The Army of One

Other than keenly observant military historians, few can trace the origin of the US Army’s present slogan; “An Army of One” to the W.W.I battle that forever changed the way war is waged.

Prior to the battle of Meuse-Argonne in France, which began on September 26, 1918 and mercifully was finally ended with the Armistice on November 11 of that year, virtually all battles were fought using more men than equipment.

Traditionally, mortal courage and human aggressiveness were considered to be the key elements of success on a battlefield and indeed for millennia this theory had proven true as retold in countless stories of heroic charges against seemingly overwhelming odds that had carried the day and brought victory to the boldest and bravest of the competing warriors.

Prior to the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the French and British had already began thinking along the lines of letting equipment do most of the heavy fighting and then sending in troops to mop up based on the horrific losses that they had suffered in the years of trench warfare that they had endured up to that battle. As a result of their new manner of conducting war; including firing thousands of artillery rounds, deploying hundreds of armored tanks, and blasting at the German positions with uncountable howitzer rounds and then moving their ground forces forward with yet more artillery fire leading the way; they were able to neutralize 4 or 5 enemy soldiers for each man that they had killed, captured or wounded.

The Americans, not having learned so dearly the lessons of the trenches and still following the traditional “over the top” and “guts and glory” mentality of warfare by sending wave after wave of lightly armed infantry into literal hails of machine gun bullets, artillery fire, and exploding mortar shells showed a final reckoning of this final battle of the “war to end all wars” of more than 120,000 killed or wounded—almost exactly the same number of casualties that the Germans suffered or a one-to-one ratio.

Once peace was restored and military minds began reviewing the lessons of WW I in general and the battle of Meuse-Argonne in particular it became obvious that future wars would be fought with a much greater dependence on technology and the equipment that technology was able to create.

These lessons have led us to the point where today the US Army’s goal is to literally make each individual solider as capable of completing a modern mission that traditionally required a platoon of men to accomplish. That is why each modern soldier carries a camera, radio, and ever more powerful and diverse weaponry and will generally not advance into a danger zone until air power or laser guided missiles have done much of the dirty work for them.