Weakness of the US Army - Essay Example

14 November 2007 U.S. Army During the world wars, the U. S. army experienced slow development caused by political and economic factors. After the WWI, the entire U.S. Regular Army numbered less than 135,000 men, spread out in small detachments throughout the country. No permanent combat organizations larger than individual regiments existed (no brigades or divisions), and those regiments that did exist on paper were woefully undermanned and ill-equipped. Historians underline that the main factors that slowed development were inadequate patterns of training established during the WWI, inadequate structure of the Army, and economic crisis (the Great Depression). Following Black (2004, 206) it was World War I that set the pattern for the most important future operations of the United States Army. The Superior Board consequently advocated retaining the four-regiment division and urged that it be reinforced with a large assortment of heavy supporting units in artillery and the division train. The relative immobility of the big square division, the board reasoned, accorded with certain intractable facts of modern war: that the division always attacks frontally, that it attacks in a severely constricted zone of action, and that accordingly it has little occasion for maneuver. The Superior Board insisted that with the First World War setting the pattern for the army's major future combats, the essential principle shaping the army ought to be power, not mobility. The Congresses and chief executives in the 1920s and 1930s prevented the design of the National Defense Act from attaining fruition. The statute authorized a regular army of 280,000 officers and men. Congressional appropriations failed to maintain any such level. The actual strength of the army was by 1922, 147,335; by 1932, 134,024. By 1939 there had been a gradual increase to 188,565. As a result of fiscal trimming, regular army formations became largely skeletonized after all (Black 234). Yet the few formations that were kept at an approximation of full strength and readiness remained those most likely to be involved in small wars reminiscent of the old Indian campaigns--particularly the troops along the Mexican border. MacArthur's thinking not only limited the size of tanks, but also did much to kill one of the army's few promising ventures toward preparing for a possible return from small-scale colonial wars to European war (Sweeney 145). The choice of the small wars army, akin to the American army of the Indian-fighting past, as the basis upon which to build the post-1919 force was a choice for mobility rather than power as the central principle of the army (Sweeney 148). Late in the First World War, however, there had emerged a new potential for combining mobility and power, for designing military formations that would emphasize neither principle to the debilitation of the other, but would harmonize both (Sweeney 148). The weakness of the Army and military strategy was lack of training and 'old fashioned design' of the army. The most vigorous army chief of staff in the years following World War General Douglas MacArthur, reinforced this emphasis on a mobile army preparing for small colonial and border wars. When he began his tour as chief of staff in 1930, MacArthur found that despite the absence of prospects for another war of mass armies, his planners were busily at work on mobilization schedules for the mustering in of citizen-soldiers to wage a hypothetical grand-scale war (Sweeney 151). He turned the mobilization planners instead to designing an Immediate Readiness Force, to be drawn from the regular army for dispatch to colonial or Western Hemisphere trouble zones (Sweeney154). The concept of a light, fast-moving army tailored to wage war not against European mass armies but against elusive, highly mobile opponents emerged also, with a particularly conspicuous effect upon the subsequent combat capacities of the army in World War II, in the restriction of the weight of American tanks to 15 tons. Any heavier tank would have exceeded the limit of 15 tons placed by the War Department on the standard medium pontoon bridge, as well as the weight limits of most American highway bridges of the 1920s. This headquarters concentrated its efforts on fostering the case for an altogether independent air force by advancing the idea that air power could be an independent weapon able to win wars on its own. The other weakness was that MacArthur attempted to create a people's army on the Swiss model in a setting where the cultural and political prerequisites of the Swiss citizen-soldiery were scarcely to be found (Sweeney 152). The American army of the 1920s and 1930s was an army designed and deployed primarily to fight small wars. Psychologically as well as organizationally, it was an extension of the Indian-fighting constabulary that the army had been through the great bulk of it history, with the momentous