CHAPTER 5
A Return to the Past; A Look
to the Future
Nor can it be questioned that the Division as now organized and composed of foot, animal, and motor elements, all with varying rates of speed, is uneconomical, unwieldy and unadapted to the demands of modern mobile warfare
After establishing post-World War I divisions, the Army experienced a prolonged period of stagnation and deterioration. The National Defense Act of 1920 authorized a Regular Army of 296,000 men, but Congress gradually backed away from that number. As with the Regular Army, the National Guard never recruited its authorized 486,000 men, and the Organized Reserves became merely a pool of reserve officers. The root of the Army's problem was money. Congress yearly appropriated only about half the funds that the General Staff requested. Impoverished in manpower and funds, infantry and cavalry divisions dwindled to skeletal organizations.
Meanwhile, the General Staff and service schools searched for a divisional structure, particularly for the infantry, that best suited the conditions of modern warfare. Like their European counterparts, American military planners remembered, above all, the indecisiveness that had dominated the battlefield in World War I. The result had been a protracted war of hitherto unimagined devastation. The search for a sound divisional organization was part of the effort to find the means of restoring decisiveness to warfare. Otherwise, victors might suffer as much as, or even more than, the vanquished. These considerations drew attention especially to various means of improving the division's mobility and maneuverability so that the Army could avoid future wars of position that would force it to adopt the bloody strategy of attrition.
Paper Divisions
Between 1923 and 1939 divisions gradually declined as fighting organizations. After Regular Army divisions moved to permanent posts, the War Department modified command relationships between divisional units and the corps areas. It placed elements of the 1st and 3d Divisions and the 8th, 10th,
- ↑ Ltr, CofS to CGs all corps areas and other addresses, 5 Nov 20, sub: Reorganization of Divisions and Higher Units, AG 320.2 (11-4-35), RG 177, NARA.
