Illegitimate Power: From Chapter 1 of Pawns

IN THE BEGINNING, America’s armed forces had their roots in the needs and democratic spirit of its people.  None of the colonies could afford to maintain a standing body of regular soldiers, and none had the slightest desire to do so.  But there was a need for defense against Indian attack, and so all the colonies except Quaker Pennsylvania made provision for a popular militia.  

Colonial militias were based upon the principle of universal male obligation.  All men, usually between the ages of 16 and do, were required to arm themselves and muster for drill about half a dozen times a year.  New England militiamen elected their com­pany officers; in Massachusetts, over-all command of the militia was vested in an elected official known as the ser­geant major-general.  Elsewhere militias were commanded by colonial governors, with the elected assemblies maintaining con­trol of expenditures and close surveillance over all military operations.

In practice, the need never arose for the simultaneous service of every able-bodied male in a colony.  Consequently, when a limited number of troops was required for a specific campaign, the legislatures assigned quotas to local militia districts.  Local officers then called for volunteers; if a sufficient number did not step forward, they would draft men for the duration of the campaign.  One very important limitation, however, applied to the use of militiamen except in special circumstances: they could not be sent against their will on expeditions outside the boundaries of their colony.

This form of military organization suited the new settle­ments well.  As farmers, craftsmen, and traders, the colonists’ prime concern was earning a living.  To their way of thinking, it was neither necessary nor desirable to create a special class of full-time soldiers, separate from, supported by, and inher­ently dangerous to, the general body of citizens.  Moreover, the system worked well in practice, at least in terms of local ac­tions: in campaigns against the Pequots, Mipmucks, and Narra­gansetts of New England, the Yamasees of South Carolina, and various other Indian tribes, the militia emerged victorious.

Significantly, the militia did not fare well in the French and Indian War, an aggress­ive affair that reached far beyond the existing limits of colonial settlement.  Few militiamen volun­teered for active duty, and the colonial assemblies were un­willing to enforce a rigorous draft.  Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie originally proposed to raise a regiment of two thou­sand volunteers.  After a few weeks of fruitless recruit­ing, he lowered his request to eight hundred.  When even that number failed to come forward, he asked the legislature to draft one in ten of the militia.  The House of Burgesses refused.  The expe­rience in other colonies was similar.  Although British regulars eventually managed to win control of French Canada and the Ohio Valley, they did so without much help from the colonists.

Within a decade, American militiamen were not merely ignoring British efforts to turn them into professionals; they were actively revolting against the Crown’s misuse of its stand­ing armies.  Among the grievances listed against King George III in the Declaration of Independence were four pertaining to his abuse of military powers:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies with­out the Consent of our legislatures.  —He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power…

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to com­plete the works of death, desolation and tyranny… —He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high seas to bear Arms against their country.

The Revolution spawned the first standing army of Amer­icans.  But despite the im­portance of the cause, the Continental Congress was almost as wary of its military creature as it was eager to expel the British.  The last thing Congress wanted was a native Cromwell emerging from the ranks of the Continental Army, and though Washington had no such inclinations, Con­gress eyed him apprehensively none­the­less.

The “regulars” in the Continental Army consisted of militia regiments provided by the states, and Washington was hard-pressed to mold them into a disciplined force.  For one thing, they kept returning to their farms when their short enlistments expired; for another, they were unused to the kind of formal­ized, European-style fighting that Washington fell was neces­sary to defeat the British redcoats and  Hessian mercenaries.

At times during the eight-year struggle, it appeared as though Washington’s army would completely disintegrate.  Volunteers, food, and supplies were often perilously low.  But Washington kept his band of regulars together and gradually began to instill in them the discipline he sought.  Punishment for misconduct or infractions of regulations was harsh.  Washington’s favorite remedy for misbehavior was the lash; he persuaded Congress to raise the permitted number of strokes from thirty-nine to one hundred.  He also approved on occasion the unauthorized punishment of running the gauntlet.  With the invaluable aid of Baron von Steuben, fresh from the court of Frederick the Great, he drilled the Continentals with Prussian-like rigor.

