→ Main article: Military history of the United States
Before and during the founding of the United States, quasi-military groupings of poorly trained militias arose under the command of the states. A resolution of the Continental Congress provided for the creation of a Continental Army in which these would be combined. This force, with considerable support from France, won the War of Independence under the command of George Washington, but was subsequently disbanded in adherence to the ideals of the Revolution.
In time, the need for a standing army as well as a navy became apparent. The ordering of several frigates in 1794 was the de facto birth of the U.S. Navy. The Army once again combined the disorganized and poorly trained contingents of the State militias to pool their strengths and clean up their weaknesses.
Between the founding of the United States and the Civil War, American forces won the American-Tripolitan War on the North African coast, failed to prevail in the British-American War, but enabled the territorial expansion of the United States to the Southwest. At the beginning of the Civil War, several units became part of the Confederate military, including some of the most able generals. The war cost the lives of 600,000 people and lasted four years before the Union army won the final victory.
In the period between the Civil War and the 1890s, the importance of the military declined, even as Army units fought Indians in the course of the steady westward expansion of the United States. By the turn of the century, however, this trend was reversed as the fullness of the United States' power began to increase, necessitating the final legal separation of police and military powers. The Army fought in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines in 1898. Also to be added are dozens of interventions under the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America and the dispatch of the Great White Fleet by President Theodore Roosevelt to demonstrate the new national self-confidence. The Militia Act of 1903 established the National Guard.
In April 1917, in response to the German Empire's rampant unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States entered World War I as an associated power alongside the Entente. The United States supported its allies with massive amounts of supplies, relieved them by sending a million-man expeditionary force to Europe, and thus made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the Central Powers. Due to the isolationism that prevailed in the interwar period, the U.S. military, especially its land forces, was greatly reduced, but in part expanded again in the run-up to World War II.
As a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States initially entered the war against Japan in December 1941, and shortly thereafter the two Axis powers, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States. In the confrontation with Nazi Germany, the armed forces participated in the reconquest of large parts of North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe, establishing, as in World War I, a superiority in weapons, troops, and supplies that enabled the Allies to defeat the German Reich. This was the only way, for example, that the Western Allies were able to open a second front in the large-scale, successful Normandy landings. In the Pacific they pushed back the troops of the Japanese Empire almost without foreign support in a laborious so-called "Island Hopping". The United States forced the Japanese surrender by using twoatomic bombs, which they were the first nation in the world to possess since 1945 (Manhattan Project), in order to avoid a loss-making invasion of the main Japanese islands.
Already in the final phase of World War II, the impending tensions of the Cold War were looming. The statist tendency of United States society, which had made downsizing the military a matter of course after the end of major wars, gave way to fears of the spread of communism, so American troops were stationed abroad in large numbers.
Over a period of 40 years, the National Security Act, passed in 1947, was to represent the most far-reaching military reform. Many agencies and units that had been established in the just-concluded global conflict with the proviso of functioning as expeditiously as possible were eventually merged or reformed. Whereas air units had been part of the Army during World War II, the Act placed them on an equal footing with the other armed forces under the umbrella of the United States Air Force. Moreover, the most important innovation was the creation of a central foreign intelligence service, which was to be assisted by a whole network of intelligence agencies with special competencies in the course of the Cold War. The law also included the creation of cross-force general staffs and ministries.
With the advent of the Cold War, a debate over force strategy ignited. Senior Air Force officers relied on nuclear weapons as conventional offensive assets and called for massive spending on strategic bombers. In contrast, the Navy pointed to the successes of naval dominance in World War II. The cancellation of an ordered aircraft carrier by Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, who favored air power, led to the admirals' revolt.
In fact, both branches of the armed forces remained predominantly equal during the Cold War, although strategic initiative in the air became an increasingly important moment in American and Western military doctrine. The United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) made a major contribution to deterring the Soviet Union and, because of Europe's geostrategic location, became a central hub of American military operations around the world. At the height of their strength, 60,000 airmen were under the command of the USAFE.
Although there was no direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, American soldiers fought in several proxy wars between the two power blocs. While the three-year Korean War, as a result of which a significant portion of U.S. forces were stationed in South Korea, was almost forgotten collectively for lack of a successful conclusion, the Vietnam War, which was ultimately lost, caused far-reaching military and social changes. The U.S. had failed to defend the Republic of South Vietnam against the attacks of the northern part of the country, which was communist. The most drastic example was the suspension of conscription in 1973. For almost two decades, the trauma of the war in Southeast Asia prevented major operations by the US military.
