Rumsfeld Generals History

We hear about Rumsfeld and Generals, while history tells us, about previous feuds, friction and conflicts.
Chapter I:
The War Department From Root To Marshall
The basic structure of the War Department and the Army down to 1903 was established after the War of 1812 by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in an effort to assert centralized control over their operations. There were and are essentially two separate elements - a departmental staff, serving directly under the Secretary of War, and the Army in the field, divided into geographical districts under professional military commanders.
The departmental staff from the beginning was called the War Department General Staff, but it was not a general staff in the modern sense of an over-all planning and co-ordinating agency. It consisted instead of a group of autonomous bureau chiefs, each responsible under the Secretary for the management of a specialized function or service. By the 1890s the principal bureaus were the judge Advocate General's Department, the Inspector General's Department, the Adjutant General's Department, the Quartermaster's Department, the Subsistence Department, the Pay Department, the Medical Department, the Corps of Engineers, the Ordnance Department, and the Signal Corps.
While the Judge Advocate General's and Inspector General's Departments were staff advisers to the Secretary of War, the other agencies combined both staff and command functions. They acted as advisers to the Secretary of War and also directed the operations and the personnel involved in performing their assigned functions. Each had its own budget appropriated, specified, and monitored in detail by Congress.
Creation of the New General Staff, 1900-1903
When Elihu Root became Secretary of War on 1 August 1899 the moment was opportune to assert greater executive control over the War Department's operations. During the Spanish-American War the absence of any planning and preparation, the lack of co-ordination and co-operation among the bureaus, and the delay caused by red tape had become a public scandal.
The Early Years of the General Staff, 1904-1917
The new Chief of Staff and the General Staff were immediately attacked by traditionalists in the bureaus who were opposed to any attempts to assert control over their autonomy.
Mr. Root resigned as Secretary of War on 31 January 1904 with his work unfinished. His successor, William Howard Taft, lacked the inclination and ability to make the new dispensation stick in the face of bureau opposition. He was distressed at having to referee disputes between the Chief of Staff and the bureau chiefs, particularly Maj. Gen. Fred C. Ainsworth, the new Military Secretary and subsequently The Adjutant General. "The Military Secretary in many respects is the right hand of the Chief of Staff," Taft vainly pleaded, "and they must be in harmony, or else life for the Secretaries and all others in the Department becomes intolerable. Let us have peace, gentlemen."
Under the influence of Ainsworth, Taft abandoned Mr. Root's alliance with the Chief of Staff for the traditional Secretary-bureau chief alliance. Convinced the Chief of Staff and General Staff were too involved in administrative details, he restricted the General Staff's activities in April 1906 to purely "military" matters. On "civil" affairs the bureau chiefs were to report directly to the Secretary. It was Taft's belief that the Chief of Staff was Chief of the General Staff only and served in a purely advisory capacity.

At about the same time President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Military Secretary (later The Adjutant General) as Acting Secretary of War in the absence of the Secretary or Assistant Secretary. Taft was frequently absent for long periods on political junkets, leaving Ainsworth in charge. The Chief of Staff thus became subordinate to The Adjutant General instead of the reverse as Mr. Root had intended and as the law clearly stated.
All this changed when Henry L. Stimson, a law partner and protégé of Mr. Root's, became Secretary of War on 22 May 1911. Taking up where Root had left off, he reasserted the principle of executive control and embarked on an ambitious program to rationalize the Army's organization from the top down along sound military and business lines. He reformed Mr. Root's alliance with the Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who thought along the same lines.

General Wood, the Army's first effective Chief of Staff, had been in office a year when Stimson became Secretary. He was a brilliant administrator with a much broader background in managing large-scale, multipurpose organizations than his predecessors or immediate successors. He could distinguish between the important and the unimportant. Wood could make prompt decisions. He knew how to select competent subordinates, and he freely delegated authority to them. He abolished the "committee system" within the General Staff, eliminating one source of delay. Wherever possible he sought to streamline departmental procedures in the interests of greater efficiency. He also made enemies, especially in Congress.
The 1910 elections returned a Democratic House of Representatives, and the new chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, James Hay of Virginia, was a rural Jeffersonian opposed on principle both to a large standing army and the idea of a General Staff. From 1911 until his retirement from Congress in September 1916, Hay did his best to limit the size and activities of the General Staff with substantial assistance from War Department traditionalists, chiefly General Ainsworth.
World War I: The Bureau Period, 1917-1918

