Reconsidering the American Way of War: US Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan

243 Pages·2014·2.16 MB·English

by  Antulio J.

Reconsidering the American Way of War
Reconsidering the American Way of War
US Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan
Antulio J. Echevarria II
© 2014 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information
storage-and-retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Echevarria, Antulio Joseph,
1959–
Reconsidering the American way of war : US military practice from the
Revolution to Afghanistan / Antulio J. Echevarria II.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62616067-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Strategic culture—United States—History. 2. United States—Military
policy—Case studies. 3. United States—History, Military.
4. Strategy. I. Title.
U21.2.E32 2014
355’.033573—dc23
2013034006
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library
Materials.
15 14 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America
To Jorge, who fought well.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
I. Preludes
1. American Ways of War: Turns in Interpretation
2. American Strategic Culture: An Elusive Fiction
3. American Military Art: A Misleading Analogy
II. American Military Practice
4. The Revolutionary War to the Mexican War
5. The Civil War to the Boxer Rebellion
6. The Caribbean Wars to the Korean War
7. The Guatemalan Coup to the War on Terrorism
Conclusions and Observations
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I began framing the chapters of this book while on a visiting research fellowship
through Oxford University’s Changing Character of War program. I enjoyed the
better part of a year at Nuffield College, which afforded me access to Oxford’s
vast research facilities and a collegial environment in which to work. My
warmest thanks go to Sir Hew Strachan, Rob Johnson, Andrea Baumann, and
Sibylle Scheipers, whose perspectives greatly enriched my own. I would also
like to thank my friends and colleagues from the Society of Military History,
many of whom gave of their valuable time to consider or debate some of the
points in this study. All were helpful in that special way the society has of
encouraging the research of its members, but Bianka Adams, Conrad Crane,
Brian Linn, Randy Papadopoulos, Jill Russell, and Janet Valentine deserve
particular mention. I am also grateful to Don Jacobs of Georgetown University
Press for his professionalism in preparing this manuscript for publication.
Last and never least, my deepest appreciation goes to my family, whose
patience was limitless over the long months I spent writing this book. To my
wife Laurie and our children I owe a debt I can never repay.
Preface
This book of history … is based on an assumption that what we believe and what we do today is
governed at least as much by the habits of mind we formed in the relatively remote past as by what we
did and thought yesterday.”
Russell Weigley, The American Way of War, 1973
THIS BOOK CHALLENGES several longstanding notions about the American way of
war. It examines American military practice from the War of Independence to
the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to determine what patterns, if any, exist in
the way Americans have used military force against their adversaries. It argues
that many beliefs concerning the American way of war—such as its alleged
apolitical and astrategic character and its reputation for using overwhelming
force to achieve decisive results—do not, in fact, hold up to scrutiny.1 American
uses of force were typically driven more by political considerations than military
ones, and the amount of force employed was rarely overwhelming or decisive.
Whereas Russell Weigley’s celebrated work, The American Way of War, traced
ideas about military strategy, this study concentrates on strategic and operational
practice. Its premise is that what people did historically is just as revealing as, if
not more than, what they thought or said. Accordingly this book closes the gap
between Weigley’s novel effort to represent America’s way of war as a history of
ideas and the more grounded narratives of America’s diverse wars and military
actions.
Focusing on strategic and operational practice helps strip away some of the
rhetoric of the age, such as Gen. William T. Sherman’s oft-repeated phrase “hard
hand of war.”2 Such rhetoric obscures both the complexity and the simplicity of
what took place. Peeling it away is especially necessary because the language of
the so-called transformation and counterinsurgency “revolutions” has
misrepresented the American way of war for more than a decade. Each tried to
lay claim to the American style of fighting, though in different ways and for
different reasons. Since those revolutions are behind us, we can now take a more
objective look at what the American way of war was and in some ways still is.
Hence the title of this book.
Weigley’s American Way of War remains a classic. Even so, and even with his
considerable skills as a historian, his history of ideas necessarily omitted much.
We find little discussion of America’s supposed small wars, except for the
campaigns against Native Americans, and those were not small when their
geographic scope and duration are considered.3 Almost no mention is made of
the Barbary Wars, the antipiracy actions in the Gulf of Mexico and the
Caribbean, the Banana Wars, the border wars with Mexico, and the various
