ABSTRACT

Before the U.S. Civil War, the War Department saw little reason to collect intelligence on foreign armies. Americans believed that their distance from Europe and the Far East mitigated the possibility of war. Sending an expeditionary force to these areas would have been inconceivable to the public in the nineteenth century. Occasionally, individual officers traveled abroad to observe wars or foreign military maneuvers, but these missions were temporary and short-lived. Immediately after the war, officers came home and reported their information to their superiors and then went back to their former duties.1