The apparent intent of Hay, Ainsworth, and other traditionalists was to revive through the National Defense Act the organization of the War Department that had broken down in 1898. At least Secretary Baker thought so. As soon as Mr. Hay was no longer chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee and General Ainsworth had considerably less influence, Baker announced that so far as he was concerned "The Chief of Staff, speaking in the name of the Secretary of War, will coordinate and supervise the various bureaus . . . of the War Department; he will advise the Secretary of War; he will inform himself in as great detail as in his judgment seems necessary to qualify himself adequately to advise the Secretary of War."
After declaring war against Germany on 6 April 1917 Congress passed emergency legislation reversing the policies of Hay and Ainsworth by providing that the Chief of Staff should have "rank and precedence over all other officers of the Army" and increasing the size of the General Staff to nearly 100.35 With this authority Mr. Baker could have asserted firm executive control over the bureaus through the Chief of Staff in the manner of Root and Stimson. Instead for nearly a year he went back to the traditional policy of allowing the bureaus to run themselves, with results similar to those in the War with Spain, only far more serious.

Believing he was following the confederate philosophy of Jefferson Davis, Baker asserted that "civilian interference with commanders in the field is dangerous." He applied the same principle in dealing with the bureau chiefs. President Wilson also sought to run the war along traditional lines with as little executive control as possible. Both he and Secretary Baker exercised their authority by delegating it freely. The President left the running of the Army and much of the industrial mobilization program to Mr. Baker who in turn delegated his authority freely to his military commanders and the bureau chiefs.

World War I: The March Period, 1918-1919
March, who believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, was a hard-working ruthless executive. He made a lot of enemies in the process, especially in Congress.
The Long Armistice, 1919-1939
The successive Secretaries of War between World War I and World War II had little impact on the Army or on Congress. The one exception was Harry H. Woodring, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose feud with Assistant Secretary Louis A. Johnson in the late thirties demoralized the department and the General Staff. Two of them, John W. Weeks, appointed by President Warren G. Harding, and Patrick J. Hurley, appointed by President Herbert C. Hoover, were men of considerable talent, but they served in a period when the American people and Congress deluded themselves that large armies were becoming obsolete.
The broad delegation of authority by the President and Secretary Baker to General Pershing resurrected the position of Commanding General which had caused so much trouble in the nineteenth century and which Mr. Root had deliberately abolished for this reason. Mr. Baker apparently failed to appreciate Mr. Root's purpose in replacing the Commanding General by the Chief of Staff as the Secretary's principal military adviser. The divided authority created by the President and Mr. Baker inevitably led to serious friction between General Pershing and General Peyton C. March, the Chief of Staff after May 1918. March was the first to assert vigorously his 1917 statutory "rank and precedence over all other officers of the Army." In ignoring Mr. Root's advice Mr. Baker was in large measure responsible for the troubles that arose.
The bureaus operated as virtually independent agencies within their spheres of interest. These spheres often overlapped and conflicted, demonstrating what Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard Law School, described as "our settled American habit of non-cooperation.

