All the histories of the First World War devote considerable attention to the impact of war plans and war planners-how in the foreign relations among the great powers war plans became factors in their own right. Many of these plans revealed volumes about the attitudes of the officers who wrote them, from the offensive a l'outrance of French plan XVII ("even the customs officials attack" [1] ) to the cold calculation of the Schlieffen plan, which called for the invasion of an unoffensive neutral country to achieve a military advantage. Americans usually exclude themselves when they discuss the pre- war military plans, but there were U.S. war plans in 1914. How these plans were developed, and their impact on the development of American strategic thought will be the theme of this paper, revealing a United States less militarily naive than commonly thought and suggesting insights relevant to U.S. strategy on the eve of the next century. Background The history of the looming hostility between the United States and European powers in the years prior to World War I has long roots. As early as the American Civil War, the United States was collecting intelligence on the European powers. For example, the National Archives contains an intriguing document from President Lincoln's papers labeled "Tables of Comparative Power of American and European Navy Rifled Ordnance." This chart, clearly derived from covert intelligence, consists of comparisons of the characteristics of rifled cannon made in Prussia, England, France, Italy, and America. [2] Likewise, secret testimony before the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War in 1865 stated that "We have in this country more powerful rifled cannon than any we know of abroad," a conclusion reached after at least one secret inspection of the Krupp works in Germany during the Civil War. [3] Further, in a February 1864 Senate hearing, Union Commodore John Rogers expressed the view that American weapons are the "best in the world," and revealed that Union ironclad ships were designed to rival British, and not Confederate, naval vessels. [4] Just as the United States was taking the measure of the Europeans, European military observers were sizing up the Americans. These observers were particularly interested in American coastal fortifications. British observers concluded that "ships cannot contend with forts when conditions are anything like equal" [5] and therefore to reduce a wellconstructed fort it was necessary to land a force and establish siege batteries. The Prussian observer, Captain Justus Scheibert, reached similar conclusions based upon his observations of the defense of Charleston and his studies of joint operations on the Mississippi River. "A fleet," Scheibert wrote in a study he entitled Zusammenwirken der Armeee und Marine (Collaboration of the Army and the Navy), "despite its mobility and clear superiority in both the caliber and quality ... of its guns, was not equal to land batteries ... if not supported by land forces." [6] The Swiss military observer, Major Ferdinand Lecompte, offered the view that while the amphibious landing in the Crimean War was regarded as almost "the eighth wonder of the world," [7] the Union Army during the Civil War had conducted about 50 such landings "with superior skill and less fanfare." [8] Although no one can say for sure whether these judgments deterred any hostile designs, during the Civil War there were distinct possibilities that war would break out between the United States and two European powers. The first was Britain. Beginning with the Trent affair, U.S./British relationships underwent severe strains, resulting in the dispatch of a force of British troops to Canada. Hostile feelings were aggravated by the British refusal to stop building Confederate commerce raiders in British ports. After the summer of 1863, however, Britain perceived that the Confederates were not likely to win the war, and that after a Union victory the United States Army could easily seize Upper and Lower Canada. At this point tensions eased, and relations improved between the two countries. The other country with which the United States could have gone to war was France. In 1859, Mexican conservatives had borrowed money from European banks to finance a civil war against the liberal faction led by Benito Juarez. When the liberals got the upper hand in 1861, Juarez refused to pay those debts, and as a result in 1862 the French emperor, Napoleon III, sent a 25,000 man force to Mexico. This was a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, but Napoleon thought that the United States was too preoccupied with its own rebellion to do anything about it. The French scheme culminated in the installation of the Austrian Prince Maximillian as Mexican emperor in the spring of 1864. After the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson sent a force of 50,000 well-equipped, veteran troops under the command of General Sheridan to Brownsville, Texas. This force was not in the least daunted by the prospect of fighting 25,000 French troops in Mexico, but as it turned out they did not have to. In the summer of 1866, the Prussians defeated the Austrians at Koningratz, and Napoleon reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that France was next. Clearly, he could not afford to maintain a large force in Mexico, and the French garrison returned to France. Without French soldiers to prop up his throne, Maximillian could not defend it and, in 1867, the whole ill- conceived scheme ended with his execution, an inglorious end to the most serious challenge to the Monroe Doctrine until the Cuban missiles crisis a century later. When the Mexicans executed Maximilian, the only significant justification for U.S. military preparedness died with him. In the years after the Civil War, Americans assumed that there was virtually no possibility of a war with a foreign power. England, our traditional foe, might have had ambitions in the American hemisphere, but the fact that its possessions in British North America were vulnerable to U.S. invasion was viewed as a deterrent. France, or for that matter any other continental European power, did not have a big enough navy, and besides would not dare to send troops to the Americas because it would leave itself open to attack by its European rivals. The American military was reduced accordingly, to a navy suited to limited coastal defense, and an army tailored to the modest requirements of military occupation of the former confederacy (until 1877), restoring order in labor disputes, and fighting the western Indian tribes. The cooperative spirit between the Army and the Navy, which the European observers had admired during the Civil War, disappeared, as for over 30 years the Army cooperated more closely with the Department of the Interior, and the Navy with the Department of State. Yet, even in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, developments were under way which would begin the chain of events that dominated American strategy in the first half of the 20th century. In the early 1860s, the process of German unification began. The wars against Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866 established Prussia as the leading German state, and the defeat of the Second French Empire in 1870 codified the union of the German nation under Prussian leadership. Previous U.S. relations with the German states had been cordial, if distant. Now, the newly unified German state's continental, if not global, ambitions held forth the prospect of conflict with the reunited United States. On the other side of the world, the year 1867 was the first year of the reign of the Meiji emperor of Japan. This dynasty devoted its energies to the nation's modernization and the reversal of the unequal treaties with western powers. Japan placed a number of orders with British shipyards to build a modern navy and, under the direction of General Yamagata Arimoto, discarded the medieval samurai system to build a modern army based on European-style conscription. Significant as they appear in retrospect, few Americans at the time could predict how these developments would threaten their country's security. Back to Table of Contents Joint U.S. Army-Navy War Planning WWI Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com