Modernizing the American War Department: Change and Continuity in a Turbulent Era, 1885-1920 (review)

Daniel R. Beaver describes this volume as "not a simple, linear administrative history." Rather, it is a study of "the adjustment of certain representative nineteenth-century U.S. War Department organizations to the managerial, technological, and policy challenges of a new day" (p. viii). Beaver defines modernization as the transition from a decentralized bureaucratic system that operated by consensus and cooperation among semiautonomous entities to a centralized structure with formal, hierarchical lines of authority in which decisions were based on rational planning and clearly defined objectives. Beginning with a description of the evolution and functioning of the nineteenth-century War Department, Beaver traces the course of modernization from the Root reforms through World War I and its aftermath. In chapters that combine a chronological and topical approach, Beaver focuses on command and control, supply, technology, tactical doctrine, and the interface between the War Department, the Army, and the civilian industrial and scientific communities. In all these areas, the trend was toward increasingly complex interaction between the separate parts of the emerging system, the management of which required a mixture of the new formal organization and the old processes of informal consultation and compromise.

For Dr. Beaver, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, this volume is the culmination of nearly a lifetime's work. Author of a previous study of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and the American mobilization during World War I, Beaver has delved deeply into primary documents and secondary literature covering the period 1885 to 1920. Besides the more familiar policy-related sources, he has consulted obscure works on weapons technology and tactical doctrine to illustrate the War Department's struggle to adapt to rapid changes in those areas.

The volume is rich in insights and new slants on old subjects. Beaver, for example, does not view the Army's perpetual line-staff conflict as a black-and-white clash between line progressives and staff bureau reactionaries. Instead, he says, it was a collision of officers with differing concepts of professionalism and of who should be considered "real" soldiers.

Beaver devotes more than half of his book—seven of eleven chapters—to the impact of World War I on the War Department. The unprecedented size of the U.S. mobilization, the technological and tactical challenges of the Western Front, and the military's need to work closely with civilian business and industry forced the War Department into a convulsive and politically painful leap toward centralization and hierarchical organization. Beaver gives high marks to President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Baker as war managers. Nevertheless, he points out, they relied for too long on informal cooperation as a means of coordinating the mobilization effort. Only after the logistic near collapse in late 1917 did they turn to centralized formal organizations, such as the General Staff's Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic, to bring order out of the chaos. Even then, Beaver concludes, the American effort to produce large amounts of advanced military equipment, notably tanks and aircraft, essentially was a fiasco.

As the United States approached World War II, Beaver concludes, modernization appeared to have triumphed. Yet at the same time, he declares, "the War Department and the army, with all their myriad historical parts, still retained a persistent institutional life, purpose, and body of revealed truths beyond contemporary managerial modes" (p. 210). Modernizing the American War Department is a densely detailed interpretive work and belongs in the library of anyone concerned with American military institutions, past and future.