War: American Way of War

This entry is a subentry of War.

Like shadows on a parade field, military institutions and war reflect in part the society that creates them. Although many Americans view themselves as a peace‐loving people and war as an aberration, war has been a regular part of American history, integral to the way the nation developed.

Despite divisions among Americans, the United States has justified its wars as in defense of American lives, property, or ideals. Policymakers have also taken the nation into war for various strategic, economic, and political reasons. But since the idea of Old World balance‐of‐power wars or wars of subjugation over other nations has been anathema to Americans' self‐image, the United States has usually mobilized for war in highly idealistic crusades—for liberty or democracy.

America views itself as antimilitaristic because for most of its history, the nation relied in wartime on ad hoc citizen armies rather than large standing forces, and because civilian control of the military is seen as a fundamental principle. This antimilitarism was reinforced by isolationism. Secure behind vast oceans, the United States did not develop large peacetime standing forces until the Cold War.

Another paradox is that although Americans generally view themselves as peaceloving, they have been capable of engaging in the most devastating kind of warfare—war aimed at total victory and complete elimination of the enemy threat, sometimes of the enemy themselves. This view of warfare emerged from European Americans' wars with Native Americans.

Eastern woodland Indians' warfare was originally much less bloody than that of Europeans, who were accustomed to vicious religious crusades and to the savage subjugation of peoples from Ireland to the Indies. Even as the horrors of religious wars were replaced in the Old World by limited warfare using newly organized professional armies, they were repeated in the New World by amateur soldiers of the militia.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial militiamen were mobilized in terms of crusades against the “heathen savages.” Unable to entice Indian warriors, who preferred raiding, sniping, and ambushing, into open‐field European‐style combat, frustrated militiamen turned to complete destruction of Native Americans' crops and villages, killing men, women, and children, or selling them into slavery. Although the Indians responded with escalating violence, the superior numbers and resources of the colonists ultimately led to the destruction or removal of entire Indian nations. An American view emerged that military threats to society could indeed be eliminated by the extirpation of the enemy—a result that was impossible among European nations.

This American view of war was reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the French and Indian War (1756–1763), the Americans claimed credit for aiding the British army and navy drive the French out of Canada and the trans‐Appalachian West. Later, in the Revolutionary War, Americans won complete independence from Great Britain. The apparent British threat to American interests and liberties was again defeated in the War of 1812.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States remained free from any external threat (the Civil War was internal and viewed as an aberration). The country was protected by its geographical isolation, the balance of power in Europe, and relatively weak and nonaggressive neighbors. Its formative experiences with war had produced a dichotomy in which the nation was perceived as either wholly secure or wholly insecure. In the latter case, a crusade could be waged that would eliminate the threat and thus restore Americans to total security.

A pattern had emerged in America's wars. War usually began with setbacks, largely because the nation, although willing to go to war, was militarily unprepared. Early defeats were followed by preparation and retaliation, and ultimately decisive redeeming victories—at Quebec, at Saratoga and Yorktown, at New Orleans, and at Gettysburg (at least for the Union). The belief in the inherent righteousness of the cause, in the natural fighting ability of the American citizen‐soldier, and in the nation's ability to mobilize its resources gave Americans an extraordinary optimism about what they could achieve militarily. Wars against Indians, Mexicans, and Spaniards in the nineteenth century reinforced these views, as with relatively small loss of life suffered by U.S. citizens the United States gained enough territory to claim overwhelming, if not always total, victory. In World War I, President Woodrow Wilson called for a crusade to “end all wars” and to make the world “safe for democracy.” The American war effort helped defeat the German empire, create a German republic, and make the United States the financial capital of the world.

The Civil War had led the United States to adopt the warfighting doctrine of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which emphasized overwhelming and continual military force applied directly against the enemy army and indirectly through deprivation of the enemy's civilian population and resources. In the twentieth century, during two world wars, and limited wars in Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. Army would pursue this strategy against the enemy forces, while the air force and navy pursued the indirect campaign, through bombing and blockade, against the enemy's material resources and political will.

As the United States industrialized, optimism about America's fighting ability focused on superior weaponry. At the turn of the century, Adm. Alfred T. Mahan's doctrine of Sea Power emphasizing the use of a modern fleet promised swift and total victory. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service helped develop the doctrine of Strategic Airpower as a technological means to achieve quick and total victory. In World War II, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and in a crusade against fascism, Americans waged war on land, sea, and air, including conventional and ultimately nuclear bombing of urban areas to achieve decisive victory and unconditional surrender of the enemy.

The Cold War posed a major challenge to American views of war and the military. Containment of the Soviet Union led to large standing military forces, but even these did not produce a sense of military security, for the USSR also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons. Before it ended in 1991, with the total collapse of the Soviet empire, the forty‐year Cold War represented an unprecedented period of U.S. uncertainty over national security.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government refrained from the use of total military force in Korea and Vietnam. But the policy of limited war clashed with the traditional goal of total victory. The Korean War ended in a frustrating stalemate, the Vietnam War ultimately in defeat. After the United States had fought for more than seven years to prevent it, the Communist victory in Vietnam was a severe blow to Americans' optimism, sense of righteousness, and sense of military prowess, which did not return until the collapse of the USSR and the American victory in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

The U.S.‐led coalition assault in Operation Desert Storm seemed quite justified and resulted in a quick, decisive victory that drove the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Although the Baghdad regime continued in power, its threat to the region was dramatically curtailed. More than any other U.S. military engagement since World War II, the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait conformed to the traditional American way of war.

[See also Civil‐Military Relations; Internationalism; Isolationism; Strategy; War: Causes of War; War: Levels of War; War: Nature of War.]

Bibliography

• Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, 1973.
• John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, 1976.
• Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience, 1978.
• Lloyd C. Gardner, A Covenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan, 1984.
• Stephen Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820, 1987.
• Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam—The Story of America's Rise to Power, 1989.
• John E. Frehling, Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America, 1993.
• Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s, 1995.
• John Whiteclay Chambers II and G. Kurt Piehler, eds., Major Problems in American Military History, 1999