America’s Expeditionary War Transformation

The meaning of “expeditionary war” may at first appear self-evident. But since the 1960s the armed forces’ joint definition of expeditionary war could apply to almost any military operation undertaken outside the nation’s geo graphical borders. In common with other joint-service terms such as “Military Operations Other Than War," this vagueness allows each service to claim a slice of the expeditionary mission and its budget. Some in the Navy wax enthusiastic about the expeditionary strike group, a mission-tailored “means to ensure a fully capable, flexible, and global naval presence” through “cooperative engagement capability” and “networked and distributed combat force.”¹ Within the Marine Corps there is a tendency to deliberately confuse expeditionary warfare with amphibious warfare, and to refer expeditionary warfare with amphibious warfare, and to refer back to the Corps’ historic legacy of small wars and overwater assaults. In one of the more recent of its transformation initiatives, the U.S. Army declared its intention to be a “Campaign Quality Army with Joint and Expeditionary Capabilities.” The U.S. Air Force boasts its “Expeditionary Air Forces” and, at least in some circles, rewrites history to demonstrate that World War II was actually an expeditionary war (won, of course through air power). Some military writers even envision a future in which a commander in the United States will be able to send a cruise missile to a target thousands of miles away—seemingly unaware that push-button warfare is neither new nor expeditionary.²

At present, there is very little effort to answer the essential questions that would allow for a precise definition of expeditionary war. How is expeditionary warfare distinct from conventional outside-the-border military operations? Is it defined by the geography of the area of operations? By the objectives of the military forces? By the size and composition of the force? By the duration of the campaign? Instead of seeking precision, service spokesmen make the term ever more vague and confusing, so that expeditionary war can mean, according to the speaker, a quick in-and-out punitive mission or the main component of the Global War on Terror. Instead of clarity and precision, the tendency has been to string buzzwords together, producing such gibberish as: “Joint Adaptive Expeditionary Warfare requires capabilities organized cross-enterprise, adapting dynamically to uncertainty and turbulence in a multi-dimensional, nonlinear, competitive environment.”³

The paucity of informed analysis in writing on expeditionary warfare stems, in part, from the fact that many military analysts base their recommendations for current policy on inaccurate assessments of past experiences. Thus, quasi-mythological events, such as First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon’s march toward Tripoli or Brigadier General Frederick Funston’s capture of Emilio Aguinaldo, are cited as the inspiration for expeditionary doctrine. In order to counteract both the more extravagant abuses and the overly pessimistic notion that every foreign intervention must end in tragedy, military historians need to provide today’s writers with important context by explaining how the U.S. military’s understanding of expeditionary warfare has evolved and changed.⁴ One particularly valuable area of inquiry is the century prior to the deployment of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in World War I.

The 19th Century View of Expeditionary Warfare

It is essential to recognize that for more than a century Americans, both civilian and military, regarded expeditionary warfare as a threat, not a means for global power projection. The defense policy of the early republic expressed this concern in a number of ways, from the Constitution’s provisions that the militia could be called out to repel invasion (but not for overseas war) to the priority given to coastal defense fortification. For 19th century Americans, the meaning of expeditionary warfare was clear. In two wars, the British were able to send large expeditionary forces that forcibly occupied several major cities— Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Washington—and to attack and burn many others.

Following the last of these wars, the Army took as its first priority the defense of the vital commercial ports. For the next century Congress supported a series of harbor fortification programs on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. That the only time these fortifications fired their guns in anger was against other Americans during the Civil War should not detract from the urgency with which military writers, including navalists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, supported them. Even during the interwar era, air power advocates boasted as much of the airplane’s ability to defeat an enemy invasion as they did of its potential for strategic strikes against hostile cities. Thus, in many ways the traditional American military view of expeditionary war has more in common with a strategic ballistic missile defense shield than it does with the aggressive global preventative war concepts of today.³

