In April 1904, in response to a recommendation made by Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Adna R. Chaffee, Secretary of War William Howard Taft directed the Joint Army Navy Planning Board to: agree upon a series of practical problems (taking them in the order of their assumed importance) which involve cooperation of the services, and for the execution of which in time of emergency the two staffs will be responsible. [41] The Joint Board's solutions to these "practical problems" would become war plans signed by the two service secretaries. This was the first joint deliberate planning system in American history. Admiral Dewey directed the chiefs of the: two war colleges, Admiral Henry C. Taylor and General Tasker H. Bliss, to submit recommendations on how best to get the study underway. 42 Bliss submitted a 21-page paper, which shaped American war plans for the next 30 years. He assumed that the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, which he pointed out at the time of the War with Spain was the "only" American foreign policy, would be the most probable cause of America's future wars. Significantly, Bliss reasoned that the acquisition of the Philippines expanded the Monroe Doctrine beyond the American hemisphere. He concluded that the major European powers would not likely attack the United States itself because diversion of military resources would weaken them in the face of continental rivalries; and that the real purpose of any violation of the Monroe Doctrine would be to seize American possessions in our hemisphere or in the Philippines. [43] Accordingly, Bliss's paper recommended that the two services study the following problems in this order: 1. U.S. intervention in a South American country to assist the government in ousting a foreign power supporting insurgents; 2. U.S. at war against two continental European powers [one of which was sure to be Germany] 3. U.S. at war against a coalition of Britain and Canada; and, 4. U.S. intervention into Mexico "with another foreign complication" [presumably a European power collecting Mexican debt]. The most virulent of all the potential enemies analyzed by the Joint Board was Germany. Accordingly, in 1913, these studies led to the formal plan BLACK, for war between the United States and Germany. In 1905, the Russo-Japanese War added another country to the list of potential enemies of the United States--Japan. Plans for the defense of the Philippines had previously assumed a European enemy. [45] Beginning in 1906, particularly at the Naval War College, Japan became the chief adversary for all war planning and war games [46] (see Figure 2). Figure 2: 1909 Estimate of Japanese Invasion of the Philippines. These were no mere academic exercises. Diederichs' Japanese war planning counterpart was an Army officer named Giichi Tanaka, who in the 1906 draft of the Imperial Defense Policy included plans for war against the United States in the Philippines. [47] The problem of war with Japan was more difficult than war with Germany because the distance over which the Navy would have to project the fleet. In 1914, after 8 years of study, during which the United States provided for its Pacific interests by signing a number of treaties (Taft-Katsura, Root-Takahira, and the Lansing-Ishii treaties [48] ), the first edition of War Plan ORANGE for war with Japan emerged. Making matters worse, in 1902 Japan had signed an alliance with Britain, which meant that a war with Japan might involve the United States in a war with Britain as well. The United States would plan for war with Britain (Warplan RED) until 1921, the year when the Anglo-Japanese treaty was allowed to lapse. In 1910, a third source of potential danger emerged in the American hemisphere. At the beginning of the century the Mexican government was in the hands of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, who ran Mexican affairs with an iron fist. Under his rule, however, the Mexican economy improved, railroads were built, mines and oil wells developed, and industry expanded. When he was overthrown as a result of the Revolution of 1910, Mexico was thrown into a period of instability and violence. The violence in Mexico was in itself a peril to American interests, but the real danger of all the revolutionary unrest in the American hemisphere, of which Mexico was the prime example, was that hostile powers would emulate Louis Napoleon and exploit instability for the sake of advancing their own ambitions in the Americas. German and Japanese advisors were already in Mexico, either in covert or officially acknowledged status, Consequently, the measures which were taken to provide security against a threat from Mexico, and which eventually would be codified into Plan GREEN, were oriented as much against the Germans and Japanese as against any indigenous Mexican threat. Thus, when hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States had already contemplated the possibility of war, and had developed plans for the employment of its military forces for the defense of its territory and the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, territorially expanded to encompass its new Pacific holdings. It remained an open question, however, as to whether the country possessed the means to achieve these objectives. 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. 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