9 - Brazil

The history of Brazil begins with the arrival of the first indigenous peoples, thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering land bridge into Alaska and then moving south.

The European first to explore Brazil was Pedro Álvares Cabral on April 22, 1500 under the sponsorship of Portugal. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Brazil was a colony of Portugal. On September 7, 1822, the country declared its independence from Portugal and became a constitutional monarchy, the Empire of Brazil. A military coup in 1889 established a republican government. The country has seen a dictatorship (1930–1934 and 1937–1945) and a period of military rule (1964–1985).

The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) (Kyūjitai: 大日本帝國陸軍, Shinjitai: 大日本帝国陸軍, Romaji: Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun), or literally Army of the Empire of Greater Japan was the official ground based armed force of Imperial Japan from 1871 to 1945. 

It was controlled by the Imperial Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of War, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor of Japan as supreme commander of the army and the navy. Later an Inspectorate General of Military (Army) Aviation, became the third agency with oversight over the army. During wartime or national emergencies, the nominal command functions of the emperor would be centralized in an Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ), an ad-hoc body consisting of the chief and vice chief of the Army General Staff, the minister of war, the chief and vice chief of the Naval General Staff, the inspector general of military aviation, and the inspector general of military training.

The German Army (German: Deutsches Heer, Heer pronounced [ˈheːɐ̯] ( listen)) is the land component of the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany. Following the disbanding of the Wehrmacht after World War II, it was re-established in 1955 as the Bundesheer, part of the newly formed West German Bundeswehr along with the Navy and the Air Force. In the aftermath of the German reunification of 1990, the National People's Army of the former German Democratic Republic was integrated into the (West) German Army.

A unified German Army dates from 1871, and the unification of Germany under the leadership of Prussia. From 1871 to 1919 the title Kaiserlich Deutsches Heer or Imperial German Army was the official name of the army. This was the title the army carried during the First World War. From 1921 to 1935 under the Weimar Republic the army's title was the Reichsheer or National Army. From 1935 to 1945 the title was Heer (Army), part of the Wehrmacht, the name of Germany's armed forces under the Third Reich. From 1938, the Heer was first involved in the occupation of Czechoslovakia and then the successor events that led to the Second World War. The Heer effectively ceased to exist in 1945. Germany was split into two regions from 1945 and in the East the East German Army was eventually created. In the West the reborn Deutsches Heer or German Army became part of the West German Bundeswehr. The two armies faced each other across the Inner German Border, respectively part of the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Since 1990 however the reunified army has been involved in peacekeeping operations in Somalia, and since 2002, fighting with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

Traditions can be traced between the Imperial German Army, the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht Heer. However after the Second World War the architects of the new Bundeswehr Heer deliberately denied all linkages between the Nazi-era army and the new army of the Federal Republic of Germany. The only permitted historical antecedants for today's Bundeswehr Heer are the Prussian military reformers and the servicemen who carried on an underground resistance against Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

A Military Department was created in the Supreme Government of the East India Company at Kolkata in the year 1776, having the main function to sift and record orders relating to the Army issued by various Departments of the Government of the East India Company.

With the Charter Act of 1833, the Secretariat of the Government of the East India Company was reorganized into four Departments, including a Military Department. The army in the Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay & Madras functioned as respective Presidency Army until April 1895, when the Presidency Armies were unified into a single Indian Army. For administrative convenience, it was divided into four commands at that point of time, namely Punjab (including the North West Frontier), Bengal, Madras (including Burma) and Bombay (including Sind, Quetta and Aden).

The British Indian Army was a critical force in the primacy of the British Empire in both India, as well as across the world. Besides maintaining the internal security of the British Raj, the Army fought in theaters around the world - Anglo-Burmese Wars, First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars, First, Second and Third Anglo-Afghan Wars, First and Second Opium Wars in China, Abyssinia, Boxer Rebellion in China.
First World War
Indian Army personnel during Operation Crusader in Egypt, 1941.
Main article: Indian Army during World War I

In the 20th century, the British Indian Army was a crucial adjunct to the British forces in both the World Wars.

1.3 million Indian soldiers served in World War I (1914–1918) for the Allies after the United Kingdom made vague promises of self-governance to the Indian National Congress for its support. Britain reneged on its promises after the war, following which the Indian Independence movement gained strength. 74,187 Indian troops were killed or missing in action in the war.

The "Indianisation" of the British Indian Army began with the formation of the Prince of Wales Royal Indian Military College at Dehradun in March 1912 with the purpose of providing education to the scions of aristocratic and well to do Indian families and to prepare selected Indian boys for admission into the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Indian officers given a King's commission after passing out were posted to one of the eight units selected for Indianisation. Political pressure due to the slow pace of Indianisation, just 69 officers being commissioned between 1918 and 1932, led to the formation of the Indian Military Academy in 1932 and greater numbers of officers of Indian origin being commissioned.
Second World War
Main article: Indian Army during World War II

In World War II Indian soldiers fought for the Allies. In 1939, British officials had no plan for expansion and training of Indian forces, which comprised about 130,000 men. (In addition there were 44,000 men in British units in India in 1939.) Their mission was internal security and defense against a possible Russian threat through Afghanistan. As the war progressed, the size and role of the Indian Army expanded dramatically, and troops were sent to battle fronts as soon as possible. The most serious problem was lack of equipment.

Indian units served in Burma, where in 1944-45 five Indian divisions were engaged along with one British and three African divisions. Even larger numbers operated in the Middle East. Some 87,000 Indian soldiers died in the war. On the opposing side, an Indian National Army was formed under Japanese control, but had little effect on the war.

