religion was “Protestant,” his politics, “none,” and he occupied the rank of a second lieutenant. We know little else of Kang’s life, or the lives of the other 262 trainees, for that matter.71
While G-2 divulged little, the historical record reveals that these individuals were the product of long and contentious debates among U.S. officials about the benefits of utilizing Asian soldiers. The debates began shortly after the Korean War started in June 1950. U.S. leaders knew already that the Korean War was the beginning of a much longer and wider war to secure the Asian periphery and link its economies to Japan, which in due time would embroil the United States in Vietnam. The seemingly boundless scope and geography of the war in Korea demanded flexibility and vigilance on the part of Americans. Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 1951, “We are confronted with a world situation of such gravity and such unpredictability that we must be prepared for effective action, whether the challenge comes with the speed of sound or is delayed for a lifetime.”72
Marshall’s statement echoed a broader concern among U.S. officials about the overstretched U.S. military and its state of combat readiness. With less than seven hundred thousand servicemen scattered around the globe, the prospects of waging a full-scale and effective war in Korea seemed a logistical impossibility.73 Only days after the war began, the Senate Armed Services Committee initiated hearings on a bill to create a system of universal conscription to boost U.S. military manpower. As reports came in from the front lines about the ineffectiveness of South Korean soldiers, many who apparently had fled their posts and ceased to fight, the need to build up the U.S. Army grew acute.74 “The balance of manpower is against us,” the chairman of the Armed Services Committee Lyndon Johnson remarked during the hearings in January 1951, as the induction rate reached an all-time peak of eighty thousand a month. “The grim fact is that the United States is now engaged in a struggle for survival…. Unpleasant though the choices may be, we face the decision of asking temporary sacrifice from some of our citizens now, or of inviting the permanent extinction of freedom for all of our citizens.”75
In June 1951, the Universal Military Training and Service Act passed and addressed the concern by lowering the draft age from nineteen to eighteen and extending the active-duty service commitment from twenty-one to twenty-four months, in total more than doubling the draft numbers between 1950 and 1951. The act also established the National Security Training Commission, which immediately took up the task of outlining a long-term U.S. military policy. “This solemn and far-reaching action of Congress and the President,” the commission stated in its first report to Congress, “reflects a realization, even in the heat and tension of the present crisis, that the major problems we face in the world will be of long duration, that no tidy or decisive conclusion is to be expected soon.” According to the report, the Korean War was but a phase of a global struggle that required a more or less permanent state of militarization. “The American people must be prepared, like their forebears who pushed the frontier westward, to meet a savage and deadly attack at any moment.” The frontier mythology emphasized the current threat to “free society” in a language the American public widely recognized, and the similarities could not have been more transparent. The report concluded: “The return to frontier conditions demands a frontier response.”76
In the first year of the Korean War, military and government officials experimented with this “frontier response,” reconfiguring the American military for permanent war. Beyond increasing the draft numbers, the Universal Military Training and Service Act expanded the army reserves to create a more mobile and flexible force dispersed across the globe, “capable of instantly bearing arms” to meet conflicts anytime and anywhere they occurred. At the same time, another major reform was under way that encountered far more resistance in Congress, particularly among representatives of the white South: the desegregation of the armed forces. Slow to achieve in the years after President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which had mandated “equality of treatment and opportunity” within the armed services, the integration of African Americans in the military became official policy in 1951 as part of the solution to the growing combat-troop shortage and morale problems. “It was my conviction,” Gen. Matthew Ridgeway stated, that integration would “assure that sort of esprit a fighting army needs, where each soldier stands proudly on his own feet, knowing himself to be as good as the next fellow.”77
The demand for more bodies on the front lines made racial integration a “high priority,” and it resulted in another experiment of military integration that involved a different population.78 On August 15, 1950, as U.S. casualties in Korea continued to mount, representatives of the Eighth Army, KMAG, and the ROK Army met to discuss the possibility of incorporating Koreans into the U.S. Army. The depleted ranks left nothing to question. Two days later, before a concrete plan for procurement and training was finalized, each of the four U.S. divisions in Korea received an initial increment of 250 soldiers under the Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army (KATUSA) program. According to one report, they were “forcibly and indiscriminately recruited from the streets of Pusan and Taegu, who had received no military training whatsoever.” Some of them received “a few weeks” of basic training, others were promptly assigned to units and trained just prior to being sent into combat. By November 1950, 22,000 Korean soldiers were integrated into the Eighth Army.79
The KATUSA program was part of a longstanding colonial practice of incorporating “native” troops into the imperial army. The Philippine Scouts, organized at the start of U.S. colonial rule as a separate organization of the U.S. Army, served as a direct blueprint. As with the Scouts, KATUSAs occupied a liminal position as “not technically a part of the U.S. Army,” but who nonetheless filled the ranks as an intermediary who could gather intelligence and impart knowledge about the local terrain and population. Their language and cultural difference drew the ire of their American counterparts. “The ROK soldiers were unable to understand even the simplest command,” according to one report. Their lack of “understanding of field sanitation and personal hygiene,” and their general unfamiliarity with “U.S. conceptions of everyday living,” including rations and clothing, turned them “from a welcome asset to an irksome burden.”80
Military officials with no firsthand experience of these limitations sang praises for the KATUSA program, especially with their sights set on the future. In their view, the program gave Korean soldiers “sorely needed training in U.S. methods and techniques,” and thus provided “a U.S.-trained cadre for the postwar Korean Army.” The program proved useful even beyond the Korean context. As officials understood, KATUSA was an experiment in “military efficiency” that could inform how the United States conducted its future global conflicts. “The United States may well again be faced with the possibility or necessity of augmenting the U.S. Army with native troops,” according to an operations research study conducted in 1953. As Asian nations became formally decolonized, the Pacific region emerged as a laboratory to experiment with various methods of incorporating “native” manpower into the U.S. military. “Future military operations in underdeveloped parts of the world,” the 1953 study affirmed, would “unquestionably involve the use and support of native armies.”81 This idea, I show in later chapters, led to military experiments throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Since the start of the Korean War, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace Jr. realized that a state of permanent war would require the mobilization of non-U.S. populations. In November 1950, as the integration of KATUSAs progressed at a peak rate, Pace requested Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Wade Haislip to conduct a study, as “a matter of urgency,” of the possibility of using “foreign nationals to build up the strength of our forces in critical areas overseas” beyond Korea. In his request, Pace referenced the Lodge Act that had been enacted earlier in June, which allowed for the overseas recruitment of “aliens” into the U.S. armed forces. This act only applied to the countries of Western Europe, however, and recruited subjects who were “eligible to citizenship” (hence, racially “white”), thus rendering it ineffective and irrelevant in the “Pacific Area.”82 In light of the current war in the Asian rimlands, Pace advocated that
