Royal American Army

The Royal American Army is the land service of the Royal American Armed Forces and the senior of the Realm’s six services. It numbers approximately half a million regulars, organised in fifteen divisions and sixty-four regiments of the line, and it is commanded professionally by the Chief of the Army Staff under the ministerial control of a Minister for the Army answerable to the Commons.

It is senior because it is older than the country. The Navy of the United Kingdom of America was created by the Charter settlement; several regiments of the Army were raised as provincial corps from 1741, fought for the Crown in the colonial wars, fought against it between 1775 and 1779, and were still on the establishment when the Charter was signed. The Army therefore predates the constitution it serves, and it has never entirely resolved what to do about that. It keeps two birthdays and celebrates them on different days.

Its modern purposes are four and only one of them involves an enemy. It defends a continent that nobody can plausibly invade. It provides the expeditionary force for the Realm’s commitments under the Atlantic Treaty Organization and the interrealm defence framework. It contributes a standing brigade to the deterrence of the Russian Republic in Europe alongside German and British formations. And it conducts disaster relief at continental scale, which is what it actually does in most years and what has made it politically untouchable.

The Army’s record contains one very large wrong. For roughly sixty years, from about 1840 to about 1900, the principal activity of the Royal American Army was the dispossession of the Native nations of the interior. That is not a chapter of its history. For most of the nineteenth century it was its history, and the Army now teaches those campaigns to its own officers as the standing case study in the difference between a lawful order and a right one.

Origins

The colonial regiments

The oldest formations of the Army began as provincial corps raised by the colonial assemblies, the oldest of them in 1741, for service against the French and their allies. They were colonial troops in the ordinary eighteenth-century sense: locally raised, locally officered, embodied for a campaign and stood down afterwards, and regarded by the regular British establishment with a condescension that took a century and a half to fade.

Their continuity is genuine and is documented. The Regiment of Virginia can trace an unbroken succession of colours, records and title from a provincial regiment of the 1750s to the three battalions that exist now. So can several others. What makes the inheritance strange is not its length but its direction. These regiments fought for the Crown, then against it, and then for it again, without ever ceasing to exist.

The Continental Army and the Charter

The Continental force raised from 1775 was not the same institution and was not, in the end, disbanded. The Four-Year War ended in armistice rather than in conquest, and the four years of negotiation that followed produced a settlement in which the army that had fought the King became the King’s army by conversion rather than by surrender. Units were taken onto the establishment. Officers were commissioned afresh. The men who had shot at British regulars at Boston drew pay from the Crown within a decade.

Nothing in the Charter describes how this was supposed to feel. The legal work was straightforward and the institutional work was not, and the Army’s habit of holding two incompatible things at once begins here.

Two birthdays

The Army observes two founding dates and has never chosen between them.

The older is 1741, marked chiefly by the regiments that can claim it, and preferred by those who wish the Army’s origin to precede the quarrel with Britain entirely. The other is a 1775 date, taken from the raising of the Continental force, which is the one the Army as a whole observes and which has the peculiar quality of being a national institution’s annual commemoration of an armed rebellion against the sovereign it now serves.

Both are kept. Neither is official. The Army’s own regulations refer to “the anniversaries” in the plural and decline to list them, which is the sort of solution the Realm produces when a question has no answer that anybody wants.

The second paragraph is the one that does the work, and it is taught from the first week of training. The order of the two clauses in the first paragraph was fought over for a generation before it settled, and the Army’s motto, Fides Servata, faith kept, was adopted precisely because it takes no position on the question of faith kept to whom.

History

The early Realm

For the first two generations after the Charter the Army was kept deliberately small. A standing army was the institution the Charter generation feared above all others, and the parliamentary answer to that fear was to vote it as little money as could decently be managed. The establishment in the 1790s would have been recognisable to a European observer as a garrison rather than a field force.

What it did instead was engineering. It surveyed, mapped, roaded, dammed, dredged and bridged a continent, and it justified its existence to a suspicious Commons by pointing at the work. That inheritance has never been given up, and it is the reason the modern Army is better at moving earth than most armies and better at disaster relief than any of them.

1861 and the breaking

The American Civil War came close to destroying the Army as an institution, and the damage was done in the first weeks rather than in the fighting.

Around a dozen regiments raised in the five rebel polities went over more or less whole. Twelve are recorded as struck off, and three of them were among the oldest regiments in the Army; the Regiment of Virginia split, and its loyal half kept the colours. Roughly a third of the officer corps resigned or defected. The territorial recruitment that the Army defends as the reason it is trusted in the polities is the exact mechanism by which it nearly came apart, and no officer discussing the regimental system is unaware of it.

The regiments and the officers who went were struck from the lists and were never restored. The loyal men of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama were formed into new regiments under new names in 1862 and 1863, and those regiments take their seniority from that date rather than from the colonial dates of the regiments they replaced (see Struck off in 1861). Petitions for posthumous reinstatement have been made in every generation since and have been refused in every generation since, which is among the few questions on which the Army has never wavered.

Robert E. Lee declined to resign his commission. He advised the ministry in writing that Grant should command the armies and then served under him, and the Realm has spent a century and a half deciding what to make of a man whose loyalty was a matter of professional obligation rather than of political conviction. He had commanded the federal force that took John Brown as a professional officer and nothing more; he stayed in 1861 on the same reasoning.