The land forces of imperial Russia before 1917 and of the new state of Russia after 1992 were known as the Russian army; from 1918 to 1946 the land forces of Soviet Russia and (from January 1924) the USSR were officially the ‘Workers' and Peasants' Red Army’ (RKKA), usually abbreviated to the ‘Red Army’, and from 1946 until the dissolution of the Union in December 1991, the ‘Soviet army’. Because of the strong element of continuity throughout the period, this entry covers them all. Although always variable in quality and at times cursed by poor leadership, rigid tactics, lack of initiative, and occasionally indiscipline which led to atrocities, the Russian and Soviet armies often surprised their critics, and those who underestimated them—including Napoleon and Hitler—paid a terrible price. They have also made remarkable contributions to the development or adaptation of military technology, of tactics, operational concepts, and the military art throughout the last three centuries. As the German general and military theorist Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven said of the imperial army on its exit from WW I, it remained, ‘to the end a redoubtable adversary’. Winston Churchill, no Russophile, paid his great ally the highest compliment: ‘The guts of the German army’, he said in 1944, ‘have been largely torn out by Russian valour and generalship’.

The Russian army was born under the ‘Tartar yoke’, the two-and-a-half centuries of Mongol suzerainty in Russia from 1240 to 1480. Under the command of Genghis Khan's grandson, Batu, with Subedei as COS, the Mongols seized the heart of what is now European Russia in two swift campaigns (1237-8 and 1240), deliberately choosing to attack in winter because the rivers and ground would be frozen. The Mongols exercised power through Russian princes, who were responsible for raising troops. Russian princes were therefore part of the Mongol military system and could hardly fail to be impressed by it. In 1380 Prince Dmitry of the Don defeated the Tartar Khan Mamay at Kulikovo field, with an army raised on the Mongol conscription system and using Mongol tactics. In 1382 the Mongols retaliated, capturing and burning Moscow which was defended, for the first time in Russia, by artillery. The Mongol influence persisted after the end of the Tartar yoke. Giles Fletcher, Elizabeth I's ambassador to Russia in 1588-9, wrote that the Russians were at war with ‘the Tartars’ nearly every year and that they were the neighbours ‘with whom they have greatest dealings and intercourse, both in peace and war’. The Mongol legacy can be traced to this century, for example, in the lava—a Cossack formation, an open-order cavalry attack. Lava is from the Mongol word lau, which expresses the idea of convergence. It was employed against the French in 1812 and in 1912 was adopted as the standard formation for Russian cavalry, and was widely used in the Russian civil war. So a Mongol formation with a Mongol name survived for 700 years, right into the Soviet period.

The Russians' great emphasis on artillery, in which the Russian army has always had a tradition of excellence, may also date back to fighting the Mongols. Russian writers commented that artillery was the one thing that really frightened the Mongols, and it was the only weapons system that gave the Russians the crucial advantage of range over their powerful composite bows.

The Asiatic component of the Russian army and its experience of campaigns in the Caucasus and central Asia, combined with its schizophrenic position on the edge of Europe, sometimes playing a European role, sometimes not, gave it many characteristics which it shares with the British army.

Under Ivan ‘the Terrible’ professional units of gunners (pushkary) and musketeers (streltsy) were formed, although the Russian army remained a predominantly cavalry force on the oriental model until the 17th century. Then Russia began to look to the west, a process which began in earnest under Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich in 1645-76. After the Thirty Years War and the British civil wars there were plenty of mercenaries for whom Russia offered both safety from reprisals and opportunity, including Scotsmen like Gen Patrick Gordon, who entered Russian service in 1661.

Russia exerted a fascination on western intellectuals which has continued to this day. John Milton and Daniel Defoe both wrote about it. Milton noted that the Russians fought ‘without order, nor willingly give battail but by stealth or ambush; of cold and hard Diet marvellously patient’, an assessment with which the Wehrmacht in 1941-5 would probably have agreed. An early 18th-century assessment of the Russian fleet similarly stressed Russian cunning and their expertise at ‘a handsome defence, ever a Russian's masterpiece’.

The process of westernization accelerated under Peter ‘the Great’, who created a regular army on the western model, based on a system of conscription. The Russians learned by their mistakes, losing to the Swedes at Narva in 1700 but winning at Poltava in 1709. The army regulations (Ustav voinskiy) of 1716 established a regular army of 112, 000 men, comprising 70, 000 infantry, 38, 000 cavalry, and 4, 000 artillerymen.

By the mid-18th century the Russian army had expanded to 331, 000, ready for Russia's appearance as a major player in European politics in the Seven Years War. At the battle of Kunersdorf on 12 August 1759 a Russian-Austrian army under Russian Gen Saltykov defeated Frederick ‘the Great’, and the following year a Russian cavalry raid reached Berlin. The Russians introduced excellent new artillery including the ‘unicorn’ howitzer and at the battle of Paltsig (modern Pałcł in Poland) used a form of indirect fire. Russia was now a great European power, and would remain so. In 1763 the Russian general staff was formed. During this period the main European powers had moved towards characteristic uniform colours, though with many exceptions, and the Russians adopted a very practical dark green.

Russia's double-headed eagle continued to face east—or south—as well as west, however. There were a total of nine Russo-Turkish wars (1676-81, 1686-1700, 1710-13, 1735-9, 1768-74, 1787-91, 1806-12, 1828-9, and 1877-8), not counting the Crimean war and WW I, the first of which began against Turkey and the second of which included large-scale action against Turkey on the Caucasus front. The fifth and sixth Russo-Turkish wars provided a hard school for many 18th- and early 19th-century Russian commanders, including Rumyantsev, Suvorov, and Kutuzov.

A key figure in the development of the Russian army was Potemkin, who established a Russian trend for practical, comfortable, but stylish uniforms. Potemkin's easygoing uniforms were discarded under mad Tsar Paul, who ruled 1796-1801 and ordered a return to Prussian-style drill and uniforms and pigtails. The Russian army which goose-stepped into battle at Austerlitz in 1805 was still run on the lines laid down by Paul. After the defeat at Austerlitz the Russians discarded the Prussian system and began training their troops to conduct aimed fire and make use of natural cover. In 1809 a new 0.7 inch musket was introduced. The war ministry had also been founded in 1802 (from 1802-12 it was called the ‘Ministry of Land Forces’) and officers began undertaking field training and staff rides. As a result, the Russian army was much better schooled and equipped to take the field against Napoleon in 1812.

