The True Napoleon of the West: General Winfield Scott’s Mexico City Campaign and the Origins of the U.S. Army’s Combined-Arms Combat Division

Combined-arms combat divisions emerged fully during the French Revolutionary Wars in the late 1700s. This paper explores how U.S. General Winfield Scott’s Mexico City campaign (9 March–14 September 1847) contributed to this military innovation’s transatlantic diffusion. It argues that Scott organized the Army of Invasion of Mexico according to the French system of combined-arms divisions, enabling him to replicate the Napoleonic era’s aggressive operational tactics. In this way, Scott nullified the Mexican forces’ numerical superiority, overcame their fortified defensive positions, and gradually annihilated them, strengthening his claim to be the “Napoleon of the West” and demonstrating that combined-arms divisions were appropriate for the American way of war.