and in its place a "jury-rigged, extempore" organization would be thrown together on an emergency basis. As a corporation lawyer he asserted that "in the successful business world" work was not done in the disorganized manner of the War Department. "What would become of a railroad, or a steel corporation, or any great business concern if it should divide its business in that way? What would become of that business?" 8

A modern army, Mr. Root said, required intelligent planning for possible future military operations and effective executive control over current ones. Intelligent planning required an agency similar to the General Board of the Navy or the Great German General Staff. Control over current operations required a professional military adviser to act as the department's general manager with a staff to assist him along the lines of modern industrial corporations. Mr. Root proposed that Congress provide by law for a Chief of Staff as general manager with a General Staff which would assist him both in planning future operations and in supervising and co-ordinating current

ones.

Mr. Root's proposal represented a major break with War Department tradition. He was the first Secretary of War to abandon the alliance between the Secretary and the bureau chiefs, replacing it by an alliance with line officers through the Office of the Chief of Staff. The alliance was deliberate because Root did not see how it was possible for any Secretary to exercise effective control over the department unless he had the active support of professional soldiers whose interests, expressed in terms of their traditional insistence on unity of command, were similar."

To achieve these goals Mr. Root first had to abolish the

Statement of Hon. Elihu Root, Secretary of War, Before the Committee on Military Affairs of the United States Senate on the Bill (S. 3917) to Increase the Efficiency of the Army, 12 Mar 02. Reprinted in U.S. Congress, The National Defense: Hearings Before the Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixtyninth Congress, Second Session-Historical Documents Relating to the Reorganization Plans of the War Department and to the Present National Defense Act, 3 March 1927 (hereafter cited as The National Defense), pt. I, pp. 7, 17.

In planning and in negotiating with Congress Root relied heavily upon the experience and knowledge of The Adjutant General, Maj. Gen. Henry C. Corbin, whose assistant, Lt. Col. William H. Carter, did much of the detailed investigation. At a critical moment Lt. Gen. John M. Schofield, a former commanding general, supported Mr. Root's proposals before Congress. There are excellent sketches of both Schofield and Corbin in Cosmas, An Army for Empire, pp. 28-29, 62–64.

position of Commanding General. He made it clear to Congress that the Chief of Staff would act under the authority and direction of the Secretary of War and the President as constitutional Commander in Chief. He would not "command" the Army or be designated as the Commanding General because command implied an authority independent of the Secretary and the President. This change in title would avoid the repeated conflicts that had arisen between successive commanding generals and the Secretary or the President during the previous century. At the same time he wanted the Chief of Staff to be the principal military adviser of the Secretary and President. There was under the Constitution only one Commander in Chief, the President, acting through the Secretary of War, and there should be only one principal military adviser for the Army, the Chief of Staff, to whom all other Army officers would be subordinate, 10

The need for firm executive control over the bureaus, Mr. Root told Congress, was obvious. The bureaus overlapped and duplicated one another's functions up and down the line. Their traditional mutual antagonism caused disagreements, no matter how petty, to come all the way up to the Secretary personally for resolution. Supplying electricity for new coastal defense fortifications provided a glaring example. In those days, fifty years before anyone ever heard of project management, at least five overlapping bureaus were involved in supplying some part of the electricity needed to build or operate the fortifications, the Engineers in construction, the Quartermaster for lighting the posts, the Signal Corps for communications, the Ordnance for ammunition hoists, and the Artillery which had to use the guns. If the Secretary acted on the request of one bureau, the others immediately complained of interference with their work. The only thing he could do was to call in the bureau chiefs concerned and spend half a day thrashing out a decision. The Secretary simply could not spend all his time on such details, and the result was that the bureaus were continually stepping on each other's toes.11

In Mr. Root's scheme the Chief of Staff, assisted by the

10 The National Defense, pp. 6-25, 109–60. (2) King, Memorandum With Respect to the Command of the Army by the Chief of Staff.

11 The National Defense, pp. 157-58.

General Staff, would investigate and recommend to the Secretary solutions to such technical problems. Root further recommended consolidating all Army supply operations in one bureau along the lines suggested by the Dodge Commission. This was the way modern industrial corporations did business, and it did seem a pity, he thought, "that the Government of the United States should be the only great industrial establishment that could not profit" from the lessons and experiences of modern industry.12

Mr. Root's proposal to combine responsibility for both current and future operations in the General Staff created serious management problems from the start. Neither the General Board of the Navy nor the German General Staff, which he cited as examples of what he had in mind, had administrative responsibilities. In the government as well as in industry responsibility for current operations has always tended to drive future planning into the background. Co-ordinating bureau activities also involved the General Staff in bureau administration, especially where the bureaus came into conflict with one another as they frequently did. In practice the distinction between supervision or co-ordinating and direction or administration was largely theoretical. What was supervision to the General Staff the bureaus objected to as interfering with their traditional autonomy. They also naturally resented their proposed subordination to the Chief of Staff which would remove them from their traditional direct access to the Secretary.

