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

The American way of war is often defined in terms of its relationship to technology. Thus, the U.S. military during World War II is frequently described as reliant at least in part on the mass production and utilization of technologically inferior but fairly standardized weapons. Similarly, the current U.S. military is often portrayed as dependent on the employment of technologically advanced weaponry.

Over the last three decades, however, military historians have developed a more sophisticated understanding of the American way of war that pays less attention to technology and focuses instead on the means, personnel, objectives, and strategies that the United States has used to fight its wars and the cultural, social, and military experiences and perceptions that have informed them. The seminal work on the subject was Russell Weigley's The American Way of War (1973). Weigley argued that during the War of Independence, the United States lacked military resources and thus pursued a strategy of attrition designed to exhaust its opponents. As the nation's industrial and military might expanded, however, so did its war aims. During the Civil War, Weigley claimed, a strategy of annihilation designed to overthrow the enemy by destroying its armed force became the characteristic American way of war.

In The First Way of War, John Grenier, an air force officer and professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, offers an important addition to the literature on the American way of war by tracing the development of a distinctively American method of warfare back to the frontier conflicts with Indians during the colonial era. He argues that early Americans combined irregular methods with unlimited objectives to create "a military tradition that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages and agricultural resources" (p. 10). From 1607 to 1814, they employed this first way of war in a series of shockingly violent but devastatingly successful campaigns that ensured the subjugation of the Indians and secured the conquest of the trans-Appalachian West. Although the first way of war lost its central place in American military thought after 1814, Grenier suggests that it remains part of the nation's military heritage.

The key elements of the first way of war were extirpative war, the use of rangers, and scalp hunting. Many of the early colonial leaders were veterans of the brutal religious wars of Europe, during which burning towns and killing noncombatants were commonplace. Others were familiar with the British use of the feedfight, the destruction of an opponent's fields and villages, to suppress rebellion in Ireland. They employed many of these same tactics against the Indians they encountered in the New World. As the colonists' settlements expanded, however, it became increasingly difficult to defend them against Indian attacks that relied on speed and stealth to strike quickly and retreat before a response could be mounted. To counter the attacks, the colonists formed ranger units that imitated Indian methods. The rangers proved successful but their numbers were limited. To increase the number of rangers and secure the frontier, colonial governments began offering scalp bounties. By 1730, extirpative war, ranging, and scalp hunting had coalesced into the first way of war. For the next eighty-five years, the first way of war was the preferred method of warfare for Americans on the frontier.

Although the first way of war that Grenier describes was undoubtedly an important pattern of conflict in colonial America, he never acknowledges that it was employed almost entirely against Indians. Nearly all of his examples of extravagant violence against noncombatants are drawn from conflicts between American frontiersmen and Indians. The virtually exclusive application of the first way of war to a single group of opponents raises doubts about his claim that the frequent blurring of boundaries between combatants and noncombatants by later Americans is "a living legacy of the first way of war" (p. 15).

Grenier's book is...