Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man
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struggle that required a more or less permanent state of militarization. “The American people must be prepared, like their forebears who pushed the frontier westward, to meet a savage and deadly attack at any moment.” The frontier mythology emphasized the current threat to “free society” in a language the American public widely recognized, and the similarities could not have been more transparent. The report concluded: “The return to frontier conditions demands a frontier response.”76
In the first year of the Korean War, military and government officials experimented with this “frontier response,” reconfiguring the American military for permanent war. Beyond increasing the draft numbers, the Universal Military Training and Service Act expanded the army reserves to create a more mobile and flexible force dispersed across the globe, “capable of instantly bearing arms” to meet conflicts anytime and anywhere they occurred. At the same time, another major reform was under way that encountered far more resistance in Congress, particularly among representatives of the white South: the desegregation of the armed forces. Slow to achieve in the years after President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which had mandated “equality of treatment and opportunity” within the armed services, the integration of African Americans in the military became official policy in 1951 as part of the solution to the growing combat-troop shortage and morale problems. “It was my conviction,” Gen. Matthew Ridgeway stated, that integration would “assure that sort of esprit a fighting army needs, where each soldier stands proudly on his own feet, knowing himself to be as good as the next fellow.”77
The demand for more bodies on the front lines made racial integration a “high priority,” and it resulted in another experiment of military integration that involved a different population.78 On August 15, 1950, as U.S. casualties in Korea continued to mount, representatives of the Eighth Army, KMAG, and the ROK Army met to discuss the possibility of incorporating Koreans into the U.S. Army. The depleted ranks left nothing to question. Two days later, before a concrete plan for procurement and training was finalized, each of the four U.S. divisions in Korea received an initial increment of 250 soldiers under the Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army (KATUSA) program. According to one report, they were “forcibly and indiscriminately recruited from the streets of Pusan and Taegu, who had received no military training whatsoever.” Some of them received “a few weeks” of basic training, others were promptly assigned to units and trained just prior to being sent into combat. By November 1950, 22,000 Korean soldiers were integrated into the Eighth Army.79
The KATUSA program was part of a longstanding colonial practice of incorporating “native” troops into the imperial army. The Philippine Scouts, organized at the start of U.S. colonial rule as a separate organization of the U.S. Army, served as a direct blueprint. As with the Scouts, KATUSAs occupied a liminal position as “not technically a part of the U.S. Army,” but who nonetheless filled the ranks as an intermediary who could gather intelligence and impart knowledge about the local terrain and population. Their language and cultural difference drew the ire of their American counterparts. “The ROK soldiers were unable to understand even the simplest command,” according to one report. Their lack of “understanding of field sanitation and personal hygiene,” and their general unfamiliarity with “U.S. conceptions of everyday living,” including rations and clothing, turned them “from a welcome asset to an irksome burden.”80
Military officials with no firsthand experience of these limitations sang praises for the KATUSA program, especially with their sights set on the future. In their view, the program gave Korean soldiers “sorely needed training in U.S. methods and techniques,” and thus provided “a U.S.-trained cadre for the postwar Korean Army.” The program proved useful even beyond the Korean context. As officials understood, KATUSA was an experiment in “military efficiency” that could inform how the United States conducted its future global conflicts. “The United States may well again be faced with the possibility or necessity of augmenting the U.S. Army with native troops,” according to an operations research study conducted in 1953. As Asian nations became formally decolonized, the Pacific region emerged as a laboratory to experiment with various methods of incorporating “native” manpower into the U.S. military. “Future military operations in underdeveloped parts of the world,” the 1953 study affirmed, would “unquestionably involve the use and support of native armies.”81 This idea, I show in later chapters, led to military experiments throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Since the start of the Korean War, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace Jr. realized that a state of permanent war would require the mobilization of non-U.S. populations. In November 1950, as the integration of KATUSAs progressed at a peak rate, Pace requested Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Wade Haislip to conduct a study, as “a matter of urgency,” of the possibility of using “foreign nationals to build up the strength of our forces in critical areas overseas” beyond Korea. In his request, Pace referenced the Lodge Act that had been enacted earlier in June, which allowed for the overseas recruitment of “aliens” into the U.S. armed forces. This act only applied to the countries of Western Europe, however, and recruited subjects who were “eligible to citizenship” (hence, racially “white”), thus rendering it ineffective and irrelevant in the “Pacific Area.”82 In light of the current war in the Asian rimlands, Pace advocated that the army increase the number of aliens in the armed forces “to a much greater figure,” including the possibility of organizing Japanese nationals into separate combat units.83
Two weeks later, Haislip and his staff responded by publishing a study that outlined different methods of mobilizing foreign manpower, including the enlistment of “displaced persons, defectees and potential defectees from unfriendly countries” into the U.S. Army. The study also suggested the possibility of organizing alien service members into separate units for “unconventional” warfare.84 Its range of ideas prompted further consideration by the National Security Council, which issued its policy paper on the subject in April 1951. NSC 108, as the policy was designated, spelled out the problem with a language similar to that used to justify Universal Military Training: “The United States should seek urgent improvement in the utilization of foreign manpower for military purposes in order to increase the flexibility of employment of our own military forces and to avoid a disproportionate contribution of the United States manpower to the over-all military posture of the free world.” Taking a global view, the policy crunched some remarkable numbers: the availability of “physically fit” 15- to 49-year-old men from countries “favorably disposed toward the United States” stood at 130 million, roughly 17 million more than those in the “Soviet bloc.” The mobilization of this vast pool of foreign manpower would bolster the overall military capability of the “free world” to act as an effective bulwark against “Soviet expansionism.”85
By calculating the ways that foreign manpower could be mobilized, NSC 108 worked as a sort of addendum to the Universal Military Training and Service Act that was enacted two months later. But beyond increasing manpower and improving “military efficiency,” the utilization of foreign soldiers served a broader cultural function. The policy made clear that part of the goal of mobilizing these subjects was “to stimulate a genuine ‘will to fight’ by the winning of men’s minds and the build-up of resistance to communist ideology and propaganda.” The National Security Council insisted cultural diplomacy and military buildup were complementary projects, it was something that Soviet leaders had pursued for some time by recruiting soldiers from the “Soviet bloc,” and Americans needed to catch up and do the same. “We have more to sell, but [the Soviets] have been the better salesmen to date.”86
The dual imperatives of “selling” democracy and mobilizing foreign military labor, however, opened the United States to the charge of employing mercenaries, which threatened to undermine American credibility. As General Haislip and his personnel staff cautioned, the use of mercenaries by the United States would be “repugnant to the ideals of our people, would leave us open to the charge of ‘imperialism,’ and give substance to the charge of our enemies that we intend to hire others to fight for us.” The French Foreign Legion, “composed mostly of aliens” and French colonial subjects, had drawn the indignation of world opinion precisely for this reason. Haislip and staff pointed out that even “our own Philippine Scouts,” America’s most recent experiment with