The Enrolment Act of 1862 forced the first of the war’s two confidence questions and very nearly ended the Lincoln ministry. It filled the ranks. It also permitted substitution and commutation, so that the wealthy bought their way out, and the riots that followed turned on Black communities. Those two facts are one fact, and the Army has drawn the same conclusion from them for a hundred and sixty years: conscription is a weapon that damages the institution wielding it. The Realm’s modern all-volunteer settlement begins in 1862.

Black soldiers were admitted on unequal terms. Their pay was equalised retrospectively by Parliament, over the objection of the department, and the Army has been allowed to take credit for that ever since without having earned it.

Its Reconstruction service was direct administration rather than military government, and it was carried out well in some districts and disgracefully in others. The variation is the story. Where a commanding officer chose to protect freedmen, freedmen were protected; where he did not, they were not; and the Realm built no mechanism to make the first case compulsory.

Root and the modern Army

The Army that entered the twentieth century was organised for the frontier and for nothing else. The reforms carried through by Elihu Root from the late 1890s, and left unfinished when Theodore Roosevelt could not complete them, made it into a modern institution in four moves.

They gave the General-in-Chief a general staff and made him answer to the minister, where before he had answered to nobody in particular. They created a staff college, so that high command became a taught profession rather than an inherited manner. They imposed a rotation between staff and command, breaking the caste of permanent bureau officers who had run the department as a private estate. And they wrote civilian control into the structure of the department rather than leaving it to be assumed.

Root treated the Army as a constitutional instrument rather than as a professional interest entitled to govern itself, and the modern Army’s self-understanding is substantially his.

The First Great War

The Realm’s contribution to the First Great War required an army of millions, and it was raised by conscription after a debate made savage by the memory of 1862.

The performance was competent and the start was a shambles. Supply failed, medicine failed worse, and the public inquiry that followed was blunt in a way that set the Realm’s expectations of candour about its own institutions permanently. The modern Army is a product of that inquiry more than of any victory.

It was also the last war in which the Army executed its own soldiers. The shootings for desertion and cowardice were the subject of a blanket posthumous pardon by statute a century later, granted over the Army’s formal objection that a legislature cannot rewrite the findings of courts that sat under the law of their day. The objection was reasonable and it lost.

Between the wars

Through the Depression the Army supplied conservation labour, relief logistics and public works under civilian direction. This is the origin of the disaster-relief competence that is now its most-used skill, and the Army went along with it at the time for the unglamorous reason that it kept the officer corps employed and trained through a decade in which there was no other budget.

It declined to enforce Prohibition, and fought hard not to, on the ground that policing citizens is not a soldier’s work. That refusal is the clearest early statement of a position the Army has held ever since.

The Second Great War

The Army fought in both theatres of the Second Great War and carried the weight of the European one. The Pacific was substantially a naval and Marine war; the campaign against fascist France in Europe was the Army’s, alongside German and British formations, and it is the achievement the public remembers when it thinks about soldiers at all.

Desegregation happened during that war, under manpower pressure rather than under principle. The Army claimed principle at the time. It admits necessity now, and the documents make the second version unarguable. Its sixteen distinguished Black regiments were dissolved into the integrated force one by one between 1942 and 1944, and their lineages were deliberately preserved in successor units rather than allowed to lapse, which is the part the Army got right: each regiment’s honours passed to the regiment that took most of its men, and are carried on that regiment’s colours (see The Black regiments).

The Japanese-heritage removals

In 1942 the Royal American Army removed citizens of Japanese descent from their homes on the western coast and delivered them into confinement.

It was a military operation conducted under a military order. The Realm records it as the wartime failure of the American Rights Act, and the Army’s share of that failure is not reduced by the fact that the policy was ministerial, that the polity law officers pressed for it, or that the courts allowed it at the time.

Japanese-heritage soldiers were serving in the Army’s own ranks while it was being done, some of them in units that took heavy casualties in Europe in the same years, several of them with families behind wire. That is the fact that makes the episode unanswerable, and the article states it here rather than in a footnote because a footnote is what it received for forty years.

One area commander delayed his part of the removals for eleven days while he sought written confirmation. The delay saved nobody. It is remembered anyway, because it is the only recorded instance of any officer doing anything at all.

Indochina

The Realm fought a long counter-insurgency in Indochina that it should not have entered. It ended badly.

Conscription returned briefly for it, and abandoning conscription afterwards is what made the Realm permanently all-volunteer. Al Gore enlisted in 1969 and served there as a military information specialist, which was an ordinary posting for an ordinary graduate of the period.

There were atrocities. The prosecutions that followed reached a general, which is unusual in any country and which the Army regards, correctly, as the most creditable thing it has ever done about the least creditable thing it has ever done. He was convicted and imprisoned. The Army treats the conviction as proof that the system works and the sentence as proof that it does not go far enough, and holds both views simultaneously and sincerely.

Parliament ended the commitment by cutting supply, which is the modern precedent every war-powers argument cites.

Three regiments were disbanded in the reductions that followed, the only regiments the Army has ever lost to economy.

The Army thinks it lost. It says so in its own staff histories rather than blaming the politicians, which is rare enough among armies to be worth stating plainly.

The long cold war and after

For fifty years the Army stood in Europe, in a brigade and sometimes more, preparing for a war in the German plain that everybody assumed would go nuclear within days and that never came at all. It is an odd thing to build an institution around, and a generation of officers spent entire careers on it.