Throughout the 19th century, Army officers almost unanimously rejected offensive expeditionary warfare as contrary to the nation’s strategic interests. As one officer wrote in 1894, “We are so widely separated from all nations of great importance that there is absolutely no probability that we shall ever be called upon to send against them an invading force.”⁶ Nor did their civilian superiors, even those presidents who sought to acquire overseas possessions, provide any strategic guidance that would suggest this was a primary mission for either service. Rather, there is evidence of a consensus among officers that aggressive expeditionary warfare was fundamentally against both the Army’s credo and the nation’s core ideals. Writing on the Mexican War, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock wrote, “1 might draw a line between my duty to remain in the army to repulse any attempt made from abroad upon us, and the questionable duty of going beyond our borders to inflict a direct wrong upon another people, with probable injury to us in the end.”⁷ In a book published in 1897, a year before the Army sent two expeditionary corps across the globe, the service’s former commanding general John M. Schofield declared emphatically, “Foreign conquest and permanent occupation are not a part of the policy of this country.”⁸ Those today who argue expeditionary war is the American “way of war” must accept that for many 19th-century officers, an aggressive war against an enemy that had not attacked American soil was both militarily and morally unthinkable.

Within the Navy, there was more acceptance of an offensive expeditionary mission, but hardly in the context that today’s thinkers envision it. Although some writers have argued that from its founding the U.S. Navy was an “expeditionary” force, this claim is based on a highly selective use of historical examples and often counterfactual arguments. Under such reasoning, Commodore Matthew Perry’s mission to Japan is termed “expeditionary” because if it had had to fight, it supposedly could have. But Perry’s mission is better described as engagement or imperialism or diplomacy; calling it an expedition is incorrect, both historically and as a guide for the present.

Similarly, there is no doubt that the Navy and Marine Corps conducted punitive strikes, naval landings, amphibious raids, and other landing operations. But these were ad hoc incidents of military forces assisting the commerce-protecting gunboat diplomacy of the era, not as part of a national strategy of using expeditionary war to further American interests across the world. Those who single out Presley O’Bannon’s march toward Tripoli as evidence of a putative expeditionary war heritage need to give equal attention to presidential declarations that the purpose of the Navy was to serve as “floating fortifications” and to protect the nation’s coasts from foreign invasion.⁹ As late as 1881 the prize-winning essay in Proceedings declared that future warship construction programs needed to be based, in part, on the fact that “the necessity for the transportation and convoy of land forces is, with regards to the United States of the least of all probabilities.”¹⁰ It was not until the 1880s that U.S. Navy officers began discussing expeditionary warfare as an essential component of their mission. As American trade spread farther into areas beyond the rule of great-power codes of conduct, Navy ships assigned to remote stations were pressed into service for operations ashore. Writing in 1880, Lieutenant Charles Belknap argued that in peacetime, “navies are the police of the world at large” and this mission required the capacity for “instantaneous and determined naval intervention.”¹¹

In the next decade, some authors explored the use of “naval brigades”—loosely defined as “battalions of two or more ships brigaded together for the purpose of landing for operations on shore.”¹² Lieutenant John C. Soley, later to become a distinguished naval theorist, argued that in peacetime “it is principally by landing operations that the Navy acts.” Ships’ crews needed to prepare for sudden “expeditions against savage nations,” and, occasionally, against rival great powers that were “desultory in nature, occurring rarely, and generally involving some hard fighting.” The Navy needed to train ships’ crews for “operating, in large or small bodies, in a town or country unfamiliar to them, in the midst of a hostile people, in guarding consulates, in repressing insurrections, in bush fighting, or perhaps, in storming fortified places.”¹³

Although many of these articles, like those of today, focused on the minutia of organization, tactics, and equipment, they reflected a growing familiarity with the practice of landing operations. These were largely confined to relatively small units, however, perhaps one or two ships’ companies whose limited duties might consist of no more than a punitive raid, occupying a customs house, or suppressing riots for a few days. There was no suggestion of creating a permanent specialized expeditionary force for sustained military operations ashore as part of a military campaign. Although a start, the discussion was relatively brief: In the 25 volumes of Proceedings that preceded the Spanish-American War, there was only a handful of articles on landing operations.

