United States Army

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1939, the United States Army was smaller than the army of Portugal. Estimates of its strength ranged between 174,000 and 200,000 soldiers, which ranked it seventeenth or nineteenth in the world. Today it is the largest branch of the American military, with a projected headcount of 1,005,725 soldiers for fiscal year 2022. It operates tens of thousands of combat vehicles and holds the highest vehicle-to-soldier ratio anywhere. How did a force born as a wartime improvisation grow into this? Why did the young republic disband its first army and then have to rebuild it? What does it take to fight in Florida, in Mexico, on Pacific islands and in desert tank battles? And how does one institution hold together full-time soldiers, part-time soldiers and state governors who each claim a share of its authority?

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• 2. Continental Beginnings

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  On the 14th of June 1775, the Second Continental Congress created a unified army for the colonies and named George Washington as its commander. Its first officers had served in the British Army or in colonial militias, and they brought much British military heritage with them. French aid, resources and military thinking later shaped the force. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, one of several Europeans who came on their own to help, taught Prussian tactics and organizational skills.

  At Trenton and Princeton, Washington led victories against the British. He also lost a series of battles in the New York and New Jersey campaign of 1776 and the Philadelphia campaign of 1777. In the South in 1780 and 1781, Major General Nathanael Greene used Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics. He struck where the British were weakest and wore their forces down. A decisive victory at Yorktown, won with French help, settled the war.

  After Yorktown, the Continental Army was quickly given land certificates and disbanded, reflecting a republican distrust of standing armies. State militias became the new nation's only ground army. The exceptions were one regiment guarding the Western Frontier and one battery of artillery guarding the arsenal at West Point. Continuing conflict with Native Americans soon made a trained standing army seem necessary. General St. Clair's defeat at the Battle of the Wabash, where more than 800 soldiers were killed, forced a reorganization. The small Regular Army became the Legion of the United States in 1791 and took the name United States Army in 1796.

  In 1798, during the Quasi-War with France, Congress established a three-year Provisional Army of 10,000 men. It was to include twelve regiments of infantry and six troops of light dragoons. In March 1799, Congress added an Eventual Army of 30,000 men, including three regiments of cavalry. Both armies existed only on paper, yet equipment for 3,000 men and horses was bought and stored.

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• 3. Treaties and Territory

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  The Treaty of Ghent closed the War of 1812, the second and last war between the United States and Great Britain. Fighting was split into a Northern, a Southern and a naval campaign. Native tribes fought on both sides. The result is generally considered inconclusive, yet it opened a peace between the two nations that has now lasted more than two centuries.

  Against the Seminoles, the Army fought a war that stretched over 50 years. The usual strategies against Native American tribes were to seize winter food supplies and to form alliances with a tribe's enemies. Neither worked in Florida. The climate there barely varied, and the Seminoles had a long history of warring with other tribes in the region.

  The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the source calls it a defining event for both countries. In the treaty, Mexico ceded a large portion of land to the United States. That land included the modern states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, along with parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

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• 4. The Civil War

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  The 620,000 men who died in the American Civil War make it the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war. The share was 6.4% in the North and 18% in the South. After most slave states formed the Confederate States, the Confederate States Army mobilized a large fraction of Southern white manpower. It was led by former U.S. Army officers.

  The Union Army combined a small body of regular army units with a large body of volunteer units. Those volunteers were raised from every state, north and south, except South Carolina.

  For the first two years, Confederate forces did well in set battles but lost control of the border states. They did have the advantage of defending a large territory where disease caused twice as many deaths as combat. The Union answered by seizing the coastline, blockading the ports and taking control of the river systems. Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862 and the Tennessee River as well. In the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-1863, General Ulysses Grant seized the Mississippi River and cut off the Southwest.

  Grant took command of Union forces in 1864. After a series of battles with very heavy casualties, he had General Robert E. Lee under siege in Richmond. Meanwhile General William T. Sherman captured Atlanta and marched through Georgia and the Carolinas. The Confederate capital was abandoned in April 1865, and Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. All other Confederate armies surrendered within a few months.

