For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012

900 Pages·2012·29.68 MB·English

by  Allan R. Millett

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Contents
INTRODUCTION
1. A Dangerous New World, 1607–1689
2. The Colonial Wars, 1689–1763
3. The American Revolution, 1763–1783
4. Preserving the New Republic’s Independence, 1783–1815
5. The Armed Forces and National Expansion, 1815–1860
6. The Civil War, 1861–1862
7. The Civil War, 1863–1865
8. From Postwar Demobilization Toward Great Power Status, 1865–1898
9. The Birth of an American Empire, 1898–1902
10. Building the Military Forces of a World Power, 1899–1917
11. The United States Fights in the “War to End All Wars,” 1917–1918
12. Military Policy Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939
13. The United States and World War II: From the Edge of Defeat to the Edge
of Victory, 1939–1943
14. The United States and World War II: The Road to Victory, 1943–1945
15. Cold War and Hot War: The United States Enters the Age of Nuclear
Deterrence and Collective Security, 1945–1953
16. Waging Cold War: American Defense Policy for Extended Deterrence and
Containment, 1953–1965
17. In Dubious Battle: Vietnam, 1961–1967
18. The Lost War: Vietnam, 1968–1975
19. The Common Defense and the End of the Cold War, 1976–1993
20. World Disorder New and Old, 1993–2001
21. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001–2011
Photographs
APPENDICES
Appendix A. Participation and Losses, Major Wars, 1775–2012
Appendix B. The Armed Forces and National Expansion
Appendix C. The Armed Forces of the Cold War and After
Appendix D. U.S. Troops Stationed Abroad
Appendix E. American Military and Diplomatic Deaths, Terrorist and
Military Actions, 1980–2000
INDEX
The Chapter Bibliographies and General Bibliography can be accessed online
at the Free Press author pages: http://www.SimonandSchuster.com, and
Professor Feis’s webpage at Buena Vista University:
http://web.bvu.edu/faculty/feis/ftcd/FTCD_Bib.html
Acknowledgments
Writing the acknowledgments for a book that is thirty years old and now takes
new life in a third edition is more challenging than writing the book. It does
not become easier when the book has three authors. As the senior author, I
have usurped the role of writing these acknowledgments in order to avoid
pronoun confusion. Peter Maslowski and William B. Feis are blameless for any
oversights or insensitivities our readers may spy.
This book had its start in my first exposure to a class in American military
history taught by my adviser, the late Harry L. Coles, at The Ohio State
University. Harry assigned us Walter Millis’s Arms and Men (1956). Given the
choices in 1963, the book was the right one for a course that stressed civil-
military relations and the political and social influences on strategy. Having
just finished three years as a Marine infantry officer, I didn’t want to read a
textbook written for ROTC cadets about leadership and patriotism, the
general focus of the other potential texts. On the other hand, Millis had little
feel for how military organizations work (or don’t), and his grasp of
operational problems lacked expertise. Harry agreed—and said I should try to
do better some day. That day came sooner than he and I anticipated.
I had the good fortune to return to The Ohio State University in 1969
after teaching at the University of Missouri-Columbia for three years. Harry
Coles had become department chair, and I inherited his one-quarter (ten-week)
course on American military history, from Jamestown to the nuclear age. I had
used Millis at Missouri and did not like it for a semester course. I liked it even
less on the quarter system. On the other hand, I also inherited a stellar group of
graduate students, among them Calvin Christman, Robert Daugherty, J.
Frederick Shiner, and Peter Maslowski. Peter and I shared several interests,
among them bird-watching and basketball. Peter finished his dissertation despite
my mentoring, went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, taught American
military history, and agreed with me that the book choices still left much to be
desired. By now we had a new candidate, Russell F.
Weigley’s The American Way of War (1973); but Russ, I thought, worked too
hard to make military history (often just army history) fit his criticism of
American strategy in Vietnam. Through the 1970s, as Peter and I taught and
wrote other books, we talked about writing our own text. Peter took the initiative
in opening negotiations with the Free Press, and soon we had a contract and a
chance to write, not just gripe.
