United States military (1941): Global mobilisation

Korea is not a footnote here. 25 June 1950 to the 27 July 1953 armistice was the first large hot war of the 1947 department: MacArthur, then Ridgway; Inchon (15 September 1950); a Chinese intervention; a war that created the US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty (1 October 1953). Matthew Ridgway is the correction to the MacArthur photograph. The Vietnam War, the all-volunteer force (1973), and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols jointness law are later hinges. Scale and political impact sit near the top of this atlas because the institution became a global alliance system -- including the ROK.

Anglophone memory is thick to the point of distortion: WWII as "the good war," Korea as the forgotten one, Vietnam as the argument. This file will keep 1950-53 in the second paragraph on purpose. No current ORBAT, no special-operations method, no nuclear employment content (see ICBM).

A republic that built a department and then an alliance system The US military's honest twentieth-century sentence is 1947 plus 1950 -- a legal department that went to war on the Korean peninsula before it had finished unpacking. Militia politics, a small regular core, a navy of the early republic, then a mass industrial civil war. Grant is the named closer; the cost band lives on the American Civil War page.