In the 1980s, American troops fought in Operations Just Cause in Panama and Urgent Fury in Grenada. In Lebanon, the death of 239 Marines and the subsequent withdrawal of foreign troops established the beginning of the civil war there. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 reorganized the military and successfully ended rampant rivalries between the armed forces. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, cutbacks, rationalizations, and base closures set in. Still, the U.S. military contested deployments. The liberation of Kuwait in alliance with nearly 30 other countries, resulting in the complete destruction of Iraq's forces in four days with minimal coalition losses, demonstrated the military supremacy of the United States. U.S. forces initially wore down Iraqi units through weeks of airstrikes, with a deployment of ground forces only occurring when strong resistance was no longer expected. The operation in Somalia experimented with the use of military units to stabilize weak nation states or to establish nation states capable of acting. However, it ended with defeat in the Battle of Mogadishu, which confronted the U.S. military with the tactics of guerrillas in urban areas. In addition, the U.S. military intervened in several smaller operations such as Kosovo and Haiti.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted a strategic reorientation, reflected, for example, in the transformation of the US Army and the cancellation of the Comanche program. The defense budget rose to unprecedented levels after the Cold War. The United States invaded Afghanistan as late as 2001 and Iraq in March 2003. The war against Iraq was also waged under the pretext of fighting terrorism, but it later turned out that Saddam Hussein's regime had no ties to Osama bin Laden, nor were any chemical agents found that would have posed a threat to the region. While the campaigns have been militarily successful, pacifying the areas of operations has proved difficult. Since late 2008, the battlefield has shifted from Iraq back to Afghanistan, which, like the Korean War, has been dubbed the "Forgotten War." The strategy of cooperation with locals and the planned expulsion of insurgents from their retreat areas, once successfully applied in Iraq, had not yet led to success in the strategically difficult-to-control mountainous region of Afghanistan. Rather, the battlefield has now expanded to include border regions in Pakistan, where U.S. forces have already conducted several operations, including with remote-controlled drones. Due to the difficulty in distinguishing between Taliban, insurgents and local groups, incidents continue to occur, resulting in casualties of uninvolved civilians. Meanwhile, both deployments have lasted longer than the American involvement in World War II.
War victims
Fallen
In absolute numbers, World War II, the War of Secession, World War I, and the Vietnam War were the United States' highest-loss wars. In these wars, 292,131, 184,594 (both Civil War parties combined), 53,513, and 47,369 American soldiers, respectively, were killed by direct enemy action.
When other causes of death, such as epidemics, mortal wounds, frostbite, or friendly fire are added, the highest death rate was in the War of Secession, in which 600,000 more American soldiers died than in all other U.S. wars combined. About 4.8% of the total number of soldiers deployed did not survive the war.
The War of Independence and the war against Mexico were marked by similar hardship in terms of casualties, with 4435 and 1733 soldiers respectively, 2.2% of the troops killed in action. Proportionately, this was more than the 1.8% of the troops who fell in World War II, but the absolute numbers were considerably higher there, averaging 6700 men per month.
Wounded
In percentage terms, there has been a decline in the number of wounded in wars with American participation since the beginning of the 20th century. In the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, a quarter of the troops were lost to wounds, and in the case of the Southern states, nearly a third. All other major wars, including World War II, caused wounding rates between 5% and 7%. After that, Korea and Vietnam decreased the rate to 2.4%. After the Vietnam War, the wounding rate dropped to unprecedented levels. This trend can be explained by general developments in medical technology and the deliberately increased effort of the US armed forces with regard to troop care, which in turn is rooted in the professionalization of the military.
The risk of an American soldier being killed in action or dying from battle-related injuries fell to an all-time low during the occupation of Iraq, although the predominantly urban battlefield made it difficult to medically evacuate soldiers. Underlying this trend is the development of so-called Forward Surgical Teams (German, roughly: "vorgelagerte chirurgische Behandlungsgruppe"). These are mobile and comprehensively equipped medical teams on alert, which can provide full outpatient medical care until the wounded are hospitalized. These treatment teams, which also operate in the field, have increased the likelihood of surviving a wound from 75% in the Vietnam War to 90% by the end of 2004.
Missing
The search for missing soldiers from all branches of the armed forces is the task of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a working group of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office within the Department of Defense. Since March 2011, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command has been cooperating with the Russian Federation in its role as the successor state of the Soviet Union in a committee.
Since 1945, approximately 83,900 American servicemen have been considered missing in action worldwide, with nearly 74,000 of those missing in action as a result of World War II. With the increasing downsizing and professionalization of the armed forces, accompanied by rising expectations of troop welfare as well as the expanded diplomatic, logistical and technical possibilities for clarifying the whereabouts of so-called MIAs (Missing in Action), these numbers fell to a few thousand for each of the conflicts after World War II: to 8,000 for the Korean War and 1,600 for the Vietnam War. Although individual cases from the Second Gulf War, for example that of the pilot Scott Speicher, received a great deal of public attention, according to official statistics no missing persons from this war remain.
War Crimes
See also:
- War Crimes by the United States in World War II
- War crimes committed by the United States during the occupation of Iraq
United States soldiers committed war crimes in several armed conflicts, which became public due to the increasing media treatment of the war as well as against the proclaimed claim of the US armed forces to fight as "clean" wars as possible. In this regard, the Vietnam War stood out with the MỹLaimassacre. From the Korean War, the Nogeun-ri massacre became well known. Also, during the Iraq War or the occupation of Iraq, increasingly strong allegations were made against US soldiers. Of the confirmed incidents, the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal and the Haditha massacre achieved sad notoriety.
War Costs
Determining the cost of warfare to the United States outside of the ordinary defense budget is difficult because of documents that have been lost in many cases, changes in accounting mechanisms, and inflation that often cannot be reconstructed, and thus cannot be approached with general reliability. Nonetheless, a 2008 congressional report notes that World War II cost $4.1 trillion (June 30, 2008 dollar level) in inflation-adjusted terms, and weighed on U.S. gross national income at the time at a rate of 37.5%. The next largest fiscal burdens on the U.S. prior to the 21st century were the Vietnam War, which consumed $686 billion and nearly 9.5% of gross national income in 1968, and the Korean War, which was funded at $320 billion and took about 14.1% of GNI in 1952. By contrast, the United States' global warfare and security operations since 2001 have cost $859 billion through fiscal year 2008, but are relatively small in 2008, totaling 4.2%.