Since Indochina it has fought almost nowhere. The chief exception is Panama in 1989, a short intervention that Parliament authorised to remove an entrenched military ruler, in which overwhelming force ended organised resistance quickly and civilians were killed in numbers that are still disputed. League peacekeeping is now the main operational experience the Army has, and it has shaped a generation of officers more than any war has. It is also where the Army repaired its reputation, and a large number of its serving soldiers have never heard a shot fired in anger.

The Frontier Campaigns

This section stands on its own because putting it inside the chronological history would be a way of minimising it. For roughly sixty years, from about 1840 to about 1900, the dispossession of the Native nations was not an episode in the Army’s work. It was the Army’s work.

The campaigns

The campaigns ran against the Apache, the Lakota, the Cree and many others, and the worst of them came after 1863, when the end of the Civil War released a large, experienced and newly unemployed army into the interior. They were conducted by coercion, by the destruction of subsistence, by winter attacks on encampments, by the removal of populations from land that had been guaranteed to them by treaty, and by massacre.

The Army was the instrument of dispossession. It did not originate the policy, which was ministerial and parliamentary and popular, and it executed the policy for two generations with competence and persistence. The named massacres are recorded, and the principal source for them is the Army’s own paperwork: patrol reports, returns of expenditure, casualty lists, and the correspondence of officers who described what they were doing in detail because they did not imagine anyone would object.

The reckoning

The orders were lawful. This is the difficult part and the article does not soften it.

Almost nothing done on the frontier was illegal under the law of the Realm as it then stood. Treaties were abrogated by statute; removals were authorised by instruments that were properly made; officers who destroyed food stores in winter were acting within their instructions. A constitution that restrained the Army perfectly did not make the Army decent, and the Realm’s whole apparatus of civilian control, parliamentary supply and judicial review operated throughout without producing a different outcome, because the civilians, the Parliament and the courts all wanted the same thing.

This is why the Frontier Campaigns are the case study taught at West Point and at Leavenworth for the clause of the oath concerning unlawful orders. The lesson is not the easy one, that a soldier must refuse an order that breaks the law. It is the harder one: that an officer may spend a career executing lawful instructions and be, at the end of it, the instrument of something indefensible, and that the law will not tell him when that has happened.

A board convened by the Army itself, under public pressure, struck a number of frontier battle honours from the colours within the last decade. Not all of them. The board’s report is public, its reasoning is contested, and several of the honours it left standing are the ones campaigners most wanted removed.

A proposal to mark the surviving frontier honours in the way the 1775 honours are marked, borne without a crown above them, was rejected on the ground that it would equate rebellion with atrocity. The reasoning was accepted at the time and has not stopped being argued about.

The apology and what has followed it

The King apologised in person, on Native ground, with the Chief of the Army Staff standing beside him, within living memory. It was a joint apology of Crown and Army, and it was the first time either had said the word in the Realm.

Three things have followed it, none of them complete.

Land has been returned, from Army holdings to the nations it was taken from, slowly and in small parcels, against the objection of commanders who point out that the training estate cannot be reduced indefinitely. The archive has been opened, and the Army’s own campaign records are being published in full on a rolling rule that historians describe as generous and campaigners describe as slow. And remains and objects held in regimental museums are being repatriated, negotiated museum by museum because no regiment will be told what to do with its own collection by anybody in Marlborough.

Several regiments have refused. The apology did not resolve this and did not create a mechanism to resolve it, and the refusals are the live grievance.

Native service

Native people enlist in the Royal American Army at rates far above the national average, and have done so for a century.

The reasons given are ordinary. They are employment, trade training, education, family precedent, a wish to leave home and a wish to come back, and they are the same reasons anybody else gives. Treating them as exotic is its own error, and the Army’s own recruiting literature made that error for decades before it stopped.

There is no formal Native structure within the Army, no Native regiment and no scouts corps, and the absence is the policy rather than an oversight. Native soldiers serve throughout the Army as anybody else does. The Arizona Scouts are not an exception to that policy, though they are an exception to the uniformity of the line. The regiment inherited its title from the frontier scouting units of the old West, and it kept the work along with the name: it is a line regiment recruiting across the March like any other, and it also scouts when a task needs it, in desert and broken country where the old skills of tracking and reading ground have never been fully replaced. It has no Native structure and is not a scouts corps. The Army has declined every proposal to change the name, on the ground that removing it would tidy the record rather than correct it. The one episode that stands apart is the use of Native languages as field codes in both world wars, a contribution that went unacknowledged for decades after the wars it won, and whose acknowledgement is a separate wrong from the frontier and is recorded separately here.

Organisation

The regimental question

The Army is organised on regiments and on divisions at the same time, and has never decided which is real.

The regiment is the permanent home. It holds the colours, the honours, the museum, the recruiting area and the identity, and a soldier joins one and in the ordinary case stays in it. The division is the operational formation, and every operation the Army has conducted in living memory has been run through divisions and joint commands rather than through regiments.

Neither has won. The cost of the stalemate is a command structure with two of nearly everything: two sets of loyalties, two chains of administration, two answers to the question of who a battalion belongs to, and a standing argument in every staff course about which should be abolished. Every attempt to resolve it in favour of divisions has collapsed when recruitment and retention collapsed with it, and every attempt to resolve it in favour of regiments has foundered on the fact that regiments cannot fight a modern campaign.

