In 1901 Secretary of War Elihu Root appointed an ad hoc War College Board, which actually functioned as an embryonic General Staff. It consisted of five officers detailed for limited terms, plus the Chief of Engineers, the Chief of Artillery, the Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the commanding officer of the Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Root charged the board with the advancement of Army education and the study of military policy. In 1903 Congress, at Root's recommendation, established a General Staff Corps with a Chief of Staff. The War College Board then gave way to an Army War College that performed some General Staff functions and that served as a capstone for a reorganized military education system.
Prior to 1900 an Army system of individual education did not exist; individual training was accomplished primarily within units. In most cases, Army schools were local in attendance and were designed to improve the academic education of the new officer as well as his professional military education. Notable exceptions were some of the schools of application that were early forerunners of the later combat arms schools: the Artillery School of Practice, Fort Monroe, Virginia (1824); the Engineer School of Application, Washington Barracks, D.C. (1866); and the Infantry and Cavalry School, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (1886). During the Spanish-American War, officers in the lower echelons demonstrated that they knew their basic jobs, but those at higher levels did not sufficiently adapt to the problems of sudden mobilization and training and the widespread deployment of military forces.
Secretary Root discovered that one-third of Regular Army officers possessed no formal military education, and he believed that the Military Academy and the schools of application were inadequate to equip officers to handle the new responsibilities attendant to the growing world prominence of the United States. Nevertheless, he valued the Military Academy as the initial training ground for the Army's officers and launched a successful campaign to increase the cadet corps, modernize the academy's curriculum, and improve its physical plant. In 1901 Root announced a comprehensive system of officer education in which the Military Academy, post schools, five special service schools, and the General Service and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth would train officers in combined arms and staff positions in large units; and what became the Army War College would do advanced planning at Washington Barracks, D.C. The special service schools were the Artillery School at Fort Monroe; the Engineer School of Application, Washington Barracks, D.C.; the School of Submarine Defense, Fort Totten, New York; the School of Application for Cavalry and Field Artillery at Fort Riley, Kansas; and the Army Medical School, Washington, D.C. Root required that the schools test the officer students and that the results be placed in their records. All of the Army's schools for officers except the Army War College admitted National Guard officers and civilian graduates of land grant college military training programs who were earmarked for future U.S. Volunteers commissions. In 1904 the Army's system of military education added post schools for the academic and technical instruction of enlisted men.