Back in the days of the brown shoe Army, the cavalry branch still had a certain panache, although we were running out of cavalry. Just before World War II, there was one cavalry division stationed along the Mexican border, and a few National Guard horse regiments, two in Texas. It was rumored that the early top graduates of the Armored OCS (Officer Candidate School) were commissioned in cavalry, the rest in infantry or artillery, there being no armored branch as such. Such discrimination was perhaps caused by the fact that the U.S. Cavalry had done most of the fighting from 1865 to 19l7, and horse soldiers seemed more glamorous than foot-sloggers. In any case, many of the Army's ranking people came from that branch, so much so that in the 1930s, certain career adjustments had to be made.

It used to be, and maybe still is, that officers are organized, kept track of and promoted by branch rather than job specialty. This created awkwardness and confusion in new specialties such as armored warfare (the red, yellow and blue colors on armored division patches stand for artillery, cavalry and infantry) until the armor branch was created in 1951. Another example was Army aviation, in which pilots remained in their ground career branches before it too was made a “branch.”

I began to think about all this when I got caught up in military symbology and branch changes. I was commissioned in infantry but, being assigned to an armored cavalry squadron, changed branches — easy to do as a lieutenant. Then, a local general required all us cavalry types to wear an insignia someone cooked up, a replica of a World War I tank. The handsome crossed sabers of the cavalry were verboten. This was argued as “modernization.” Then, when the armor branch was created in 1951, powers that were insisted upon superimposing a facing tank on crossed sabers. All cavalry branch were switched to armor. Along with this change, new colors were mandated for guidons: green and gold instead of white and red. It took the Army a long time to figure out that while we fought in tanks and armored vehicles, the old insignia and designations were vastly historic and inspiring.

It never seemed to occur to armor people that the infantry no longer uses muskets, military police flintlock pistols, ordnance flaming bombs, nor does the artillery fire muzzle-loading cannons. Those insignia are symbolic, containing a lot of history. If we are going to represent techniques on our uniforms, we'll have to change them very often. However, changing guidon colors to green and gold (some high-ranking idiot's notion) from the ancient white and scarlet was soon recognized as nonsense. Symbology gains with age. Techniques, as Clausewitz wrote, do and must change, daily.

When strategy calls for mobility, shock action, fire power, it doesn't matter whether these are applied by soldiers riding horses or helicopters — so long as this is the technique of the day. Wars are never lost by clinging to old symbols.

They can be lost by trying to keep up with the latest fashion.


T.R. Fehrenbach is an author and historian.