The United States has no Single Way of War
This is a historiography for the masses article
In his landmark book, The American Way of War, Russell Weigley argues that there is, in fact, a distinctly American method of waging war. Weigley examines American strategic thought and finds a strategic culture predicated on pursuing war through Hans Delbrück’s division of strategy into two lenses — attrition and annihilation.
Americans, he says, pursue a strategy of attrition when they lack the means to directly defeat an enemy and seek to grind their opponent down, such as during the American Revolution. Alternatively, a strategy of annihilation aiming to decisively defeat the enemy’s military, as seen in the American Civil War or the European theater of World War II.
Weigley’s thesis is sound when applied to the few wars he examines — the largest shooting wars in American history. He is correct in asserting that American strategy was often limited, and American military plans often ignored the political ramifications of its chase for decisive battle and annihilation. The ideal of the decisive battle for annihilation has preoccupied the American military planners since, as evidenced by attitudes toward Vietnam and Iraq.
As such, when one examines the entire breadth of the American military experience, it quickly becomes apparent that Weigley’s decision to adopt Delbruck’s division of strategy into attrition and annihilation artificially narrows his selection of conflicts to those that fit those strategies.
However, when the analysis is expanded to a greater breadth of American conflict, Weigley’s thesis falls short. More often than not, American armed forces have been engaged in what Max Boot calls “small wars,” or “imperial wars” that he defines as “campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will meet them in the open field.”
In The Savage Wars of Peace, Boot argues that the American military experience is predominantly one of these small wars. This has been especially true since 1945 when the United States has nearly only fought limited wars against a wholly unmatched opponent or guerrillas. The lone exceptions are the incredibly similar wars contextually in Korea and the First Gulf War.
While the geopolitical situations were similar, and the United States rallied large international coalitions to respond, the outcomes could not be much different. Regardless, the post-1945 atomic reality is that most wars the United States has fought have not been large-scale combat operations despite earnest preparations for them. Moreover, that holds trust for the country’s entire history.
Brian Linn’s The Echo of Battle (2007) challenges the view that the United States has one coherent warfighting tradition and instead argues that distinct internal cultural traditions create their own comfortable vision of war through their digestion of lessons from the past war. Linn argues that it is less about the wars themselves than how officers perceive their lessons.
Throughout American history, according to Linn, military leaders have eschewed the lessons of low-intensity and counterinsurgency in favor of preparing for the next great battle, chasing the elusive decisive battle. John Shy in A People Numerous and Armed, and Allen Millet, Peter Maslowski, and William Feis in For The Common Defense likewise describe an American military tradition of small armies occasionally enlarged to fight existential wars, such as those of annihilation that Weigley so deftly uses to advance his thesis.
In an essay in Wayne Lee’s Warfare and Culture in World History, Adrian Lewis posits that, in at least the post-World War II era, there has existed an American style of warfare predicated on limiting casualties, chasing decisive battle, and placing a premium on technological superiority, a reliance on airpower, and avoidance of committing ground forces. For Lewis, though, this is a byproduct of the American discourse on war informed by total war experiences in World War II and responding to the changing notions of war in the post-war era.
Reconsidering the American Way of War from Antulio Echevarria challenges Weigley even more directly. Echevarria’s primary criticism of Weigley is not his broad ideas, but rather what he omitted — the “small wars” and other military actions in places like the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, the Philippines, China, and Russia. Echevarria argues that American strategy has been open-ended, consistently engaging in conflicts with political considerations always at the forefront.
Despite the debate over strategic culture and practice, Echevarria shows that if there is an American way of war, it is predicated on tactical success. The American assumption is that battlefield victories lead to successful campaigns and victorious war. This thought leads to a narrow view of strategy and is the root cause of simplistic views about an American way of war.
Instead, battlefield success and victorious termination of war are not always compatible, and the failure to acknowledge the nuance of war termination has, as Echevarria shows, “caused an American way of battle more than a way of war.” Moreover, Echevarria argues that no single type of fighting dominated American operations for any length of time, and execution remained decentralized.
Ingo Trauschweizer argues in The Cold War U.S. Army (2008) that throughout the Cold War — even during the Vietnam War — American military planners were preoccupied with preventing or fighting a land war against the Soviet Union in Europe. A preference for large-scale operations and a predominance of technology and firepower is problematic when fighting elusive insurgents.
In The Army and Vietnam (1986), Andrew Krepinevich emphasizes the Army’s insistence on using large-scale operations and a plethora of firepower in pursuing a strategy of attrition. In so doing, army leaders ignored the political and social dimensions that form the foundation of successful counterinsurgency warfare. American failure in Vietnam resulted in a wholesale rejection of irregular, counterinsurgency doctrine that had lasting implications when the United States found itself embroiled in two long counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Enamored with the quick success of the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003, the post-Saddam US-led government ignored Sunni political concerns and failed to grasp an effective strategy for post-combat governance operations. As Peter Mansoor demonstrates in his memoir, Surge (2013), it was only through a deliberate process that the United States began to adapt doctrine and infuse ideas and soldiers to find a modicum of success defeating the insurgency.
The notion of a decidedly “American way of war,” especially one dominated by massive armies fighting wars of annihilation, is, at best, reductionist. Like any military, the United States might have a preferred method of fighting — quick, decisive battle — but this is rarely if ever, realized.
When faced with a large-scale existential threat, the United States has, as Weigley writes, resorted to a strategy of annihilation. More often, as Echevarria, Linn, and Boot point out, the United States has engaged in numerous low-intensity conflicts throughout its existence. The relative success at wars of annihilation against uniformed enemies has given American leaders encouraged military strategies that seek those rather than low intensity “small wars,” with some officers declaring in the 1970s, “No more Vietnams!”
Regardless, the penchant for exploring “ways of war” has contributed to and expanded military history to contextualize war and military institutions within the culture that produces them. This method allows historians to contextualize better how armies fight to look at broad trends across time and space. To do so, historians must examine the entire breadth of any given society’s military experience.
