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THE ARMY AND THE COMING

CONGRESS

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THE NEXT ARMY APPROPRIATION BILL ANALYZED A MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT
OF 500,000 MEN, TO CONSIST OF A STANDING ARMY OF 200,000 AND
A TRAINED VOLUNTEER RESERVE FORCE TO BE CALLED

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HE Administration is going to put before Congress in December the most radical military measures of a generation. The proposed legislation will be in the form of the annual Army and Navy appropriation bills, but the framers of each bill, in response to the nation-wide demand for preparedness, have given to them something of the character of emergency measures. They are emergency measures.

It is inevitable but unfortunate that such measures, of the gravest national moment, will be approached from some quarters in a spirit of narrow politics and sectionalism. This is a time for statesmanship and not for politics. And yet already the issue is being confused and misrepresented in efforts to turn its strong tides to personal or party profit. For such reasons the reluctance of the Administration to have the specific requirements of the Army and Navy bills generally advertised before their presentation to the next Congress may be appreciated.

When it comes to actual preparedness and questions of adequate defense, the case of the Army is much more difficult than that of the Navy. In the Navy we have a relatively high degree of defense generally acknowledged. We have the units in existence. We do not have to induce a new state of mind or create a new establishment. All we need do-though this is, indeed, a formidable undertaking is to expand what we have, to scale it higher in response to a demonstrable need. For either we need no Navy at all or we

need one which can protect at least one of our coasts for a period of two months.

But with the Army we must in the country at large recognize one fundamental truth which is already abundantly clear to the Army itself. Our present military establishment is of no practical value as a defense against any first class Power. If we are serious about adequate defense for the country, if the people really believe the Nation and its institutions worth defending, then the Army must be more than doubled in size, and military affairs in this country must be put on a new footing, acquire a new dignity and value in popular estimation.

The problem is not, shorn of its political aspects, a complex one. It is as simple as an example in elementary arithmetic. And standards to gauge it by, events and conditions to prove it, precedents, examples, warnings are to be found to-day all over the rest of the civilized world, in China as well as in France; in Belgium and Russia as well as in Germany, in Turkey, or in England.

For the purpose of national defense, as national defense has been defined in this war, we have no Army. If we would put the country into a condition of preparedness to defend itself we must start in now to make an Army adequate to its defense, for it will be too late, after a not impossible war, for us to begin. What does an adequate Army, an adequate military system, mean? The War Department has been devoting itself for the last six months to the answer to that question, and it thinks it has found an answer

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that will appeal to Congress and to the people as reasonable. It is not the answer that the Army believes in as a whole; it falls short of what military experts can demonstrate to be logical preparation for the partic national menaces from abroad agai which we ought to be on our guard. But it hits with a high degree of judgment that middle ground where our national needs and our national temperament meet.

A MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT OF 500,000 As the material of the bill shapes in October, roughly the guiding idea is this: The unit of change ought to be 500,000 men; that is to say, less than that is not a material difference from what we now have. More than that could not be profitably used in the present condition of the country, economically, politically, and otherwise. The military experts can easily prove that we need an Army of 1,000,000 men. They under-estimate the difficulty, in fact the impossibility, in our present civic and economic phases of preparedness of getting together and handling a body of this size. Its mere mobilization, concentration, and movement present problems which it will take us several years to master. The Germans have been at it for two generations and hold the formula now as one of their most valuable military secrets. We should squander billions of dollars and a good many lives in trying to make a million volunteers mobile. In doing so we should almost certainly be creating more of a national menace than a national defense. We have got to scale down our first measures of preparedness to our limitations as they actually are.

A STANDING ARMY OF 200,000

The War Department's idea of an increase in the standing Army always available is to adjust it to needs which are continuing and actual, on the continent and in our insular possessions, and by that is meant needs which are short of invasion by a first-class foreign Power. Two hundred thousand men in the regular establishment will satisfy these continuing, semi-constabulary needs. That number will not mean doubling the present military

appropriations, but at the very outset will the country stand paying approximately one fourth of its income for military purposes-with the Navy recommendations, a third of its income?

