War and the War of 1812 were mostly a string of tactical and operational defeats against the British interrupted with an occasional American victory, while the Quasi-War with Revolutionary France was inconclusive, resulting in the French Fleet continuing to harass American shipping and the United States’ commerce taking a major hit during the course of the Napoleonic Wars. To make matters worse, with the exception of its war against the Barbary States in the early nineteenth century, the United States had almost no experience fighting overseas. While American naval forces were familiar with operating long distances from the continental United States, they faced the challenge of transporting and deploying large American military forces in order to remove Spain from Cuba and its various colonial possessions in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Regardless of their military shortfalls in the upcoming war with Spain, the Americans had the advantage of having a more modern navy than the Spanish. The United States had spent the years since its confrontation with Chile well. When Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt came into office, he continued the rapid growth and modernization of the naval force, while directing American warships to key locations around the world in order to be ready for a war.75 In addition, while the American ground forces were small in comparison with the other major world powers, they served as a small professional military core for the United States to quickly mobilize and then expand the size of its all-volunteer military force for action. Although military weapons, supplies, bases, and infrastructure were lacking, by 1898, the United States had a well-developed industrial base and transportation system.76 With the technological and organizational instruments in place, the United States’ difficulty was mobilizing its potential military strength quickly enough to defeat the Spanish forces before they could dig in and prepare against the anticipated American offensive.
Military mobilization and organization during the Spanish-American War greatly varied between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army. Once war was declared, telegraph messages were quickly sent from the Secretary of Navy’s offices in Washington, DC, to move against Spain’s Pacific and Caribbean colonial possessions. The U.S. Navy Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey quickly steamed from Hong Kong to Manila Bay, where it quickly made short work of destroying Rear Admiral Patricio Montojo’s squadron, while still in harbor, with its quick-firing five-inch guns, and eliminating Spanish naval power in the Asia-Pacific Region. Soon afterward, American military ground forces, in conjunction with Filipino insurgents, quickly captured Manila and seized control of the Philippine Islands.77
Even though the American forces made short work of Spain’s colonial possessions in the Pacific, the main theater of the war was concentrated primarily in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Facing significantly larger, better prepared military forces on those islands, the U.S. Navy quickly positioned itself to cut off all communications with Spain as well as to neutralize Spanish naval power to prevent any Spanish military attacks along either the Gulf Coast or the eastern seaboard of the United States.78 Once naval dominance was established around these islands, the U.S. Navy conducted reconnaissance and shaping operations to prepare the operational battlespace for invasion. The U.S. Navy did possess Marine detachments, but they were simply not enough to project military power ashore. American military forces in theater had to wait until either the U.S. Army was mobilized and trained for the upcoming invasion or additional Marine units were raised and deployed from the continental United States.
The U.S. Army’s leadership quickly took the lead in organizing the mobilization of an all-volunteer expeditionary force to conquer Cuba and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, the U.S. Army took a long time to mobilize and concentrated its units in Florida in preparation to deploy as the expeditionary force.79 In addition, the U.S. Army did not have a long history of conducting amphibious warfare—only, to a limited extent, during the American Civil War with the capture of major ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the South as well as controlling the Mississippi River. Unfortunately, that was many years previously, and the U.S. Army did not yet appreciate the importance of amphibious operations; instead, it focused on physical conditioning and basic training, especially with an emphasis on marksmanship, field craft, hand-to-hand combat, animal husbandry, and horsemanship. Meanwhile, officer and noncommissioned officer leadership was in short supply within the regular forces and, as a result, had to be supplemented with ad hoc selections of potential officers based on past military leadership, education, physical fitness, character, and leadership potential. While officers and noncommissioned officers were drafted from the ranks, they received training in military leadership, tactics, organization, logistics, and administration. Unfortunately, when it came to embarking the large military force onto ships in preparation for amphibious operations in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Major General Shafter from Port Tampa, Florida, notified the Adjutant General of the United States Army in Washington, DC, that he encountered numerous difficulties in loading men, equipment, and animals onto the ships and that the infrastructure to move the expeditionary force from the camps to the ships made quick loading impossible.80
By June 1898, the United States was positioned to launch the final part of its war with Spain. While the U.S. Navy quickly destroyed Spanish naval forces, Spain’s colonial garrison had time to dig in and fortify its positions in both Cuba and Puerto Rico, while in the Pacific, the Philippines was threatening to drift into chaos. In these hostile, uncertain conditions, the United States’ ground and naval forces were making final preparations for destroying Spanish colonial forces and seizing control of the Caribbean. In the American military leadership’s assessment of the intelligence reports they were receiving from Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States was at a severe disadvantage in that they would be landing troops on a hostile shore against enemy forces that had had years to prepare and fortify their positions against potential invasion. Through practicality and the technology it currently had on hand, the American military began its first steps in modernizing amphibious warfare and adapting the tools and opportunities offered by the Second Industrial Revolution.
Technological Influences on the United States Military and Its Impact on Amphibious Warfare
The Spanish-American War was the first major war the United States fought overseas. Despite having fought against Great Britain, France, and even the Barbary States, these conflicts were either waged mostly at home within the United States or on international waters. Unfortunately, the United States did not have a great success rate in winning overseas conflicts, since these conflicts were either open-ended affairs or else ended in a stalemate. In addition, the wars fought on the North American continent depended on the national welfare of the United States and were against weaker, less organized opposition, as seen in its victories over the American Indians and Mexico. Meanwhile, the American Civil War was a matter of national survival, and the performance from both the North and South during that conflict was observed by the major European powers as simply uninspired and amateurish at best.
The war with Spain, just like previous conflicts involving the United States, caught the Americans at a disadvantage in terms of training, experience, and planning. In fact, according to Graham A. Cosmas’ study of American military capabilities during the Spanish-American War, American military planners discovered they had an acute shortage of shipping, personnel, and facilities to support the immediate deployment of an American expeditionary force to the Caribbean in July 1898. Both Secretary of War Russell Alger and Quartermaster General Marshall Ludington had taken drastic steps to alleviate naval transportation, which included chartering not only every available American steamship and ocean-going vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, but also going as far as to recruit foreign vessels as well.81 Since the United States had not yet taken the time to fully explore how much war had changed in the nineteenth century, the American republic’s reactions were the typical knee-jerk response (as in past conflicts) to ensure it could quickly close the gap militarily with the opposition. However, unlike its previous wars, the United States was better positioned industrially, scientifically, and financially to push for significant changes in its country’s military forces as well as to utilize the tools and weapons to help the American expeditionary forces succeed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Although the United States military went into the Spanish-American War with few technological innovations,
