative treatise on naval warfare fought under steam power, he proposed to discover the requisite principles through a comparative approach. By studying the conduct of warfare on land, he believed that naval officers could establish parallel principles for sea warfare. Realizing that the key faculty member would be the lecturer on naval history, Luce looked “for that master mind” who would do for naval science “what Jomini has done for military science.” As he later wrote, “He appeared in the person of Captain A.T. Mahan, U.S.N.”
Nothing in his previous career foretold greatness for Mahan. The son of West Point’s Dennis H. Mahan, he attended the Naval Academy against his father’s wishes, graduating in 1859. During the following years of uneventful service, he developed a hatred of the sea and maneuvered for shore duty whenever possible.
He hoped to win renown through intellectual performance, and in 1883 he published a competent study of the Civil War Navy. Accepting Luce’s offer to teach at the Naval War College, he spent the winter of 1885–1886 preparing his lectures. Published in 1890 as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, the lectures established his reputation as the world’s foremost naval historian.
The book, supplemented by Mahan’s article titled “The United States Looking Outward” that also appeared in 1890, set forth a philosophy of sea power linking national greatness, prosperity, and commerce to imperialism and navalism. From his research Mahan concluded that England became a great nation by controlling the seas and the commerce they bore. Britain could attack an enemy’s colonies, blockade its ports, and choke off its trade routes. Enumerating six elements of sea power based primarily on England’s experience, Mahan emphasized the applicability of these factors to the U.S. and concluded that it possessed the ingredients to become a world sea power.
To achieve greatness, the United States must abandon its “continentalist” policy in favor of more aggressive competition for world trade, which required a strong merchant marine, colonies, and a big navy. The merchant marine would carry foreign trade and serve “as the nursery of naval attitudes,” while colonies provided raw materials, markets, and naval bases. Mahan especially wanted to annex Hawaii as a bridge to Asia and to control any future Central American canal, which would be a funnel for world trade and inevitably attract Europeans bent on defiling the Monroe Doctrine. An avowed missionary for Manifest Destiny, Mahan also perceived colonies as toeholds for extending Western civilization. A powerful navy would protect the merchant marine and colonies, but not by the traditional guerre de course. Mahan considered it useless as a primary strategy, since history “taught” him that commerce raiding never won a war. A navy’s purpose was to gain “command of the sea” by defeating the enemy fleet in a decisive battle. Only battleships, not cruisers and destroyers, could fight such battles. A concentrated battleship fleet was “the arm of offensive power, which alone enables a country to extend its influence outward.”
For the Common Defense Page 36