The Politics of Intervention

6 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

In 1898, when forced by "the People" to fight its first
foreign war in fifty years, the Army, a meager twenty-eight
thousand, found the task beyond its resources. There were too
few hands and too little experience to draw upon, from the
Secretary of War down to the newest lieutenant. At Las
Guasimas, General Joe Wheeler may have thought the Span­
iards were Yankees; the rest of the Army conducted the war
as if it were fighting the Sioux.
Soon enough the Army and the American public were made
aware by foreign military observers, a legion of correspondents,
and the Dodge Commission that little was right with the
American military system. Even so, Elihu Root, upon becom­
ing Secretary of War in July, 1899, found it difficult to make
the reforms to correct the moribund organization of 1898.
Nonetheless, the Root reforms did begin to reorient the Army
to the demands of the twentieth century. By 1903 legislation
had created an embryonic General Staff with planning and
supervisory responsibilities over the Army bureaus, replaced
the commanding general with a chief of staff of limited tenure,
established the Army War College, and reorganized the
National Guard. For the first time the United States Army
was placed on an organizational par with European armies.
The reforms had little immediate applicability to the Army's
most pressing problem, that of pacifying and administering
America's new colonial possessions. The only change that
helped was the enlargement of the Army. Whether Root was
most influenced by the new problems of world politics or by
the belief that his reforms had universal appropriateness in
terms of managerial efficiency, he directed American military
thinking toward the problems of defending the United States
from the organized armed forces of other industrialized
nations. This is not to say that Root slighted colonial prob­
lems. Much of his work as Secretary of War (indeed the
rationale for his appointment) was to administer the insular
possessions.^10 Although he might have chosen to thrash out
publicly the policy with which the United States should
govern culturally and racially different peoples, he did not.