Divisions and arms

The Army fields fifteen divisions, mixing armoured, light, mountain and one standing Arctic division, the 15th, recruited heavily from Alaska and the northern polities. The Arctic division is the most fashionable posting in the Army, which surprises everybody outside it.

Divisions are numbered, and every one of them has a nickname given by its own soldiers, none of which appears in any official document and all of which appear in every unofficial one. A division draws its battalions from the regiments of a region, though the two-of-everything problem means a battalion can serve in another division for years without its regiment ceasing to regard it as on loan.

The arms are the old ones: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Engineers, Signals and the supporting corps. Cavalry now means armour and the title was never changed. Airborne forces exist. Special forces exist and are kept deliberately small and firmly subordinate, because the Realm distrusts private armies of every kind and regards an elite that answers to itself as the beginning of one.

Horses still work. In the mountain west and on the Arctic approaches there are tasks for which nothing mechanical is better, and the Army maintains pack and mounted capability for them while being faintly embarrassed at how useful it continues to be.

Nothing that flies belongs to the Army. Every aircraft, including every helicopter, belongs to the Royal American Air Force, and the Army resents this daily and has lost the argument in every defence review for sixty years.

Garrisons

The Army is stationed mostly at home, in a small number of very large continental garrisons: the southern plains of Texas and Oklahoma where the land and the weather permit year-round training, the mountain west and the desert southwest, the southeast in a concentration inherited from Reconstruction, and Alaska and the north. Abroad it maintains a standing brigade in Europe under ATO and garrisons in the sister realms and dependencies.

The geography is political. A great garrison is the largest employer in several polities, closing one is a parliamentary event, and the distribution explains why the Army is regarded warmly in the south and the west and barely thought about in the northeast. Those are the same phenomenon seen from two ends.

The Army holds an enormous acreage, and much of it is now the best-preserved habitat in the Realm, a distinction it achieved by accident and takes credit for deliberately.

Reserves and the polity guards

A federal reserve of former regulars and part-time soldiers exists, larger than the polity guard formations and far less visible.

The polity guards are not the Army and are not armies. A polity may maintain a guard formation for disaster relief and civil support, locally commanded and locally funded, federalisable on proclamation, holding no war-making capacity. The Army sets their standards, inspects them and trains them, and treats the relationship frankly as a recruiting pipeline.

Officers are divided about them, and the division tracks precisely whether an officer has ever worked alongside them. Those who have, rate them. Those who have not, worry about locally commanded armed bodies, which is what the Charter was written to prevent.

The regiments

The Army has sixty-four regiments of the line, and the King’s Guards above them. Every one of the forty-nine polities has at least one regiment, as do the Columbia District and the Territory of Loreto, and eight polities hold more than one: New York and California four each, Texas three, and Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, North Carolina and Cascadia two each. They recruit territorially and genuinely so, which the Army defends as the reason it is trusted in the polities and which is also the mechanism that nearly destroyed it in 1861.

A regiment has between one and three battalions, according to the size of the polity it recruits from. No regiment has ever been amalgamated with another. Regiments have been struck off, dissolved and disbanded, and each of those is recorded below, but the practice of merging two old regiments under a double name has never been used, and the Army regards the refusal as a kindness to the regiments and a cost to the establishment that it has chosen to bear.

Seniority runs by the date on which a regiment was raised. The precedence number is carried in the Army List and on parade states and never in a title: nobody in the King’s Own Massachusetts calls it the First. A regiment that went over in 1861 lost its place with its name, and the regiments rebuilt from the loyal men of the rebel polities take their seniority from 1862 and 1863.

Ten regiments wear red in full dress, being the ten raised before the Charter that are still on the establishment. Before 1861 there were thirteen. The other three went over, and their rebuilt successors wear blue, because the rule follows the date and not the province. The remaining fifty-four wear dark blue.

Every regiment has a nickname and a motto. The nicknames run from the honorific to the insulting, and the oldest are the strangest. The mottos are mostly Latin or English. Ten are in a language of the polity or of the people who founded the regiment: louisianais, Wisconsindeutsch, Swedish, Hawaiian, Scottish Gaelic, Chinook Jargon, Spanish twice, Tlingit and Cherokee. The Army List prints the last two in English, with the language named. Two more are their polities’ own old mottos, in a language of neither: Maryland’s is Italian and Montana’s Spanish.

The six cavalry regiments are armoured, whatever their titles say. The Infantry, Rifles and Light Infantry titles no longer mark any difference of role, although the rifle regiments keep their quick march and their green facings and will explain the distinction to anybody who stands still.

Regiments raised by number in wartime, such as the Twenty-third Ohio of the Civil War, were federally embodied for the duration and were never regiments of the line. They are not listed here.

The King’s Guards

The King’s Guards stand at the head of the list and outside the sixty-four. They were raised in 1861, in the first months of the rebellion, as the Crown’s own foot guard at the seat of government, drawn from men of every loyal polity when the Army could not be sure of the men of any one of them, and they are still the only regiment of the Army that recruits from every polity rather than from one, which was the point of raising them. Their depot is at New Westminster.

Their full dress is red and blue halved, the one uniform in the Army that belongs to neither the older regiments nor the newer, and the rest of the Army calls them the Harlequins, which the regiment has never managed to stop. Their motto is Rex et Carta, the King and the Charter.