During the ‘long peace’ which followed the Napoleonic wars the European Russian army ossified, reflecting the backward state of the economy. However, in the Caucasus the Russians were fighting a vicious war against local tribes (1817-64) including the great guerrilla leader Shamyl, an experience similar to that of the British in India or the US army in the west at the same time. Furthermore the 1848 revolutions gave the Russian army an opportunity to deploy the first force ever sent on operations (as opposed to on exercises) by railway. The ‘Eastern war’, as the Crimean war was known in Russia, showed the backwardness of the Russian army, still equipped with smooth-bore muskets, compared with the French and British who had the new Minié rifle. Their inferiority was even more apparent at sea, where the Russian wooden fleet declined to give battle to the iron-framed, steam-powered vessels of Britain and France. However, for the Russians the Crimean peninsula (where Turks and Piedmontese were also employed) was a minor theatre: the main potential theatre was in central Europe and they also fought a war with the Turks in the Caucasus with Shamyl at their back.

It was obvious that what would later be called a ‘revolution in military affairs’ was taking place, and the Russians determined to do something about it. The liberal war minister Gen Dmitry Milyutin set in train a series of military reforms between 1860 and 1870. Most remarkable was the invention of the system of Military Districts (MDs), from 1863, which survived into the Soviet period. Russia was so vast—it stretched from Poland more than halfway round the world to Alaska, which was not sold to the USA until 1867—that the only way to defend it was to make each MD able to fight a war on its own. This happened twice in the Soviet period, though in both cases a single MD was not quite up to it. The Leningrad MD fought the war with Finland in 1939-40 and the Turkestan MD was responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Milyutin's reforms included examination of the movement of troops by rail and water (1864) and of Russia's strategic railways (1866). Both were chaired by Gen Mikhail Ivanin, a veteran of the central Asian expedition to Khiva in 1839-40 and an expert on the Mongols. In 1874 Russia also introduced a modern system of universal short service conscription, to replace the older system where certain peasants had been called up for long periods of service.

In 1877 Russia was drawn into war with Turkey in support of her Orthodox and Slavic kinsmen in Serbia and Bulgaria. Volunteers had been going to the Balkans for some years before. The Russian army, reformed by Milyutin, performed brilliantly. In the battle of Avliyar-Aladja, they used the telegraph to co-ordinate an attack on a wide front, and pushed Lt Gen Yuri Gurko's forward detachment through the little-used Khainkoi Pass through the Balkans to take the main Shipka Pass in the rear, and then to cut Turkish communications. It was the prototype of the Great Patriotic war ‘forward detachment’ and ‘mobile group’, and of the ‘operational manoeuvre group’ which caused NATO analysts such alarm in the 1980s. The Russian army stopped, in part to avoid clashing with the British who did not want them to seize Istanbul.

It was also in the 1870s that the Russian army began its extraordinarily rigorous and academic exploration of the likely character of future war. More than the other great European powers, they took the lessons of the American civil war seriously, particularly with regard to cavalry ‘raids’, known as Americanskiy reyd.

The Russian army which went to war in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 was, in spite of the common impression, a good one. The Russians were well equipped, especially with artillery, and fought well. There were two problems: Gen Kuropatkin, the former war minister, tried to bring about a single decisive battle, in an era when battlefronts had extended to make this impossible, and the Russian army had to be supplied along an incomplete single-track railway over about 4, 000 miles (6, 436 km). In spite of that, Kuropatkin was optimistic that the Russians could win, until the 1905 revolution in European Russia forced the government to end the war.

The Russians were similarly unlucky in 1914. Between 1908 and 1915 the Russian army was reorganized under the CGS, then war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. He responded correctly to the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war, but his reforms were not complete when war started. During this period a group of bright young officers, who would later join the Red Army, including Aleksandr Neznamov, began working on a unified military doctrine. The Russians mobilized faster than the Germans expected, and won their first battle, at Gumbinen. They had prepared for a short, sharp, mobile war—the wrong war. As in the west, they rapidly experienced a shell shortage. A number of western journalists were with the Russian army and their reports indicate they were generally impressed. Despite defeat at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the Russians held the Germans and regularly bested the Austrians. The Brusilov offensive in June 1916, timed to coincide with the British Somme offensive, was brilliantly planned and came close to achieving a breakthrough. The Russians attempted a final great offensive, the ‘Kerensky offensive’ of summer 1917, but it failed. Contrary to Lenin's statement that the Russian army ‘voted for peace with its feet’, the evidence indicates that many Russian units stood their ground until the November revolution (see Russian Revolutions). Freytag-Loringhoven was right. The imperial Russian army remained, to the end, a redoubtable adversary.

Some officers, including the brilliant Gen Mikhail Alekseyev, joined the ‘White’ forces, opposed to the revolution, in the Russian civil war that followed. But some 50, 000 imperial officers—often those from Moscow or Petrograd—joined the new Red Army, founded by a decree of 28 January 1918 since it became obvious that the revolution would have to defend itself. By the end of April 1918 the Red Army was 196, 000 strong. By autumn 1920, at the end of the main phase of the civil war, it was 5.5 million. Although led at the highest level by Trotsky, the mechanics of fighting were left to ex-imperial Russian army officers under political supervision—the origin of the commissar system—while imperial army NCOs formed the next generation of senior officers. Very senior officers like Brusilov, the CGS during WW I, Nikolay Mikhnevich, and Maj Gen Aleksandr Svechin moved into teaching positions; more junior officers like Tukhachevskiy and Boris Shaposhnikov rapidly assumed senior command and staff positions. It was the latter officers who were mainly killed in the great purge of 1937, allowing the tsarist NCOs like Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovskiy to take command and become marshals during the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941-5. Shaposhnikov, a tsarist cavalry officer who had completed the General Staff Academy in 1910, survived, uniquely, to be CGS at the beginning of the 1941-5 war and a Deputy People's Commissar of Defence. Stalin said it was because Shaposhnikov did everything he was told.

