Under its provisions, an artillery, cavalry, or infantry sergeant received $30 a month; corporals in these branches, $21; and privates first class, $18. The pay reform of 1908 was the Army's way of recognizing both the importance of the NCO corps and the need to compete with the private sector for qualified people.

Unfortunately, the reform did not last. Noncommissioned officers expected that NCO pay would now reflect their higher status within the enlisted ranks and, at the same time, assure them a living wage for skills also sought by industry. But their expectations were not always fulfilled. During the 1920s and 1930s, antiwar feeling, isolationism, and the Great Depression in turn swept America. The whole Army suffered, in particular the NCO corps, whose numbers and pay were cut. Once again, the gap between a private's and a sergeant's pay narrowed. The War Department and the Chiefs of Staff strove to preserve a corps of experienced, professional soldiers and their special place within the Army, but not until World War II was the Army leadership able to take practical action on pay issues.

Since then the American people have come to realize

that the Army is not something to be created for wars and destroyed afterwards. It is now accepted that the nation needs a continuing, and adequately paid, force to meet the ongoing dangers that threaten liberty and American security. Legislation has gradually transformed the status of noncommissioned officers. One of the most significant acts was the Military Pay Bill of 1958, which created two additional pay grades, E-8 and E-9. This action emphasized the increasingly important role of senior NCOs in the post-Korean War Army and was one way of rewarding experienced E-7s who had performed in an outstanding manner. The laws creating the Modern Volunteer Army after Vietnam ensured that noncommissioned officers would be paid salaries that reflected their professional status in the Army and in American society. Today, the Regular Army fully recognizes the professionalization of the NCO corps in its pay scales, as it does in other crucial ways.

NCOS in peacetime often had reason to complain of their treatment. The problems went beyond the old soldier's lament, which many who wore the uniform could recite:

God and the soldier, we adore

In time of troubles, not before.

When victory's won and all things righted,
God's forgotten and soldier slighted.

A great deal has been said already about the American habit of cutting its defense forces to the bone as soon as the latest war is over. But the noncommissioned officer corps had special problems. The skills it had learned in war were dismissed as useless to the nation, some of its most experienced members were lost, and its status was lowered and its pay cut. Not only was it often neglected during peacetime, but during demobilization it frequently became a repository for surplus officers. Every time this happened, NCOS were reminded that their status as career soldiers meant little when their interests competed with those of the officer corps.

The tradition of neglect during peacetime went back to the earliest days of the American Republic. The Continental Army had been created only to fight the War of Independence. Once the Treaty of Paris formally ended that conflict in September 1783, the Continental Congress moved to reduce the Army drastically. In June

1784 Congress disbanded the force except for one company (very quickly expanded to one regiment). Former Continental officers and NCOs returned to civilian life or were dispersed to militia units, where they maintained as best they could at least minimal military training based on Steuben's Regulations. Clearly, the Founding Fathers did not provide very much opportunity for NCO professional advancement.

In the late 1780s and early 1790s the strength of the standing force rose and fell in response to various crises. The shock of the War of 1812 left the country more willing to trust a larger standing Army than before. In 1815 Congress authorized a postwar Army of 10,000 men, plus engineers. But the lesson of the war did not really take hold, and in 1820 the authorization was cut to 6,000.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Regular Army numbered some 16,000 men. The Union forces expanded quickly, as thousands rallied to the colors. The war was fought largely with volunteers, most of whom left the service at the war's end, and the Army once again shrank to a small professional force over the next decade. Beginning in the 1870s, the "Boys in Blue" were no

longer the darlings of the public they had been a decade earlier. Southern congressmen who resented the Regular Army's role in the military occupation of the South during Reconstruction often voted against appropriations. At the same time, the use of the militia and the National Guard in many states to quell civil disturbances and strikes did not endear the military to urban workers in many northern and western states.

Insofar as Americans admired the military, they tended to extol the volunteer citizen-soldier, while resenting or ignoring the professional. This attitude tended to make the public uncaring about the fate of the Regular Army. In 1877 national indifference reached the point that Congress failed to appropriate funds for the Army until almost the end of the fiscal year. Inevitably, the individual NCO felt the effects. Promotions came slowly, if at all. By 1894 almost all 1st Cavalry sergeants had been in grade for ten to sixteen years— some even longer. These veteran noncommissioned officers, and others like them, gave a good account of themselves as small unit commanders in the final decades of the Indian Wars, but most worked and fought without hope of better pay or promotion and without the admiration, or even the respect, of many of their fellow citizens.

The war with Spain in 1898 was a popular undertaking. But the nation again chose to fight largely with volunteers, and the conflict did little to improve the image of the professional soldier. World War I brought a tremendous growth in the noncommissioned officer ranks, but the expansion was temporary. Soon after, the American public's mood veered toward isolationism. If the United States was not going to become involved in an overseas adventure again, why have a large standing Army? Following demobilization from a peak strength of over 4,000,000, Congress cut the Army's overall manpower to 280,000 total strength in 1920, to 125,000 in 1923, and to 118,750 in 1927. Reductions in grade for career NCOs saw over 1,600 demoted by the end of 1922, including many outstanding NCOS who had been commissioned during the war.

The widespread personnel reductions and downgradings of the 1920s made it impossible for the Army to maintain and build upon General Pershing's wartime programs to encourage the professional spirit of the noncommissioned officer corps. The Great Depression in the 1930s brought further cuts in congressional funds for the Army and more hardships for those trying to make a living as career soldiers. Yet many civilians were going hungry, and the Army was a career that offered relative security. Many competed for the few vacancies that were available.

