The Dawes network: Charles Gates Dawes and the improvisation of an American army

This thesis re-interprets the significance of Charles Gates Dawes to the development of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, focusing on his pivotal role as a “network connector”. Faced with the unprecedented challenge of deploying a large-scale army overseas, Dawes’s extensive pre-war political, business, and military networks, along with his own well-developed faculties for expanding and connecting such networks, contributed essentially to the rapid improvisation required to build an effective logistical infrastructure for the AEF. His personal relationship with General John J. Pershing, along with his ability to merge military structure with business practices, positioned Dawes to orchestrate critical partnerships essential to sustaining AEF operations in France.
The thesis argues that the AEF’s ability to support itself logistically relied more upon hybrid civil-military networking than upon military “professionalism” or specific military expertise. Dawes’s model of “superimposed control” exemplified this approach, enabling informal civilian oversight of military procurement, financial, and other activities without compromising the formal authorities of the underlying formal hierarchies. His method enabled the swift integration of civilian specialists, often recruited through his network connections, into military logistics, enabling rapid learning and adaptation to the dynamic demands of war. Drawing on Niall Ferguson’s arguments on the historical importance of networks and Aimee Fox’s work on networked organisational learning, this study positions Dawes as a key “network connector” whose actions contributed essentially to wartime learning and adaptation within the AEF. The thesis interprets the development of AEF logistics largely as a product of collaborative civil-military networking and suggests the potential risk inherent in models of military organizational development that overemphasize “professionalism” at the expense of civil-military networking.