CHAPTER I

The War Department From Root To Marshall

The basic structure of the War Department and the Army down to 1903 was established after the War of 1812 by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in an effort to assert centralized control over their operations. There were and are essentially two separate elements-a departmental staff, serving directly under the Secretary of War, and the Army in the field, divided into geographical districts under professional military commanders.

The departmental staff from the beginning was called the War Department General Staff, but it was not a general staff in the modern sense of an over-all planning and co-ordinating agency. It consisted instead of a group of autonomous bureau chiefs, each responsible under the Secretary for the management of a specialized function or service. By the 1890s the principal bureaus were the Judge Advocate General's Department, the Inspector General's Department, the Adjutant General's Department, the Quartermaster's Department, the Subsistence Department, the Pay Department, the Medical Department, the Corps of Engineers, the Ordnance Department, and the Signal Corps.

While the Judge Advocate General's and Inspector General's Departments were staff advisers to the Secretary of War, the other agencies combined both staff and command functions. They acted as advisers to the Secretary of War and also directed the operations and the personnel involved in performing their assigned functions. Each had its own budget appropriated, specified, and monitored in detail by Congress.1

The Army in the field, known as the line as opposed to the

1(1) Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801-1829 (New York: The Free Press, 1951), pp. 221–23. (2) Raphael P. Thian, Legislative History of the General Staff of the Army of the United States From 1775 to 1901 (Washington, 1901).

staff in the War Department, was organized in tactical units and stationed at posts throughout the country. The regiment was normally the largest unit and was often scattered over a large area. The posts were grouped geographically into "departments" commanded by officers in the rank of colonel or higher. Above the geographical departments in the field the chain of command was confused and, in fact, fragmented. The titular military head of the line Army was the Commanding General, a position created by Secretary Calhoun but without Congressional authorization prescribing its duties and functions or defining its relations with the bureaus, the Secretary, and the President.

The Commanding General did not in fact or in law command the Army. Successive incumbents asserted repeatedly that in a proper military organization authority should be centralized in one individual through a direct, vertical, integrated chain of command. Instead the bureau chiefs in Washington were constantly dealing directly with their own officers in the field at all levels of command, acting they insisted under the authority and direction of the Secretary of War. When the Commanding General protested such actions as violating the military principle of "unity of command," the Secretary of War generally supported the bureau chiefs.

The President was constitutionally the Commander in Chief, and many including James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Abraham Lincoln at times exercised their command personally or through the Secretary of War rather than the Commanding General. By the end of the Civil War Lincoln had established unity of command in the field under General Ulysses S. Grant, but the extent of the latter's control over the bureaus was not clear, and, in any case, after the war the old system of divided control was revived.2

As prescribed formally in Army regulations the division of functions seemed reasonably clear. All orders and instructions from the President or the Secretary of War relating to military operations, control, or discipline were to be promulgated through the Commanding General. On the other hand, fiscal

'Col Archibald King, JAGC, Memorandum With Respect to the Command of the Army by the Chief of Staff, 30 Mar 49. Tab F of Tabbed Materials on Improvement of the Organization and Procedures of the Department of the Army, Prepared by the Management Div, OCA, 22 Jul 49.

affairs were to be conducted by the Secretary or War through the several staff departments:

The supply, payment, and recruitment of the Army and the direction of the expenditures of appropriations for its support, are by law intrusted to the Secretary of War. He exercises control through the bureaus of the War Department. He determines where and how particular supplies shall be purchased, delivered, inspected, stored and distributed.3

This theoretical clarity did not exist in practice. An informal alliance developed between the civilian secretaries and the bureau chiefs which hamstrung the Commanding General's control over the Army. The departmental staff's responsibility for logistics and support also diluted his authority over the territorial departments. Several commanding generals in protest moved their headquarters from Washington. Since secretaries came and went, power gravitated to the bureau chiefs, who, in the absence of any retirement system, remained in office for life or until they resigned.

