U.S. Army Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

U.S. Army - Essay Example 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 comba t capacities of the army in World War II, in the restriction of the weight of American tanks to 15