The continuity between the imperial army and the Red Army was underplayed, though acknowledged, in the Soviet period. Neznamov, who had worked on military doctrine before WW I, now began publishing and during the 1920s the Red Army developed its understanding of the operational level of war. An enormous effort went into military education, to provide new working-class commanders with the knowledge and education needed to handle large military formations, and to enlist them into the communist party.

During 1924-5 the Frunze military reforms took place, leading to the creation of a ‘mixed’ system with a small professional army at the core of a territorial militia which could be called up in war. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Red Army was responsible for some of the most original and far-reaching developments in military theory on the conduct of total war and the development of deep battle, especially the work of Aleksandr Svechin, Triandafillov, and Tukhachevskiy. By 1935 it was clear that technological advances made it essential to have a ‘high quality mass army’—an ambition the USSR struggled to achieve, probably bankrupting itself in the process.

In 1937 the Soviet armed forces, including the army, were devastated by Stalin's great purge. The army lost 3 out of 5 marshals, 3 out of 5 ‘army commanders first class’ (generals), all ten second class, 50 out of 57 corps commanders, 154 out of 186 divisional commanders, and 401 out of 456 colonels. Although these figures were not published until 1987, foreign observers at the time knew enough of what had happened to believe the Red Army had been decapitated and would prove easy meat in a future war. The way the Red Army looked in the invasions of eastern Poland in 1939, the Baltic States in 1940, and its performance in the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war suggested they might be right. By this time the Red Army was receiving some remarkable new equipment but appeared unable to use it.

BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 that began the war on the eastern front, was the most devastating attack in the entire history of war. The Red Army, supported and sometimes disciplined by the troops of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), fought stubbornly, and inflicted the first great defeats on the German armies at Moscow and Stalingrad. The conceptual studies of the inter-war years bore fruit in vast operations of staggering scale and scope. The old tsarist badges and insignia were reintroduced, and victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan brought glory to Russian arms. Although it was very variable in quality, sometimes guilty of atrocities, and maintained in battle by a combination of patriotism, courage, and coercion, the Red Army's reputation soared. In 1946 it was renamed the Soviet Army.

The ‘revolution in military affairs’ brought about by the nuclear weapon and the ballistic missile to carry it led to the creation of a new armed service in 1959—the Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN), avoiding the awkward problem which faced western governments in deciding whether to give the new weapons to the army, navy, air force, or all three. A strategic air defence force (PVO) had been created in 1941, operating both aircraft and anti-aircraft guns and missiles, creating a structure with five armed services rather than the traditional three. The army was last in the queue for recruits—the best went to the high-tech services. We will never know how it would have performed against NATO but it would have been formidable. The Soviets made mistakes in Afghanistan in 1979-89, but learned from experience. The lack of a tradition of doctrine for operations short of major war—it had focused totally on large-scale armoured and nuclear warfare—proved a major disadvantage.

On 8 December 1991 the USSR broke up and shortly afterwards the new Russian army was formed. Its uniforms, badges, and insignia were little changed apart from the reintroduction of the double-headed eagle, facing east and west. The financial crisis of the 1990s meant that soldiers and officers went unpaid, and it was difficult to attract recruits. In 1996 President Yeltsin announced to intention to end conscription by 2000—this was hastily pushed back to 2005 and then 2015. At the time of publication, Russia cannot afford professional armed forces, though it would like them. The army's performance in Chechnya was variable, but it was ultimately successful. Its most professional troops—the airborne forces—have performed very creditably in Bosnia. The Russian army will no doubt rise from its present crisis as it has before. It will always be a ‘redoubtable adversary’. Or, preferably, as it was to America and Britain in much of two world wars, a mighty ally and friend.

In the closing year of the American independence war, Washington wrote his views of a proper military (land forces) policy for the new United States of America. Washington's ‘Sentiments on a Peace Establishment’, completed in May 1783, not only reflected the experiences of the colonial period and the war for independence, but also identified the enduring factors that would shape American armies well into the 20th century. From his experience in two North American wars, Washington did not believe that Americans would ever tolerate the cost or political threat of a large regular army raised and commanded by a strong central government. ‘Altho' a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of the Country, yet a few Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably necessary. Fortunately for us our relative situation requires but few.’ Washington knew that the state governors and assemblies jealously guarded their control of the militia, the citizen-armies of white male homeowners-voters-taxpayers that had defended their villages and farms since the early 17th century. He also knew that the state forces and his own Continental Army had great difficulty using any sort of conscription system. Such drafts usually meant opening service to ‘the lower sort’ and offering them rewards of land, money, and political rights.

Washington also recognized that militia-based land forces had one military function: the defence of localities and states from direct attack, whether from the sea by Europeans or from Native American warriors, often abetted by Europeans. With a vast new nation to defend, thinly populated away from the Atlantic seaboard, no conceivable national army could protect the western settlers by itself. Even if Congress provided some sort of army to police and protect the national domain, most conspicuously the Northwest Territory beyond the Appalachians and north of the Ohio river, this army would be too small to replace the militia. The difficulty with any militia force was that it included the males who formed the backbone of America's agricultural population, the largest and most important part of its free labour force. Thus, state authorities—let alone a national officer—were unlikely to call out the militia for greater than a 30-60-day period of compulsory service; expeditions that left a state and/or remained in the field for a longer time would have to be raised as volunteers under either national or state authority. These volunteers would insist, like the militia, in selecting their officers (meaning gubernatorial appointment) and establishing their own regulations. They also presented the same problems as the militia in terms of discipline and effectiveness.