The secretaries were unable as a consequence to exercise any effective control over the bureau chiefs upon whom they had to rely for information. The bureaus operated as virtually independent agencies within their spheres of interest. These spheres often overlapped and conflicted, demonstrating what Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard Law School, described as "our settled American habit of non-cooperation." The whole system was sanctioned and regulated in the minutest detail also by Congressional legislation, and any changes almost invariably involved Congressional action. Bureau chiefs in office for life also had greater Congressional influence than passing secretaries or line officers.

In effect, the War Department was little more than a hydraheaded holding company, an arrangement industrialists were finding increasingly wasteful and inefficient."

'War Department, Regulations for the Army of the United States, 1895, art. LXII (Staff Administration), par. 736.

Roscoe Pound, "Bureaus and Bureau Methods in the Civil War," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1945), 423, 435. For a detailed, comprehensive treatment of the disruptive effects of American individualism upon social stability, see Rowland Berthoff, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1971) contains a well-balanced appraisal of the War Department and the line Army in the years prior to the Spanish-American War, which, as the author demonstrates, caused much of the trouble in the early months of that conflict. See especially pages 5-68.

One War Department committee seeking means of improving its methods of operation concluded:

The fundamental trouble was in the system of administration a system that was the gradual growth of many years, and founded upon the idea that the bureau chiefs in Washington and the Secretary of War were the only ones who could be trusted to decide either important or trivial matters in a manner to properly protect the interests of the Government; a system that necessarily resulted in congesting the paper work in Washington, in multiplying the number of clerks required to handle and record the papers, and finally in so overloading the chiefs of bureaus by attention to unimportant details, that they had not sufficient time for the consideration of more important matters.

This legacy of bureau autonomy and Congressional control in managing the affairs of the Army and the War Department was passed on from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and constituted a principal problem of Army organization.

Creation of the New General Staff, 1900-1903

When Elihu Root became Secretary of War on 1 August 1899 the moment was opportune to assert greater executive control over the War Department's operations. During the Spanish-American War the absence of any planning and preparation, the lack of co-ordination and co-operation among the bureaus, and the delay caused by red tape had become a public scandal.

President William McKinley appointed a commission headed by retired Maj. Gen. (of Volunteers) Grenville M. Dodge, a Civil War veteran and railroad promoter, to investigate the problem. After intensive hearings and investigation the Dodge Commission reported that most of the trouble stemmed from the red tape and inefficiency of the War Department's operations generally and in the Quartermaster's and Medical Departments in particular. Congress, it said, was partially to blame because of its insistence upon monitoring departmental administration in detail. Everywhere officials were forced by regulations spawned in Congress to devote too much

Memorandum Report, First Division, General Staff to the Assistant Secretary of War, 27 Sep 05, sub: The Simplification of War Department Methods pp. 12-13. Copy in Cater files on Origins of General Staff, OCMH. The Army regulations running to over 1,500 paragraphs are a good reference for the detailed controls exercised by the bureaus over expenditures and accountability.

time to paper work and not enough to substantive matters. "No. well regulated concern or corporation could transact business satisfactorily under such regulations as govern the staff departments." The commission particularly recommended investigating the question of combining all supply operations in one agency and transportation in another, following the example of modern industrial organizations."

After studying the Dodge Commission report, Secretary Root told Congress that unless drastic changes were made in War Department organization and administration to provide for greater executive control the department would be unable to operate effectively in any war. It would break down again,

(1) U.S. Congress, S. Doc. 221, 56th Cong., 1st sess., Report of the Commission Appointed by the President to Investigate the Conduct of the War Department in the War With Spain (Washington, 1900), vol. I, pp. 113-16, 120-21 on War Department red tape, pp. 147-48 on the Quartermaster's Department, and pp. 188-89 on the Medical Department. Quotation is from page 113. (2) Cosmas makes it abundantly clear that the War Department and the bureau chiefs performed as well as miscreating circumstances referred to above permitted. Cosmas, An Army for Empire, pp. 245-314. (3) Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1962), pp. 1-51; Chandler, "The Beginnings of 'Big Business' in American Industry" and "The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management," both in James P. Baughman, ed., The History of American Management: Selections from the Business History Review (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), pp. 1-52, summarize the development of vertically integrated functionally divided headquarters in modern industry. The major railroads deliberately adopted the military staff and line principle, recognizing that effective control over their far-flung operations required unity of command.