In approaching this whole question the framers of the bill are trying to adapt their advocacy of radical measures in the new legislation to the temper and characteristics of the country as they now are. We are not dealing with a Prussianized public opinion; we are not dealing even with a national state of mind like that of France, created and maintained by the constant imminence of the national peril. We are dealing with a comparatively inert, uninformed Americanism. The United States as a whole has to-day a healthy man's intolerance of a doctor or a doctor's prescription. A better figure would be that of a man who thinks himself to be entirely healthy but who, to the skilled eye of the specialist, is either tending toward, or actually suffering from, an unsuspected organic disorder.

The European war has been undeniably a kind of shock to our sense of immunity and security. With its ravished Belgium and its desolate Poland, its revelation of the weakness of the British polity, its examples of the united fortitude and efficiency of France and Germany, it has suddenly brought us next door to Europe. A new consciousness is awakening, a new state of mind is becoming evident with which, for the first time in two generations, it may be possible to accomplish something of a practical effect in the way of generally understood national defense.

Now the question is how to deal with. that growing state of consciousness. Compulsory universal service is one extreme: letting things go as they now are is the other extreme. In between somewhere lies the right answer. We must take it for granted that the object is to obtain the maximum of results with the minimum of expense in the way of money, time, and oratory. Therefore we must recognize that some remedies, however desirable or necessary they may appear from some points of view, are impossible of immediate or early realization. We hear, for example, a lot of advocacy of the Swiss system, which

is founded upon compulsory military instruction in all the educational institutions of the country. Consider what the adoption of this system would mean in this country. It means in the first place a Constitutional amendment-and Constitutional amendments in this country, without the actual imminence of foreign invasion or something equally compelling, take years in fruition. Another way of adopting either this Swiss system or some other Federal formula would be identical legislation in all the states conterminous with the Federal Government, an idea which is almost hopeless, as one confronts the towering clouds of vapor created by all kinds of argument and debate which would arise out of every state capitol in the land. Remember, this is a subject upon which prevail the most violent differences of opinion, fortified in selfishness, in prejudice, in politics, in religion, in emotion.

Consider what happens with a measure which has none of these drawbacks. Take the matter of negotiable paper or of uniform divorce laws, the first at least being a measure almost completely devoid of politics, or religion, or emotional considerations. Yet upon such a desirable measure we have never yet been able to get uniform interstate legislation. As for the matter of divorce, a man who is married in one state is a bachelor in another, and a woman who is respected in one state is considered disreputable in another.

It is all very well for your spellbinders to flip their fingers and enunciate panaceas: Swiss system, Australian system, Federal organization, universal service, etc.; but in endeavoring to accomplish something for the common welfare we have got to consider the existing laws of the land, the existing temper and prejudices of the people. In other words, we have got to understand what we have to work with.

Now just as a doctor connotes to the average healthy man, or the man who considers himself healthy, sickness and depression, and just as such a person lumps together the agency of remedy with the disease and hates them both, so a country like this is apt to look askance upon those who are now prescribing military preventive measures for our widespread but

unrealized disease of unpreparedness. Now put yourself in the place of the War Department and the Administration. Suppose you are yourself concerned with some loved one's health. You do not go out and get a quack with a glib remedy already prescribed. You do not put your faith in labels unless you are sure of what is in the bottle. You are apt to get some one who knows and understands the system of the patient and his history, and who will therefore adapt remedies to a familiar and particular diagnosis.

In going before the country this autumn with recommendations for legislation we can either (1) chill the whole thing, smother the flame just starting, or (2) we can warm it, kindle it. Why support a measure or measures which cannot be started for years? Such measures may be easier to define and advocate. They make a fine sound in the ear but they are apt to lead only to debate and smoke. Remember the spirit of the American people so often demonstrated in times past, self-centred, incredulous, independent; they will not believe until they have got to believe. But when once they believe they come with a rush. To advocate before the Sixtyfourth Congress measures so radical as to excite general opposition would be to kill popular interest in the whole subject of national defense.

