Air University Review, September-October 1985
SERVING soldiers from time immemorial have recognized that dictated change does not always bring increased military effectiveness, the basic criterion they apply to reform. An unnamed soldier in the army of republican Rome recognized the problem:
We trained hard…but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
The Duke of Cambridge, who witnessed the impulse for reform in Queen Victoria's England, summed up the thinking conservative's view of all reform, civil and military: "There is a time for all things; there is even a time for change; and that is when it can no longer be resisted." Whether the parent state is autocratic, revolutionary, or democratic, its armed forces are not likely to view military reform as an unconditional good. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, however, the armed forces of democracies had a special problem because they were altered so radically in peacetime periods between wars. The change was not necessarily dictated by size but represented a fundamental challenge of the values of the standing forces. In times of peace, democracies ignored their standing forces, for they knew that in wartime the "nation in arms," for better or worse, would go to the battlefield with a new set of criteria for evaluating military leadership, organization, weapons, and tactics. Skeptical of the adaptiveness of peacetime forces, democracies would dictate that their military establishments would fight and change their institutional character at the same time.
Like many of his other observations in Democracy in America, Tocqueville had more to say about military reform in Europe as the seasons of American military reform may or may not coincide with belligerency. They certainly do not match the outcomes of wars. For example, in comparing the results of the Mexican War (1846-48) with the Spanish-American War (1898), one can conclude that both were smashing victories in terms of national objectives. The War with Mexico outstripped the War with Spain in its degree of mismanagement and the near perilous commitment of inadequate military power. Yet it was the 1898 war that set off more than a decade of land force reform, largely because it occurred simultaneously with the Progressive Era. Nor does the importance of the war dictate the degree of reform. The American Revolution gave rise to a generation of rhetoric but prompted little change to the militia system inherited from the colonial era. The War of 1812, in contrast, created the political environment that brought significant change to the War and Navy departments. Nor does military reform require the shock of wars badly won or lost that galvanizes public outcry. Reform in the twenty years before the Spanish-American War and World War II proceeded with minimal public attention, yet produced important changes in both the U.S. Army and the Navy.
If military reform is purposeful change that improves the U.S. Armed Forces (i.e., the product of public policy), it is not a phenomenon that occurs in either linear or cyclical fashion across time. Even "improve" can mean several things. By strictly military criteria, reform should increase the likelihood that the armed forces will perform their missions in war and peace with increased effectiveness, but reform in the United States seldom meets the standard of pure functionalism. Indeed, some of the most deep-seated notions of military change have included both explicit and hidden agendas that had little to do with military effectiveness in the direct, tangible sense. For example, at one time or another, the federal government has used military reform to encourage infant industry, build continental railroads, teach young males hygiene and physical fitness, further racial and gender integration in the larger society, and educate generations of civil and marine engineers. In fact, American military reform probably includes only one constant: it must not endanger civilian control of the military. In any event, the reason why military reform defies simple explanation is that it has worked in five distinct aspects of the institutional development of the armed forces:
Reform in each of these five areas has built its own set of historical patterns, and the causal relationship between reform movements has not been nearly so direct as some military re formers believe. In fact, it is closer to the historical experience to recognize that successful reform in one area may retard improvement in others. Such unanticipated outcomes have occurred so often that they explain some of the military predisposition to make change slowly, especially in peacetime. On the other hand, compartmentalized reform may have no effect at all outside its narrow sphere of influence. Thus, military reform in the United States refuses to fit neatly into a historical pattern that points clearly to reform's future.
