American Military History, Volume 1 by Richard W. Stewart

Military history today has a much wider scope than previous generations of scholars granted it. More than simply the story of armed conflict, of campaigns and battles, it is the story of how societies form their institutions for their collective security and how those institutions operate in peace and war. It is the story of soldiers and the subculture of which they are a part. It includes the entire range of economic, social, legal, political, technological, and cultural issues that arise from the state's need to organize violence to preserve its existence and accomplish its national goals. Military history cannot be viewed as a separate, quaint, subset of the wider history of a society. It is an integral part of a society; and the essence of a military, the armed citizen, is a reflection of that society.

War is only one aspect of military history, though it remains the critical test for any military establishment and thus an essential aspect. The changes in warfare over time are thus a legitimate focus for the student of military history. The American Army has been both a recipient of and a contributor to the fruits of the changes in warfare pioneered by the Western world. The United States was born in the eighteenth century, during the great age of European dynastic wars involving, generally, armies of professional, uniformed soldiers whose maneuvers and battles left the civilian masses of a nation-state largely unaffected. Until the latter part of that century, wars were relatively simple and restricted in area, forces, and objectives. This changed with the advent of the "nation in arms" during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Warfare became conflicts of mass armies of conscripts, motivated by revolutionary ideology. With the spread of the industrial revolution in the following century, warfare grew even more complex and exerted an ever-increasing influence on more elements of society. This new era in warfare coincided with the evolution of the United States as an independent nation. In the first half of the twentieth century the effects of large-scale wars became so pervasive that they were felt not only by the combatant nations but throughout the entire world, now seemingly grown more compact due to the advent of faster transportation and communications means. The outcome in those wars was no longer measured in terms of the preservation of national honor or the conquest of territory, familiar in eighteenth century warfare, but in terms of national survival. Thus, as warfare in the past two centuries broadened to involve more and more people and more and more of the energies and resources of society to fight it-or during the Cold War, to deter it-the definition was extended to encompass more activities.