ABOUT
The United States Military
The Continental Army was created on 14 June 1775 by the Continental
Congress as a unified army for the colonies to fight Great Britain,
with George Washington appointed as its commander. The army was
initially led by men who had served in the British Army or colonial
militias and who brought much of British military heritage with
them. As the Revolutionary War progressed, French aid, resources,
and military thinking influenced the new army. A number of European
soldiers came on their own to help, such as Friedrich Wilhelm von
Steuben, who taught the army Prussian tactics and organizational
skills. The army fought numerous pitched battles and in the South
1780-81 sometimes used the Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics,
hitting where the enemy was weakest, to wear down the British
forces. Washington led victories against the British at Trenton and
Princeton, but lost a series of battles around New York City in 1776
and Philadelphia in 1777.
The War of 1812, the second and last American war against Britain,
was less successful than the Revolution had been. An invasion of
Canada failed, and U.S. troops were unable to stop the British from
burning the new capital of Washington, D.C.. However, the Regular
Army, under Generals Winfield Scott and Jacob Brown, proved they
were professional and capable of defeating a British army in the
Niagara campaign of 1814. Two weeks after a treaty was signed,
Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans.
However this had little effect; as per the treaty both sides
returned to the status quo. Between 1815 and 1860, a spirit of
Manifest Destiny was common in the U.S., and as settlers moved west
the U.S. Army engaged in a long series of skirmishes and battles
with Native Americans that the settlers uprooted. The U.S. Army also
fought and won the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which was a
defining event for both countries. The U.S. victory resulted in
acquisition of territory that eventually became all or parts of the
states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and
New Mexico. The Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the
American Civil War The Civil War was the most costly war for the
U.S. in terms of casualties. After most states in the South seceded
to form the Confederate States of America, CSA troops opened fire on
the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, starting
the war. For the first two years Confederate forces solidly defeated
the U.S. Army (with a few exceptions), but after the decisive
battles of Gettysburg in the east and Vicksburg in the west,
combined with superior industrial might and numbers, Union troops
fought a brutal campaign through Confederate territory and forced
the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at
Appomatox Courthouse and the Confederate Army of the Carolinas at
Dunham Station in April 1865. The war remains the deadliest conflict
in American history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers.
Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43
died in the war, including 6% in the North and 18% in the South.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. Army fought a long battle with
Native Americans, who resisted U.S. expansion into the center of the
continent. By the 1890s the U.S. saw itself as a potential
international player. U.S. victories in the Spanish-American War and
the controversial and less well known Philippine-American War, as
well as U.S. intervention in Latin America and the Boxer Rebellion,
gained America more land and power.
Assault on a German bunker, France, circa 1918 Starting in 1910, the
army began acquiring fixed-wing aircraft. In 1910, Mexico was having
a civil war, peasant rebels fighting government soldiers. The army
was deployed to American towns near the border to ensure safety to
lives and property. In 1916, Pancho Villa, a major rebel leader,
attacked Columbus, New Mexico, prompting a U.S. intervention in
Mexico until 7 February 1917. They fought the rebels and the Mexican
federal troops until 1918. The United States joined World War I in
1917 on the side of Britain, France, Russia, Italy and other allies.
U.S. troops were sent to the front and were involved in the push
that finally broke through the German lines. With the armistice in
November 1918, the army once again decreased its forces. The U.S.
joined World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On
the European front, U.S. Army troops formed a significant portion of
the forces that captured North Africa and Sicily. On D-Day and in
the subsequent liberation of Europe and defeat of Nazi Germany,
millions of U.S. Army troops played a central role. In the Pacific,
army soldiers participated alongside U.S. Marines in capturing the
Pacific Islands from Japanese control. Following the Axis surrenders
in May (Germany) and August (Japan) of 1945, army troops were
deployed to Japan and Germany to occupy the two defeated nations.
Two years after World War II, the Army Air Forces separated from the
army to become the United States Air Force in September 1947 after
decades of attempting to separate. Also, in 1948 the army was
desegregated. The end of the Second World War set the stage for the
East-West confrontation known as the Cold War. With the outbreak of
the Korean War, concerns over the defense of Western Europe rose.
Two corps, V and VII, were reactivated under Seventh United States
Army in 1950 and American strength in Europe rose from one division
to four. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops remained stationed in
West Germany, with others in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom, until the 1990s in anticipation of a possible Soviet
attack. Soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division man a machine gun
during the Korean War During the Cold War, American troops and their
allies fought Communist forces in Korea and Vietnam. The Korean War
began in 1950, when the Soviets walked out of a U.N. Security
meeting, removing their possible veto. Under a United Nations
umbrella, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops fought to prevent the
takeover of South Korea by North Korea, and later, to invade the
northern nation. After repeated advances and retreats by both sides,
and the PRC People's Volunteer Army's entry into the war,
the Korean Armistice Agreement returned the peninsula to the status
quo in 1953. The Vietnam War is often regarded as a low point for
the army due to the use of drafted personnel, the unpopularity of
the war with the American public, and frustrating restrictions
placed on the military by American political leaders. While American
forces had been stationed in the Republic of Vietnam since 1959, in
intelligence & advising/training roles, they did not deploy in large
numbers until 1965, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. American
forces effectively established and maintained control of the
“traditional” battlefield, however they struggled to counter the
guerrilla hit and run tactics of the communist Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese Army. On a tactical level, American soldiers (and
the U.S. military as a whole) did not lose a sizable battle. An
infantry patrol moves up to assault the last Viet Cong position at
Dak To, South Vietnam after an attempted overrun of the artillery
position by the Viet Cong during Operation Hawthorne During the
1960s the Department of Defense continued to scrutinize the reserve
forces and to question the number of divisions and brigades as well
as the redundancy of maintaining two reserve components, the Army
National Guard and the Army Reserve. In 1967 Secretary of Defense
McNamara decided that 15 combat divisions in the Army National Guard
were unnecessary and cut the number to 8 divisions (1 mechanized
infantry, 2 armored, and 5 infantry), but increased the number of
brigades from 7 to 18 (1 airborne, 1 armored, 2 mechanized infantry,
and 14 infantry). The loss of the divisions did not set well with
the states. Their objections included the inadequate maneuver
element mix for those that remained and the end to the practice of
rotating divisional commands among the states that supported them.
