diplomatic and territorial issues in Europe were slowly dividing the world into two armed camps based on two alliance systems: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was the crucial element for the global war that broke out in 1914. The nature of the Austro-Serbian crisis should not have been the event to trigger a world war. The balance-of-power system created by Great Britain as a result of the Napoleonic Wars should have prevented a confrontation among the major powers and should have instead minimized conflicts while encouraging dialogue and conflict resolution. Between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, despite intense nationalistic competition, saber rattling, and local wars between the major powers, peace was quickly restored. However, in 1914, the bipolar system created between the Allied and Central Powers structured the international environment from which crucial decisions were made.16
These alliances were activated on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That August, World War I began, and as a result, the major powers of the world were pulled into the conflict. The societies of every belligerent country were mobilized and put on a total war footing, either siding with the Allied Powers (the former Triple Entente) or the Central Powers (once known as the Triple Alliance). Initially viewed as a war of maneuver, the conflict quickly became a war of attrition. Machine guns and quick-firing artillery made short work of the massive conscript armies of both sides. Locked in a stalemate, both the Allied and Central Powers turned to various technologies and tried to use them to change the strategic dynamics of the war in their favor. In 1917, the United States was also pulled into the conflict. Robert Bruce points out that during the global struggle between the two alliance systems, technological development dramatically accelerated: “The rule seemed to be: in war, no time; in peace, no rush. The European arms race in the early twentieth century, which might be called Cold War I, and the outbreak of the First World War sounded an alert in American military circles…. But this time American participation in the war was indeed too brief for R&D [Research and Development] to play a part in the victory.”17
Map 2. U.S. Amphibious Operations in East Asia (1898–1902)
Geopolitical Events in Amphibious Warfare in the Philippines and China
The beginning of the twentieth century saw extraordinary advances in science and technology that dramatically changed the makeup of the globe. As a result of the Second Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s, the world was making fundamental changes in economics, society, governance, and especially the military. These advances also ushered in a more dynamic environment in which the need to adapt to future expectations and challenges was becoming more important than ever. According to Tony Zinni, a former Marine general, any organization that hopes to survive and flourish must be adaptive; if it is not, the organization risks becoming irrelevant in this dynamic, competitive, adapt-or-die world.18 In the early 1900s, this drive to adapt and flourish influenced the United States to retain and further develop its amphibious capabilities. American political and military confidence encouraged a more aggressive gunboat diplomacy in which the United States used hard power to not only protect its interests, but also to deter potential enemy powers.
Amphibious warfare was the way of the future for the United States’ geopolitical strategy during the twentieth century. This emphasis on amphibious warfare was based on the United States’ smashing success in the Spanish-American War, and it continued to influence the American political and military leadership until the country’s entry into World War I. However, the United States continued to focus applying its nascent amphibious capabilities in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. In the Pacific, the United States focused its military efforts in the Philippine-American War, in which it became increasingly evident that the Filipinos did not care for a long-term American occupation. While the American military did send observers to watch Japanese amphibious operations during the Russo-Japanese War, it also continued to perform ad hoc amphibious operations to attack and pacify hostile islands, especially when the Philippine insurgency began to spread beyond the main island of Luzon to other remote, isolated islands. “The first years of American occupation of the Philippines were marked by full scale war,” writes Warren Zimmermann in his study of American involvement in the Philippines during the first decade of the twentieth century. “The shape of the Philippines, an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands stretching a thousand miles from north to south, complicated the task of the U.S. Army. Also, [Emilio] Aguinaldo’s [insurgent] forces at first outnumbered the Americans by about seventy-five thousand troops in the Philippines.”19
To continue to pressure the Philippine insurgency, small naval squadrons (usually composed of a few cruisers and gunboats) dropped off company- or battalion-sized elements on various Philippine islands to either flush out the insurgents or settle down as a long-term garrison post. First Lieutenant Smedley Butler’s experience as a U.S. Marine serving in the Philippines provides the context of the environment where men like him had to operate for years occupying the island of Olongapo using a native outrigger during a storm. The driving rain combined with the rough seas quickly drained the strength of Butler and his men. While they were not attacked by Filipino insurgents during their amphibious operation, not only did the weather and the ocean severely damage their ship, but the Marines also had to deal with the laborious task of moving supplies and artillery ashore onto an island hostile to an American occupation.20
In each case, ground and naval forces planned and worked together to implement small-scale landings involving the U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps, with the occasional participation of Filipino auxiliary troops. However, Filipino guerrillas used ambushes as well as hit-and-run tactics to attack American military forces. In addition, the use of pits and mantraps was not uncommon in order to add to the frustration and misery of the Americans. By avoiding the strength of the U.S. military and nibbling along the edges and weak points of the occupational force, American soldiers were either forced to fight the Filipino rebels from a position of weakness or put them in morally compromising positions that undermined support for the U.S. occupation. The American military tried to avoid the advantages that the Filipino guerrilla enjoyed by instead sticking to the coast and employing gunboats to move, land, and support U.S. military forces. By cutting insurgency support from the ocean, the United States forced the Filipino rebels to attack the American military in fortified positions along the coast while also creating conditions where insurgents were vulnerable either to naval gunfire or an amphibious landing from a powerful American force.21
This approach ultimately broke the backbone of the insurgency and led to the incorporation of the insurgency’s top leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, into the establishment of an American territorial government to administer the Philippines. When the Philippine insurgency was finally suppressed, the United States continued to deploy its ground and naval forces in support of small-scale amphibious operations in the Philippines, while also utilizing a series of counterinsurgency operations against the last Filipino insurgent hold outs. This course of action proved to be long and expensive, and it plagued both the American political and military leadership from 1899 to 1903. Senator Frisbie Hoar, a prominent United States politician and senator from Massachusetts, remarked critically:
You [President Roosevelt] have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit…. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.22
The Americans put the Philippine-American War on hold when the Boxer Rebellion threatened the Foreign Quarter in Beijing in June 1900. While these rebel forces had existed years prior as a secret society against westernization, they quickly picked up credibility and strength due to the Chinese population’s growing dissatisfaction with the military, political, and economic strength of China, as well as the unfair economic and
