Joseph T. Glatthaar, The American Military: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)
A comprehensive yet succinct overview of the American military experience, Joe Glatthaar’s The American Military: A Concise History offers the reader a keen understanding of how the United States Military has developed since birth. Glatthaar shows how the American military evolved from pre-revolution colonial militias to a military industrial complex larger than anything the nation’s founders could have ever imagined.
Over the course of 127 pages, Glatthaar describes the American military through four specific lenses, thus splitting the long history into four chapters. Glatthaar’s four significant lenses include the struggle of balancing a standing army with the citizen soldier; enhancing professionalism; the development and utilization of technology through modernization; and understanding the limits of military power. By exploring these problems, Glatthaar takes the reader on a journey through the history of military forces in America. These lenses provide the framework for understanding how the American military evolved.
The Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Joseph T. Glatthaar is the author of eight other books. The majority of his work focuses on the Civil War, but his teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Houston has encompassed the breadth of American military history. His wealth of experience is on full display in this work as he combines a lifetime of teaching and research.
In his opening chapter, Citizen Soldiers and Sailors, Glatthaar describes a young nation at odds with the idea of standing armies. The period until the end of the War of 1812 was one of small military forces augmented by citizen militias. In fact, the Second and Third Amendments to the Constitution make clear the public’s wariness of standing armies. Rooted in revulsion to the English Civil War and more contemporary reasons such as British occupation forces throughout the colonies, a public distrust for a standing military is woven into the founding documents of the United States. The notion of citizens defending their own property through the tradition of a Universal Military Obligation is both noble and altruistic, but one not grounded in the reality of 18th Century war-fighting. Colonial militias proved increasingly problematic and regular soldiers took on increasing importance throughout the American Revolution. Washington understood that maintaining an army in the field would help preserve revolutionary fervor. The War of 1812, as Glatthaar points out, displayed many of the problems with citizen militias, many of which refused to march over state lines much less into Canada. Despite Andrew Jackson’s stunning victory in New Orleans, the time had come to begin professionalizing and institutionalizing the American military.
In Glatthaar’s second chapter, The Struggle for Military Professionalization, he meticulously details the military’s rise from a small force augmented by militia through the War of 1812 to a professional force by the turn of the century. The establishment of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy, as Glatthaar describes, shows a nation slowly embracing professionalization. Meanwhile, the struggle to adopt steam on naval ships, for example, demonstrates the difficulty in applying progressive ideas to organizations predicated on tradition. Finally, the Spanish American War and the logistical debacle that ensued led to a comprehensive review of how the United States Military conducts its business, which further led to sweeping reforms as the 20th Century dawned.
The third chapter, titled Technology, Mechanization, and the World Wars, Glatthaar describes a military still trying to catch its European counterparts. The Root Reforms set the stage for a further professionalization of the military necessitated by its ever-increasing mechanization. Creating a single standard and integrating the National Guard through the Dick Act, combined with the establishment of war colleges and a general staff prepared the military for the complex problems of the 20th Century. These fundamental changes created a professional, educated, and flexible force poised to find success in the two world wars. However, as the military grew in response to those world wars, new challenges were discovered, which personalities such as George Marshall worked quickly to alleviate. Marshall’s command structure overhaul, for example, streamlined the chain of command and fostered American success in two large theaters of war while he commanded upwards of eight million men.
In the fourth chapter, the Limits of Power, Glatthaar demonstrates how the American experience in World War II left the nation stronger than ever before. A robust economy, fewer casualties, and the atomic bomb made the United States the world’s primary superpower, supplanting Great Britain in that role. The feeling was short-lived, as in 1949, China fell to Mao’s forces, and the Soviet Union tested its first atomic device. This ushered in a new era of limited warfare as the United States came to grips with the limits of its own power. American forays into Vietnam and Iraq did much to highlight how limited military power can be in the face of a determined insurgency. Especially when juxtaposed against such rousing, confidence building victories as the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Glatthaar concludes with a chapter on the current state of the American Armed Forces. He draws parallels between the Armed Forces’ problems of today and its traditional struggle to balance the citizen soldier and a standing army, enhancing professionalism, the development, and use of technology, and understanding the limits of military power. He surmises that, as Harry Stimson pondered in 1912, the livelihood of the military depends on whether the nation can plan an effective policy toward it. Finally, Glatthaar touches on civilian-military relations, and how the growing divide between those who have served and those who have not leads to a decreased understanding in how the military functions and thus how to best create policy.
This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the entirety of American Military History. It has potential as required reading for introductory undergraduate courses on the subject and can enhance any student’s understanding of United States history. What it lacks in minutia, it more than makes up for in breadth with a surprising amount of detail for 142 pages. The strength of this work lies in Glatthaar’s ability to describe the history of the American military using language anyone can digest. While Glatthaar provides enough context and detail to please any student of American military history, its wave-top view leaves room for further study. However, Glatthaar provides a robust bibliography for anyone wishing to dive deeper into their study of the American military experience. This work adds to the field by offering an easy to understand road map for any student of American military history.