After France fell in 1940, a mass mobilization for World War II by the United States brought thousands of

new men into the Army, overwhelming the small prewar NCO corps. Trained for the most part by older Regular Army noncommissioned officers, these newcomers won, often within months, the stripes their instructors had taken years to earn. Following the war, the nation once again demobilized, undergoing a 75 percent reduction of the Army in just two years. To deal with a huge surplus of commissioned officers who wished to remain on active duty, the Army allowed thousands of these men to revert to the top three NCO grades. That step not only made these grades heavily overstrength, but also ensured that noncommissioned officers below the level of master sergeant would be frozen in place for a long time.

Incredibly, the Army proceeded to make the same mistake following the Korean War. During fiscal year 1955, more than 5,000 reserve officers were still serving on extended active duty, most of them recalled to active duty during Korea, but passed over for promotion to captain, major, or lieutenant colonel. The Army offered those whose service began before 22 March 1948 automatic appointments as master sergeants, and those with later entry dates were offered NCO appointments at the next lower grade. This well-intentioned policy again glutted the top enlisted ranks at a time when the Army needed young technicians and specialists. By early 1958, with no "hot war" going on, the Army had more

master sergeants and sergeants first class than at the height of World War II.

Fortunately, the Army learned its lesson. At the end of the war in Vietnam, instead of flooding NCO ranks with people who were neither outstanding small unit leaders nor specialists, the Army sought to attract and retain a truly professional noncommissioned officer corps by guaranteeing that the role and dignity of the NCO in peacetime would not be diminished.

NCO training and education had long been the focus of Army reform debate. All professional groups formally educate and certify their members. Doctors attend medical schools; attorneys, law schools; and commissioned officers, military academies and service schools. But for much of their history the Army's noncommissioned officers, other than technical specialists, did not receive professional educational opportunities. Instead, the Army's leadership considered "OJT" (on-the-job training) adequate. Occasionally, during the 1800s the Army provided specialized training for field artillery and engineer sergeants, medical personnel, signalmen, and various other technical NCOs. But before 1971 a formal, standardized educational program for the noncommissioned officer corps did not exist within the Army school system. For the great majority of enlisted men, regardless of rank, "training" meant nothing more than hands-on experience.

Baron von Steuben had made noncommissioned officer training the responsibility of the company commander, but such training was uneven and rudimentary at best. Still, it was recognized from the earliest days of the Republic that NCOs often filled in for fallen officers. By the time of the Civil War, Maj. Gen. Silas Casey, in his volume on tactics, insisted that NCOs be formally trained, beyond their customary duties and roles, to give commands on the battlefield.

As the Indian Wars came to an end and the nineteenth century drew to a close, Army officers began to consider the challenges the new century was likely to bring. Reformers, both within and outside the Army, agreed that a fundamental need existed for better trained noncommissioned officers, like those found in the older, more experienced armies of other countries. In 1878 Bvt. Maj. Gen. Emory Upton, in his book The Armies of Asia and Europe, warned of the inadequacy of NCO training in the United States. In travels overseas he had learned that all European armies accepted the notion that "a good noncommissioned officer can no more be improvised than an officer."

But the road to reform was long. Since the early years of the nineteenth century the Army had provided some technical training for noncommissioned officers of the artillery at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Hospital stewards, the senior NCOS of the Medical Service, had received

special training since 1857. Since the 1870s Signal Corps noncommissioned officers had been trained, first at Fort Whipple, Virginia, and later at Fort Riley, Kansas. Similarly, engineer NCOs had been trained at Fort Totten, New York. For a time, an Infantry School of Application at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and a Cavalary School of Application at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, trained noncommissioned officers in those branches. But such schools were not ready to meet the technological challenges the twentieth century would bring to NCO education. Their tradition-bound curriculums simply did not keep up with progress in the various skill fields.

At first, most company grade officers opposed the establishment of more and better schools for noncommissioned officers. They argued, with some justification, that the company commander knew his men's capabilities and limitations best and therefore was in a position to provide them on-the-job training. A minority of officers expressed doubt whether OJT for combat arms NCOS was adquate; they wanted more post schools, where instruction could be given in elementary mathematics, science, mechanical drawing, surveying, and engineering. But World War I opened with NCOs being trained in the traditional way, while schools for officers multiplied.

American noncommissioned officers, consequently, were seen as half-trained and unsophisticated during their early contacts with Allied NCOs. When General Pershing recommended that special schools for sergeants be established immediately to improve leadership skills, schooling was provided, but only for noncommissioned officers in the American Expeditionary Forces-it was not institutionalized Army wide. And Pershing's wartime expedient did not survive demobilization.

Pershing's special schools for NCOs were not revived during World War II, although some leadership training was integrated into the unit training cycle before deployment. Decisive change came only after the war, as the Army took up its occupation duties in Germany and Japan and prepared to face the challenges of the Cold War. The Army Staff decided to develop servicewide standards for NCO training in peacetime. Although well-trained noncommissioned officers were still needed, few possessed the skills required for postwar duties.

The Army's answer was the NCO academy system. Beginning in 1947 and continuing throughout the 1950s, a small number of noncommissioned officer academies emerged, the first being the Constabulary Academy founded at Sonthofen, Germany. Probably the best known was the Seventh Army Noncommissioned Officers Academy in Munich. Although promising, the new schools had shortcomings: weak guidance from above