Order of precedence

The corps

The corps are not regiments. They hold no territorial recruiting area, and a soldier joins a corps for a trade rather than for a place. All ten are styled in the same form. Before 1861 the gunners, the engineers and the chaplains were departments rather than corps, and the war that made the King’s Guards made corps of all three.

Struck off in 1861

Twelve regiments went over to the rebellion in 1861 and were struck from the lists. Their names have never been restored and are not available to any new regiment. Four of them wore red, and one of the four was the Richmond half of the Regiment of Virginia, so the Army had thirteen red regiments before the war and has ten now.

Virginia is the exception, because its regiment split. The half recruited around Richmond went over under a name of its own choosing, the True Regiment of Virginia. The loyal half kept the colours, the records and the title, which is why the Regiment of Virginia can claim unbroken succession from the 1750s and why the rest of the Army calls it the Other Half.

In the other four rebel polities the loyal men were formed into new regiments in 1862 and 1863: the North Carolina Rifles from the mountain loyalists, the Carolina Light Infantry from the loyal men of both Carolinas, which is why it recruits in both and is counted as South Carolina’s, the Georgia Light Infantry, and the Alabama Rifles from the loyal north of that State.

The Black regiments

Sixteen Black regiments were raised in 1862 and 1863, as separate units under white field officers, and they took the same form of title as every other regiment. Two of them, from Missouri, founded Lincoln University at Jefferson City in 1866 out of their own pay. They served in Cuba and in the Philippines with a distinction that was publicly acknowledged and changed nothing for the communities they returned to.

They were dissolved one by one between 1942 and 1944, as the Army integrated under the pressure of the Second Great War. Each regiment’s lineage and honours passed to the regiment that took most of its men, and are carried on that regiment’s colours, so that the honours of the Massachusetts Light Infantry are borne on the oldest red colour in the Army and the honours of the Virginia Light Infantry are carried by the regiment that guards the Tomb.

Disbanded after Indochina

Three regiments were disbanded in the reductions of 1975 and 1976 that followed the end of conscription. All three were second or third regiments of large polities, which is how the rule that every polity keeps a regiment survived the cuts. Their colours are laid up in the capitols of their polities. The Virginia Rifles’ men went to the Regiment of Virginia as its 3rd Battalion, which keeps their green facings and quick march and carries a colour bearing their honours.

Command and the constitution

The chain

Formal military authority descends from the Crown. Operational command does not.

The Chief of the Army Staff is the Army’s professional head, the post that replaced the General-in-Chief in the postwar settlement of 1948, and is a force provider rather than a commander: he raises, trains and sustains the Army and hands it over. Operational command of anything deployed belongs to the Chief of the Defence Staff through a joint command. Ministerial control runs through a Minister for the Army under the Minister of Defence, answerable to the Commons alone.

There is no rank of Field Marshal and never has been. The Realm declined to institute one on the ground that a rank implying command over the Crown’s other services was a rank nobody should hold, and the Army has never asked for it. It has once created a rank above general. In 1919 John J. Pershing received the unique rank of General of the Armies, recognising his wartime command without placing him over the other services or making a precedent, and no one has held it before or since.

Domestic deployment

The Army may be deployed inside the Realm only on the joint authority of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General. Neither can act alone and neither can be bypassed.

It has been used once, for Al Gore’s cordon around the bombed districts of New York after the May Day bombings of 2006. The force used was federalised polity guard formations rather than Army regulars, which was a deliberate political choice, and which was invisible to New Yorkers and enormous to lawyers.

The Army does not want the domestic role and says so. Its settled institutional position is that internal deployment is the fastest available route to losing public trust, and it regards the two-signature requirement as a protection for itself rather than as a restriction on itself. Asked by select committees, it says this plainly, and it is the one political question on which serving officers will speak.

The Army has never openly defied a lawful order. It has once delayed one: a domestic deployment order was slow-walked until the political moment passed and the order was withdrawn. The delay is more instructive than a refusal would have been, because nobody had to decide anything, and because it demonstrates a capacity the constitution does not formally acknowledge.

War powers and supply

The Army cannot be deployed abroad without a Commons vote, except for immediate defence. This is statutory rather than conventional, and it has been tested. Allies plan around it, and the Realm’s reputation is of a partner that is highly professional and constitutionally slow.

Parliament’s other instrument is supply, voted annually on estimates that are read item by item. The Army finds the scrutiny humiliating and admits that it works: procurement here is less scandalous than in comparable states, for the unglamorous reason that somebody actually reads the numbers. Supply has been used decisively once, to end the Indochina commitment.

Civil-military relations

No Chief of the Army Staff has resigned in public protest. Private resignations have occurred and are known and unrecorded. Generals write memoirs rarely, and the profession regards publishing against a living minister as bad form bordering on dishonour. Serving officers do not speak publicly on policy, a rule enforced by career consequence rather than by regulation, though they are expected to be candid before select committees and generally are.

There has never been a coup plot in the Realm, nor a serious scare about one. Most large armies have something. This one has nothing, and the absence is worth stating because it is not the natural condition of a standing army in a country this size.

Four Governors-General have been career Army officers: Scott, Pershing, Marshall and Powell. Hayes held a wartime commission in the rebellion, and Washington’s command was of the Continental force before it became the King’s. The Realm is broadly comfortable with this, on the reasoning that a soldier who has spent a career under civilian control is exactly the person one wants holding reserve powers, and the four are the Army’s clearest single mark upon the constitution.

