British COIN (merged thread)

[Sigaba]

Prior to World War II the military had precious little clout, and when they did it was by making use of internal pressures (Indian wars) to motivate specific state delegations (Texas for one). Military experience from the Civil War didn't help them, either, as most of the legislators with experience had been Volunteers and remained quite hostile to a standing, professional military (John Logan is but one example).

FWIW, I respectfully disagree with this assessment.

The inability of the American army to achieve its policy aims was more due to the tone of specific reformers--specifically Emory Upton and like minded soldiers-- in the army than to civilian indifference/hostility/disinterest in military affairs. As one historian of the Old Army put it.

By proposing a military policy that the country could not accept, Emory Upton helped ensure that the country would continue to limp along with virtually no military policy at all.*

Many soldiers and civilians made potentially viable suggestions for the reform and modernization of the army but, time and again, the Uptonians either shouted them down or refused to help build the kind of intellectual and political momentum that might have led to change.

By contrast, American navalists articulated a multi-faceted argument that made an intellectual, strategic, historiographical, political, cultural, and economic case for the a new vision of American maritime power.

Granted, given the realities of international and domestic politics as well as the vastly different traditional views of the army and the navy in American culture, the army had a bigger hill to climb than the navy. However, I am of the view that the army's "lack of clout" was more the result of miscalculations within its leadership than of external factors.

This distinction is crucially important today because contemporaneous discussions of military policy are still shaped by the ongoing acceptance of a trajectory of American military historiography. This trajectory accepts uncritically the views of Emory Upton, Peter Michie (his biographer), and William Ganoe (his advocate).

My $0.02

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*R. F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (1967), p. 281.

[Bob's World]

The difference between the Army and the Navy is due primarily to the difference in their peacetime roles. The US will always be a nation that benefits from a lack of peacetime ground threats (so no need for a large standing peacetime army to secure the homeland), and the requirement for unhindered access to global markets and resources, that demands a robust Navy in both peace and war.

This is not a matter of policy so much as a matter of geostrategic realities and common sense. Any policy or effort to somehow treat or view these two services as "equals" in times of peace is not well thought out at best, and at worst subjugated the needs of the nation to the desires of the individuals and organizations advocating for an excessive peacetime ground force.

Oh, and while we are currently a nation with troops in combat, we are not a nation at war, so to play the "we're at war" card every time one wants to justify more deficit spending on ground force capabilities is growing wearisome as well. Current "COIN" definitions and doctrine accentuate this problem.