Chapter II:
The Marshall Reorganization
There were other complications. When Marshall became Chief of Staff a bitter feud between Secretary Harry H. Woodring, a forthright, impulsive Middle Western isolationist, and Assistant Secretary Louis A. Johnson, an ambitious, active interventionist, had demoralized the department and reduced the Office of the Secretary of War to a position of little consequence.
This feud placed General Marshall in an impossible situation, which the President's delay in dealing with it made worse. Roosevelt finally removed Woodring in June 1940, and for personal and political reasons replaced him with a Republican, Henry L. Stimson, previously Secretary of War, as well as a colonel in the AEF, Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, and Secretary of State. Stimson's great personal prestige and distinction as an elder statesman in the Root tradition became the basis for his real authority within the department rather than his ambiguous official position under a President who frequently acted as his own Secretary of War.
Although the relations between the Secretary and the Chief of Staff were strained at first by the President's policy of dealing with the latter directly, Stimson and Marshall soon re-established the alliance between the Secretary and Chief of Staff initiated by Mr. Root. Friction then gave way to a close personal relationship based upon mutual respect.
The Operations Division's internal organization reflected its several functions. The Strategy and Policy Group was responsible for strategy and planning. It provided OPD's representation on the joint and combined planning staffs and liaison with other war agencies. The Logistics Group determined the resources required to support projected military operations. It also represented OPD on those joint and combined committees responsible for logistical planning. Necessarily, it worked closely with G-4 and Army Service Forces, and in the process considerable friction developed between OPD and ASF's Plans and Operations Division. ASF, believing OPD did not pay sufficient attention to practical logistical problems, especially the lead time required to produce weapons and other materiel, sought a greater role in strategic logistical planning. OPD, on the other hand, resented ASF's attempted intrusions into its areas of responsibility.
That friction should- have developed between General Somervell's headquarters and the technical services is not surprising, given the latter's tradition of resisting executive control over their operations. It was just as natural for General Somervell, saddled with the responsibility as their commander for supplying the Army, to seek effective control over their operations.
The friction between ASF "landlords" and their "tenants" developed because ASF, acting through the service commands and post commanders, determined the allocation of men, money, and materiel for these functions. AGF and AAF commanders might request facilities, but it was the post commander or his superiors who determined what money was to be spent where. In one instance a division commander requested construction of a .22-caliber range. The post commander disapproved, and the dispute went all the way up through channels to General Marshall personally for decision.
General Marshall also looked to General Somervell as his chief adviser on supply, treating him as G-4 of the General Staff as well as commanding general of the ASK Somervell also benefited from the support of Secretary Stimson and of Harry Hopkins in the White House. On the occasions when he lost a round in the constant bureaucratic feuding within and outside the department, he lost because either the Secretary or General Marshall sided with his opponents.
The status of the newly organized Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was the centre of a running feud between its determined director, Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, and General Somervell's staff. At first placed under the Director of Personnel in November 1943, the Office of the Director of the Women's Army Corps became a special staff agency of ASF attached to General Somervell's office. His staff continued to veto Colonel Hobby's proposals for improving the status of women in the Army, and in February 1944 General Marshall agreed to remove the Office of the Director of the Women's Army Corps from ASF and place it under the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-1, whose chief, Maj. Gen. Miller G. White, proved to be more hospitable. Such was the opposition to the WAC among conservative Army officers that General Marshall personally had to intervene repeatedly to ensure that his directives aimed at improving the status of the WAC were carried out.
Chapter III: Changes in the Marshall Organization
The difficulties Marshall and McNarney had with the management of intelligence, personnel functions, and research and development of new weapons indicated that the reorganization had not solved all problems of administration. The relations between the functionally organized ASF headquarters and the offices of the chiefs of the traditional technical services presented another difficult problem. Large industrial corporations which attempted to combine a functionally organized headquarters with a decentralized product-oriented field structure were experiencing similar difficulties.
Supervising and co-ordinating the technical services along functional lines which cut across formal channels of command inevitably generated friction. If the offices of the chiefs of the services had been phased out of existence as had been done with the chiefs of the combat arms within AGF, there might have been less friction and ill-feeling. AAF headquarters deliberately created its own integrated supply system from the start and did not have to deal with any technical services with long-established traditions and influence.
ASF might have solved its organizational and management problems by confining its top staff to broad policy planning and co-ordinating functions. The technical services chiefs argued for this alternative, but the experiences of the three major commands led their commanding generals to insist that their headquarters staff must operate in order to exercise effective control over their subordinate agencies and commands.
There were conflicts and jurisdictional disputes between General Somervell's headquarters and OPD over logistical planning responsibilities and with AAF headquarters as a result of the latter's aggressive drive for autonomy.
Although put together in haste, the Marshall reorganization worked as well as it did because General Marshall was the real center of military authority within the department. Both Roosevelt and Secretary Stimson supported him. In turn General Marshall delegated broad responsibility with commensurate authority to Generals McNarney, McNair, Arnold, and Somervell. While the Marshall reorganization lasted only as long as he was Chief of Staff, it was based upon the accepted military principle of unity of command and similar to concepts of administrative management developed by major industrial corporations.
Chapter 21: Grand Strategy and the Washington High Command
The last year of the war witnessed, along with the finishing touches on grand strategy, the change-over from the predominantly military to the politico-military phase. As victory loomed, stresses and strains within the coalition became more apparent. With the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944 agreement among the Allies on military plans and war strategy became less urgent than need to arrive at acceptable politico-military terms on which the winning powers could continue to collaborate. That need became even more marked at Yalta in February 1945 and at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. To handle these new challenges after building up a staff mechanism geared to the predominantly military business of fighting a global and coalition war necessitated considerable adjustment of Army staff processes and planning. In midwar Army planning had been geared to achieve the decisive blow on the Continent that had been a cardinal element in the planners' strategic faith. Scarcely were the Western Allies ensconced on the Continent, however, when the challenges of victory and peace were upon the Army planners. They entered the last year of the war with the coalition disintegrating, the President failing in health, and a well-organized politico-military machine lacking. Besides the frictions generating on the foreign fronts, the Army still had to cope with the immense problem of what to do with the beaten foe-with terms of surrender, occupation, and postwar bases. The military fell heir-by default- to problems no longer easily divided into military and political.
Chapter VI: The Post-Korean Army
The Feud Over Research and Development
The emergence of the Office of Chief of Research and Development on 10 October 1955 as an independent General Staff agency ended a strenuous five-year campaign for recognition by civilian scientists both within and outside the Army. It was also part of the continuing struggle for control over the technical services because they performed most of the research and development within the Army.