interventions in the Philippines, China, and Russia. Weigley’s focus was
decidedly on major wars and more precisely on the strategic ideas underpinning
them. However, since the late eighteenth century, the United States has
employed force overseas roughly two hundred times to protect or promote its
interests.4 That number increases when one adds the three dozen or so covert
operations undertaken during and after the Cold War, as well as some 150
domestic military operations short of war. Admittedly, many of these actions did
not escalate to bloodshed, yet they represent a Clausewitzian “continuation of
policy by other means.”5 Collectively they create a truer picture of how and why
Americans used military force. For that reason, this book covers not only
America’s major conflicts, but also many of its smaller wars and military actions
(it was simply not possible to examine all of them) to offer a more
comprehensive treatment of the American way of war.
This more comprehensive picture reveals that, of the many factors that drove
American uses of force, perhaps the most important was an administration’s
desire to reduce its political risk. Rarely was the use of overwhelming force seen
as a way to reduce risk. Instead, political leaders typically focused on
committing only sufficient force. This rationale is counterintuitive from a
military perspective, which considers it beneficial to enter a conflict with a
preponderance of force. Ultimately what constituted an acceptable level of
political risk to an administration was a subjective call. Presidents and their
advisers took any number of internal and external factors into account when
determining the degree of risk they were willing to accept. Such factors included
an administration’s sense of itself, how strong its mandate appeared, its
assumptions regarding the efficacy of military force, and how confident it felt
about its ability to fight a war while advancing its other policies. Thus the chief
characteristics of the American way of war—and how they changed over time—
were determined largely by the major tensions and dialectical turns in American
politics. The American way of war was, and still is, thoroughly political.
To underscore the point further, Americans have used war as a political
instrument not only to advance their foreign policies, but also to promote their
domestic agendas. Successes and failures on the battlefield clearly affected how
international rivals (and partners) dealt with one another. However, US
policymakers also readily leveraged such outcomes to strengthen their parties’
standings at home and to weaken those of their opponents. As interesting as it
would be to explore such dynamics, this book is an analysis of American
military, not political practice. The latter would require a study organized along
completely different lines. Instead, this work examines the strategic and
operational practice that made up the American way of war—defined for
purposes of this study as how the United States used military force to protect or
promote its interests.6
Contrary to the received view, the American way of war was also not
astrategic. American strategic and operational practice became more fused over
time. The latter incorporated the former in war plans and campaign plans or,
more precisely, within the various sections detailing the schemes of maneuver
for such plans. This development did not mean that military strategy was
consumed by operational art, as some claim.7 Rather, it meant that military
strategy—the art of the general as it has been called—had become more diffuse.
Instead of one general or field commander directing armies or navies in wartime,
the scope of modern war required that many generals and admirals assume
responsibility for specific sectors or functions within geographically defined
theaters or operational areas. In short, it meant American military strategy
became more “nested” in practice. It was possible, for instance, for the United
States to pursue an overall military strategy of attrition against the Japanese, as
articulated by President Roosevelt in 1943: “We set as a primary task in the war
of the Pacific a day-by-day and week-by-week and month-by-month destruction
of more Japanese war materials than Japanese industry could replace.”8 Yet
within that overarching strategy, it was also possible for Gen. Douglas
MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz to pursue strategies of position in
designing their respective campaigns, even as they carried out force-oriented
strategies aimed at destroying Japanese combat power. Strictly speaking,
strategies of position and control do not preclude the use of force-oriented
strategies or vice versa. Yet the distinction provides a useful framework for
discussing the variety of military strategies that made up American military
practice. The downside of such variety is that, without strong coordination at the
top, nested military strategies can become disjointed, with each of the armed
services pursuing separate strategic agendas. That, in fact, happened to a degree
in several American conflicts.
Another observation supported by an analysis of American military practice
is that the anatomy of war—the operational phasing—currently followed by
American campaign planners is misleading.9 It places too much emphasis on the
phase referred to as decisive operations. If such operations were truly decisive,
there would be little need for studies concerning war termination. And yet such