In the end, it was Washington’s main-force regiments, as­sisted by a fleet of French warships, that surrounded Corn­wallis at Yorktown and sealed the victory.  Even so, local militia were essential throughout the Revolution, and it is un­likely that the war would have been won without them.  Colonel Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys seized Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and hauled its artillery to Boston in time to help the assembled New England militia fight the Battle of Bunker Hill.  In the South, guer­rilla forays conducted by partisan colonists under Colonel Francis Marion (“the Swamp Fox”), “Light Horse Harry” Lee, and others helped defeat superior British forces in Georgia and the Carolinas, pushing Cornwallis toward the sea and inspiring him to retreat to what he thought was the relative safety of Virginia.

NO SOONER had the British departed than Congress dismantled the army it had created.  “Standing armies in time of peace ate inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism,” Congress resolved in 1783.  It then directed that “the command­ing officer…discharge the troops now in the services of the United States, except for twenty-five privates to guard the stores at Fort Pitt, and twenty-five to guard the stores at West Point and other magazines.

The men who gathered in Philadelphia four years later were more attentive to the need for a regular national army, but not by much.  Many believed along with Sam Adams that “it is a very improbable supposition that any people can long remain free with a strong military power in the heart of their country, unless that military power is under the direction of the people, and even then it is dangerous. “

As in so many other areas of controversy, the arrangement finally agreed upon by the drafters of the Constitution was a compromise.  It provided for two different types of armies in America: a part-time citizens’ militia controlled by the states, and a full-time regular army controlled by the national govern­ment.  The understanding, however, was that by far the more numerous of the two would be the militia of citizen-soldiers.  It was also understood that, to the extent that a universal mili­tary obligation would be continued in America, a citizen would only be obliged to serve in his local militia; the national army would be composed solely of volunteers.  Most importantly, it was explicitly stipulated that the militia, whose officers would be appointed by the states, could be called into federal service only for three purposes: “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.”  Citizen-soldiers, in other words, could be used to maintain internal order and to defend against attack, but they could not be employed for non-defensive purposes.

The granting to Congress of the power to raise a national army was undertaken with many qualms.  Primarily, it was thought, the standing federal army would be needed to fight Indians and to quash domestic uprisings.  (Shay’s Rebellion of just a year before was much on the Framers’ minds, though it had been successfully put down by the Massachusetts militia.)  But while the federal government was empowered to raise a standing army, numerous safeguards were instituted to pre­vent such an army from accumulating unwarranted power over the citizenry.

First of all, it was established, or at least understood, that no citizen would be com­pelled to serve in the standing army or even to quarter its soldiers.  Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia undoubtedly expressed the prevailing sentiments among Convention delegates when he declared in his opening address that only “inlistments,” not “draughts,” were appro­priate for raising a national force.  Although no outright ban on national conscription was written into the Constitution, a prohi­bi­tion against the involuntary quartering of troops during peacetime—which was con­sidered a much more palpable dan­ger at the time than federal conscription—was incorporated in the Bill of Rights.

Secondly, it was anticipated by nearly everyone at the Con­vention that the standing national army would always remain small.  Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts at one point proposed a constitutional provision “that there shall not be kept up in time of peace more than ___ thousand troops.”  His idea, according to Madison, “was that the blank should be filled in with two or three thousand.”  While Gerry’s motion for a specific constitutional troop limitation was voted down, it was clear from the discus­sion that the Framers believed, as George Mason of Virginia put it, that “there would be no standing army in time of peace, unless it might be for a few garrisons.  “

To make sure that the army would stay small and not be enlarged by an ambitious executive, the power to appropriate funds for the military was vested in Congress.  Moreover, even Congress was deterred from acting imprudently in its dispens­ing of military funds by a provision that “no appropriation [for the army]…shall be for a longer term than two years. “  In no other area of government was Congress’s power of the purse thus limited.  The limitation was patterned after the Brit­ish Mutiny Act, which set forth the rules for administering the British army.  Parliament took it upon itself to subject the Mutiny Act to annual renewal.  If Parliament did not renew the law, the King’s army, at least in theory, would disintegrate.