organization
For their first century, the three existing services (the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps) developed a dual structure that gave their administrative headquarters in Washington centralized control. Operating forces in the field had little influence on service policy because the service civilian and military staffs controlled budgets and regulation writing, largely to satisfy civilian oversight. Effective power to run the Army rested with the department and bureau chiefs of the War Department. Their counterparts in the Navy's bureaus and the Marine Corps' small headquarters staff had similar power. In wartime, however, this system normally collapsed, since the standing procedures and limited numbers of personnel could not cope with mobilization. By the end of the nineteenth century, the services moved to close the line-staff division through the creation of service general staffs. The Navy began the process with the establishment of a General Board (1900) and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (1915), but the Army went further in centralizing military control with its War Department General Staff (1903). The Air Force duplicated the Army system in 1947, although Strategic Air Command established a semi-feudalistic autonomy like that maintained by some portions of the Navy's support establishment. In the twentieth century, the general staff reform movement finally ensured that line officers would dominate their services and provide authoritative advice to their civilian superiors, but Congress has worked to counter this trend by providing staff access through the funding process. The career of Admiral Hyman Rickover is only the most notable example of technocratic insurgency.
The pressure for interservice collaboration––some coming from civilians, some from military officers––coincided with the growth of the general staff movement and in some ways competed with it. The Joint Board (1903) coped with such joint service responsibilities as coast defense, aviation policy, and amphibious operations, as well as advising the service secretaries on war plans. Replaced by the Joint Chiefs of Staff system in World War II, the Joint Board showed characteristics of joint planning that still prevail. The board had only an advisory role; it could not make decisions, which required active, civilian participation and a willingness to decide. The joint planning system dictated that interservice disagreement would surface, whether the issue was the defense of Subic Bay or the management of military space programs. The organizational response to this condition after 1947 has been to increase the power of the Secretary of Defense and, much less significantly, the power of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Drawing from service experiences, the reformers have assumed that more centralization alone will improve joint collaboration. But service-level centralization rested on a different problem: the ascendancy of line officers in service planning within a system of civilian control. The debate on joint planning now focuses on force employment issues that require strategic guidance from political authority, something noticeably absent throughout the entire history of the general staff reform movement. During the one period in which that guidance came with a vengeance, the tenure of Robert S. McNamara as Secretary of Defense (1961-67), the entire system shuddered and eventually rebelled.
technology
Since the earliest bureaucratization of the armed forces, technological change developed as a constant focus of military reform. Only the issue of technological adaptation has been a constant, for the pattern of change itself has varied. In the design of military vehicles and their different power plants, reform has normally wedded government designers and civilian innovators and producers, linked by a delicate balance of military need, psychic satisfaction, and monetary profits. Through World War I, this military-civilian collaboration produced sailing ships, the first ironclads and steel warships, Army wagons and their braying "power plant," railroad systems (most notably during the Civil War), automobiles and trucks, and airplanes. Although the pattern of collaboration has continued into the 1980s, it has been affected by the growing specialization of military vehicles, increased unit cost, and the length and complexity of the design and procurement process. Procurement, however, since the Frigate Act of 1794, has always been a political issue, which it will remain as long as Congress exercises its fiscal powers. Changes in military vehicles, an area of high need and high cost whether the vehicles carry weapons or simply provide transportation, will continue to be in the forefront of technological development because the mastery of time and space remains a central criterion for military effectiveness.
Ordnance development, on the other hand, has been made principally on the arsenal model, since military ammunition, cannon, and fusion warheads have little commercial appeal. Ordnance development had depended more on nation-against-nation military assessments of weapons effectiveness than military-civilian comparisons, which shape evaluations of vehicles. Except for the occasional intervention of individual inventors (e.g., John Browning and John Garand) into the arsenal system, ordnance development has been the province of military bureaucracies, which tend to balance promised increases in firepower with questions of tactical effectiveness and logistical feasibility. If there is any historical trend in weapons development, it has been that the capabilities of the platform vehicles have often exceeded the ordnance they carried, at least until the development of nuclear and terminally guided conventional munitions.