WHAT CONGRESS WILL BE ASKED TO DO

The forthcoming legislation, therefore, will fall short of the theories of those who, like Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Gardner, or the younger officers of the General Staff, advocate compulsory measures or a very large standing Army. On the other hand, they are entirely opposed to the Bryan school of do-nothing pacifists. Hitting between these two extremes, the Army recommendations ought to appeal to the great body of public opinion which is not extreme and which is willing to welcome reasonable measures for national safety.

The War Department, therefore, will ask Congress to increase the regular establishment to about 200,000 men, and, distributed over the various arms of the service, this is not a very great increase. It will advocate the upkeeping of the Na

tional Guard as an excellent Federal asset, as a kind of Americanized Landwehr. It believes that it would be a mistake to try to develop the National Guard on its present lines of state control, for that would result merely in the creation of forty-eight distinct little armies of widely varying degrees of efficiency and availability. Every militiaman costs the state and national governments nearly twice as much as the regular enlisted man, and he is about half as useful. No sound military system could be founded on such shifting sands, but the existence of these units more closely affiliated by an energized instruction under General Staff direction would make of the various state militias an excellent Federal asset.

AN ANNUAL CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

How, then, leaving the National Guard out of direct consideration as part of the available Army establishment on its practical basis, as already defined, of 500,000, how then are we going to supply the deficit? By an act of Congress authorizing the President to call annually for a minimum of 100,000 volunteers, to serve for a period as yet undetermined-of weeks or months, and to be subject in time of national need to service with the colors for three years.

Such a system would constitute an 80 per cent. advance over what we have to day. It provides a sensible way to create a body of citizen soldiery of the right kind, intensively trained, familiar with the rudiments of military life, and adaptable to organization in large units. The plan would not necessitate anything in kind much more radical than the recent Plattsburg encampment. It would simply mean the nationalizing of that idea, which is much older than its successful operation at Plattsburg. It would mean simply providing the means annually wherewith. 100,000 or more American citizens at least could respond to the growing idea of a military responsibility in their citizenship. And every one of those men, like the 1,300 who came back from Plattsburg better men than they went, would become a radiating centre for the dissemination of wholesome military ideas. Every one of

them as he went back into his business world, his club, his church, or his local society would be an active agency in the educational process which must in this country precede anything like national conviction or advocacy of a new idea. Such seed would be bound to fall upon fallow ground.

TO TRAIN MORE OFFICERS

To direct this new United States Army a great many additional officers will, of course, become necessary. The War Department has planned for such an emergency. The existing plant at West Point will admit only of an additional 50 per cent. of cadets. This will be asked for and in addition some scheme will be de- ! vised whereby the military schools and the state-endowed colleges that have military clauses in their constitutions will be organized in such a manner as to more than supply the deficit.

In this matter of what it takes to make an officer the country needs education. The Army service schools must be enlarged and increased, for the highest type of coördination is necessary between the General Staff and subordinate officers in modern war. In the German or French armies a five- or ten-word order is sufficient to animate an army corps into perfectly reciprocating action, whereas under our present system pages upon pages of orders could not accomplish the same result because of the lack of generally understood terms and training.

Nor can we rely merely upon service schools to provide this training. They do give a technical experience but we have perhaps more than a proportionate share of that already. The officers in our Army need men more than they do maps. One of the practical ideas in the new Army recommendations will be that officers shall have more service with their troops and that these troops shall be manœuvred and associated in much larger bodies organized by territorial divisions.

If the 100,000 volunteers placed at the President's call by act of Congress are not annually forthcoming, that will not be the Government's fault nor the Army's fault. The responsibility will be placed

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