CHAPTER XX

THE LESSONS OF OUR PAST WARS

HE various wars waged by the United States from

TH

the Revolution down to, and including, the Philippine War have been characterised by certain conspicuous blunders from a military standpoint. At the outbreak of hostilities the Government has found itself seriously embarrassed for the ensuing reasons:

First: The Regular Army has invariably been too small to cope with the situation in such a manner as to give reasonable assurance of success.

Second: Never once has the Army been properly organized, nor has it been so constituted that, when war was recognized to be inevitable, it could be automatically expanded to the requisite strength.

Third: No proper reserves have ever existed from which could be drawn the trained men necessary to raise the Regular Army to war strength.

Fourth In consequence of a total lack of such reserves, the Army has almost invariably been compelled to accept such recruits as offered themselves. These recruits have, as a rule, been deficient in training and therefore below the standard of the soldiers already in the Regular service. Not only has the requisite number been rarely obtained but, in proportion as they have been incorporated into the Army, their inferiority has necessarily diminished in value of the Army as a fighting force until sufficient training could be given them to bring them up to the standard of the professional soldier.

Fifth: The policy of the United States with respect to

the length of enlistments has uniformly been the very incarnation of folly. Rare indeed have been the occasions when they have not been for too short a term of service, and so seldom has Congress displayed the wisdom of taking advantage of the enthusiasm at the beginning of hostilities to prescribe that all enlistments shall be FOR THE WAR that the instances are conspicuously unique. As a result of this failure, troops, which after long periods of training have developed into dependable forces, have had to be discharged; generals in the field have been forced to act in opposition to military sense or been greatly embarrassed in their operations; the War Department has had to resort to innumerable shifts to extricate itself from the difficulties into which it was plunged by approaching or actual expiration of enlistments; and more than once our national destinies have been imperilled by the depletion of armies from this cause at the very time when troops were most imperatively needed. The whole question was admirably summarized by Washington in a letter- hitherto unpublished - addressed to Fielding Lewis, Esq., and dated "Peaks-kill, 28th June, 1781," in which he said:

"I lament most sincerely the system of policy which has been but too generally adopted in all the States, to wit, that of temporary expedients; which like quack medicines are so far from removing the causes of complaint that they only serve to increase the disorder. This has in a most remarkable manner, been the case with respect to short enlistments; which has been the primary cause of all our misfortunes-all our expenses (which may, through a thousand different channels, be traced up to this source) and of the calamities which Virginia, the two Carolinas & Georgia now groan under." 1

And the United States has groaned under this system of too short enlistments in war from that day to the close of the Philippine insurrection.

Sixth: Invariable failure to increase the Regular Army until the eve, and frequently after the beginning, of hostili

ties, with the result that it has rarely attained its full authorized strength during the war.

Seventh Persistent neglect, until the Spanish-American War, to keep the organizations at the front up to their full war strength, while new and untrained regiments were either substituted for, or used to increase, the armies in the field.

Eighth Incessant use of bounties, both State and national, down to the close of the War of the Rebellion - the logical result of short enlistments, the dearth of proper methods of recruiting, and the failure to enlist FOR THE WAR only.

Ninth Too great a dependence placed upon raw troops and neglect to set a proper standard for them until the Philippine War. This was the case with respect to the militia used even in the War of the Rebellion and the volunteers accepted during the Spanish-American War. In the Philippine War, however, the volunteer army created under the Act of 1899 was so closely akin to Regulars in many respects that it proved immeasurably superior to any similar force we have ever organized.

Tenth: The needless protraction of all our great wars down to 1898, owing to the inefficiency of the troops employed.

Eleventh: The appalling expense caused by the unnecessarily large number of troops under pay until the SpanishAmerican War, the wanton waste resulting from lack of discipline, and the heavy losses from sickness which are inevitable among raw troops. These last two facts were abundantly demonstrated in the various camps established during our "toy war" with Spain.

Twelfth The persistent failure of Congress to realize that, in a military system combining the use of Regulars and volunteers or militia, men, in the absence of compulsion or strong inducement, will invariably enlist in the organization most lax in discipline.

Thirteenth Uniform neglect to provide beforehand for the requisite equipment of the number of troops likely to be called into service during the war.

Fourteenth: Lack of a General Staff, which can alone formulate a definite military policy and proper plans of campaign to be inaugurated at the beginning of war, and thus prevent the necessity of resorting to inadequate and costly makeshifts often imperilling the chances of success.

Fifteenth: The total inability of Congress and the American people to comprehend that military resources can only be utilized to best advantage by the central Government to which the entire nation owes paramount allegiance; that war cannot be conducted with that degree of efficiency which the people have a right to demand in return for their sacrifices unless the Government wields its power despotically; and that any delegation of that power to the States must obviously weaken the national military strength and correspondingly increase the national expenditures beyond all justification.

CHAPTER XXI

CITIZEN-SOLDIERY

E Americans are prone to boast that whatever we

W possess is the "finest in the world," and we gloat

with a pride often offensive over the marvellous achievements of our national career. Superficiality - which is a dominant American trait has caused us to slumber under a fictitious security and to flatter, ourselves that, because we have fortunately been victorious in our past wars, we may dismiss any apprehension as to the future. The Monroe Doctrine, with its policy of non-interference in European politics and its dogma that European Powers shall not meddle in the affairs of this hemisphere, has contributed to imbue us with a provincial standpoint from which even the Spanish-American War and our sudden development into a "World Power" have as yet been unable to divest us entirely. Animated by the deeply-rooted Anglo-Saxon repugnance to a large standing army and to anything which smacks of militarism in the remotest degree, we as a people cling with incredible tenacity to the preposterous fallacy that an American with a rifle in his hand and a uniform on his back is fully equal, if not vastly superior, to the trained soldier of other nations both in courage and efficiency. That we have thus far weathered the storms to which the American Ship of State has been exposed seems to us to afford ample reason why we should content ourselves with the same course that we have steered in the past, utterly oblivious to the fact that the world is constantly progressing in military matters and that we have apparently tried to forget every lesson which we ought to have learned by our own experience in former wars.