United States military

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).