Thirdly, the Convention determined that the ultimate power to control this tiny fed­er­al force would lie with the legislature and not with the executive.  The President, under the new Constitution, would be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces when they were in the field, but the power to raise the armed forces, to make rules for their governance, and—most importantly—to inaugurate war, would rest exclu­sively with Congress.

The debate at the Convention also made clear the delegates’ intention that Congress’s power to “declare” war be truly the power to inaugurate war and not merely to issue a formal declaration that a state of hostilities existed.  The original version of the war-making clause authorized Congress to “make” war.  Madison moved that the word “make” be changed to “declare,” so that the President might “repel sudden attacks”; this amendment was adopted by a vote of eight to one, with only New Hampshire in the negative.  Thus, the President could defend the nation in the event that another country suddenly attacked America first, but could not otherwise em­bark upon a war.  In this respect, as Alexander Hamilton pointed out in Essay Number 69 of The Fed­eralist, the President’s powers were considerably less than those of the British mon­arch, who could initiate wars purely on his own volition.

Thomas Jefferson did not attend the Convention, but was in full accord with the Framers’ determination that the President should not have the power to initiate war.  “We have already given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war,” he wrote to Madison in 1789, “by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Execu­tive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay.”

Despite all these safeguards, there continued to be wide­spread aversion throughout the young republic to providing for any standing army at all.  Fear of an uncontrol­lable military that might threaten the liberties of citizens was in fact a prin­cipal cause of opposition to the proposed new Constitution.  Patrick Henry, for one, exclaimed before the Virginia ratifying convention:

Had we a standing army when the British invaded our peaceful shores?  Was it a standing army that gained the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and took the ill-fated Burgoyne?  Is not a well-regulated militia suffi­cient for every purpose of internal defense?  And which of you, my fellow citizens, is afraid of any invasion from foreign powers that our brave militia would not be able immediately to repel?

To allay such fears, Madison and Hamilton argued in The Federalist that the people’s liberties would be protected at three levels: first, at the level of the federal legislature, which would keep a wary eye on the executive; next, at the level of the states, which would guard against undue federal aggrandizements; and finally at the level of the people themselves, who if worst came to worst could fight off the national army with their own rifles.  Thus, Hamilton pointed out in Number 24 that:

The legislature of the United States will be obliged…once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the pint; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents.  They are not at liberty to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence…

Independent of parties in the national legislature itself, the State legisla­tures, who will always be not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of citizens against encroachments from the federal government, will constantly have their attention awake to the conduct of the national rulers, and will be ready enough, if any thing improper appears, to sound the alarm to the people, and not only to be the voice, but, if necessary, the arm of their discontent.

Madison was even more explicit in Number 46:

Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made.  Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal govern­ment: still it would not be going too far to say that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.  The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms.  This pro­portion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men.  To these would be opposed a mili­tia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among them­selves, fighting for their com­mon liberties, and united and con­ducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.  It may well be doubted, whether a mili­tia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.

Such arguments as these helped carry the day for the Fed­eralists.  Even so, it is unlikely that the new Constitution would have been ratified had its advocates not agreed to support a Bill of Rights embodying, in the Second Amendment’s guar­antee of the right to bear arms, Madison’s vision of an armed citizenry as the ultimate check against illegitimate federal power.

The early Congresses acted to reinforce the constitutional safeguards against a power­­ful standing army of professional sol­diers.  The second Congress under the new Con­stitution adopted the Militia Act of 1792.  In doing so, it rejected the advice of Wash­ington—who, as a professional, was not very fond of the militia.  Instead of providing for federal arming and training of the state militia, as Washington had recommended, the law of 1792 simply instructed able-bodied males to equip them­selves with rifles and report to their local company commander.  It also restr­icted the period for which the President might call militiamen into national service to no more than three months per year.  As for the standing army, its strength was limited under an earlier law to 1,216 enlisted volunteers, mostly pri­vates whose pay was fixed at $3 a month.