Soldiers

Who serves

The Army is all-volunteer and has been since conscription was abandoned after Indochina. The Realm regards peacetime conscription as constitutionally objectionable, a position that begins in the resentments of 1862 and was confirmed by the brief Indochina call-up.

Recruitment is disproportionately from the south, the west and the rural interior, and disproportionately from the children of soldiers. The Army claims a cross-section and does not quite have one. Senior officers have begun saying publicly that a self-replicating military caste is a problem for a constitutional army, and no minister has yet found a remedy that survives contact with a budget.

It is short of the right recruits rather than of bodies. Infantry battalions fill. The technical trades, signals, engineering, medical and cyber, cannot be filled at any price the Army is permitted to offer, and this is the largest practical constraint on what the Army can do.

Non-citizens may enlist, with citizenship at the end of a term, a long-established and much-used route.

Pay is modest and the real value of service is in housing, health through the National Health Service of America, pension and education. That package is how an all-volunteer force is actually staffed, and it is also why the Army’s married quarters, which are poor, are the commonest reason good people leave.

Training and the officer corps

Recruits pass through common basic training at a handful of great depots and then go to their regiment’s own home for regimental training, which is where the identity is made.

Officers come by several routes. West Point supplies a minority of them and most of the generals, so the academy is dominant at the top and not at the bottom. Its four-year course is heavily academic, and its graduates are notoriously better at mathematics than at soldiering for their first decade. Commissioning from the ranks is routine and a substantial share of officers came up that way, including the current Chief of the Army Staff.

Purchase of commissions never existed. The Charter settlement excluded it from the beginning, and the Army regards that as its founding distinction from the British Army it otherwise resembles. One consequence is that the officer corps is socially broad by the standards of comparable institutions. Another is that the officers’ mess was never rich: the older regiments keep silver and ceremony, the newer ones do not, and the difference is a class marker every soldier can read at a glance.

The Joint Staff College at Leavenworth is shared with the other services, which was the real innovation of the Root reforms and remains unusual internationally. Passing it is the gate to command above battalion.

Ranks

The Army’s ranks are American in pattern and British in their history. Until the Root reforms it used the titles it had inherited from the colonial regiments. Root’s rank reform of 1903 renamed the junior and one-star officers and abolished the brevet: the ensign became the second lieutenant, the lieutenant the first lieutenant and the brigadier the brigadier general, and the brevet, an honorary higher rank that gave precedence and not command, went altogether. Lee won three brevets in Mexico, and Hayes and McKinley left the Army in 1865 as brevet major generals. Nobody has held one since.

The sergeants kept their British titles through the First Great War and lost them in the reorganisation of 1920, when the colour sergeant became the sergeant first class, the company sergeant major the first sergeant and the regimental sergeant major the command sergeant major. The purely American ranks arrived one at a time: warrant officers in 1918, the specialist in 1955 and the Sergeant Major of the Army in 1966.

The top of the list was built slowly. Washington had been a lieutenant general, and nobody held the rank again until it was revived for Winfield Scott in 1848. The full rank of general was created in 1863, at the end of the war, for Grant and Lee together. General of the Armies has been held once, by Pershing from 1919, and there is no field marshal.

Two survivals are regimental. The ten red regiments, raised between 1741 and 1758, still call a second lieutenant an ensign. And a private goes by the title of the arm or the regiment: Fusilier in the fusilier regiments, Rifleman in the rifles, Trooper in the cavalry, Sapper in the engineers, Jaeger in the Wisconsin Jaegers and Piper among the pipers of the Highland Fusiliers. Gunner in the artillery is the newest of them: the Corps of Artillery called its privates privates through the Second Great War and took the title only after it. On paper the rank is private in every case.

Colonel-in-Chief, Colonel of the Regiment and the old General-in-Chief, which Scott, Sherman, Pershing and Eisenhower held, are appointments and not ranks, and they are not in the table.

Women, race and the Rights Act

The pattern of the Army’s social history is that it did not reform itself. It was made to, by litigation, under the American Rights Act.

Women were integrated in the 1950s, by a case brought by a wartime auxiliary who refused to be stood down, and exclusion proved litigable because the Act binds the Crown. The integration was resisted, and the resistance did not end so much as change form: it moved from exclusion to harassment, which is a harder problem, and it is not solved.

Racial desegregation came during the Second Great War under manpower pressure. It was not the end of the matter. Integrated units kept segregated promotion for another generation, and military justice was worse: conviction rates by race were indefensible, were eventually published, and were broken only by a series of Rights Act cases. Colin Powell’s career is read in the Realm as a triumph, and is better read as a measure of how slow the institution was.

Gay and lesbian soldiers serve openly and did so earlier than in comparable states, for the same reason as everything else in this paragraph: the Act made exclusion litigable. Those discharged under the old rules have had their records corrected and have been compensated, which few states have managed.

There is no union and no collective representation. Proposals appear whenever pay lags and vanish whenever it catches up.

Leaving

Veterans are genuinely well provided for, through education, health, housing preference and pension, and the provision is a substantial part of why the all-volunteer force works at all.

They are a smaller political constituency than an outsider would expect, because the force is small and the wars have been few. Such organisation as exists is regimental rather than national, which blunts them politically and helps them socially.

