Born Leaders and Kriegsspielers: War, Leadership, and Education in the U.S. Army, 1880-1910

Benjamin D. Brands

Advisor: Christopher H. Hamner, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Michael O'Malley, Samuel Lebovic

Horizon Hall, #3223
July 17, 2025, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

When a new second lieutenant graduated West Point in 1880 and joined his regiment, he had already completed all of the professional education he would ever receive. The professional knowledge he had learned over four years at West Point was thought sufficient to prepare him not only to lead a small unit in a dusty frontier outpost, but also—given time and experience—to command at the highest levels during the next major war. No formal professional military education existed after commissioning. A West Point graduate in 1910, however, could look forward to a career marked by professional education. Yearly education at his post as part of the officer garrison schools would be supplemented with attendance at the School of the Line at Fort Leavenworth, and if he made it to the senior ranks at the Army War College with the potential to serve on the new General Staff. He would also attend annual large-scale maneuvers that would test his professional skill in planning and executing tactical maneuvers against a living, thinking enemy force. This creation of a hierarchal professional military education system over the course of thirty years was an important achievement in its own right, but it also revealed a more fundamental change. Over this same period the Army officer corps changed the way it thought about war and leadership, moving from a view of leadership as an innate skill belonging to “natural geniuses,” who would be revealed in the fires of war to a concept of war as a science and the need for “safe leaders” educated in peacetime to perform their wartime roles to an acceptable level of competency using a uniform process and speaking a uniform language. Using the words of these officer themselves, recorded in official records, personal papers, and professional journals, this dissertation will argue that it was this intellectual shift that undergird the creation of a system of professional military education, and that system in turn disseminated and reinforced the intellectual shift. Finally, while institutionally ascendent by 1910, the concept of safe leadership and the peacetime preparation for war was never able to fully extinguish the older view of leadership, which survived in the way officer spoke about war and leadership and viewed themselves as a profession unique from other professions due to the ultimate ineffability of war and combat leadership.