The War of 1812 illustrated both the weaknesses and the advantages, depending upon one’s viewpoint, of America’s dual military system.  The performance of the militia in defend­ing against attack was mixed: at Bladensburg it stumbled badly, al­low­ing an outnumbered British raiding party to sack the city of Washington, while at New Orleans, under Andrew Jackson, a motley assortment of militiamen, sailors, and free Negroes savagely routed an attacking force of eight thousand British regulars.

More interesting was the militia’s performance as an offensive force.  The first Amer­ican undertaking of the war was an in­vasion of Canada.  President Madison request­ed the New Eng­land governors to deliver into federal service as many militia­men as General Henry Dearborn required.  These gover­nors, however, were opposed to the war, and they stalled on the grounds that no invasion of America had taken place.  Eventually Dearborn was able to assemble a mixed force of regulars and militia, and he set out along Lake Champlain to ward Montreal.  Much to his chagrin, however, most of his militiamen refused to cross the border into Canada, insisting that the Constitution required them only to repel invasion, and no invasion had occurred.  Thus was America’s first aggressive military plan thwarted.  Signif­i­cantly, after the New England coast was attacked by Britain in 1814, thousands of New Englanders volunteered for service in the regular army.

One other aspect of the War of 1812 deserves note.  The early recalcitrance of New England, coupled with the disappointing number of volunteers elsewhere, caused Madison to propose America’s first national conscription plan.  Daniel Webster denounced the proposal as a sinister attempt to bypass the restrictions upon federal use of the citizen-soldier:

This, then, Sir, is a bill for calling out the Militia, not according to its exist­ing organization, but by draft from new created classes; not merely for the purpose of “repelling invasion, suppressing insurrection, or executing the laws,” but for the general objects of war—for defending ourselves, or invad­ing others, as may be thought expedient—not for a sudden emergency, or for a short time, but for long stated periods….The question is nothing less than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrend­ered, & despotism embraced in its worst form.

Despite Webster’s eloquence, the Senate approved a two-year draft, but the measure died in a conference committee in 1814 as the war drew to an end.

THE YEARS PRECEDING the Civil War saw the regular army grow in size and profess­ion­alism.  Though enlisted men tended to come from the poorest and least edu­cated elements of society, the Military Academy at West Point began turning out a corps of skilled and dedicated officers, not a few of whom had political ambitions.  The ranks of the Army swelled to six thousand by 1830 and twelve thousand by 1840, as the credo of Manifest Destiny impelled the nation westward into confron­ta­tion with the Plains Indians and, by 1845, with Mexico.

The Mexican War was an important milestone in many ways.  Not only did it give the Army a chance to test its mettle in a major foreign expedition; it also marked the first time that an American Commander-in-Chief exceeded the constitutional limits on the President’s war-making powers.

Earlier Presidents had all carefully respected these constitu­tional boundaries.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson re­sponded to international harassment of American commerce by turning to Congress for authority to defend ships at sea; and James Madison insisted in 1812 that the choice of whether or not to declare war against England was a responsibility “which the Constitution wisely confides in the legis­la­tive de­partment of government.”

James K. Polk, on the other hand, without authority from Congress, dispatched some four thousand American troops under Zachary Taylor into territory south of Corpus Christi that had always been considered part of Mexico.  Taylor pro­ceeded to build a fort on this Mexican soil and to block the Rio Grande to Mexican shipping.