  Peace gave the Army new duties. It set up many forts to contain western tribes on Indian reservations and fought the last of the American Indian Wars. Troops also occupied several Southern states during Reconstruction to protect freedmen. In 1898, the key battles of the Spanish-American War were fought by the Navy. Mostly new volunteers still defeated Spain in land campaigns in Cuba, and the Army played the central role in the Philippine-American War.

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• 5. Two World Wars

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  In 1910, the Army began acquiring fixed-wing aircraft. That same year, during the Mexican Revolution, it was deployed to U.S. towns near the border to protect lives and property. In 1916, the rebel leader Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico. The attack prompted a U.S. intervention in Mexico that lasted until the 7th of February 1917. Fighting against the rebels and the Mexican federal troops continued until 1918.

  The United States joined World War I in 1917 as an Associated Power, alongside Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the other Allies. U.S. troops went to the Western Front and took part in the last offensives that ended the war. After the armistice of November 1918, the Army again decreased its forces.

  General George C. Marshall became Army chief of staff in September 1939 and set about expanding and modernizing the force for war. The United States entered World War II in December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some 11 million Americans served in Army operations. In Europe, Army troops landed in French North Africa, took Tunisia, then moved on to Sicily and Italy. Millions of them played a central role in the June 1944 landings in northern France and the liberation of Europe.

  In the Pacific, Army soldiers made up the vast majority of ground forces and captured islands from Japanese control. There were 86 amphibious landings across the Pacific, and the Army conducted 71 of them. After the Axis surrenders in May 1945 for Germany and August 1945 for Japan, Army troops occupied both defeated nations.

  Demobilization was swift. The Army fell from eight million soldiers in 1945 to 684,000 in 1947, and its active divisions dropped from 89 to 12. Army leaders saw this as a success. In September 1947, the Army Air Forces separated to become the United States Air Force. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the Army by order 9981.

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• 6. Cold War Reinvention

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  The Korean War began in June 1950 when the Soviets walked out of a UN Security Council meeting, removing their possible veto. Under a United Nations umbrella, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops fought to stop North Korea from taking over South Korea and later to invade the north. The Chinese People's Volunteer Army entered the war, and both sides advanced and retreated repeatedly. The Korean Armistice Agreement of July 1953 returned the peninsula to the status quo. The war also raised fears for Western Europe. In 1950, the V and VII Corps were reactivated under Seventh United States Army, and U.S. strength in Europe rose from one division to four.

  U.S. forces had been stationed in South Vietnam since 1959 in intelligence, advising and training roles. They were not deployed in large numbers until 1965, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. They effectively held the traditional battlefield but struggled against the guerrilla hit-and-run tactics of the Viet Cong and the People's Army of Vietnam. The war is often regarded as a low point for the Army because of the draft, public unpopularity and frustrating restrictions set by political leaders.

  In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided that 15 combat divisions in the Army National Guard were unnecessary and cut them to eight. He raised the number of Guard brigades from seven to 18. The states disliked losing divisions, but no reduction in total Guard strength was planned, which convinced the governors to accept. The states reorganized between the 1st of December 1967 and the 1st of May 1968.

  After Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams adopted the Total Force Policy, which treated the Regular Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve as a single force. Extended operations became impossible without the Guard and Reserve in a mostly combat support role. The Army also became an all-volunteer force. General William E. DePuy, first commander of Training and Doctrine Command, drove reforms centered on training to specific performance standards.

  The Camp David Accords of 1978, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, led the United States and Egypt to agree to a joint military exercise, usually held every 2 years, known as Exercise Bright Star. The 1980s were mostly a decade of reorganization. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created unified combatant commands. The Army also played a role in the invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.

  By November 1989, with Germany nearing reunification, Pentagon briefers were laying out plans to cut Army end strength by 23%, from 750,000 to 580,000. Early retirement was among the incentives.

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• 7. From Desert Storm Onward

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  In 1990, Iraq invaded its smaller neighbor Kuwait, and U.S. land forces quickly deployed to protect Saudi Arabia. Operation Desert Storm began in January 1991. The U.S.-led coalition deployed over 500,000 troops, most of them from Army formations, and routed the Iraqi Army. Some of the largest tank battles in history took place, including the Battle of Medina Ridge, the Battle of Norfolk and the Battle of 73 Easting. For the rest of the 1990s the Army saw no major combat but joined a number of peacekeeping activities.