but brief exceptions of 18611865 and 1917 - 1918 (Black 211). In its strategic conceptions, on the other hand, the army believed that victory in a major war must be achieved through the application of superior, overwhelming power against the enemy in battle (Between World Wars 2007). The strategic conceptions of the army were nurtured in particular by its professional school system, which had always looked to European military experience for guidance, even while the Indian wars lasted. These strategic conceptions demanded an army whose essence was power (Sweeney 146). Another factor which influenced the development of the Army was the Great Depression. Unforeseen and unexpected, inexplicable and inexorable, the Great Depression was a traumatic experience for many of the men and women of the 1930s and exercised a profound influence on the generation that lived through it. In its duration and magnitude, it was infinitely more severe than any other episode of "hard times" in American national life and was unquestionably the dominant force molding the nation's history during the long decade reaching from mid-1929 through 1940 (Sweeney 146). The depression brought great hardship and suffering to millions of Americans. It also created a political and social atmosphere fertile for major changes across the entire range of economic, political, and social institutions and policies. The depression made a strong impact on people's everyday lives because so many suffered from economic hardship and insecurity. The majority of Americans escaped actual unemployment or loss of farm or home, but all felt their lives shaped by the depression to some degree because they lived in fear that it might directly engulf them too (Black 208). The proposed shift in divisional structure from square to triangular, the First Army, under General Hugh A. Drum, conducted the most ambitious effort toward large-scale maneuvers seen in the army since the First World War (Black 209). The defending BLUE corps was much smaller than the army but featured mobility, including a mechanized cavalry brigade in addition to an infantry division and a separate infantry brigade(Between World Wars 2007). His criticism of the army for insufficiently appreciating the merits of sustained combat power nevertheless pointed toward flaws that in prolonged battle would become apparent in triangular infantry divisions and in American armored divisions as well. Drum dissent from reorganization plans indicated that on the eve of World War II the tensions between mobility and power--in a historic sense, between the army's Indian-fighting past and its worldpower future--had not been resolved. It was fortunate that behind the United States Army, already partially prepared for wartime mobilization by the army's planning during the interwar years, lay so vast a national reservoir of sheer material strength (Black 212). 2. Guadalcanal was an immense battle: at sea, in the air, and most certainly on land. It was at this improbable place, an island in the southern Solomons chain, that the Americans and Japanese first slugged it out toe to toe in all three elements. The bitter struggle resulted in the loss of 1,200 aircraft, 49 ships, and as many as 35,000 American and Japanese lives. Although the issue was often in doubt, the Americans finally won. Guadalcanal (Smith 28) The main weakness of the US army was lack of navy and air forces enabled the Allied forces to win. For instance, "Admiral Ghormley's naval forces were weaker than those of the Japanese. Total American naval strength in the South Pacific included three aircraft carriers, one battleship, six cruisers, and eighteen destroyers, organized into three carrier task forces under Admiral Fletcher's command" (Miller 82). Whether he realized it or not, Fletcher was responding to this dictate when he treated the operation as a raid. It was incumbent upon him to exercise control of the sea, as he alone possessed the means of enforcement. But his initial superiority would diminish rapidly as the Japanese, with more numerous carriers, reached the scene. Their bases were close at hand; Fletcher's base was Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles away. He had seen U.S. carriers sunk in battle and was loath to risk our last carriers in the Pacific in action against a greatly superior force. Bombardment shells were not available, and the cruisers had little or none of the common ammunition we had expected to use (Smith 30). Armor-piercing projectiles would have been almost totally ineffective against earthen beach defenses. The gunfire was rapid and accurate, and it was a morale-building spectacle for embarked Marines. The U.S. Navy even lacked adequate charts of the region. But the news that Japan was constructing an airstrip on Guadalcanal clinched that island's fate as the target of the American initiative. With air power based at Guadalcanal, the Japanese could control the skies over the crucial