The Mexicans, not surprisingly, attacked Taylor’s forces, and Congress thereupon authorized further hostilities against Mexico.  But two years later, in passing a reso­lution of thanks to General Taylor, the House of Representatives, by a vote of eighty-five to eighty-one, attached an amendment denouncing the war as having been “un­necessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”

As the Regular Army steadily grew in strength and prestige during the mid-nine­teenth century, the militia correspondingly declined.  States were notoriously lax in enforcing the universal male obligation, and were just as relaxed about providing effective training.  Though some elite units voluntarily kept themselves in spiffy shape, most militia musterings were occa­sions for drink and merriment, not for serious drilling.

The federal government had little inclination to correct these shortcomings.  Recall­ing Dearborn’s troubles at the Canadian border, Polk realized the militias were not suited to his purposes; he got around the constitutional limitations on non-defensive use of citizen-soldiers by creating a new category of volunteers under Regular Army command.  Later, because of sectional tensions, Congress was understandably reluc­tant to strengthen the state-controlled militias.

In 1861 the domestic insurrection that had been simmering for decades finally erupt­ed.  Nearly a third of the Regular Army’s officers resigned to aid the Southern rebel­lion.  Lincoln called out the Northern militias for three months’ federal service until Congress could convene.  They fought—not very well—at Bull Run, and the Civil War was on in earnest.

Both the Confederacy and the Union, once Congress assembled in July 1861, deter­mined to build massive regular armies strengthened with long-term volunteers.  Soon after Bull Run, the Confederate Congress voted to raise 400,000 volun­teers for three years.  Not to be outdone, the Union Congress authorized a million-man army, though with the careful proviso that it be reduced to 25,000 as soon as peace was restored.

Initial enthusiasm was such that volunteers stepped forward faster than their armies could absorb them.  In the North, the volunteer units, though legally distinct from the state militias, retained much of the militia spirit: uniforms were varied and colorful, discipline was lenient, company officers were usually elected by the men, while com­manders were frequently political appointees.

As the war dragged on with no end in sight, it became apparent on both sides that the consuming need for manpower was exceeding the willingness of the male citizenry to volunteer.  Large bounties were offered to spur enlistment, but to little avail.  Casual­ties and desertions mounted.  Soon the Confederacy and then the Union fell back upon the expedient that few of the Founders had thought possible: national conscrip­tion.

The Confederate conscription law of 1862 subjected to compulsory military service all white male citizens between the ages of 17 and 50.  Men engaged in essential war industries could be exempted at executive discretion.  Slaveowners or overseers were also exempted if they possessed or supervised fifteen slaves, which raised protests about class discrimination.  By means of its draft law, the Confederacy provided directly or indirectly for some 300,000 soldiers, about a third of its total strength.

In the North, the Enrollment Act of 1863 imposed a federal military obligation upon all male citizens between the ages of 20 and 45.  Military provost marshals were sent from door to door to register eligible males.  The law had many loopholes, mostly favorable to the rich.  For $300 a drafted citizen could purchase a commutation, or he could hire a substitute (if he could find one) for less.

Enactment of the conscription law provoked widespread resistance.  Some state and local governments passed laws to buy general commutation for their residents.  Anti-draft riots in New York City caused 1,200 deaths, and there were frequent protest demonstrations elsewhere.  Draft evasion became so widespread that a new word—”skedaddling”—was coined to describe it.  Enrolling marshals were lied to, avoided, even attacked.  New towns sprang up across the Canadian border, populated by evaders from all parts of the country.  Many fled to California or mining towns in the Rockies.  In the end, only 249,259 persons were actually called up under the Enroll­ment Act, and of these 86,724 escaped by payment of commutation while another 216,188 sent substitutes.

Though the Civil War was uniquely an internal quarrel, it had a lasting effect upon the American military.  The drift toward centralization of the armed forces was ac­cen­tuated.  Not only did the federal government resort, for the first time, to con­scription; it also recruited directly from among the citi­zenry, instead of having the states provide troops to meet federal quotas.  It also proposed, unsuccessfully for the moment, creation of a national army reserve that would have effectively supplanted the militias.  Discipline, too, was tightened by the war, and though flogging in the Navy was abolished in 1861, bucking and gagging in the infantry and spread-eagling in the artillery were common punishments.