The Effects of Overseas Imperialism

The leap to making expeditionary war part of a national strategy occurred in the 1890s, when the curriculum at the Naval War College expanded to include lectures on combined maritime operations. These were envisioned as large-scale joint Army-Navy landings that were intended to achieve significant campaign goals, such as the seizure of a port as a base for invasion. A study of past American and European sea-borne landings revealed that warships had rarely been able to defeat land fortifications and, conversely, land operations without naval control of the surrounding waters had been similarly unsuccessful. History also showed that many combined operations had failed because of personal or bureaucratic clashes: Admirals had disregarded the advice of land commanders and vice versa. Although recognizing the complexity and problems of combined operations, and also that they had occurred in every recent war, the college made no effort to develop a joint doctrine for future conflicts. This was a serious omission because naval thinkers such as Mahan, Henry Taylor, Charles Stockton, and Stephen B. Luce were coming to believe that in the next war the Navy would need to seize and hold harbor facilities to resupply and shelter the fleet.¹³

The increased importance of expeditionary warfare may be seen in the contingency plans for a war with Spain, many of which included Army expeditions to Cuba and the Philippines. Taken as a whole, these early plans reveal strategic assumptions that too often typify the “American Way of Expeditionary Warfare.”¹⁵

First, naval strategic planners in both Washington and Newport assumed that expeditionary operations would be short and decisive; there was no consideration of the problems of sustaining a naval force ashore for a prolonged conflict. Focused exclusively on the enemy fleet, and convinced that once it was defeated enemy colonies would fall like ripe plums, they failed to consider that enemy resistance on land might be of sufficient strength to require large and long-term ground operations.

Second, perhaps because naval planners were so optimistic about a short war, they assumed Army commanders would accept the Navy’ strategic priorities. There were no provisions for joint staffs or for an agency that might anticipate and resolve interservice conflicts. There was not even sufficient effort to assess the Army’s capability to execute its Navy-directed missions. Some future problems might have been resolved, or at least raised, had Navy Department planners consulted with their War Department colleagues stationed in the same office building.

Third, there was the implicit assumption that American expeditionary forces would be welcomed. No one thought that occupation might promote instability and provide a unifying target for what had been a divided opposition.

Finally, Navy officers tended to regard expeditionary warfare either in a complete strategic vacuum—simply as a problem of landing forces at an unspecified place for unspecified objectives—or as a means to achieve vastly ambitious political and ideological agendas. Thus Mahan saw the acquisition of colonies not only as a means of securing naval bases, but also of increasing economic trade and even spreading Christianity and American values around the globe.

The imperial wars of 1898-1902 exposed the falsity of assumptions that expeditionary war was an easy, low-cost, and decisive form of warfare. The rapid termination of hostilities, the abject surrender of the enemy, and the enormous gains in territory and prestige have led many to conclude that victory in the war with Spain was a given. But contemporaries were very clear on how close the American expedition to Cuba had come to disaster. Alfred Vagts’ caustic comment that “practically everything, politically, tactically, technically, or strategically speaking, in combined operations that could have been done wrong was done by the American authorities in 1898” still holds true.¹⁶ Veterans condemned the popular hysteria that contributed to a hurried and disorganized mobilization and the even more hurried and disorganized dispatch of the 5th Corps to Cuba. They criticized the interservice bickering, the collapse of logistic and medical services, and the tactical ineptitude displayed by senior leaders. The Cuban expedition ended with a congressional investigation of the War Department and an unseemly and deeply divisive public controversy between the two senior Navy commanders.

