After much debate Congress amended the National Defense Act on 4 June 1920, providing for a new military establishment but scuttling the unpopular universal military training proposal. Instead it authorized a Regular Army of 296,000 officers and enlisted men, a National Guard of 435,000 men, and an Organized Reserve (Officers Reserve Corps and Enlisted Reserve Corps) of unrestricted size. To improve mobilization the law required that the Army, as far as practical, be organized into brigades, divisions, and army corps, with the brigades and divisions perpetuating those that had served in the war. The new law replaced the old territorial departments with corps areas, which assumed the tasks of administering and training the Army. Each corps area was to have at least one National Guard or Organized Reserve division. Corps areas were to be combined into army areas for inspection, mobilization, maneuver, and demobilization. Rather than mandating the structure of regiments as in the past, Congress authorized the number of officers and enlisted men for each arm and service and instructed the president to organize the units. To advise on National Guard and Organized Reserve matters, Congress directed the formation of committees with members from the Regular Army and both reserve components.[1]
On 1 September 1920, the War Department established the general outline of the postwar Army. It consisted of three army areas divided into nine corps areas (Map 1). Each army area supported one Guard and two Reserve cavalry divisions, and each corps area maintained one Regular, two Guard, and three Reserve infantry divisions, all to be sustained by combat support and combat service support units to be perfected later.[2]
Six committees of the War Plans Division developed the postwar Army. Only one, however, the Committee on Organization, dealt directly with the structure of the division through the preparation of organizational tables. Until that work was completed, no realistic calculation of future military requirements could be made. The other committees defined the roles of the National Guard and the Organized Reserves, estimated the number of Regular Army personnel required to train and administer them, established manning requirements for foreign garrisons, determined the number of regulars needed for an expeditionary force, and fixed the distribution of the Regular Army in the United States to meet strategic and training considerations.[3]
The Committee on Organization prescribed a 23,000-man square division patterned after the unit of World War I. Seeking comments from beyond the confines of the General Staff, Col. William Lassiter of the War Plans Division sent the tables to the commandants of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia; the General Service Schools at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and the General Staff College in Washington, D.C., as well as to General Pershing's AEF headquarters in Washington.[4]
Faced with the possibility of having a decision made without his views being considered, on 16 June Pershing finally forwarded the Superior Board report along with his comments about the infantry division, which differed substantially
- ↑ WD Bull 25, 1920.
- ↑ WD GO 50, 1920; Memo, WPD for Dir, WPD, 10 Jul 20, sub: Committee No. 2 Report on Army Reorganization, AWC file 52–21, Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. hereafter cited as MHI.
- ↑ Memo, WPD, 5 Jun 20, sub: Committees for Working out Army Reorganization, AWC file 52–21.
- ↑ Memo, WPD to General Staff College (hereafter cited as GSC), 14 Jun 20, sub: Army Organization, 14 Jun 20, with enclosures, Memo, WPD to GSC, 15 Jun 20, sub: Army Organization, AWC file 52–10. Pershing maintained an AEF headquarters in Washington between the time fee returned from France and the time he assumed the position of Chief of Staff, Army.