shipping lanes to Australia and could support a further military advance to the southeast. From the outset, it was characterized by makeshift and make-do, even at the level of command structure, which was already distorted by the thespian presence of Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific. Much criticism fell upon Fletcher, whose withdrawal had precipitated Turner's conference, removing Crutchley from command and his heavy cruiser from the battle line at a crucial moment. Moreover, Fletcher, fleeing south to safety during the night, was out of range to pursue Mikawa's force up the Slot the next day. Fletcher would fight one more battle, but his controversial departure on the evening of August 8 shadowed his reputation, and by the end of the month he was relieved of command. As for Captain Bode, his despondency over his sorry role on that devastating night may well have contributed to his later decision to take his own life. Yet for all the ruination that Mikawa's tornado had visited upon the U.S. Navy, he had in fact failed to reach his objective: the still-unloaded transports lying off Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Like Nagumo at Pearl Harbor, his own special case of victory disease inclined him to clasp the prize of his effortless triumph without gathering the final fruits of victory by smashing the supply ships and thus breaking the back of the American invasion. And overshadowing the entire operation was the simultaneous and much larger enterprise in North Africa, which severely constrained Admiral King's ability to reinforce Guadalcanal, especially with critical air power (Smith 31). November 3, 1942, the fighting on distant Guadalcanal was locked in stalemate. The transports bearing American troops to North Africa were still at sea. At home, all was bustle and confusion, the inevitable effects of a crash mobilization program that had uprooted millions of people but had so far produced more aggravation and griping than tanks and bullets. The Pacific was a peculiarly alien place for American servicemen, and an achingly lonely one too. Most of the fighting took place in the tropics, home to exotic diseases like dengue fever and filariasis, a lymphatic infection (Frank 25). Malaria was so endemic throughout the Pacific islands that troops on the ground were put on a compulsory regimen of Atabrine, a drug of dubious efficacy which the men resisted because it jaundiced the skin and was rumored to cause insanity and impotence. For the moment, impotence was in any case a small worry, since there were few available women, as evidenced by the fact that servicemen in the Pacific had markedly lower rates of venereal disease, the traditional soldier's scourge, than did those in Europe (Frank 92). The main weaknesses of the strategic planning took their roots in inadequate planning and political decisions had made after the WWI. Prewar American planning had contemplated only defensive action in the Pacific. But the Pearl Harbor attack, followed by fabulous luck at Midway and hard-won success a Guadalcanal, not to mention the flow of guns and ships from American factories, eventually shaped a pivot on which Admiral King had swung from the anticipated holding action against Japan and gone on the offensive. Following Frank, the Pacific war was a war of distances measured culturally as well as geographically. Each combatant, Japan and the United States alike, saw its adversary through a distorting lens laminated from historically accumulated layers of ignorance, arrogance, prejudice, and loathing. As more machines of war poured off American assembly lines and more men marched out of the training camps, the United States was poised as 1944 began not only to launch Overlord in Europe but at the same time to undertake two distinct offensive operations across the immense reaches of the Pacific. Following Smith (2000, 83), unlike their comrades in Europe, who typically fought long campaigns against modern, mechanized German adversaries, fighting usually at rifle-shot-length and beyond, the American soldiers and marines in the Pacific experienced a war of isolation, boredom, and disease, punctuated by long ocean crossings and brief bursts of combat, much of it in harrowing hand-to-hand struggle with poorly outfitted but ferociously motivated Japanese Imperial soldiers. Works Cited 1. Black, J. Rethinking Military History Routledge; 1 edition, 2004. 2. Between World Wars. 2007. 3. Frank, R. Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle. New York: Random House, 1990 4. Miller, J. The US Army in the WWII: Guadalcanal: the First Offensive. N.d. 2007. http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/amh/amh-19.htm 5. Smith, Michael T. Bloody Ridge: The Battle That Saved Guadalcanal. New York: Pocket, 2000. 6. Sweeney, J.K. A Handbook of American Military History: From the Revolutionary War to the Present niversity of Nebraska Press; 2Rev Ed edition, 2006. Read More