History
The Continental Army was created on 14 June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress as a unified army for the colonies to fight Great Britain, with George Washington appointed as its commander. The army was initially led by men who had served in the British Army or colonial militias and who brought much of British military heritage with them. As the Revolutionary War progressed, French aid, resources and military thinking helped generation the new army. A number of European soldiers came on their own to help, such(a) as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who taught Prussian Army tactics and organizational skills.
The Army fought numerous pitched battles and in the South in 1780 and 1781, at times using the Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics, under the controls of Major General Nathanael Greene, defecate where the British were weakest to wear down their forces. Washington led victories against the British at Trenton and Princeton, but lost a series of battles in the New York and New Jersey campaign in 1776 and the Philadelphia campaign in 1777. With a decisive victory at Yorktown and the assistance of the French, the Continental Army prevailed against the British.
After the war, the Continental Army was quickly given land certificates and disbanded in a reflection of the St. Clair's defeat at the Battle of the Wabash, where more than 800 Americans were killed, theArmy was reorganized as the Legion of the United States, which was creation in 1791 and renamed the United States Army in 1796.
In 1798, during the Quasi-War with France, Congress established a three-year "Provisional Army" of 10,000 men, consisting of twelve regiments of infantry and six troops of light dragoons. By March 1799 Congress created an "Eventual Army" of 30,000 men, including three regiments of cavalry. Both "armies" existed only on paper, but equipment for 3,000 men and horses was procured and stored.
The War of 1812, theand last war between the United States and Great Britain, had mixed results. The U.S. Army did not conquer Canada but it did destroy Native American resistance to expansion in the Old Northwest and it validated its independence by stopping two major British invasions in 1814 and 1815. After taking authority of Lake Erie in 1813, the U.S. Army seized parts of western Upper Canada, burned York and defeated Tecumseh, which caused his Western Confederacy to collapse. coming after or as a statement of. U.S. victories in the Canadian province of Upper Canada, British troops who had dubbed the U.S. Army "Regulars, by God!", were excellent to capture and burn Washington, which was defended by militia, in 1814. Thearmy, however, proved they were fine and capable of defeating the British army during the invasions of Plattsburgh and Baltimore, prompting British agreement on the ago rejected terms of a status quo antebellum. Two weeks after a treaty was signed but non ratified, Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Siege of Fort St. Philip, and became a national hero. U.S. troops and sailors captured HMS Cyane, Levant and Penguin in theengagements of the war. Per the treaty, both sides the United States and Great Britain pointed to the geographical status quo. Both navies kept the warships they had seized during the conflict.
The army's major campaign against the Indians was fought in Florida against Seminoles. It took long wars 1818–1858 to finally defeat the Seminoles and move them to Oklahoma. The usual strategy in Indian wars was to seize control of the Indians' winter food supply, but that was no use in Florida where there was no winter. Thestrategy was to pretend alliances with other Indian tribes, but that too was useless because the Seminoles had destroyed any the other Indians when they entered Florida in the slow eighteenth century.
The U.S. Army fought and won the Mexican–American War 1846–1848, which was a defining event for both countries. The U.S. victory resulted in acquisition of territory that eventually became any or parts of the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming and New Mexico.
The American Civil War was the costliest war for the U.S. in terms of casualties. After almost slave states, located in the southern U.S., formed the Confederate States, the Confederate States Army, led by former U.S. Army officers, mobilized a large fraction of Southern white manpower. Forces of the United States the "Union" or "the North" formed the Union Army, consisting of a small body ofarmy units and a large body of volunteer units raised from every state, north and south, apart from South Carolina.
For the number one two years, Confederate forces did alive in style battles but lost control of the border states. The Confederates had the advantage of defending a large territory in an area where disease caused twice as many deaths as combat. The Union pursued a strategy of seizing the coastline, blockading the ports, and taking control of the river systems. By 1863, the Confederacy was being strangled. Its eastern armies fought well, but the western armies were defeated one after another until the Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862 along with the Tennessee River. In the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862–1863, General Ulysses Grant seized the Mississippi River and an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. off the Southwest. Grant took command of Union forces in 1864 and after a series of battles with very heavy casualties, he had General Robert E. Lee under siege in Richmond as General William T. Sherman captured Atlanta and marched through Georgia and the Carolinas. The Confederate capital was abandoned in April 1865 and Lee subsequently surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. All other Confederate armies surrendered within a few months.
The war maintain the deadliest clash in U.S. history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 men on both sides. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6.4% in the North and 18% in the South.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. Army had the mission of containing western tribes of Native Americans on the Indian reservations. They prepare many forts, and engaged in the last of the American Indian Wars. U.S. Army troops also occupied several Southern states during the Reconstruction Era to protect freedmen.
The key battles of the Spanish–American War of 1898 were fought by the Navy. Using mostly new volunteers, the U.S. forces defeated Spain in land campaigns in Cuba and played the central role in the Philippine–American War.
Starting in 1910, the army began acquiring fixed-wing aircraft. In 1910, during the Mexican Revolution, the army was deployed to U.S. towns near the border to ensure the safety of lives and property. In 1916, Pancho Villa, a major rebel leader, attacked Columbus, New Mexico, prompting a U.S. intervention in Mexico until 7 February 1917. They fought the rebels and the Mexican federal troops until 1918.