Like Washington, the other military experts and political leaders of the post-independence period agreed in principle that the USA still faced threats of internal unrest and foreign invasion and the nation's economic health and political liberties demanded a mixed force of long-service volunteer ‘regulars’ called the US army and state-controlled militia organized for emergency ‘calling forth’ by national and state authorities. Like many other aspects of the American federal system, embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the power over the use of military force and the creation of military institutions rested in the hands of many levels of political sovereignty and (in one interpretation of the Second Amendment) in the hands of citizens themselves, who retained the ‘right to bear arms’. This ‘right’ in Great Britain had rapidly disappeared in the face of laws designed to disarm Celtic rebels and disgruntled rural mobs. While the national government had the power to form armies (granted to the Congress in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution) and command these armies through the President as C-in-C (Article 2, Section 2), the states bore the principal responsibility for maintaining their own defence forces as they saw fit.

As the land forces developed in the Federalist and Jeffersonian periods (1789-1816), the US army and the militia forces of the states and federal territories exhibited the very strengths and weaknesses that Washington and other nationalists predicted in the 1780s. The US army performed four major functions: expanded the western frontier; manned coastal fortifications with heavy artillery around major harbours or estuaries; developed and produced military ordnance like cannon and muskets; and provided officer-experts in exploration, cartography, and civil engineering, all essential to westward settlement. The territorial and state militias had the duty of mounting an immediate response to invasion, whether by a British army or a Shawnee war party, and of suppressing rebellion, whether it came from slaves, a new immigrant urban working class, or unhappy farmers. Any major conflict, dignified by Congress as a ‘war’, would probably force an expansion of the US army, the formation of volunteer units under national and state authority, and the compulsory call-up of the militia for federal (limited to 90 days a year) or state service. The Militia Act of 1792 expressed this concept, amplified by further legislation in 1808 that promised that the states could share an annual appropriation of $200, 000 for the purchase of muskets if the states could prove they had an organized militia.

The War of 1812 demonstrated the best and worst of the characteristics of America's armies. The regular US army was too small and too dispersed to deter Great Britain; it was too ill-equipped and poorly commanded to either wage offensive operations or even hold its own posts along the Canadian border in 1812. It could, however, expand from 6, 000 to 33, 000 by 1815, and it performed on a few occasions up to European standards against British regulars along the Canadian frontier in 1813 and 1814. Yet the regular army alone could not meet all the military challenges. State governments, usually those most directly threatened, could and did form volunteer units to take the field. Some of these units of infantry, cavalry, mounted infantry, and artillery reached ‘professional’ standards, but they seldom served for longer than six to twelve months. Their effectiveness almost always depended on the charismatic leadership of a local warrior-hero like Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, Richard H. Johnson of Kentucky, or Samuel Smith of Maryland. At one time or another almost 500, 000 citizen-soldiers served in the 1812-15 war, and they contributed to some notable successes like the Creek campaign of 1813 and the defences of Plattsburg, Baltimore, and New Orleans in 1814-15. They also suffered their share of defeats, the sack of Washington (1814) being the most dramatic.

For the rest of the 19th century, American land-force policy endured despite fundamental changes in the conduct of war like the development of breech-loading ordnance and steam-powered transportation as well as the institutional growth in Europe of professionalized officer corps and general staffs. The regular army and the state forces continued to perform their traditional missions with relative effectiveness; their only major failure in maintaining the authority of the national government occurred in 1860-1, and became the American civil war.

The Mexican war had shown how flexible the system might be, especially adaptive to the political realities of a war that divided citizens on party and regional lines. The regiments and batteries of the US army increased in strength through bounty-driven volunteering from 7, 400 to 42, 400; this wartime expansion included the formation of ten brand-new regiments, rich in officer commissions. Nineteen out of 29 state governments provided 61, 000 men in 27 volunteer regiments, enlisted for one year's service or more. The War Department later concluded that 12, 600 militia had also served under involuntary call-up, but these Texas and Louisiana units were probably volunteers in state service and served for very short periods. Some entered federal service to cross state or national boundaries as the Texas Rangers did under Taylor in the army in northern Mexico or the Mormon battalion and New Mexico militia who participated in Gen Alexander W. Doniphan's expedition into north-central Mexico. In retrospect, the regular regiments fought and won the war's major battles, three in Texas and northern Mexico under Taylor in 1846 and six under Scott in the campaign that eventually captured Mexico City. In only one battle (Buena Vista, February 1847) did state volunteers bear the brunt of battle. The regular army also endured the preponderance of combat casualties, 1, 100 of 1, 700 dead and 2, 745 of 4, 102 wounded in action. The war demonstrated—as the War of 1812 had not—that the USA could bring most of its wartime army to bear upon the enemy, even in an overseas expedition.

In terms of land-force policy, the civil war proved little except that mass American armies could kill and maim each other by the hundreds of thousands over a four-year period. Despite some creative myth-making during and after the war about the superior generalship of regular officers (West Point graduates like Lee, Grant, and Sherman) and the staunch service of small contingents of US army ‘regulars’—really wartime enlistees—the war from start to finish was a bloodletting inflicted by citizen-armies upon each other. Of the four million officers and men who served in either the Union or Confederate armies, fewer than 100, 000 had seen service in the regular US army, fought in the war with Mexico as volunteers, or participated in pre-1860 military training as volunteer militia, a category of citizen-soldier that had grown after the 1812-15 war. These units protected or attacked urban ethnic groups, provided ceremonial units in state capitols, satisfied the martial urges of upper middle-class gentlemen, and trained expatriate revolutionaries who wanted to free Ireland, Hungary, and various states in Germany. If one counts every man who had a uniform and took part in military training on a regular basis in 1860 (the US army and the volunteer militia), the total land forces of the USA on the eve of its bloodiest war (both in absolute and population-proportional terms) might have been 56, 000.

A handful of Union army officers, incorporated back into the post-war US army, saw two major lessons in the American civil war: the wartime army like the peacetime army must be run by professional officers, embodied into a general staff and devoted to wartime contingency planning; efficient and timely wartime mobilization required a federal reserve force untainted by state politics that would enlarge the regular US army quickly and provide new units if necessary. After 1871 the German model attracted great interest, but the Swiss system of universal military training also had its attractions. In the meantime, the post-war army went back to its coast defence and frontier forts, numbering only 37, 200 by 1870 and 27, 300 in 1890.