In contrast to the ineptitude displayed in Cuba, the planners of the expedition to the Philippines displayed far better administrative skills, though equally weak strategic foresight. Both the Navy admiral on the spot (George Dewey) and the Army’s senior commander in Washington were emphatic that only 5,000 troops were required, setting a benchmark for consistent underestimates of troop needs that continued throughout the entire four-year conquest and occupation. Political and military leaders were equally sanguine that deposing Aguinaldo and scattering his ragtag army would end all armed resistance.

Instead, the end of what might be termed “major combat operations” was followed by a long, expensive, and savage guerrilla war that required five times the number of troops as the entire strength of the prewar Army. The pacification of the archipelago required soldiers and sailors to invent and adapt methods of waging counterinsurgency warfare that could be of great use today. But it also showed the ease with which short-term tactical deployments could expand into major military operations. An expedition that had been intended to launch a rapid blow against Spain thus turned into a commitment that only ended with the humiliating surrender of the Philippines in 1942.¹⁷

For the Navy, the Spanish-American War confirmed Mahanian doctrine that its wartime mission was to seek and destroy the enemy fleet. This in turn led to a growing emphasis on expeditionary war. Although Navy theorists championed using the Marine Corps to secure advanced bases for the fleet, the Navy as an institution did very little to make this possible. Funding was miniscule, there was no institutional impetus to increase the size of the Corps, and equipment was obsolete and impractical. Worse, both political and naval leaders constantly stripped the Marine Corps’ small advanced-base training facilities for short-term expeditions in the Caribbean. Marines (and sailors) were landed in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and other Caribbean hotspots to restore order and protect American lives and property. Some of these commitments lasted decades. The Corps thus spent far more time learning how to fight counterinsurgency warfare in the misnamed Banana Wars than it did learning to be an advanced-base force to assist the fleet in global warfare.¹⁸

The Army’s experience with expeditionary war after 1902 was equally frustrating. The constant demand for expeditionary service after 1898 prevented the Army from focusing on preparing for a large-scale conventional war against a rival great power. Having left Cuba in 1902, the Army sent a 4,400-man joint occupation force back to the island in 1906 to stop civil war and suppress banditry. In 1914 it deployed a 4,000-man expedition to Vera Cruz after a Navy- Marine landing sparked widespread popular resistance. Two years later, a 12,000-man Punitive Expedition crossed into Mexico to retaliate for Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico. In both cases, expeditions that were intended as rapid and decisive led to prolonged and unpopular commitments, tying up thousands of troops, and with largely negative consequences. Moreover, they left the Army, and the nation, dangerously unprepared for Wilson’s deployment of two million AEF troops to France. If the consequences of his militant idealism escaped Wilson, they were not lost on some Army officers, who concluded, “punitive expeditions, or expeditions to dispossess the government in power are worse than useless and are not to be undertaken.”¹⁹

Such sober and pessimistic conclusions may resonate among some audiences today. Certainly there has been a notable diminution in the boldly optimistic predictions of a “New American Way of War,” of precise strikes and rapid decisive operations. Senior military officers now speak bleakly of a Global War on Terror that might last for another two or three decades. Some have recognized, as their predecessors did, that expeditionary warfare is seldom either rapid or cheap. As in the past, expeditions launched in expectation of rapid decisive operations and battlefield dominance have soon degenerated into prolonged and unpopular military occupations. Indigenous resistance, revelations of misconduct, excessive property destruction, and high casualties contribute to frustration and disenchantment among both military personnel and the American public.

It is too early to determine if this latest spate of expeditionary war will produce, as World War I did, a series of draining and unpopular Banana Wars, increasing public disillusionment and isolationism, and drastic reductions in defense spending. But if nothing else, recent events have provided at least one answer to the question “What is expeditionary war?” It is a complex and dangerous form of conflict that deserves far more study, and far more serious analysis, than the glib, jargon-ridden, and confident pronouncements of service advocates and civilian pundits.