Camp Benning opened on October 19, 1918, just weeks before the armistice ended World War I. A young Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived that December with 250 tankers from Camp Colt, Pennsylvania. By 1920, Congress declared it a permanent post and appropriated over a million dollars for the Infantry School of Arms. The real transformation came in 1927 when Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall took over as assistant commandant. Appalled by the casualties he blamed on poor preparation, Marshall overhauled the entire training system. The changes became known as the Benning Revolution, a phrase still used today. Marshall went on to become Army Chief of Staff during World War II, authored the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. The seeds of all of it were planted in the red clay of Georgia.

Not all of Fort Benning's history shines. The 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Triple Nickels, trained here as the first all-Black parachute unit in American history. They never deployed overseas or saw combat in World War II. Instead, they were sent to the Pacific Northwest to fight forest fires, making over a thousand parachute jumps as smoke jumpers against blazes potentially set by Japanese incendiary balloons. The racial killings of 1941 cast a longer shadow still. Private Felix Hall, a 19-year-old Black soldier, disappeared after heading to the post exchange in February. His body was found hanging in a ravine six weeks later. A Fort Benning physician ruled it a homicide, but no one was ever charged. His name is now inscribed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Days before Hall's body was discovered, Private Albert King, also Black, was shot five times and killed by a white Military Police sergeant following a bus altercation. The sergeant was acquitted and transferred the next day.

The base was originally named for Henry L. Benning, a Confederate brigadier general and outspoken advocate for secession. For over a century, the name went unquestioned. Then came the national reckoning after 2020. Congress created a Naming Commission, which recommended renaming the post for Lieutenant General Hal Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore, both buried on post. The redesignation ceremony took place on May 11, 2023. But the story did not end there. In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the name changed back to Fort Benning, this time honoring a different Benning: Corporal Fred G. Benning, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism during World War I in France. Same name on the gate, entirely different man behind it.

Today Fort Benning is the home of the Maneuver Center of Excellence, created after the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission consolidated the Infantry School and the Armor School, which relocated from Fort Knox in 2011. The post supports more than 120,000 people daily across four main cantonment areas: Main Post, Kelley Hill, Sand Hill, and Harmony Church. Three 249-foot parachute drop towers on Main Post, modeled after the 1939 World's Fair attractions in New York, still train paratroopers at Airborne School. A fourth tower was toppled by a tornado in 1954. The 75th Ranger Regiment, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and dozens of other units call Benning home. It remains what it has been since 1918: the place where America prepares its soldiers for whatever comes next.