Military Intelligence Officer Reserve Corps Established (4 AUG 1921)

Photo By Lori Stewart | The MIORC insignia, the first to represent Military Intelligence in the U.S. Army, was approved 19 November 1923.  

UNITED STATES

08.02.2024

Story by Lori Stewart 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OFFICER RESERVE CORPS ESTABLISHED
Effective 4 August 1921, under the provisions of Section 37 of the National Defense Act of 3 June 1916 (amended per 2 April 1921), a portion of the Officers Reserve Corps was designated the Military Intelligence Section, Officers Reserve Corps (MIORC). The MIORC provided many of the Army’s intelligence personnel through the interwar period.

When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, the Army found it lacked experienced intelligence officers in both the active and reserve forces. To fill its personnel requirements, the newly established Military Intelligence Division (MID) looked to the civilian sector. Because Military Intelligence was not a branch in the Army at that time, however, the chief of MID was “placed in the awkward position of having to beg for officer commission vacancies from among the War Department authorities who might happen to be blessed with unexpended allocations of that particular nature.” In this manner, MID used the Signal Corps’ unfilled quotas to grant a small number of commissions to civilians. The War College also granted a limited number of commissions to qualified interpreters desperately needed overseas.

This expedient far from alleviated the demand for intelligence personnel, and the difficulties obtaining intelligence officers did not abate after the war. Although the MID had become a coequal unit of the War Department General Staff (WDGS) in August 1918, its chief was not considered an Army branch chief and, thus, had no authority to grant commissions to officers who had conducted wartime intelligence work. When an Officer Reserve Corps was established per the National Defense Act of 1920, a select few intelligence officers were given commissions within the Quartermaster Corps Reserve with the understanding that their personnel records would be marked “for intelligence duty.” Unfortunately, this notation was regularly ignored, and these officers more often than not were assigned to normal quartermaster duties.

Brig. Gen. Dennis E. Nolan, who served as the director of the MID (a position redesignated the assistant chief of staff G-2, WDGS), lobbied for a separate and distinct section specifically for intelligence officers within the newly created Officer Reserve Corps. Because of his dedicated efforts, effective 4 August 1921, the Military Intelligence Section of the Officers Reserve Corps (known as MIORC) was formally established. While MI had no corresponding branch in the Regular Army, this action provided Nolan with the branch chief authority that had eluded the MID since 1917.

The MIORC initially was comprised of 286 experienced and trained (albeit minimally) officers who would be available for intelligence duties in the event of a full-scale mobilization. In the interwar years, that number peaked at 821 in 1927 before declining annually thereafter. By the time the United States declared war on Japan in 1941, the number of officers in the MIORC had dwindled to 573. Despite the existence of the MIORC, at the start of World War II, the Army faced a dire personnel situation similar to what it had faced at the start of World War I, because many of the World War I veterans in the MIORC were near retirement age and the more recently commissioned officers lacked practical experience.


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• Date Taken: 08.02.2024
• Date Posted: 08.02.2024 17:00
• Story ID: 477691
• Location: US