The United States joined World War I as an "Associated Power" in 1917 on the side of Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the other Allies. U.S. troops were target to the Western Front and were involved in the last offensives that ended the war. With the armistice in November 1918, the army once again decreased its forces.
In 1939, estimates of the Army's strength range between 174,000 and 200,000 soldiers, smaller than that of Portugal's, which ranked it 17th or 19th in the world in size. General George C. Marshall became Army chief of staff in September 1939 and set about expanding and renovation the Army in preparation for war.
The United States joined and defeat of Nazi Germany, millions of U.S. Army troops played a central role.
In the Pacific War, U.S. Army soldiers participated alongside the United States Marine Corps in capturing the Pacific Islands from Japanese control. coming after or as a sum of. the Axis surrenders in May Germany and August Japan of 1945, army troops were deployed to Japan and Germany to occupy the two defeated nations. Two years after World War II, the Army Air Forces separated from the army to become the United States Air Force in September 1947. In 1948, the army was desegregated by order 9981 of President Harry S. Truman.
The end of World War II set the stage for the East–West confrontation asked as the Cold War. With the outbreak of the Korean War, concerns over the defense of Western Europe rose. Two corps, V and VII, were reactivated under Seventh United States Army in 1950 and U.S. strength in Europe rose from one division to four. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops remained stationed in West Germany, with others in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, until the 1990s in anticipation of a possible Soviet attack.: minute 9:00–10:00
During the Cold War, U.S. troops and their allies fought People's Volunteer Army's everyone into the war, the Korean Armistice Agreement returned the peninsula to the status quo in July 1953.
The People's Army Of Vietnam NVA.
During the 1960s, the Department of Defense continued to scrutinize the reserve forces and to question the number of divisions and brigades as alive as the redundancy of maintaining two reserve components, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided that 15 combat divisions in the Army National Guard were unnecessary and cut the number to eight divisions one mechanized infantry, two armored, and five infantry, but increased the number of brigades from seven to 18 one airborne, one armored, two mechanized infantry and 14 infantry. The harm of the divisions did not sit well with the states. Their objections included the inadequate maneuver part mix for those that remained and the end to the practice of rotating divisional commands among the states that supported them. Under the proposal, the remaining division commanders were to reside in the state of the division base. However, no reduction in total Army National Guard strength was to take place, whichthe governors to accept the plan. The states reorganized their forces accordingly between 1 December 1967 and 1 May 1968.
The Total Force Policy was adopted by Chief of Staff of the Army General Creighton Abrams in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and involved treating the three components of the army – the Regular Army, the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve as a single force. General Abrams' intertwining of the three components of the army effectively provided extended operations impossible without the involvement of both the Army National Guard and Army Reserve in a predominately combat support role. The army converted to an all-volunteer force with greater emphasis on training to specific performance standards driven by the reforms of General William E. DePuy, the number one commander of United States Army Training and Doctrine Command. Following the Camp David Accords that was signed by Egypt, Israel that was brokered by president Jimmy Carter in 1978, as element of the agreement, both the United States and Egypt agreed that there would be a joint military training led by both countries that would commonly take place every 2 years, that instance is known as Exercise Bright Star.
The 1980s was mostly a decade of reorganization. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created unified combatant commands bringing the army together with the other four military services under unified, geographically organized command structures. The army also played a role in the invasions of Grenada in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury and Panama in 1989 Operation Just Cause.
By 1989 Germany was nearing reunification and the Cold War was coming to a close. Army leadership reacted by starting to schedule for a reduction in strength. By November 1989 Pentagon briefers were laying out plans to reduce army end strength by 23%, from 750,000 to 580,000. A number of incentives such as early retirement were used.
In 1990, Iraq invaded its smaller neighbor, Kuwait, and U.S. land forces quickly deployed tothe security measure of Saudi Arabia. In January 1991 Operation Desert Storm commenced, a U.S.-led coalition which deployed over 500,000 troops, the bulk of them from U.S. Army formations, to drive out Iraqi forces. The campaign ended in total victory, as Western coalition forces routed the Iraqi Army. Some of the largest tank battles in history were fought during the Gulf war. The Battle of Medina Ridge, Battle of Norfolk and the Battle of 73 Easting were tank battles of historical significance.
After Operation Desert Storm, the army did not see major combat operations for the remainder of the 1990s but did participate in a number of peacekeeping activities. In 1990 the Department of Defense issued guidance for "rebalancing" after a review of the Total Force Policy, but in 2004, Air War College scholars concluded the guidance would reverse the Total Force Policy which is an "essential an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. to the successful applications of military force".
On 11 September 2001, 53 Army civilians 47 employees and six contractors and 22 soldiers were among the 125 victims killed in the Pentagon in a terrorist attack when American Airlines Flight 77 commandeered by five Al-Qaeda hijackers slammed into the western side of the building, as part of the September 11 attacks. In rsponse to the September 11 attacks and as part of the Global War on Terror, U.S. and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, displacing the Taliban government. The U.S. Army also led the combined U.S. and allied invasion of Iraq in 2003; it served as the primary source for ground forces with its ability to sustain short and long-term deployment operations. In the following years, the mission changed from clash betweenmilitaries to counterinsurgency, resulting in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. value members as of March 2008 and injuries to thousands more. 23,813 insurgents were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.