Prelude to the AEF: Elihu Root Takes on the Army Bureaucracy and Creates a General Staff

Elihu Root, Secretary of War and State
(1845-1937)

After the War with Spain the Army also underwent important organizational and administrative changes aimed in part at overcoming some of the more glaring defects revealed during that conflict. Although the nation had won the war with comparative ease, the victory was attributable more to the incompetence of the enemy than to any special qualities displayed by the Army. No one appreciated the need for reform more than Elihu Root, a New York corporation lawyer whom President William McKinley appointed secretary of war in 1899. The president had selected Root primarily because he was qualified to solve the legal problems that would arise in the Army’s administration of recently acquired overseas possessions.

But Root quickly realized that if the Army was to carry out its new responsibilities, it had to undergo fundamental changes in organization, administration, and training. Root saw the Army’s problems as similar to those faced by business executives. “The men who have combined various corporations . . . in what we call trusts,” he told Congress, “have reduced the cost of production and have increased their efficiency by doing the very same thing we propose you shall do now, and it does seem a pity that the Government of the United States should be the only great industrial establishment that cannot profit from the lessons which the world of industry and of commerce has learned to such good effect.” Root adopted recommendations made by his military advisers and views expressed by officers who had studied and written on these issues, outlining in a series of masterful reports his proposals for fundamental reform of the Army to achieve “efficiency.”

Concluding that the true object of any army must be “to provide for war,” Root took steps to reshape the U.S. Army by better integrating the bureaus of the War Department, the scattered elements of the Regular Army, and the militia and volunteers.

Root perceived the chief weakness in the organization of the Army to be the longstanding division of authority, dating back to the early nineteenth century, between the commanding general of the Army and the secretary of war. The commanding general exercised discipline and control over the troops in the field; while the secretary, through the military bureau chiefs, had responsibility for administration and fiscal matters. Root proposed to eliminate this division of authority and to reduce the independence of the bureau chiefs by replacing the commanding general of the Army with a chief of staff who would be the responsible adviser and executive agent of the president through the secretary of war.

Another obvious deficiency revealed by the War with Spain was the lack of any long-range Army planning. Root proposed the creation of a General Staff, a group of selected officers who would be free to devote their full time to preparing military plans. Pending congressional action on his proposals, Root appointed an ad hoc board in 1901 to develop plans for an Army War College, but it also acted as an embryonic General Staff.

Major General Frederick C. Ainsworth
(1852-1934) The Adjutant General

In early 1903, in despite some die-hard opposition, Congress adopted the secretary of war’s recommendations for both a General Staff and a chief of staff but rejected his request that certain bureaus be consolidated. The resistance movement was led by long-time Adjutant General Frederick C. Ainsworth, who had accumulated control of a number of offices, thus accumulating considerable power and eventually becoming the dominant figure in the Department of War. In the later stages of his career, Ainsworth, once an innovator, became resistant to further reform proposed by the civilian leadership.

Congressional legislation enacting Root’s reform plan could not quickly change the long-held traditions, habits, and views of most Army officers or of some congressmen and the American public. Secretary Root realized that the effective operation of the new system would require an extended program of reeducation. The Army War College, established in November 1903, would meet that need. Its students, already experienced officers, would receive education in problems of the War Department and of high command in the field. As it turned out, they devoted much of their time to war planning, becoming in effect the part of the General Staff that performed this function. The Army also reorganized and refined the rest of its educational system in order to improve the professionalism of its officers. The General Staff and Service College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, henceforth trained officers in the employment of combined arms and prepared them for staff and command positions in large units. The Army expanded its service schools by adding the Signal School in 1905, the Field Artillery School in 1911, and the School of Musketry in 1913.

In 1904 Elihu Root was succeeded as Secretary of War by future President William Howard Taft. Taft  and all his successors supported the Root reforms, but the War Department's resistance movement was led by clever and experienced administrative operatives, and had carefully cultivated supporters in both houses of Congress.  Change came slowly.

In the first years after its establishment the General Staff achieved relatively little in the way of genuine planning and policymaking, devoting much of its time to routine administrative matters. Through experience, however, officers assigned to the staff gradually gained awareness of its real purpose and powers. 

In 1910, when Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood became chief of staff, he reorganized the General Staff, eliminating many of its time-consuming procedures and directing more of its energies to planning. The biggest change proposed was reorganizing the Army staff so that department heads reported to the chief of staff, and were not individually responsible to the Secretary of War or to Congress. Ainsworth vehemently opposed this. With the backing of the latest Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, Wood finally dealt a decisive blow to that element within the Army that opposed the General Staff. In a notable controversy, using the threat of court martial for  insubordination,  he and Stimson forced the retirement in 1912 of the leader of this opposition, General Ainsworth.  

The First American Troops Depart for France, 1917

With this bureaucratic victory, the Army was now organized in a way that would allow centralized planning to respond to the global challenges of the twentieth century.

Sources:  The U.S. Army in the World War I Era, Center of Military History; Wikipedia