A study of just this question of divided authority over and among the bureaus was the subject of a lengthy, penetrating analysis by the War Plans Division of the War Department General Staff submitted on 28 February 1919. It noted how the British and German practice was to keep the planning functions of the General Staff completely separate from administration. It asserted that before 1903 there were two distinct weaknesses in the War Department, "the lack of a powerful permanent coordinating head," solved by creating the Office of the Chief of Staff, and "the lack of a sufficient number of

12 (1) Ibid., pp. 6-25, 114-20. Quotation is from page 120. (2) Russell F. Weigley, "The Elihu Root Reforms and the Progressive Era," in Lt. Col. William Geffen, USAF, ed., "Command and Commanders in Modern Warfare," Proceedings of the Second Military History Symposium, U.S. Air Force Academy, 2-3 May 69 (Boulder: USAF Academy, 1969), p. 14.

properly delimitated administrative services" organized to perform one function only. As Mr. Root's own experience indicates, the overlap and duplication of functions among the traditional bureaus had the effect of forcing the General Staff into administrative details because there was no other agency, short of the Chief of Staff or the Secretary of War, to resolve the recurrent conflicts among the bureaus over even the pettiest of details. If there was any fault in the General Staff becoming involved in administration it was because the bureaus refused to agree among themselves. The General Staff in the latter part of World War I attempted just such a functional division of labor among the bureaus. 13

Mr. Root's own actions demonstrated the difficulty of trying to distinguish between these two functions. So urgent in his opinion was the need to control and co-ordinate bureau operations that he did not wait for Congress to provide for a permanent organization. In 1901 he appointed an ad hoc War College Board to develop plans, theoretically, for an Army War College, which actually acted as an embryonic General Staff. Its members spent most of their time assisting Root in co-ordinating current operations and little on planning.14

Accepting Mr. Root's recommendations, Congress in the Act of 14 February 1903 provided for a Chief of Staff assisted by a General Staff, but it did not consolidate the supply bureaus. The General Staff itself, as initially organized, consisted of three committees designated as divisions, the first charged generally with administration, the second with military intelligence and information, and the third with various planning functions.

13 (1) Statement of Col. John McA. Palmer, General Staff Corps, 15 Oct 19, in House Committee on Military Affairs, 69th Cong., 1st sess., Hearings on Army Reorganization (hereafter cited as Army Reorganization Hearings, 1919–20), vol. I, pp. 1230-40. (2) Maj George C. Marshall, Jr., The Development of the General Staff, Army War College lecture, 19 Sep 22, pp. 6-7. (3) War Department, Office of the Chief of Staff, War Plans Div, Appendix VIII to WPD-7942-3, Report on Staff Reorganization, 28 Feb 19, pp. 25-36; quotation from p. 34. Bound as part of a larger Study of Staff Organization, 1918-19, copy in OCMH files. (4) For the difficulties industry encountered in combining planning and operating functions, see Chandler, Strategy and Structure, pp. 104-13, 125-62; Chandler, "Management Decentralization: An Historical Analysis," in The History of American Management, pp. 167-243. (5) Weigley, "The Root Reforms," pp. 21-22.

14

(1) The National Defense, pp. 154-58. (2) Lt Col George P. Ahern, "A Chronicle of the Army War College, 1899–1919,” Washington, 24 Jul 19, pp. 1-16. Copy in OCMH.

Then in November 1903 Mr. Root established the Army War College. Its main function was to train officers for General Staff duties on the principle of learning by doing as part of a general reformation of the Army's school system. In practice learning by doing meant that instead of becoming exclusively an academic institution the War College became part of the General Staff, concentrating on military intelligence, Congressional liaison, and war planning. That left the rest of the General Staff to supervise the bureaus.

Students at the War College prepared most of the Army's war plans. They were geared closely to current contingency and operational requirements, including the occupation of Cuba in 1906-09, the Japanese war scare arising from the 1907 San Francisco School Crisis, and President Wilson's various Mexican forays. There was none of the high-level, long-range strategic thinking and planning which the War College's opposite number, the General Board of the Navy, performed.15

The Early Years of the General Staff, 1904–1917

The new Chief of Staff and the General Staff were immediately attacked by traditionalists in the bureaus who were opposed to any attempts to assert control over their autonomy.

15 (1) Ahern, “A Chronicle of the Army War College," pp. 36-278. (2) Stetson Conn, The Army War College, 1899-1940, 23 Dec 64, pp. 1-6. Manuscript copy in OCMH. (3) Lt Col Marvin A. Kreidberg and Lt Merton G. Henry, History of Military Mobilization in the United States Army, 1775-1945, DA Pamphlet 20-212 (Washington, 1955), pp. 235-40, 290-94. (4) Lt Col Josiah B. Miller, Background for 20th Century Training, 1899-1917, in “Development of the Departmental Direction of Training and Training Policy in the United States Army, 1789-1954," p. 65. Draft manuscript in OCMH. (5) Report of the Chief of Staff, in Annual Report of the War Department, 1912, pp. 235-37. (6) War Department Bulletin No. 15, 18 Sep 12. (7) John A. S. Grenville and George Berkeley Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873-1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 276-336. (8) Allan R. Millett, The Politics of Intervention: The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1906-1909 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1968), passim, especially pp. 120-43. (9) Maj. Gen. Otto Nelson in National Security and the General Staff (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal Press, 1946) on pages 66-71 points out that initially the First Division of the General Staff was responsible for supervising the War College while the Third Division's functions included responsibility for war planning. Nevertheless, from the beginning the War College aided the rest of the General Staff in preparing war plans. “In working out and discussing the multitude of details in various plans, the War College became a laboratory for the General Staff where ideas could be tested,” page 71. (10) Richard D. Challener's Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) deals with what influence the General Staff had on the development of American foreign policy. Usually it was current administration policies that dictated preparation of particular war plans.