After a decade of war-weariness and sectional strife, the states rebuilt their volunteer state militias (although compulsory service remained a legal option) in the 1870s, in part as a response to racial and labour unrest. In 1890 the volunteer militia, which had largely adopted the title National Guard, may have numbered 100, 000 in units that drilled once a week for a few hours and sometimes went to the field for a week in the summer, both training periods without pay. (States paid Guardsmen only when called to state duty, usually for riot control and disaster relief.) The national government did little to support the Guard other than transfer and sell arms and military equipment under existing federal law.

Some army and Guard officers thought that greater federal subsidies would improve the Guard as a first-line reserve for wartime mobilization, and some states successfully lobbied to have regular officers assigned as Guard advisers and to get federal funds to build armouries. More wartime soldiers, particularly junior officers, might come from the ‘Land Grant’ universities and colleges, established by the Morrill Act of 1862, which required that any state receiving Morrill Act land sales profits had to offer military training for student-volunteers at its new Land Grant university. By the 1890s the students who had received such training might have numbered as many as 100, 000.

Before various military reforms could be established, the USA fought the Spanish-American war, which led to the Philippines insurrection. Waged well beyond the continental USA, the two wars revealed the limitations of the mixed land-force system. Although the War Department wanted to fight Spain with a 64, 000-man all-regular army, supplemented if necessary with federal volunteers, Congress responded to National Guard champions and dictated that state volunteers (under their own officers) be allowed to enter federal service first. The only exceptions were three federal volunteer cavalry regiments, an engineer brigade, some specialist troops, and ten regiments of white and black troops that were supposed to be proof against yellow fever and malaria (‘the Immunes’). The 130 state volunteer regiments (200, 000 officers and men) usually included no more than one-quarter of its soldiers with any sort of prior service, but it was the state governors who commissioned the officers, about 40 for every 1, 000-man regiment. Fewer than half of the state volunteers deployed to the Caribbean or the Philippines; their disease deaths in poorly organized camps in the USA (around 4, 000, compared with fewer than 300 combat deaths) dramatized the fact that the war department had not prepared its support departments and services for wartime expansion.

In the less than twenty years before the USA entered WW I, the military policy of the nation underwent dramatic, but unfinished reform. One factor was the growing appreciation of the impact of new military technology on warfare; in this short period the US army and the National Guard converted to modern magazine rifles, experimented with machine guns, began to use automobiles and trucks, formed aviation units, modernized their artillery, adopted field telephones and primitive radios, and developed motor-powered field engineering. Another development was the awareness that the management of a modern army required extensive pre-war planning and officer education; by 1917 the US army had an officer education system in place to provide European-style commanders and staff officers for large field forces. The greatest challenge was to create a politically legitimate system for raising a wartime army. Just defending the new overseas possessions (Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippines) required far larger regular forces, and the active army reached a peacetime strength of over 100, 000 by 1905, supplemented by Filipino regulars (the Philippine Scouts) and National Guard units in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. To back up this force the War Department and Congress again turned to the National Guard.

In collaboration with the War Department, Congress attempted to reform the National Guard with two major laws, the Militia Acts of 1903 and 1908, and began the ‘nationalization’ of the National Guard as an unlimited federal reserve force, completed by the end of the century. The lever of reform would be federal appropriations for armouries, weapons and equipment, advisers, access to special education and training courses for officers and men, and pay for annual summer field training. The only omitted subsidy was drill pay, and this became a federal responsibility in 1916. The difficulty was some legal uncertainty over whether the federal government could call the National Guard to compulsory service for expeditions abroad for unlimited (‘duration of the emergency’) periods of service. When the War Department examined the issue in 1912, it received an advisory opinion from the US Attorney-General that the federalized National Guard could not be sent abroad unless its members volunteered for such service as individuals. This problem forced the War Department to examine again the feasibility of establishing a federal reserve force, and in 1912 Congress approved a provision that regular enlisted men might volunteer for a reserve corps. The number of soldiers who chose this option would not have formed a company in 1916.

Concerned about the possibility of a war with Mexico after the outbreak of revolution in 1910 and anxious about its security in a world now disordered by WW I, Congress in 1916 passed a National Defence Act. This legislation reflected conflicting sentiments: a generalized interest in ‘preparedness’, the Wilsonian pledge to maintain neutrality yet pressure the Allies and the Central Powers into a compromise peace, and a fear that the USA would soon intervene in the European war. The National Defence Act represented the first peacetime effort to deal with organizing wartime armies and to link those forces to the management of military procurement through a Council of National Defence or ‘war cabinet’ whose authority might extend to economic regulation. The legislation recognized the importance of a ready US army, expanding it to 175, 000 in 111 regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. The National Guard (planned at 400, 000) would become the first source of trained reserve manpower in tactical units, unleashed from potential legal problems by the requirement that any Guardsman receiving federal money would have to take a federal oath that obligated him to overseas service for such a period as the Congress might determine. The mobilization of the Guard for service on the Mexican border proved that Guardsmen would accept this obligation.

Although the Guard lobby and Congress could block any move to create a federal reserve force of units, they conceded that a wartime army would be likely to require the formation of other citizen-soldiers (volunteers and conscripts) into wartime divisions (roughly calculated at around 20, 000 officers and men) and much-enlarged army service and support units. The National Defence Act of 1916 focused on identifying and training officers in peacetime for wartime service either as combat leaders or staff specialists; the legislation created an Officer Reserve Corps (subdivided by combat arms and staff departments) that would come from graduates of university-based university cadet programmes, the summer training camps organized and run by the army since 1912, and from already-licensed professionals like doctors, lawyers, dentists, and engineers. Another unstated assumption was that the War Department would for the first time create officer-training courses in wartime that would supply combat arms leaders to the expanded army. This concept, which assumed the possibility of forming an army of two million, did not reflect any plan to intervene in the European war, but the possibility of a later war with Japan or some future European enemy.