Soldiers vote. Serving officers are barred from party membership and not from the franchise. A serving soldier cannot sit in the Commons and must resign his commission first, a settled and unremarkable rule.

Law and discipline

The Army maintains its own system of military justice under the Armed Forces Acts, with summary hearings, courts-martial and the Court of Military Appeal at its apex, whose decisions are reviewable by the civilian federal courts on constitutional grounds.

The Rights Act applies to soldiers in full, subject to proportionate limits for discipline that the courts police closely and have narrowed in every decade since the war.

Capital punishment was abolished throughout the Realm in 1967. It survives on paper in military law for wartime treason and mutiny, unusable in practice and never removed, an oversight that successive governments have declined to spend parliamentary time correcting. The last soldier executed by the Army died in the First Great War.

Conscientious objection was recognised unusually generously, because the Rights Act made religious liberty a hard limit rather than a concession to be administered. The tribunals of every conscription period, in the two Great Wars and in the Indochina ballot, granted alternative service readily by international standards, and the Realm is unusual in having produced no significant body of imprisoned objectors.

The Army’s standards on the treatment of prisoners are strict and genuinely observed, and it ties that directly to the second clause of the oath rather than to international convention, which is a distinction its lawyers consider important and its allies find slightly odd.

Tradition

Colours and honours

The Crown’s link to the regiments is through colours. The King presents them personally where he can and the Governor-General where he cannot, and a regiment remembers which it got for as long as the colours last.

Colonelcies are held by retired American officers, which was a deliberate limit: the Crown’s relationship is with the regiment and not with a courtier’s diary. It has been crossed once. Prince Frederick was appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the Regiment of Virginia on his fifteenth birthday, 2 May 2028, the first royal colonelcy of an American regiment, and the Colonel of the Regiment, a retired general, does the work. Since his accession as George V on 31 October 2028 the regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief is the sovereign.

Old colours are laid up in a cathedral or a polity capitol and left to decay naturally. They are never repaired. The decay is the point, and a regiment whose colours have gone to threads in a side chapel regards the threads as the honour.

Some regiments carry battle honours for actions fought against the Crown between 1775 and 1779. These are borne without the crown that surmounts every other honour, a visible compromise reached in the Charter generation and never revisited. It is probably the strangest thing on any colour anywhere: a regiment permitted to remember that it shot at its sovereign, and not permitted to let his crown sit above the memory.

Uniform, music and ceremonial

Full dress is red in the older regiments and dark blue in the newer. There is no single item that marks an American soldier, because the identity is regimental and not national, which is the recurring theme of the whole institution.

Soldiers rarely wear uniform in public off duty. This is habit rather than regulation and it dates from the 1930s, when soldiers used in industrial disputes made the uniform a provocation in the mill towns.

Regimental bands survive and are a serious musical institution, supplying much of the Realm’s brass and military music tradition. The Highland Fusiliers of North Carolina keep pipes.

The Army’s march is The March of Liberty, composed by Colonel Nathaniel Briggs in 1912 in the wake of the Frontier Campaigns. Briggs wrote it as a lament. It has been played as a celebration for over a century, and the misreading is now so complete that correcting it at a parade would be the eccentric act rather than the accurate one.

The Crown’s ceremonial in the capital is done by the King’s Guards and by nobody else. The Realm has never let them grow into a household brigade, on the sound instinct that a household brigade is the sort of thing that invites questions.

The Army-Navy Match is played annually at football, televised nationally, and attended by the Governor-General as a fixed point of the civic year. The losing academy sings the winner’s song before it sings its own.

The emblem

The Army’s institutional emblem belongs to the family the Realm uses for its departments and public bodies: a device, a rule, the name in stacked capitals, a second rule, and a date beneath. In two respects it departs from the family, and both departures are deliberate.

The ground is rifle green rather than the deep navy every other mark uses. The postal, aviation and naval emblems are warm off-white on navy, and the Army alone is not. The reason given is that navy belongs to the sea service and that the Army, having no single dress colour of its own, took the green of its light infantry rather than choose between the red of the older regiments and the blue of the newer. The reason given by everybody else is that the two services’ emblems were being confused.

The device is a crowned eagle perched on the hoop of a military side drum, its wings closed and its head turned, with two furled regimental colours rising behind it in a shallow V, tasselled and spear-finialled, and a ribbon scroll across the face of the drum reading Fides Servata.

The eagle is crowned because the Realm’s eagle is crowned everywhere the Crown’s authority runs, on the arms, the departmental seals and over the doors of the courts. The deliberate exception is the American Postal Service, whose eagle carries no crown because the letter in its claws does not belong to the King. A soldier’s commission does.

It is perched rather than displayed, which is the second departure. The other services’ eagles have their wings spread. This one stands, and the drum beneath it gives the device a base where the naval emblem has open air, which is a distinction between a land service and a sea one that nobody has ever had to explain to a soldier.

The colours are furled rather than flying, and there are no weapons on the emblem at all. That was a choice, and it is occasionally complained about by soldiers who would prefer something with an edge on it.

The date slot carries two dates. Every other mark in the family carries one. The Army, having two birthdays and refusing to choose between them, puts 1741 and 1775 side by side with a stroke between them, and it is the only emblem in the Realm that does.

Decorations and remembrance

The Realm’s highest award for valour is the Sovereign’s Cross, open to all services and all ranks, awarded very rarely, and conferred by the King in person wherever that can be arranged and by the Governor-General where it cannot.

