Lifting the Fog of Peace: How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War

Chapter 2. Two Centuries of Small Wars and Nation Building

chapter 2 Two Centuries of Small Wars and Nation Building This obviously wasn’t peace—yet it didn’t quite seem war. This was neither Kenya nor Indo-China. The system, as usual, told us nothing.1 —second lieutenant oliver crawford, the door marked malaya Writing of his experiences in Somalia in 1992, Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks observed, “This was the ‹rst U.S. brush with ‘peacemaking ’—a new form of post–Cold War, low intensity chaos that is neither war nor peace, but produces enough exhaustion, anxiety, boredom, and confusion to feel much like combat.”2 Indeed, many observers of the U.S. military’s ill-fated mission to Somalia thought that a new type of lowlevel con›ict had emerged—and they were not so sure that U.S. forces were an appropriate remedy. History indicates, however, that such missions are far from new for U.S. troops. Messy and confusing operations in Somalia and Haiti in the 1990s were not unlike frontier army duty in the 1800s, occupation in the American South after the Civil War, missions to the Philippines and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, or the so-called Banana Wars of the early 20th century. In fact, all of these experiences have far more in common with 21st-century operations in Iraq and Afghanistan than do the “major combat operations” for which the military has been organized, trained, and equipped throughout the majority of the 20th century. As this chapter reveals, the U.S. Army and 27 1. Oliver Crawford, The Door Marked Malaya (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958); reprinted in 1989 as FMFRP 12-28 USMC. 2. Tom Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribner, 1998), 17. Marine Corps have a long history of conducting such missions and a mixed record of learning from their experiences. The purpose of this chapter is not to detail every military operation the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have experienced in the past two centuries but, rather, to provide a general overview of the extent to which the military has been involved in nontraditional military missions, to highlight the common characteristics and controversies associated with such operations, and to detail how the two institutions have or have not captured lessons from these episodes to better prepare troops for future similar duties. The organizational and political narratives that evolved from this rich history have informed the modern military’s mind-set and its understanding of its “proper” role. While the actual operational experience provided substantive lessons for current and future operations, the narratives that evolved, both within the military and throughout American society, presented cultural and political obstacles to organizational change. This chapter presents a mixed record of success and failure over two centuries as the American military learned, relearned, and institutionally forgot again and again the types of complex stability operations and counterinsurgency tasks it ‹nds itself conducting again today. The chapter outlines the informal mechanisms by which troops coped with unfamiliar missions and how they shared information and adapted contemporaneously when their institutions failed to prepare them adequately. More formal attempts to convert this adaptation into longer-term organizational learning, such as the Marine Corps’ experience in crafting the Small Wars Manual in the 1930s and the War Department’s development of systematic planning processes and schools for military government and civil affairs during the interwar years, demonstrate the way in which lessons learned in the ‹eld can be captured and recorded into doctrine, education, and training. Yet in each case, powerful political and cultural forces averse to small wars and occupation managed to sideline the efforts to institutionalize lessons for future generations. Thus, although this period yields clear evidence of learning from experience and clear examples of how organizations can create processes for learning from experience, the Army and Marine Corps seemed to cope and adapt more than they actually learned institutionally. Coping and Adapting in the Early Years Contrary to current conventional wisdom, the initial purpose of the standing American Army was not simply to “‹ght and win the nation’s 28 • lifting the fog of peace wars” but, rather, to promote the development of the nation by “intimidating ” and ‹ghting the Native Americans and guarding against European colonial powers. These requirements were spelled out in Sentiments on a Peace Establishment, written by General George Washington in 1783. In the document, Washington outlined the way the new nation’s military should...