American entry in WW I in April 1917 tested every aspect of the nation's land-forces policy and found it barely satisfactory. Upon entry into the war, the Wilson administration and Congress accepted with great reluctance the reality that the war would be won or lost on the western front. To influence that outcome the USA would have to form a massive American Expeditionary Force (AEF), which eventually numbered over two million. The only way to conserve on shipping and speed up the American reinforcement was to arm the AEF with French and British weapons and equipment. Such adjustments cut almost a year (from both German and American estimates) from the time required to form an American army in France. In the crisis the US government turned to wartime conscription and Congress passed a ‘Selective Service’ Act in May 1918. This law first stirred volunteering for the regular US army and federalized National Guard in 1917 and later in the same year provided a foundation for the creation of a ‘National Army’ of draftees. The legitimacy of the system rested in the decentralization and civilization of the induction process; the locus of deciding who served and who received exemptions and deferments rested in 4, 648 local boards staffed by civilians, not the despised military officers used by the Union and Confederacy in the civil war. Voluntary enrolment for the draft produced more than 24 million names and fewer than 1 million avoiders. By war's end two-thirds of America's soldiers (2.8 million) had entered the army through the draft.

The performance of the AEF left a set of ambiguous lessons for the post-war review of land-force policy. The AEF had found plenty of brave junior officers and enlisted men in its ranks; both regulars and temporary officers (Guardsmen, reserves, and graduates of the officer-candidate schools) had performed with unexpected expertise, a credit to their own intelligence and the AEF school system. Most of the AEF's problems on the battlefield stemmed from poor staff work, primitive transportation logistics, and the inadequate use of supporting arms. No doubt some of these problems might have been eased had the AEF not existed but had been treated like British Commonwealth and French colonial divisions; that is, amalgamated into a larger national army. Such a solution was not congruent with Wilson's diplomacy nor Pershing's national and institutional pride. The AEF, which suffered most of its 55, 000 dead in a span of only fifteen weeks in 1918, had struggled until the war's last week. If less traumatized than their civil-war forebears, army officers returned from France full of ideas on how to modernize and organize American land forces.

Land-force policy and army politics felt the impact of new forms of warfare: the employment of military aircraft of various types for a wide range of missions. The Air Service AEF, an organizational stepchild of the Signal Corps, performed almost every modern airwar mission except strategic bombardment. Army aviators, flying French and British aircraft, protected their own forces, raided German airbases and installations, bombed transportation systems, took photographs, spotted artillery targets, carried messages, and strafed and bombed front-line positions. At the war's end the Air Service numbered 200, 000 officers and men, one-quarter of them in Europe. One group of army aviators, rallying around the charismatic AEF air combat leader Mitchell, argued that the army's aviation force should be an independent service with strategic bombing its primary mission; other air and ground officers believed that army aviation should be integrated with the ground forces in order to insure rapid, decisive battlefield victory. Although they did not use the term ‘air-land battle’, that is exactly what these moderate reformers envisioned. After 1918 any attempt at military reform invariably had to cope with the contentious issue of the future of army aviation.

Reflecting its understanding of the lessons of WW I, Congress passed the National Defence Act of 1920 on the assumption that the mixed armies it created in 1916 and 1917 needed little change. The regular army and National Guard still would provide infantry-artillery divisions (each about 25, 000 soldiers in 1920) while the Officers Reserve Corps would train peacetime officers for an expanded wartime army. One new concept in the 1920 Act was the creation of army Reserve divisions manned in only cadre status (1, 000 or fewer officers and NCOs) ; these federal reservists would prepare for their wartime role of training divisions of draftees for combat. The continental USA was divided into nine corps areas whose commanding generals would train one US army division, two National Guard Divisions, and three army Reserve cadre divisions. All of the divisions would be organized and equipped the same (at least on paper), which allowed National Guard divisions to form tank companies and aviation squadrons, the latter units eventually becoming the Air National Guard in 1947. The Congress intended that the regular army and the National Guard would number about 715, 000 officers and men in peacetime while all elements of the new ‘Army of the United States’ would be used as the foundation for a wartime army of 5-7 million. Congressional economizing, deepened by the economic depression of the 1930s, reduced the actual strength of both armies by 1939 to only 380, 000.

The failure to man and train the Army of the United States (AUS) in the 1930s reflected two major problems. The first was the lack of equipment modernization, which the war department and combat arms commanders recognized; equipment shortages (and the growing obsolescence of the WW I weapons) meant that much of the army could not be combat-ready for at least two years. One option was to limit investment in new weapons like tanks; another was to develop prototypes of new weapons (like the 105 mm howitzer and the M-1 semi-automatic rifle) but not field them. The army pursued better mobility, especially for its service and supply units, through comprehensive motorization, but the willy-nilly purchase of trucks and cars made automotive maintenance difficult and costly, which made Congress unhappy.

The other problem was the new popularity of the Army Air Corps, established as an equal arm in 1920 and then as a super-arm with special allowances to develop aircraft, train pilots, build airbases, and manage its own affairs, all assured in the Air Corps Act of 1926. The Air Corps may have dominated one-quarter of all army spending in the 1930s, and it enjoyed close and co-operative relations with American commercial aviation. In 1931 the army and navy agreed that the Air Corps had an important role in coast defence, which justified the highest priority development of the XB-17, a long-range bomber. In 1935 the emerging bomber force had its squadrons unified under the commanding general, GHQ Air Force. This change meant that much of the Air Corps no longer supported the ground army (the armies and corps), but prepared to wage war by strategic bombardment, smashing the will and industrial might of any future enemy by direct attack on his cities and economic assets.

Concerned with the lack of readiness of all elements of the AUS, Gen Malin Craig, the COS, decided to focus his scarce resources on portions of the US army and the National Guard; after 1935 the army would train and equip a 400, 000-man field army named the Initial Protective Force. Equipment shortages restricted the training of this grouping of ‘minuteman’ divisions; Craig estimated that he needed an additional $4 billion to arm and equip the force. This sum was eight times the army's entire budget in 1935.