NO GENERAL HISTORY of American military policy could exist without the
contributions of the two generations of scholars whose books, essays, and
articles provide the foundation for this book. Our debt to them, acknowledged
in the online chapter and general bibliographies
(http://www.bvu.edu/faculty/feis/ftcd/FTCD_Bib.html and the Free Press
author pages at http://www.SimonandSchuster.com) is complete. We hope
they recognize their contributions among our breezy assertions and
breathtaking generalizations. We are indebted to our colleagues who
volunteered their considerable talent and precious time to critique our
individual chapters. Peter, the author of Chapters 1 through 9 for the first two
editions, appreciated the advice of Dr. Douglas E. Leach, Dr. Don
Higginbotham, Dr. Charles Royster, Dr. Richard H. Kohn, Dr. Craig L.
Symonds, Dr.
Francis Paul Prucha, Dr. K. Jack Bauer, Dr. Archer Jones, Dr. Frank E. Vandiver,
Dr.
James A. Rawley, Dr. John Y. Simon, Dr. James M. McPherson, Dr. Robert M.
Utley, Dr.
Benjamin Franklin Cooling III, Dr. Graham A. Cosmas, and Dr. David F. Trask,
all experts on the American military experience from the colonial period to the
twentieth century.
Dr. Patrice M. Berger of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln history department,
Lawrence J. Baack (a former history professor), and Ms. Barbara Rader also
provided Peter with evaluations from perspectives professional but unspecialized
in U.S. history. Peter asked his mother, Edna H. Maslowski, to read portions of
several chapters to check his literary English in the first edition.
I wrote Chapters 10 through 17 of the first edition with the sound advice of
a distinguished platoon of specialists in twentieth-century American military
history: Dr. Timothy K. Nenninger, Dr. Dean C. Allard, Dr. Daniel R. Beaver,
Dr. Donald Smythe, Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, Colonel J. F. Shiner, USAF, Dr.
Gerald E. Wheeler, Dr.
Williamson Murray, Mr. Kenneth H. Watman, Mr. Charles MacDonald, Dr.
Ronald H. Spector, Dr. John L. Gaddis, Colonel Roy K. Flint, USA, Lieutenant
Colonel Harry Borowski, USAF, Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard, USA
(Ret.), Dr. David Alan Rosenberg, Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons,
USMC (Ret.), Dr. George C. Herring, Dr.
David S. Sorenson, and Dr. Joseph J. Kruzel. We also want to thank those
members of the history departments of the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S.
Air Force Academy who reviewed parts of the original manuscript.
From its inception, this study enjoyed the support of the Mershon Center
for Education and Research in National Security at The Ohio State University,
directed successively by Dr. Richard K. Snyder and Dr. Charles F. Hermann,
when this book was first written. In addition, the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln provided Peter with a Faculty Development Fellowship and Maude
Hammond Fling Summer Fellowship in order to work on this book.
Mrs. Yvonne Holsinger and the staff of the graphic arts division of The
Ohio State University’s Teaching Aids Laboratory drew the maps that have
graced this book for almost thirty years. In addition, Joyce Seltzer and Robert
Harrington of the Free Press offered valuable suggestions on the original
manuscript.
AFTER TEN YEARS, Peter and I agreed that For the Common Defense needed a
fresh coat of learning and updating. We had suggestions for improvement
from reviewers, from other historians who used the book in their classes, and
from our students, never shy in commenting about their readings. Since our
readers had not found whole sections of the book wrongheaded, we agreed
that peer review of every word in every chapter need not slow our revision
process. The only original addition was Chapter
18 and the Epilogue, which started with the end of the Vietnam War and carried
the narrative through the Gulf War, which I wrote. Even though Peter did not
have to rewrite Chapters 1 through 9, he sent these chapters or portions of them
to Dr. Ira D.
