The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil–Military Relations by Samuel P. Huntington

Author:Samuel P. Huntington [Huntington, Samuel P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674817364
Amazon: 0674817362
Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Published: 1981-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE ABORTIVE IDENTIFICATION WITH SOCIETY, 1918–1925

After 1918 the military made every effort to continue the wartime identification with American society and to expand the Neo-Hamiltonian link with the American community. Particularly in the Army, the war was viewed as ushering in a new era of civil-military relations. “The ‘splendid isolation’ of the Regular Army,” proclaimed the Infantry Journal, “is a thing of the past.” The Army was to become a participating member of American society. An Army as a special caste apart from the people, said the Secretary of War in 1920, “is relatively useless.” Instead, it must be “in fresh and constant contact with the thoughts and feelings of the civil fireside from which it had come.”11 The hopes of the military largely reflected their belief that the separation of the Army from the populace prior to the war was primarily physical in nature, the result of its being strung out in its frontier garrisons remote from the centers of population, civilization, and commerce. With the end of Indian fighting, the reasons for this isolation were now over. The urge to belong, to be accepted, to identify with the community at large, was the primary goal of the military officers as they stressed the necessity of “getting close to the people.”

The basis for uniting the Army with the people appeared to be laid in the National Defense Act of 1920. This was universally hailed by military spokesmen as inaugurating the new age of civil-military relations. The primary mission of the Regular Army was now held to be the training of civilian components — the National Guard and Organized Reserves. The new ROTC program, an extended and much broader form of the old land grant college plan, made military instruction available in any qualified college or high school. In little over a decade, more than three hundred ROTC units were set up at schools and colleges with about 125,000 students participating in the program which absorbed the energies of about 5 per cent of the Regular Army officers corps. A second link with the civilian population came from the summer training camps for youths, developing out of Leonard Wood’s prewar Plattsburg movement. The first of the new camps opened in 1922 and offered a combination of military and civic instruction to ten thousand young men for a thirty day period. Thirdly, the 1920 Act authorized the detail of regular officers as instructors with the National Guard and reserves. The Army goal was to build a nation-wide organization, so that every community in the country would have representatives of at least one of the Army components, whose views, the Secretary of War hoped, would “be felt among their neighbors until all our people come to appreciate the wisdom of supporting” a strong national defense. Finally, in these immediate postwar years, the Army also made a determined effort to institute localized recruiting, assigning each Regular Army unit to a specific geographical area and hoping in that way to build up popular support and to capitalize upon local pride.

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