  On the 11th of September 2001-53 Army civilians and 22 soldiers were among the 125 people killed at the Pentagon. The 53 civilians were 47 employees and six contractors. American Airlines Flight 77, commandeered by five Al-Qaeda hijackers, struck the western side of the building. In October 2001, U.S. and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan and displaced the Taliban government. The Army was first in, and the 10th Mountain Division was the first conventional unit to arrive.

  In 2003, the Army led the combined U.S. and allied invasion of Iraq, again going in first and supplying most of the ground forces. In the following years the mission shifted from conflict between regular militaries to counterinsurgency. More than 4,000 U.S. service members had died by March 2008, and thousands more were injured. The source records 23,813 insurgents killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

  The Future Combat Systems program was the Army's chief modernization plan until 2009, and its most ambitious since World War II. In 2009, many of its systems were canceled and the rest were folded into the brigade modernization program. Budget sequestration in 2013 led to plans to shrink the Army to 1940 levels. Between 2016 and 2017 the Army retired hundreds of OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopters while keeping its Apache gunships.

  In the 2026 Iran war, the Army took part through offensive missile launches and air defense operations. It fired both ATACMS and Precision Strike Missile tactical ballistic missiles at Iran, which marked the first combat use of the Precision Strike Missile. The Army was also speculated to have helped in the pilot rescue operation in Iran from the 3rd to the 5th of April, through the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Elsewhere, it provides materials and training to Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian war.

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• 8. Components and Command

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  Before 1933, Army National Guard members counted as state militia until they were mobilized into the U.S. Army, typically at the start of a war. Since a 1933 amendment to the National Defense Act of 1916, every Guard soldier has held dual status. Each serves as a National Guardsman under the governor of a state or territory and as a reserve member of the Army under the president. The District of Columbia National Guard is a special case, because it reports to the president rather than the district's mayor. Any or all of the Guard can be federalized by presidential order, even against a governor's wishes.

  The Army today has three components: the active Regular Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve. The two reserve components are mostly part-time soldiers. They train once a month in battle assemblies and spend two to three weeks on annual training each year. The Regular Army and the Army Reserve are organized under Title 10 of the United States Code, while the National Guard is organized under Title 32.

  This arrangement grew out of an older pattern. For the first hundred years, the Army stayed a small peacetime force that manned permanent forts and did engineering and construction work. In wartime it was augmented by United States Volunteers raised by state governments. In World War I a National Army replaced that concept. In 1941, the Army of the United States was founded to fight World War II.

  A civilian secretary of the Army leads the service, under the authority of the secretary of defense. The chief of staff of the Army is the highest-ranked military officer and sits on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the Goldwater-Nichols Act, operational control runs from the president to the secretary of defense to the unified combatant commanders. The Army's own leaders only organize, train and equip the forces they provide.

  In 2013, the Army shifted its base unit from divisions to brigades. Under the modular design, all brigades of the same type are exactly alike, so any division can command any brigade. Armored brigades have 4,743 troops, Stryker brigades 4,500 and infantry brigades 4,413. The conventional force has 12 active divisions. The 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea is the only one without permanently assigned brigade combat teams, so rotational Stryker teams from other divisions fill its role.

  Beyond the main battle tank, the M1A2 Abrams, the standard infantry fighting vehicle is the M2A3 Bradley. The most common vehicle is the Humvee, which can carry cargo or troops, serve as a weapons platform or work as an ambulance. The M4 carbine is gradually being replaced by the M7 rifle among close combat units, and the M17 pistol is the primary sidearm.

  The Army Combat Fitness Test was introduced in 2018 to 60 battalions and became the official test of record on the 1st of October 2020. It has six events, including three deadlifts, a standing power throw of a ten-pound medicine ball and a two-mile run. Recruiting has become harder since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fiscal year ending the 30th of September 2023, about 13,000 of 55,000 recruits, or 24%, took the Future Soldier Prep Course, mostly in its academic track covering basic math and English.

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