Under the proposal, the remaining division commanders were to reside
in the state of the division base. No reduction, however, in total
Army National Guard strength was to take place, which convinced the
governors to accept the plan. The states reorganized their forces
accordingly between 1 December 1967 and 1 May 1968. The Total Force
Policy was adopted by Chief of Staff of the Army General Creighton
Abrams in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and involves treating the
three components of the army- the Regular Army, the Army National
Guard and the Army Reserve as a single force. Believing that no U.S.
president should be able to take the United States (and more
specifically the U.S. Army) to war without the support of the
American people, General Abrams intertwined the structure of the
three components of the army in such a way as to make extended
operations impossible, without the involvement of both the Army
National Guard and the Army Reserve. The 1980s was mostly a decade
of reorganization. The army converted to an all-volunteer force with
greater emphasis on training and technology. The Goldwater-Nichols
Act of 1986 created unified combatant commands bringing the army
together with the other four military services under unified,
geographically organized command structures. The army also played a
role in the invasions of Grenada in 1983 (Operation Urgent Fury) and
Panama in 1989 (Operation Just Cause). By 1989 Germany was nearing
reunification and the Cold War was coming to a close. Army
leadership reacted by starting to plan for a reduction in strength.
By November 1989 Pentagon briefer were laying out plans to reduce
army end strength by 23%, from 750,000 to 580,000. [15] A number of
incentives such as early retirement were used. In 1990 Iraq invaded
its smaller neighbor, Kuwait, and U.S. land forces, quickly deployed
to assure the protection of Saudi Arabia. In January 1991 Operation
Desert Storm commenced, a U.S.-led coalition which deployed over
500,000 troops, the bulk of them from U.S. Army formations, to drive
out Iraqi forces. The campaign ended in total victory, as Western
coalition forces routed the Iraqi Army, organized along Soviet
lines, in just one hundred hours. After Desert Storm, the army did
not see major combat operations for the remainder of the 1990s but
did participate in a number of peacekeeping activities . In 1990 the
Department of Defense issued guidance for “rebalancing” after a
review of the Total Force Policy, but in 2004, Air War College
scholars concluded the guidance would reverse the Total Force Policy
which is an “essential ingredient to the successful application of
military force.”
U.S. Army and Iraqi Army soldiers patrol borders in Iraq, in
November 2009 After the September 11 attacks, and as part of the
Global War on Terror, U.S. and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in
2001, displacing the Taliban government. The U.S. Army led the
combined U.S. and allied Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq
in 2003. In the following years the mission changed from conflict
between regular militarizes to counter insurgency, resulting in the
deaths of more than 4,000 U.S service members (as of March 2008) and
injuries to thousands more. and 23,813 insurgents were killed in
Iraq between 2003-2011. The lack of stability in the theater of
operations has led to longer deployments for Regular Army as well as
Reserve and Guard troops.[citation needed] The army's chief
modernization plan was the FCS program. Many systems were canceled
and the remaining were swept into the BCT modernization
program.[citation needed]
The task of organizing the U.S. Army commenced in 1775. In the first
one hundred years of its existence, the United States Army was
maintained as a small peacetime force to man permanent forts and
perform other non-wartime duties such as engineering and
construction works. During times of war, the U.S. Army was augmented
by the much larger United States Volunteers which were raised
independently by various state governments. States also maintained
full-time militias which could also be called into the service of
the army.
By the twentieth century, the U.S. Army had mobilized the U.S.
Volunteers on four separate occasions during each of the major wars
of the nineteenth century. During World War I, the “National Army”
was organized to fight the conflict, replacing the concept of U.S.
Volunteers. It was demobilized at the end of World War I, and was
replaced by the Regular Army, the Organized Reserve Corps, and the
State Militias. In the 1920s and 1930s, the “career” soldiers were
known as the “Regular Army” with the “Enlisted Reserve Corps” and
“Officer Reserve Corps” augmented to fill vacancies when needed. In
1941, the “Army of the United States” was founded to fight World War
II. The Regular Army, Army of the United States, the National Guard,
and Officer/Enlisted Reserve Corps (ORC and ERC) existed
simultaneously. After World War II, the ORC and ERC were combined
into the United States Army Reserve. The Army of the United States
was re-established for the Korean War and Vietnam War and was
demobilized upon the suspension of the draft. Currently, the army is
divided into the Regular Army, the Army Reserve, and the Army
National Guard. The army is also divided into major branches such as
Air Defense Artillery, Infantry, Aviation, Signal Corps, Corps of
Engineers, and Armor. Before 1903 members of the National Guard were
considered state soldiers unless federalized (i.e., activated) by
the President. Since the Militia Act of 1903 all National Guard
soldiers have held dual status: as National Guardsmen under the
authority of the governor of their state or territory and, when
activated, as a reserve of the U.S. Army under the authority of the
President. Since the adoption of the total force policy, in the
aftermath of the Vietnam War, reserve component soldiers have taken
a more active role in U.S. military operations. For example, Reserve
and Guard units took part in the Gulf War, peacekeeping in Kosovo,
Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