The change of military infrastructure reflects a different historical pattern. Military investment in construction (e.g., coastal defense fortifications, naval and military bases and airfields, civil engineering projects) has declined and been replaced by investment in electronic command and control systems with global and extraterrestrial reach. Like the development of vehicles, both military construction and electronics have depended on close military-scientific-commercial interaction. At an ever-accelerating pace, the application of electronics for military purposes has dictated a bond between commercial exploitation and military application that cannot be divided. The trend began with the development of the telegraph, radio, and the electrification of warships into the use of radars, computers, infrared sensing, satellite and aerial photography, and microwave/space relay communications. In a sense, the growing importance of military information processing and analysis reflects the more widespread shift of the American economy from industrial to service entrepreneurship. Whether the microchip and solid-state circuitry will prove as important a quantum leap in the effectiveness of military command as the vacuum tube remains to be seen.
Although ideally the adaptation of military technology might be separated from domestic partisan politics (as distinguished from bipartisan military pork-barrel politics), such has not been the case, largely because military procurement always seems to carry social and political benefits of little military relevance. Historically, military procurement has been used to stimulate cutting-edge industrial giants (in shipbuilding, steel, and aviation, for example), to encourage small businesses, to strengthen labor unions and minority employment opportunities, and to sustain a broad academic-industrial research and development infrastructure. Whatever the wisdom of this public policy, it politicizes technological reform, since both major political parties have populist factions that see corporation-governmental collaboration in terms of imperialist intervention abroad and economic exploitation at home. Despite the yearning of technologists, the concerns of the laboratory, factory, and military user alone are unlikely to shape technological reform.
Since the first ill-fated campaigns by the Army into the Northwest Territory and the first cruises of the frigate Navy against Barbary pirates and French privateers, American military commanders have argued that they could do much better in the field with better men. Those "better men" should not desert and should stay, sober (at least on duty), obey superior officers and NCOs, and show some interest in training and physical fitness. They might even fight. In peacetime, the military recruiters did not have much success in drawing sturdy yeomen and fishermen or intelligent clerks into the ranks and crews, but throughout the nineteenth century they did attract pliant immigrants, wayward youths, and occupationally displaced workers into the peacetime services. Fortunately, they knew, the services would be more representative of the nation's male talent in wartime because volunteering and conscription (usually a subtle combination of both) would bring citizen-soldiers and citizen-sailors into the Army and Navy. These servicemen would not stay for the following peace. Indeed, until the twentieth century, they often went home legally even before the war ended. The services knew that these phenomena existed and tried to close the quality gap between the peacetime and wartime services. They are still trying.
Most personnel reforms designed to attract quality people––defined as trainable men in good health––came from the services themselves in collaboration with Congress. The reforms focused on "more"––more pay, more rank, more and better food, improved living conditions, more off-duty recreation, more health care and retirement benefits, more religion. They also focused on "less"––less corporal punishment, less issue alcohol, less menial work, less capricious discipline by martinet superiors. In terms of eliminating the unattractive aspects of service life, the armed forces often found themselves allied with unlikely co-reformers that ranged from the antislavery movement to legal rights groups. While they may have had the rights of servicemen in mind, civilian reformers had little interest in military effectiveness, having more concern in using the military as a laboratory for social experimentation.
The armed services had a good idea of what sort of people they did not want in the ranks, except under duress. Southern and Eastern Europeans, Jews, black Americans, Indians, Hispanics, Asians, and women all found entry and career advancement impossible or difficult at best, but as their political power grew in American society, so too did their influence on military personnel policies. In some cases, the armed forces moved more rapidly toward equal opportunity than civilian institutions; sometimes they did not. In any event, wartime service normally paved the way for better military careers, for the twentieth-century American military establishment could not defend its insular possessions or man the forces committed to forward, collective defense after 1945 without modifying its social structure. Enlisted service for a special group usually led eventually to admission to the officer ranks, sometimes at the insistence of civil rights groups with influence on Congress. With greater access to formal education and powerful formal and information sanctions against other than meritocratic advancement, minorities have demonstrated that increased military effectiveness may be compatible with social reform. The lesson, however, has not been painlessly learned by all parties or free of ambiguity.
officership
Military professionals did not find the North American continent hospitable from the earliest settlement, as the travails of Miles Standish and John Smith attest. The low state of career officers had nothing to do with the requirement for their services, which the Indians and French kept at a high level. Little had changed by the end of the Revolution, as Hamiltonian Federalists learned when they tried to create an academy and cadre of professionals to train their "federal select militia."
