United States military (1917): AEF in France — Section 692: AEF in France

From a Revolutionary militia-and-line mix to the 1947 Pentagon and a Korean War alliance -- force-structure history, not a live ORBAT. 1950-53 as the first hot UN war of the new department The United States military is a set of services whose legal modern shape is the National Security Act of 26 July 1947 (Department of Defense, CIA, a separate Air Force) laid over a much older story: 1775 Continental forces, a small nineteenth-century regular army and navy, a mass conscript war in 1861-65, and a global industrial mobilisation in 1941-45. George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and George Marshall are the three English civic names of those scales. This page is era-bounded force-structure history. It is not a live order of battle, not a basing directory, and not a how-to for any arm.

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). Rather than relying on simplified league tables or slogans, keeping the primary United States military section open beside benchmark 18 (“AEF in France”) gives operators and readers a verifiable decision trail.