Considering a Cadre Augmented Army - RAND Corporation

-316- A Historical Analysis of Cadre
Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917. 156 The bill authorized a Regular Army of 488,000, a
National Guard of 470,000 and a “National Army” initially of 500,000 with men to be added
in 500,000 increments “as rapidly as receiving and training facilities could be provided,” until
the demand for forces was met. 157 Conscription would supply the majority (sixty-seven
percent) of the manpower for World War I.
Had they been able to openly propose it, it is likely that conscription would have
been a key component of the cadre proposals of Emory Upton, Elihu Root, and Leonard
Wood. All three men proposed cadre forces based upon the armies of Germany and France,
each of which relied upon a federal reserve sustained by peacetime conscription to fill out
cadre units in wartime. However, conscription had only been used once before in the United
States. Each of these men, knowing the political realities, excluded conscription from their
proposals in the hopes that it might be more palatable. As discussed in the sections
describing the cadre proposals of each of these men, a number of historians argued that
none of these men “dared” to raise the possibility of conscription publicly. The use of
conscription in World War I made it more likely that conscription might be used in future
wars, especially in wars of similar magnitude to World War I. This increased the
attractiveness of a cadre force because it reduced the uncertainty about how a skeletonized
force would be filled out in wartime, a concern that remains important for the cadre forces
analyzed in this dissertation.
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156 Weigley (1984), p. 354
157 Millis (1956), p. 236. The relative size proposed Regular Army was 480 troops per 100,000 residents; the
relative size of the proposed National Guard was 463 troops per 100,000 residents. [U.S. Census Bureau (1975),
p. 1140-1143 and U.S. Census Bureau (2002), p. A-1]