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The United States Army devotes considerable attention to the study of history as a guide for current and future policy. It employs hundreds of historians to study the past and sends some of its brightest officers to top universities for advanced degrees. Its fills its doctrinal manuals with historical vignettes illustrating tactics, leadership, and values; a history-based article appears in almost every issue of each branch and school professional journal. Military history also plays a significant role in professional military education, from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) classes to the Army War College. The army’s official histories of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War are extensively researched operational and institutional studies. Even academic historians , who have a philosophic bias against any practical application of their discipline, must acknowledge the service’s efforts to use history as a source of intellectual self-improvement. Yet until recently the army limited its focus on historical “lessons learned” to large-scale conventional operations, or the “Big Wars”—particularly the Civil War and World War II—and, to a lesser extent, on peacetime periods of reform or “transformation.“ Indicative of this emphasis, in 1993 one historical agency produced a 434-page operational history of the 1991 Gulf War, but not until 1998 did the official history program publish a comprehensive analysis of the army’s counterinsurgency operations. The terms used for irregular warfare in the military lexicon—such as military operations other than war (MOOTW)—illustrate the service’s conviction that this is a secondary mission. In 1994, students at the Army War College felt it necessary to inform their readers that “warfighting and MOOTW are not mutually exclusive. The leadership skills required for MOOTW are the same as those necessary for warfighting. Only the degree of skill emphasis differs.”1 The army’s preference for Big War and its disinclination to study the The Impact of the Philippine Wars (–) on the U.S.Army brian mcallister linn 460 “savage wars of peace” are readily apparent in its interpretation of the 1898–1913 imperial wars in the Philippine Islands. Although several commentators have outlined what they believe are specific “lessons” from the Philippine conflicts—both positive and negative—that apply to Iraq, they are far less obvious to officers charged with applying these lessons.2 In fact, perhaps even more than most wars, the “lessons” of the Philippines are confused, ambiguous, and controversial. In part this is because over the course of its active military operations from 1898 to 1913 the army was involved in at least three distinct “wars” (only one of which was formally a war), several regional “pacification campaigns,” and innumerable combat incidents or “engagements.” During this period soldiers fought, sometimes simultaneously, Spanish regulars, the nationalist armies of Emilio Aguinaldo, local guerrillas, religious sects, agrarian rebels, brigands, and Muslim tribes—and various combinations of these opponents . In the process, they encountered a variety of tactical challenges: assault on a fortified city (Manila), pitched battles in Central Luzon, skirmishing in virtually every type of terrain, mass bolo attacks on Samar, Moro cottas (fortifications ) in Mindanao, and direct assaults on mountain strongholds (Jolo). Not surprisingly, the lessons that officers took from their varied combat experiences were diverse and often contradictory for what worked in one area might not in another. The army’s first, and only, declared Philippine war was an outgrowth of the conflict with Spain in 1898. To help secure Commodore George Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, President William McKinley ordered the army to dispatch an expedition to capture Manila. The first American forces arrived in late June 1898 and by August had increased to eleven thousand. With little more than token resistance from the Spanish, the Americans successfully stormed the city on August 13 and immediately turned their attention to keeping Emilio Aguinaldo’s nationalist army from entering Manila. Under McKinley’s directive to serve as agents of “benevolent assimilation,”soldiers socially engineered the city, cleaning up sewers, rebuilding markets, opening schools, and otherwise establishing the foundations of colonial rule. Counterguerrilla Warfare The second war, officially termed an “insurrection,” began on the evening of February 4, 1899. The ensuing conflict can be broken into two distinct phases. In 1899, the main American effort was directed toward large-unit offensives into Central Luzon to destroy the conventional forces of the Philippine Republic. With only...

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