The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland in 1939 did not change the army except to accelerate some procurement and modernization plans. When the War Department tried to put its plan for more urgent procurement into effect, the Industrial Mobilisation Plan, the Congress rejected the plea for army modernization. The fall of France in 1940 created a new sense of crisis, and the Congress approved the federalization of the National Guard and the enactment of a new Selective Service Act to draft men for peacetime military training. The fundamental concern was to deter Japan from using German successes to seize the European colonial empires in South-east Asia and the Philippines.

The War Department general staff drafted the ‘Victory Program’ of 1941, a blueprint for the creation of a wartime army of 8.8 million officers and men, a force (as planned) that would produce a ground force of 213 divisions, about half of them mechanized or motorized, and an air force of 195 groups, half of them bombers. In the same summer the Air Corps became the Army Air Forces (USAAF), whose operational forces would be assigned to a theatre commander, not a ground forces general. The Commanding General, USAAF, would be the DCOS of the army, answerable only to the COS, US army. Two years later the army's authoritative doctrinal manual on the conduct of operations stated that army aviation had a co-equal role with the ground forces in winning wars. The USAAF planners in 1941 also drafted their version of an air campaign against Germany; this war of strategic bombardment would ensure air superiority and crush the industry that supplied the Axis ground forces. None of these hopes would materialize completely or in quite the way the planners imagined, but the plans represented a dramatic shift away from massing resources in a large ground army to focusing on an élite, technologically advanced, and capital-intensive air force in order to spare lives in conventional ground battles.

The AUS met its greatest test in the two-front struggle with the Axis in WW II. The AUS split into three functional groupings: Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces (USAAF), and Army Service Forces (ASF). In terms of numbers and training quality of personnel, the Army Ground Forces took second place to the USAAF Air Forces and ASF; of the 11 million soldiers who served in WW II, only one-third served in the ground forces, principally the 89 divisions formed and deployed abroad. The USAAF absorbed 2.5 million army airmen, and the ASF, faced with global transportation and base-building challenges, grew to three million officers and men. Early in the war army COS George Marshall pledged that the army would produce the best soldiers, armed with the best weapons, in the world. This goal proved to be beyond the army's means. The massive investment of money and quality manpower in the USAAF remains controversial, but it is hard to imagine the army fighting the Wehrmacht in Europe without the benefits of its strategic bombing campaign and the direct support of tactical aviation. In quantitative terms the army directed two-thirds of its combat power against Germany and Italy and one-third against Japan.

The demobilization after WW II and the subsequent development of Cold War military challenges posed by the USSR in central Europe brought more changes to the army. First, it lost almost all its pilots and aircraft (and the guarantee of close air support) to the US Air Force (USAF) in the National Security Act of 1947. By 1949 its principal civilian official, the Secretary of War, had become the Secretary of the Army, subordinated to the Secretary of Defence and stripped of cabinet membership. The army COS became a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, eventually (1986) subordinated to a powerful Chairman invested with special access to the Secretary of Defence and the President. Fundamentally organized and equipped for a mechanized war with the USSR as part of the NATO collective defence alliance, the army, nevertheless, fought two extended ground wars in Asia, neither of which brought it much public acclaim. Instead the wars in Korea and Vietnam used up lives, morale, money for continued modernization, and a good deal of the public sympathy given the army in WW II. The most positive benefit of the two wars was the re-emergence of army aviation as a helicopter force for airmobile warfare.

The Cold War army retained much of its WW II organizational character with an active force that varied between 500, 000 and 1.6 million officers and men formed into between ten and twenty divisions, reinforced with corps troops and separate brigades. The army Reserve and the army National Guard shared the role of providing deployable units with the Reserve stressing service and support units and the Guard combat units, most of which shrank from divisions to brigades by the 1990s. Both reserve components provided units and individuals for the expanded wartime armies of the Korean and Vietnam eras, although the compulsory mobilization of the Vietnam war did not occur until 1968, too late to influence the course of the war. The Korean war mobilization, on the other hand, rebuilt a strategic reserve in the USA, provided veterans for combat service in Korea, in Germany in 1951-2, and allowed the creation of the Seventh Army. The Gulf war also required the army to mobilize Reserves and Guardsmen to strengthen the US Third Army, principally with artillery and support units. Of the 381, 000 soldiers who fought Iraq, 134, 300 male and female soldiers came to the war from federalized reserve units. The subsequent reduction of the active army in the 1990s had one happy benefit, the release of experienced soldiers to reserve units and the equipping of these units with first-line weapons and equipment.

The army also grappled with several manning changes that changed its character. None of the changes came without organizational stress. One fact of life was that the Cold War ground forces could not be manned in sufficient strength without peacetime conscription, enacted in 1948 and continued until 1973. This army of true volunteers, coerced volunteers, and conscripts meant a high turnover, heavy training load, and an irreducible minority of ‘summer soldiers’. The army also tried to balance its emphasis on ready forces, especially in Germany and Korea, with the maintenance of a vast training establishment designed for wartime expansion. By its own admission it retained too many bases, stored too much equipment, supported officer commissioning programmes that could not be justified on cost grounds, and created an active duty officer corps that lacked cohesion and common values. Many army ‘warriors’ sought refuge in élite units: rangers, special forces, attack helicopter squadrons, parts of the armoured forces, and technically advanced artillery and air defence units. The creation of an all-volunteer force in the 1980s and 1990s helped build ‘one army’ in the functional sense, but other factors brought stress from other directions.

One way the army had always justified its existence was to argue that it served as an employer of the American underclass and an agency of assimilation for immigrants, dispossessed farmers, and unemployed, unskilled workers. After WW II this social function, which was real if difficult, received a stern test. First, conscription and (later) the high wages of the volunteer army brought young men into the army with few skills, unfinished education, and no taste for authority and discipline. The drug use of the 1960s and 1970s (pandemic in the army) reflected a rootless youth culture that made training difficult.