The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (review)

The First Way of War offers an alternative interpretation of the beginnings of America's military culture and presents the convincing argument that the country's fundamental way of waging war was from the start one of irregular operations, in which civilians and their property were not merely occasional unfortunate and unavoidable "collateral damage," but were routinely and deliberately targeted as the means by which to break the enemy's means and will to wage war. Contrary to the generally accepted analysis—perhaps best expressed in Russell F. Weigley's well-respected and influential American Way of War—that the nation's military experience and doctrine have been those of formally organized armies waging campaigns in which noncombatants were regarded as sacrosanct, John Grenier argues that the oldest and most persistent American way of war was one which "had less to do with grand strategy, the movements of armies, or the clash of nations than with what eighteenth-century writers called petit guerre" (p. 4).

The First Way of War shifts the focus of colonial, Revolutionary, and early national military history from the conventional clash of European-style regulars engaged in set-piece battles in the densely populated East to the brutal raids and counter-raids along the frontier, where "extravagant violence" was the rule and where quarter toward soldiers and civilians alike was neither expected nor extended. In a concise yet thorough examination of the first two-hundred years of American warfare, Grenier, an officer in the United States Air Force and an Associate Professor of History at the Air Force Academy, demonstrates that European colonists not only improvised their own way of war but that their new situation required them to direct their military energies against civilian populations and their agricultural resources. The operations of these guerrilla or partisan warriors—"America's preferred tool of conquest"—he asserts, were not only decisive in achieving dominance over their enemies but were formative in establishing the American way of war.

Grenier gives special emphasis to the vital importance of rangers in military operations conducted in the wilderness, offering a persuasive corrective to the dominant belief in the absolute superiority of regular soldiers over incompetent and bumbling civilian soldiers in wilderness warfare. Even as late as the Federalist era, a period in which the regular army of the United States was undergoing the rigors of professionalization, irregular soldiers and tactics remained decisive in frontier warfare. Most standard histories of the American military experience, Grenier maintains, credit the regular army with the conquest of the Old Northwest and attribute only failure to militiamen and irregulars. The absence of rangers, however, led to such disasters to American arms as the battles of Eel River, Kekionga, and the Wabash. Only after Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne had recruited and incorporated a large force of irregulars into his command, and adopted their tactics of destroying villages and fields, was "the father of the regular army" able to decisively defeat the Shawnee and their Miami allies at the battle of Fallen Timbers, opening the Ohio River Valley to Euro-American settlement.

The First Way of War is a well-crafted and exhaustively documented piece of scholarship, with each footnote an authoritative mini-bibliographical essay. One might only wish that Grenier's slim volume had not ended with Andrew Jackson's campaign against the Creeks in 1814, but had continued his analysis through the United States's war with Mexico, the Civil War, and the Plains Indian wars, all of which offer further evidence to support the thesis that "the first way of war" was, and remains, a much larger factor in the making of American military culture than most military analysts will presently admit.