Nonetheless, by the end of Reconstruction, the United States Army had in fact been reduced in strength to within a few thousand of the 25,000 figure that Congress had earlier prescribed.  Until the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, there wasn’t much for the Army to do except fight Indians and break workers’ strikes, and after the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, there weren’t even any fighting Indians left.  So the Army sulked, its increasingly professional officers biding their time, cast­ing aspersions upon the militia and yearning for a more active role in the nation’s destiny.

The two most influential military thinkers of this period were Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the prolific naval his­torian, and Major General Emory Upton, a West Pointer and protégé of General William Tecumseh Sherman.  While Mahan was whetting the public’s appetite for American domi­nance of the oceans, Upton was quietly urging a more professional organization on dry land.  In 1876 he departed on a round-the-world tour to study foreign armies; he returned with an unabashed affection for the German war machine with which Bismarck had recently humiliated France and Aus­tria and forged the modern German state.  In his report, entitled Armies of Asia and Europe, Upton recommended that America abandon its dual military system and adopt a unitary professional army patterned after Germany’s.  In peace, the regular officers would prepare for war by attending a system of military schools; in war, the expanded army would consist of forces led by these thoroughly trained profes­sionals.

Upton’s magnum opus was his unfinished book The Military Policy of the United States.  In it he utterly condemned the militias—not only because they fought terribly, but also, he argued, because they lured the nation into thinking it was possible to be pre­pared for war without maintaining a first­-rate standing army.  If America’s seem­ingly successful military proved anything, Upton contended, it was that lack of prepared­ness in 1775, 1812, 1846, and 1861 had prevented the army from seizing quick victor­ies, thus costing the nation dearly in lives and treasure.  Another lesson, he wrote, was that the military suffered from too much civilian control.

Upton’s arguments gained wide appeal among the officer corps, which then as now tended to the belief that the nation ought to adjust its institutions to fit the military’s needs, and not the other way around.  His most important convert, how­ever, was a civilian: Elihu Root, the New York corporation lawyer who became President McKinley’s Secretary of War in 1899, eighteen years after Upton’s suicide.  Like Theodore Roosevelt, whom he would later serve as Secretary of State, Root believed America should play a greater role in the world, and he set out to create an army suitable for an imperial power.  A relative neophyte in military affairs, he turned to Upton’s writings for guidance.

By 1903, Root had done much to advance the army toward European-style profess­sion­alism.  A War College was opened in Washington, as Upton had recommended. A general staff system was established, based on the German model.  The Militia Act of 1903 began the process of converting the state militias (by then generally referred to as the National Guard) into a reserve for the national army.  The federal govern­ment was to issue arms and equipment to the Guard free of charge.  In exchange, Guard units had to conduct at least twenty-four drills a year as well as an annual summer encampment of not less than five days.  Regular Army officers would instruct the Guardsmen and periodically inspect their organizations.  Guard units could be called into federal service for up to nine months, a tripling of the then-existing limit of three months.  In 1908 the time limitation was dropped altogether, and National Guard units were explicitly authorized to serve “either within or with­out the territory of the United States.”

Major General Leonard Wood, who became Chief of Staff in 1910, sought to extend Root’s reforms.  An energetic man with presidential ambitions, Wood wanted to make the Ameri­can army a match for any potential European foe.  Like Upton, he greatly admired the German army’s ability to absorb great masses of conscripts under the direction of a highly trained cadre.  He also possessed great faith in the ability of citizen-soldiers to become competent warriors with only brief, albeit intensive train­ing.  Wood hoped to establish a program of universal military training and a truly national reserve force, but realized that achievement of these aims required public support.  So, with indefatigable zeal, he set out through speeches and publicity to condition the American people to the notion that a mass army of citizen-soldiers was not only necessary but democratic.  His ideas failed to win acceptance during his tenure, but they were harbingers of things to come.