Gruber, Dr. Robert Wooster, Dr. Donald R. Hickey, and Dr. Brian Linn for
review. As I recall, they liked the chapters very much. Since I had one new
chapter that needed close review, I asked my colleague Dr. Williamson Murray
to read it, and we turned to an uncommon graduate student, Jay Young, whose
government service in the 1980s made him especially expert on the defense
policy of the Reagan era. For the Gulf War, I relied upon Brigadier General
Edwin H. Simmons, USMC (Ret.), director of the Marine Corps History and
Museums Division and my former commanding officer when I headed the
fighting historians of MTU DC-4. After my retirement from the USMCR in
1990, the dedicated reserves of DC-4 covered the Gulf War on the ground, and I
saw their early drafts, as well as some operational summaries. To finish the
review process, we asked Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose to read the whole manuscript
and participate in a panel discussion of the book at the March 1993 meeting of
the Southwestern Social Sciences Association in New Orleans. Steve read the
entire manuscript with the highest standards of professional attentiveness and
made recommendations I accepted without regret.
The last and most important participant in the second review process was a
graduate student from Lincoln, Nebraska, named William B. Feis. Bill had
taken large doses of For the Common Defense as an undergraduate history
major and an MA graduate student, administered by his adviser, Professor
Peter Maslowski. As my advisee and Civil War reenactor “pard,” Bill was
unlucky enough to become a research assistant and copy editor on the second
edition. He escaped the editorial trap only by completing his dissertation in
1997, fleeing to a faculty appointment at Buena Vista University in Iowa. Peter
and I tracked his escape route and agreed that we would find more work for
him someday.
When we persuaded the Free Press that a book in continued use in
American classrooms should be revised again, Peter and I turned for help to
Dr. Calvin Christman, another Ohio State graduate who had just retired from a
distinguished teaching career at Cedar Valley Community College in Dallas,
Texas, with graduate teaching experience at North Texas University. We asked
Cal to work on the bibliographies and read any new material we wrote. His
work had just begun when Cal learned he had cancer, which killed him on
August 24, 2011. Fortunately, Bill Feis responded to our mild coercion and
joined us as a full partner, happy with the opportunity to exact red-pencil
revenge on his former advisers. Bill became the essential editor in making the
third edition possible against tight deadlines. With the aid of his academic
assistant Zoey Reisdorf, he also assembled the online bibliographies. We know
we tried his legendary patience and that of his talented wife, Dr. Dixee
Bartholomew-Feis, an accomplished teacher and published historian of the
World War II Vietnamese-OSS collaboration. Bill took over assembling the
final manuscript under demanding time and distance conditions that would
have staggered anyone. In the fall of 2011, Bill lost his father and grandfather,
but pressed on.
In addition to using Bill’s wide knowledge as the foundation for the review
of the third edition, we continued to seek student reaction to the book. I had a
class of graduate students at the University of New Orleans critique the whole
second revision in 2009, and they found several errors and gaps. The next
summer I had a class at the University of Hawaii-Manoa do a chapter-by-
chapter review as part of a class on American military history. One of this
group, Manuel Ortega, proved especially careful in his analysis.
As I coped with two new chapters that dealt with the complex interventions
in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I sought the advice
of former students who had seen these distant wars at close range: Peter
Mansoor, Mark Jacobson, Jay Young, and David Gray. I sought information
on Iraqi missiles and their nemesis, the Patriot antimissile missile, from Bryon
Greenwald, a career air-defense officer. Wick Murray provided me with the
publications of the Iraqi Perspectives Project. Dr. Richard W. Stewart, chief
historian of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, graciously provided the
high-quality maps and sound advice.
Peter, Bill, and I are indebted to all those who contributed to this book, and
we thank them for their role in its publication. Any errors or omissions are our
burden and not theirs.
There are those whose influence deserves special mention. Peter and I were
fortunate to have role models for perfection and perseverance in two World
War II veterans, Technical Sergeant Karl H. Maslowski and Colonel John D.
Millett, who remained interested in our writing until they died.
We are especially indebted to our wives. Peter’s wife, Linda
Maslowski, has always been a source of patience and wise counsel. In my case, I
had the good sense to marry Martha E. Farley, whom I met at Ohio State and
married in 1980
before publication of the first edition. As a historian and teacher, Martha brought
special insight to writing a book designed principally for university