The Navy had less difficulty finding a professional identity for its officers, since the occupation of mariner/ships officer had high status in a country that boasted a world-class merchant marine. Moreover, a Navy officer could show his commitment to the entrepreneurial seacoast culture by seeking prize-money like his privateering brethren and by his diplomatic efforts to expand American commerce abroad.
Army officers––except those who served as explorers, surveyors, and civil engineers––had little to offer the nation; even in wartime, they shared preferment with citizen-officers whose overall excellence and ability to recruit made them more valuable than regulars. Even the establishment of the Military Academy (1802) and Naval Academy (1845) did not advance the concept of special skill and public trust, for appointments to the academies soon became part of the political patronage system. Not until the post-Civil War period did academy graduates dominate the services, and then the Army had to accommodate officers whose volunteer wartime service drew them to a postwar career. Moreover, the larger society no longer ignored former wartime commanders (indeed, it elected some president of the nation), and it also rewarded a host of technicians, inventors, organizers, managers, and scientists who happened to wear uniforms.
The reform of officership in the U.S. Armed Forces largely came from within the officer corps itself and from officers who believed that peacetime education for wartime command defined military professionalism. Some of the officers' inspiration came from the debacle of the Civil War, some from foreign military practices, and some from the example of civilian professionals and businessmen.
By World War I, all the services had taken giant steps to establishing preparation for wartime command (or operational staff service) as the fundamental justification for military professionalism. The signs of reform were everywhere: in school systems for mid-career education, in the movement toward promotion by merit and board selection, by personal efficiency reporting, by the rotation through line and staff assignments. The giants of World War I and II emerged from this system and gave it its ultimate sanction. To their credit, the officers of the Army (Sherman, Upton, Schofield, Wood, Pershing, Marshall), Navy (Luce, Mahan, Sims, Pratt, Fullam, King), and Marine Corps (Barnett, Lejeune, Russell, Holcomb) who championed the professionalization of officership did so most often in the face of (at best) public apathy. They also persisted in the face of opposition from many of their fellow officers, who preferred to rely on their political contacts, bureaucratic expertise, and romantic notions of charismatic battlefield leadership. The career officer as "manager of state violence" owed little to civilian inspiration or assistance. As long as professionalization could be squared with access to officership based on education and performance and did not menace civilian control, political leaders accepted it.
The cold war, however, resurrected the dual definition of officership common in the nineteenth century, destroying the dominant identity of the officer-as-commander and rational planner of military operations. Officers explored space and the ocean depths, not just mountains and harbors; officers functioned as corporate managers and technicians in massive installations and nuclear laboratories, not railroads and gun factories; officers guided interservice and coalition commands and military assistance groups in foreign lands, not just negotiated with the Cheyennes and Fiji Islanders; officers moved freely throughout the national security bureaucracy rather than simply in and out of their service bureaus. In a sense, the power to serve the public good corrupted the core definition of officership, setting the stage for a collective malaise triggered by the Vietnam War. Since much of the crisis in professionalism was rooted in the changed values that the officer corps itself had encouraged, there should be little wonder that officers have preferred to carry on the redemptive or redefining process themselves rather than allow Congress, academic gurus, and the media to prescribe ill-suited cures for their unique diseases of the spirit. The general social pattern of professions reforming others but not themselves has little to recommend it.
