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By Root 2188 0

at Miles’s draping of himself in the Stars and Stripes, now wanted him out by the end of 1902. The president’s loathing for Miles never fell into remission, but Root, as usual, was more discreet and arranged for the retired commanding general John Schofield to tell a Senate committee that he backed the secretary of war and felt that his old office should be abolished. This country, Schofield added, should have “what other nations of the earth have, a chief of staff.” Reassured by crusty old Schofield’s appearance, many other senior officers soon outed themselves as Root backers. Miles, meanwhile, bloated by certainty that he had crippled Root, had embarked on a worldwide tour. It was a disastrous decision: during his absence, Root and Roosevelt lobbied congressmen hard, and on February 14, 1903, the bill was signed into law. A day later General Miles stepped ashore, now a powerless, forlorn figure.16 He could only count the months until mandatory retirement.

When Miles departed on August 8, Roosevelt didn’t bother sending the customary message of thanks, and Root failed to attend his leaving ceremony. Indeed, Roosevelt supplemented his formal announcement of Miles’s departure with the cutting envoi: “Lieutenant-General Miles will now proceed to his home. The travel enjoined is necessary for the public service.”17

Root’s grand reforms signaled that the Miles-dominated era of the Indian-fighting Old Army was over. The new U.S. Army was to be a gleaming model of modernity, a bureaucratically designed example of scientific management and progressive ideals in action.

The deep and startling changes between 1898 and 1903, a half-decade that straddled the old iron-and-wood nineteenth century and the steel-and-glass twentieth, bore a lasting impact on the design and production of the army’s weapons. For his new army Roosevelt wanted a new arm, a rifle that would properly represent all that the reforms stood for. In order to satisfy every army faction amid the uproar caused by Root’s rout of Miles, he intended to strike the perfect balance between diehardism and progressivism while at the same time exemplifying the highest standards of scientific management. That new weapon would be the Springfield Model 1903—Roosevelt’s Rifle.

The Krag symbolized the ancien régime and the Old Army. It was the legacy of Daniel Flagler, the chief of ordnance who had died in office in April 1899, and now that he had gone, it was time to clean house. Flagler’s replacement had been Adelbert Buffington, the former superintendent of Springfield and the very last of the old-style Ordnance chiefs. (He even had an old-style name to go with his position.) The sole reason he got the job was that he was second in seniority behind the late Flagler, and everyone knew he was just a stopgap candidate ticking off the calendar until his retirement.

Buffington was scheduled to step down in November 1901. After him, in accordance with the Root reforms, there would be no more chiefs dying in harness at advanced ages after forty years’ slow ascent up the promotional hierarchy; henceforth, there would be four-year renewable terms, a flow of new blood and fresh ideas as officers were rotated back and forth between line and staff, and selection for the top positions would be on merit.

Buffington’s departure left the door open for Roosevelt and Root to select a successor who would be their trusty tool for implementing the reforms. They already had a particular man in mind. Roosevelt had talent-spotted him as early as October 1899, when Root received a note hand-delivered by Captain William Crozier. A Kansan and son of a U.S. senator, Crozier had gone up to West Point and joined an artillery regiment on the frontier in the late 1870s, then joined the Ordnance Department in 1881. Exacting and precise, he was a master of technical matters, as he showed by codesigning an advanced gun carriage for coastal artillery in the early 1890s.

As a delegate to the International Peace Conference at The Hague, Crozier had proved especially skilled at deflecting clever attempts to