My review of John Grenier’s The First Way of War at INDenverTimes.
No book has had more influence on American military history than Russell F. Weigley ‘s The American Way of War. Written during the worst of the American war in Vietnam and focusing on traditional military campaigns, Weigley’s book has fairly owned the field of American military history for the 35-odd years since its publication. A growing number of historians are beginning to take note of the cracks in Weigley’s seminal work, however. The American Way of War posits a uniquely American way of war – specifically the use of overwhelming force with the goal of completely crushing the enemy’s military – but includes only a cursory treatment of early American warfare, beginning in earnest with the American Civil War and focusing primarily on the Twentieth Century. The hundreds of American campaigns waged against American Indians for the purpose of establishing the United States’ territorial boundaries are treated almost dismissively, given less than twenty pages in the near six-hundred page tome.
John Grenier is one of those historians working to correct the record, and his The First Way of War begins, appropriately enough for any overview of American military history, with the wars waged by the first English colonies in North America in 1607, and runs all the way through the Creek War of 1813-1814. Most of the wars during that time period were frontier wars, waged by irregular troops against Indian peoples with the direct aim of dispossessing them of their land, and unsurprisingly Grenier’s conclusions are far less complimentary than Weigley’s vis-à-vis America’s contribution to world military history. In Grenier’s words: “early Americans created a military tradition that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of nonocombatants, villages, and agricultural resources.” The term he uses to describe this type of warfare – if it can even be justified as such – is “extirpative,” as nifty a euphemism for genocide as has been employed in recent memory.
No book has had more influence on American military history than Russell F. Weigley ‘s The American Way of War. Written during the worst of the American war in Vietnam and focusing on traditional military campaigns, Weigley’s book has fairly owned the field of American military history for the 35-odd years since its publication. A growing number of historians are beginning to take note of the cracks in Weigley’s seminal work, however. The American Way of War posits a uniquely American way of war – specifically the use of overwhelming force with the goal of completely crushing the enemy’s military – but includes only a cursory treatment of early American warfare, beginning in earnest with the American Civil War and focusing primarily on the Twentieth Century. The hundreds of American campaigns waged against American Indians for the purpose of establishing the United States’ territorial boundaries are treated almost dismissively, given less than twenty pages in the near six-hundred page tome.