In 1916, Congress increased federal supervision of the National Guard, provided for forty-eight drills a year instead of twenty-four, and required Guardsmen to take an oath to obey the President and uphold the Constitution.  At the same time Congress established a new national reserve, to be composed of veterans of the Regular Army, an Officers’ Reserve Corps, and a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

Within a year, America was at war with the Kaiser.

THOUGH FEW PERSONS could have foreseen it at the time, World War I was a major milestone on the road to the awesome military institution of today.  The Selective Service Act of 1917, more than the Enrollment Act of 1863, was the precursor of the modern draft.  It applied national conscription for the first time to the task of raising a foreign expeditionary force.  It also did a way with some of the more abrasive fea­tures of the 1863 law.  Male citizens between the ages of 18 and 35 registered them­selves; no provost marshals moved from house to house in search of them.  Moreover, no substitutions or commutations were permitted.  To administer the Selective Ser­vice System, thousands of civilian draft boards were established in localities throughout the country. The system worked so well that, for the first time, military strategists in Washington were able to make decisions without worrying too much about popular opinion.

World War I was a milestone in other ways.  It was America’s major war of a truly nationalistic cast, with public emotions pumped up and orchestrated by skillful gov-ern­ment propaganda.  Most important, it marked the definitive trans­formation of the American citizen-soldier from part-time defender of his homestead to full-time legionnaire, trained and disciplined and equipped by the national government and sent to clash on distant battlefields with the greatest armies of the world.  Leonard Wood and those who said that American citizens could hold their own against any warriors were proven right.  The magic formula was strict discipline and professional leadership.  The Army had learned the formula and would apply it again.

By the end of 1919, only 200,000 soldiers, mostly regulars, remained in uniform, com­pared to the 2-1/2 million who had stood in arms barely twelve months earlier.  But Chief of Staff General Peyton C. March came before Congress with a plan which would have made the peacetime Army resemble even more strikingly than it already did the forces of the very country it had just defeated—Germany.  March proposed a permanent Regular Army of 500,000 men.  Backing up the regulars would be a con­scripted national reserve force, formed by subjecting every able-bodied male citizen to three months of military training.  In the event of war, the reserves would be blended into an expanded national Army with regulars leading the way.

The National Defense Act of 1920 did not go as far as March and his planners had wanted.  Universal military training was rejected.  The size of the Regular Army was fixed at 280,000—substantially less than the half million asked for, but a hefty force nonetheless, considering there wasn’t an enemy in sight.  The act also provided for an Organized Reserve along­side the National Guard, the reserve to be primarily led by citizen-officers who would come from an enlarged ROTC program in the colleges.

The interwar years marked a significant change in the army’s attitude toward the American people.  Prior to World War I, the military had led an almost cloistered existence, tending to its garrisons and schools and fighting Indians or Latin Ameri­cans when called upon.  Leonard Wood had begun to take the army out of its isola­tion and inject its views into the national consciousness; now this process was vastly intensified.  Military spokesmen roamed the country, spreading the gospel of national preparedness and citizen training.  With new reserve branches in almost every com­munity, the War Department expressed the hope that reservists’ views would be “felt among their neighbors until all our people come to appreciate the wisdom of support­ing a strong national defense.  If Congress, through ROTC, was trying to democra­tize the military, the army would make the best of things by trying to militarize the democracy.

Within a generation after the Treaty of Versailles, the army found itself at war again, this time against two enemies on two vastly different fronts.  Once again, national conscription was imposed, and the staggering total of fifteen million citizens were converted into soldiers.  America proved again, as it had in World War I, that it could quickly mobilize both its manpower and its economy and that it could outlast and defeat the strongest armies in the world.

But the American army that fought World War II was not, despite ROTC, a demo­cratic army, as millions of disgruntled enlisted men discovered.  They could not un­der­­stand why officers drank bourbon while they often could not get hold of Coke; why the best clubs in town were off limits to enlisted personnel; why military justice was such a one-edged sword, pitifully sharp to them but sheathed for officers.  If they were, indeed, citizen-soldiers, why were they treated like second‑class citizens?