The Army keeps no day of its own. It shares the Realm’s national day of remembrance, at which the Governor-General lays the Crown’s wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at Arlington across the river from the capital.

Its dead lie at Arlington, on the Potomac, in the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery. The burial ground was acquired by ordinary purchase in 1864. In a Realm where Lee had gone over, it would have been confiscated from him as a traitor’s property; because he stayed, the Crown had to buy it like anybody else, and the deed of sale is displayed in the visitor centre precisely because the difference is the point. The house and the rest of the estate followed by a deed of gift from Lee and his wife that took effect on his death in 1870, and the whole was the Realm’s on her death in 1873.

The Army abroad

The Army’s deepest foreign relationship is with the British Army, with which it shares ancestry, doctrine, exchanged officers and a rivalry that is genuinely affectionate. British regiments find the 1775 honours funny. British newspapers occasionally do not.

Within the interrealm framework the sister realms keep common doctrine, exchange officers and share exercises under separate command. The sister realms raise their own forces; the Army garrisons in them and does not recruit from them.

The Army trains foreign armies extensively, and some of the forces it has trained subsequently did things the Realm would rather not discuss.

Its reputation among allies is of a highly professional and politically cautious partner that will not move without a Commons vote, which everybody plans around. It takes League peacekeeping seriously, and peacekeeping is now the main operational experience it has.

Its own view of the Navy is that the Navy is the strategic service, better funded, and constitutionally safer, because a fleet cannot occupy a city.

Equipment and supply

Equipment comes from a domestic defence industry, chartered and closely regulated, which the Realm treats as a strategic asset rather than as an ordinary market.

The kit is excellent and too heavy. It was designed for a continental war against a peer competitor that has never come, and the weight is the standing complaint of every officer who has taken it anywhere hot or steep. Standardisation with ATO allies extends to ammunition and fuel and stops there, which is the ordinary international compromise and works about as badly as it does everywhere.

The Army takes the largest share of the defence budget, because half a million people are expensive whatever they are equipped with.

Its medical corps is its own, and feeds into the National Health Service of America in ways that matter to both. The chaplaincy is multi-faith by statute, which took a long fight given the position of the Church of America, and the Army’s formal relationship with the established church is close while its practical one is thin.

Assessment

The Royal American Army has never mounted a coup, never been part of a plot, never openly defied a lawful order, and never, on its own account, been asked to do anything plainly unlawful. Its professional head has never resigned in protest. Its officers do not speak on politics. It handed itself over to civilian control in the 1900s and has not asked for it back.

That record is either a compliment to the Realm’s politicians or a failure of the Realm’s record, and the Realm cannot tell which. The Army’s own archive is being opened on a rolling rule, and nothing so far has disturbed the first reading. Nothing has confirmed it either, because an absence of evidence is what both readings predict.

What can be said with confidence is harder and less comfortable.

The Army’s worst conduct was lawful. The Frontier Campaigns were authorised by properly made instruments, funded by voted supply, conducted under civilian direction, reported to Parliament and unchallenged in the courts. Every safeguard the Charter generation built against a standing army functioned exactly as designed throughout, and the result was sixty years of dispossession. A constitution restrained this Army perfectly and did not make it decent, and no reform since has closed that gap, because the gap is not a defect in the machinery. It is the distance between what is lawful and what is right, and no machinery closes it.

The Army knows this better than its critics generally allow. It teaches the frontier at West Point and at Leavenworth as the case study for the clause of the oath about unlawful orders, which is an odd and creditable thing for an institution to do with its own worst decades. It admits that it lost in Indochina, in its own staff histories, rather than blaming the ministers who sent it. It prosecuted a general and imprisoned him. It regards the conviction as proof the system works and the sentence as proof it does not go far enough, and holds both views at once.

Against that: it did not desegregate itself, it did not integrate women, it did not open itself to gay soldiers, and it did not equalise the pay of Black soldiers in 1863. In every case it was made to, by litigation under the Rights Act or by a Parliament acting over the department’s objection. An institution that reforms only under compulsion may be a well-governed institution, and it is not a self-correcting one.

And it is an army organised around not being used. Its continent cannot plausibly be invaded, its deterrent is naval, its last real war ended badly two generations ago, and most of its serving soldiers have never heard a shot fired in anger. What it does instead is engineering, logistics and disaster relief at continental scale, which is the work that has made it politically untouchable and which no recruiting advertisement has ever quite known how to describe.

If the Realm had to fight tomorrow, the thing that would fail first is manpower: half a million is a great many people until one tries to sustain a corps in the field for a year. The thing that would hold is logistics and engineering, because those are what it has practised continuously, on floods and roads and bridges, for two hundred years.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Royal American Armed Forces, the parent service and the other five branches
• American Rights Act, which desegregated the Army, integrated it and abolished its gallows
• Governor-General, whose signature is required for any domestic deployment
• The American Civil War, in which about a dozen regiments went over
• The Second Great War, the Army’s largest and best-remembered campaign
• May Day bombings, after which the Army was not deployed
• Winfield Scott, John J. Pershing, George C. Marshall and Colin Powell, the four soldier Governors-General
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, General-in-Chief from 1945 and afterwards Prime Minister
• Elihu Root, who made it a modern institution

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• Crown and state
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• Defence