Courtesy Photo | Army Chief of Staff General G.H. Decker hands Secretary of the Army Elvis J. Stahr...... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
On July 1, 1962, Army Chief of Staff General G.H. Decker signed General Order No. 38 creating the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Branch. This represented the culmination of decades of effort by Army intelligence personnel to establish an MI Branch within the Regular Army.
One of the first steps towards an intelligence branch came following World War I. In 1921, the Army established the Military Intelligence Officers Reserve Corps (MIORC) to retain the services of officers who had served in intelligence positions during the war. The MIORC would provide a pool of trained manpower if the Army needed to mobilize for another war. As anticipated, many MIORC officers provided valuable intelligence expertise during World War II. In 1952, the MIORC evolved into the Military Intelligence Branch in the U.S. Army Reserve. It was joined by the Army Security Branch for signals intelligence and electronic warfare personnel. Like the MIORC, only reserve personnel not on active duty were assigned to these branches; when called to active duty, these officers were “carried” by other branches. These reserve branches provided most of the Army’s enlisted and officer intelligence personnel throughout the 1950s. The Regular Army, however, remained without an intelligence branch.
By 1959, when Maj. Gen. (later Lt. Gen.) Alva Fitch arrived in the Pentagon as first the deputy and then the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, Army intelligence was facing a severe personnel problem. In an interview after his retirement, Fitch described the dire situation:
“When a [Reserve] intelligence officer came on active duty, he was assigned to one of the active duty branches such as Ordnance or Quartermaster or Signal Corps or whatever. Then, if he was any good, that branch would call him back. Intelligence was manned with 95 or 98 percent Reserve officers who possessed World War II experience. They were approaching their 20 year deadline where they would have to be released. I could see no way of running intelligence once they retired. So I set about getting a Regular Army Intelligence Branch organized and approved. I ran into all sorts of difficulties with the staff.…They argued that we had never had an Intelligence Branch in the Regular Army before and had won two wars so they wondered why in the hell did we need one now? It took a lot of work. The disaster that we were facing was obvious, but you couldn’t sell it.”
Through perseverance and dedication, Fitch finally did “sell it” to Army leadership, leading to the creation of the Army Intelligence and Security Branch on 1 July 1962. Fitch recalled that he “personally reviewed the records of every single officer accepted” to ensure the branch got only the best personnel. Five years after its creation, the branch was renamed the Military Intelligence Branch, and it switched from a combat service support role to a combat support role.
Fitch acknowledged that he did not create the MI Branch singlehandedly or in a single moment. He credited the series of Army chiefs of staff through the late 1950s and 1960s, who accepted that, “in peacetime, intelligence was the only active branch and the only one in contact with the enemy.” Their support and dedication of resources meant, according to Fitch, “From somewhere between 1950 and … maybe 1968, intelligence went from being the Army’s orphaned stepchild to becoming a branch of considerable importance."
| Date Taken: | 06.27.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 06.27.2022 11:47 |
| Story ID: | 423839 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 549 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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