As soon as the fighting ended, a volcano of protest erupted.  Veterans marched in the streets, wrote letters to editors, peti­tioned their Congressmen.  The issue of army reform came alive.  Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times called for an overhaul of the military’s archaic legal system.  The St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorialized: “A democratic people, now forced to have a standing Army, demands a democratic Army.  That means a radical change from present customs.”

^,Brigadier General Herbert C. Holdridge, a retired West Pointer, suggested abolish­ing the officer corps, calling all GI’s “soldiers,” and ranking them according to skill and ability.  On January 13, 1946, five hundred GI’s, described by the Times as “orderly but angry,” demonstrated in Paris in support of a three-page program they called the Enlisted Man’s Magna Carta; it demanded an end to officers’ messes and special officers’ quarters, reform of court-martial juries to include enlisted men, and a requirement that all officers serve one year as enlisted men except in time of war.  In April a Gallup poll revealed that eighty-six percent of former enlisted men favored eliminating officer privileges.

The Army responded by appointing a six-man board under Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, hero of the first bomb­ing raid over Tokyo, to study the problem of reform.  The Doolittle board received both written and oral testimony from hun­dreds of active and former soldiers, from privates to generals.  Its conclusions and recommendations were moderate.  “Discipline and obedience can only be accomp­lished by creat­ing rank and by giving necessary privileges to accompany increased responsibilities,” it argued.  But it acknowledged that “more definite protection from arbitrary acts of superiors is essential,” and recommended that there be “definite equality of treatment of both enlisted and commissioned personnel in the adminis­tration of military justice.”

The Army accepted some of the Doolittle board’s sugges­tions.  It abolished the dif­fer­ence between officers’ and enlisted men’s uniforms, except for insignia; it did away with OFF LIMITS TO ENLISTED PERSONNEL signs; it beefed up the Inspect­or General system for handling complaints.  Old-time regulars grumbled that the Army would never be the same.  A few handed in their resignations.  Actually, however, the changes were more superficial than real—just enough to quiet the clamor for reform.

Military leaders, meanwhile, had more important things to worry about.  There was first of all the question of demobiliza­tion: the nation, and especially the troops, want­ed to de­mobilize as fast as possible, just as they had after previous wars.  Presi­dent Truman and the generals, on the other hand, were concerned about Soviet intentions, and they persuaded Congress to authorize a one-million-man peacetime Army, the largest in America’s history.

Another problem was unification.  This was resolved by the National Security Act of 1946, which created the office of the Secretary of Defense and a confederation of the four services.

As always, the crucial problem was manpower procurement.  General George C. Mar­shall recommended universal military training and a strong reserve system, and Truman backed him enthusiastically, as did a number of civilian educators, who felt it would make for a democratic army.  But lawmakers were wary of militarizing the entire citizenry, especially since nuclear weapons seemed to make mass armies irrel­evant.  So Congress came up with a peacetime selective service system under which some men would be drafted while others would be deferred.  The new law was per­haps less far-reaching than a universal training program would have been.  But it surrendered to the President a virtual blank check over the lives of young people.

The new law came in handy in 1950, when Truman intervened in Korea.  Draft calls were stepped up to replenish the Regular Army.  Also, as in World War II, several National Guard units were federalized and shipped to the battlefront—any concept of the Guard as a defensive force, separate from the Regular Army, having by now quite disappeared.

It remained for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to put the finishing touches on today’s prodigious military institution.  McNamara’s plans were keyed to the con­cept of “flexible response”: the United States should be able to meet international threats without resorting to nuclear weapons.  To achieve a capability for less-than-nuclear response, the size of the army was substantially increased; so was its training in counter-insurgency warfare.

Soon McNamara got a chance to test his theories in Southeast Asia.  The trouble was that, although the standing army now had more power—save for during the two World Wars—to turn American citizens into obedient executors of national policy than it had ever had before, that power had never been less legitimate.