operational and tactical doctrine
The general concepts and procedures that guide the employment of military forces in campaigns and battles emerged in the nineteenth century as the intellectual core of officership, an acquired mix of art and science. Unlike strategy, so dependent on transient political goals and subject to the whims of wartime leaders, operational and tactical doctrine required a beguiling mix of universal principles and situational adaptations that fused the capabilities of one's own forces and one's enemy as well as considered the physical environment in which those forces would meet one another. Moreover, operations and tactics demanded that a commander do something, not just think about it––a responsibility that required emotional and physical sturdiness, not just intellectual skill. In land warfare, battles moved from sequential concepts (the artillery fired, the infantry attacked or defended, the cavalry skirmished and then pursued) to the combination and integration of arms in simultaneous combat, complicated further by the advent of the airplane. At sea, single ship actions progressed to squadron, then fleet surface operations, then major naval campaigns that included submarines, fleet aviation, surface combatants, and amphibious forces. Fighting with allies in the world wars, in Korea, and in Vietnam further complicated the crafting and adjustment of doctrine, as did the introduction of the concept of deterrence based on the threat of nuclear weapons. The technical lethality of weapons in terms of the volume of fire such weapons could produce over ever-expanding distances presented additional problems to doctrinal reformers. Technological anxiety (will our weapons work as well as the enemy's?) reinforced organizational anxiety (will our system of command and logistics suffice when Murphy's Law replaces the current SOP?).
Operational and tactical reform in the U.S. Armed Forces has been largely the province of the officer corps, which has done a surprisingly good job in peacetime in changing the services' operational concepts. The old saw that the military refights the last war bears little reality to the process of adaptation, since much doctrine comes from a desire not to fight the last war again. Whether the reformed doctrine actually fits the next war is, of course, another matter, but the Armed Forces of the United States at least had the pleasure of fighting World War II almost precisely as they thought they would in terms of operational concepts, if not in terms of place and timing. Perhaps that experience was too satisfying.
Doctrinal reform has invariably created serious internal disputes within the officer corps of every service, a condition that makes intervention by outsiders especially unwelcome. Doctrinal adaptation is like a civil war, noteworthy for the high stakes and the intensity of commitment it spawns. Outside intervention may be important but is never fully welcomed, even by the winners. When doctrinal reform coincides with other types of reform, however important and well-intentioned, the effect on a service may be wrenching. The process is even more complicated when the doctrine requires interservice negotiation, in part because joint doctrine creates additional opportunities for extramilitary intervention. Thus, the development of air power doctrine in this century, especially when it became linked with nuclear weapons, proceeded with consistent messiness from the Billy Mitchell era through the "revolt of the admirals" in 1949 into the questions of control of helicopters, close air support squadrons, and military transports. Similar disputes characterhavized the question of special operations forces, whether they were Marine raiders in the Pacific, Ranger battalions in the European theater, or Special Forces detachments in Vietnam.
The importance of operational and tactical reform is seldom in question, but no intelligent military leader can regard it as a pleasant experience. The only more perilous situation is to remain wedded to the status quo and find that adaptation must be built on the burning wreckage of one's materiel and the bodies of one's comrades.
The history of the U.S. Armed Forces provides many examples of adaptation across the entire range of organizational, technological, social, professional-occupational, and operational concerns that have drawn reformers' interest. But reform has seldom been driven by concerns for military effectiveness alone. Eventually, reform, because of its political nature, may achieve legitimacy with the nation's political leadership, but it also carries a cost––a cost extracted in time, money, interservice harmony, and the full faith and confidence that should characterize civil-military relations. Military reform is much like the very nature of republican government itself. As Federalist Congressman Fisher Ames observed, an autocratic government is like a beautiful sailing ship, fast and steady in a fair breeze, but prone to floundering in foul weather. A republic is like a raft, ungainly, unsightly, and nearly uncontrollable even in calm waters. But it never sinks, even in a gale. Nevertheless, one's feet are always wet.
Ohio State University
Allan R. Millett (B.A., DePauw University; M.A., Ph.D., Ohio State University) is Professor of History and Director of the Program in International Security and Military Affairs, Mershon Center, at Ohio State University, Columbus. He is also a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. Dr. Millett is the author of four books on the U.S. Armed Forces, has most recently written For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States, 1607-1983 (1984)in collaboration with Dr. Petter Maslowski, and has contributed numerous articles to defense journals and other periodicals, including the Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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