Photo By Lori Stewart | Brig. Gen. William Crozier, a former chief of ordnance and later chief of the War...... read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
GEN. WOOD CRITIQUES CODITION OF MILITARY INFORMATION COMMITTEE
On Jan. 20, 1913, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, the Army’s chief of staff, wrote a memo to the chief of the War College Division citing numerous deficiencies in the conduct of military intelligence work. Taken as a whole, General Wood’s concerns signaled a need for immediate resolution but were instead brushed aside by a short-staffed and short-sighted War College.
At the time of Wood’s memo, the Military Information Committee was nearly defunct. Ten years earlier, it had been given coequal footing with other major staff functions as the Second Division (Military Information) of Secretary of War Elihu Root’s new War Department General Staff. Just five years later, however, a series of bureaucratic maneuvers resulted in the Second Division’s incorporation into the War College, the staff of which were dependent on the Division’s library and files. By 1910, the Military Information Division had become a committee (on paper) that conducted no actual intelligence work. Reports from field sources and attachés piled up without processing, and its library and priceless intelligence records were scattered throughout the college.
General Wood, a strong advocate for national preparedness, had become the Army’s chief of staff in April 1910. Throughout his four-year tenure, he was commonly at odds with more traditional senior officers and members of Congress who eschewed a large standing army, cut the strength of the General Staff to bare minimum, and curtailed the executive power wielded by the chief of staff. While this situation prevented General Wood from making significant changes within the Army’s various departments, he provided pointed suggestions for improvements where necessary. His attention was soon drawn to the substandard condition of the Army’s intelligence effort.
On 20 January 1913, he drafted a memo to Brig. Gen. William Crozier, chief of the War College Division, noting several obvious deficiencies, including but not limited to the constant turnover of personnel and lack of training for new officers that prevented a continuity of effort; a dearth of officers to research and prepare military monographs and a failure to evaluate and analyze incoming information reports; significant ignorance by attachés of available information about their assigned stations; and a notable absence of coordination with other departments in the U.S. Army as well as the federal government.
A week later, on 27 January, General Crozier sent a two-page reply, without preamble, discounting General Wood’s concerns. Crozier argued turnover in the military information committee was by no means unique among the War College’s numerous committees and that continuity was maintained by virtue of the presence of a committee in the first place. He reported he had assigned officers to prepare monographs on specific countries, and those officers were also responsible for evaluating, culling, and recommending for publication any information of military planning value. Furthermore, far from being deployed with no knowledge of their assigned stations, attachés were informed of available relevant materials before, during, and after their overseas assignments. Finally, Crozier described relations with the State Department and U.S. Navy as “extremely cordial and quite intimate” as well as reciprocal. The War College chief did agree with General Wood about the poor organization of the committee’s reports and monographs, a long-standing condition he blamed on staff shortages and turnover.
Notably, Crozier’s arguments painted the military information committee as simply a repository for information. He did not outline any coordination between it and other Army departments for military planning and preparedness, the most important role of a military intelligence organization. While the Great War was still unforeseen on the horizon, this was a deficiency needing resolution. Unfortunately, Crozier’s memo seemingly staved off Wood’s immediate concerns about the status of military intelligence in the U.S. Army. This unpardonable situation would continue right up to the U.S. entry into World War I four years later.
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| Date Taken: | 01.17.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 01.17.2025 14:56 |
| Story ID: | 489293 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 27 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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