Book review: ‘The First Way of War’

The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814

John Grenier

Cambridge University Press

246 pages

No book has had more influence on American military history than Russell F. Weigley ‘s The American Way of War.   Written during the worst of the American war in Vietnam and focusing on traditional military campaigns, Weigley’s book has fairly owned the field of American military history for the 35-odd years since its publication.  A growing number of historians are beginning to take note of the cracks in Weigley’s seminal work, however.  The American Way of War posits a uniquely American way of war – specifically the use of overwhelming force with the goal of completely crushing the enemy’s military – but includes only a cursory treatment of early American warfare, beginning in earnest with the American Civil War and focusing primarily on the Twentieth Century.  The hundreds of American campaigns waged against American Indians for the purpose of establishing the United States’ territorial boundaries are treated almost dismissively, given less than twenty pages in the near six-hundred page tome.

John Grenier is one of those historians working to correct the record, and his The First Way of War begins, appropriately enough for any overview of American military history, with the wars waged by the first English colonies in North America in 1607, and runs all the way through the Creek War of 1813-1814.  Most of the wars during that time period were frontier wars, waged by irregular troops against Indian peoples with the direct aim of dispossessing them of their land, and unsurprisingly Grenier’s conclusions are far less complimentary than Weigley’s vis-à-vis America’s contribution to world military history.  In Grenier’s words: “early Americans created a military tradition that accepted, legitimized, and encouraged attacks upon and the destruction of nonocombatants, villages, and agricultural resources.” The term he uses to describe this type of warfare – if it can even be justified as such – is “extirpative,” as nifty a euphemism for genocide as has been employed in recent memory.

The First Way of War is nothing if not comprehensive in its detailing of the first two-hundred years of Anglo-American military history.  Depressingly so.  The litany of campaigns waged against American Indian civilians is not only staggering in its sheer size, it also begs the question as to why it is almost completely absent from public memory – Weigley’s book being an excellent example of this prevailing memory hole.  Outside of American History graduate programs and the occasional sentimental Hollywood flick, the hundreds of years of hundreds of campaigns against American Indians have simply vanished from American’s national discourse.  One suspects that the answer has something to do with a collective desire to misremember our national origins in the interest of preserving what we like to consider our national identity.  As Grenier puts it:

We recoil at the news reports of the killing of innocent men, women, and children in Central Africa and Bosnia.  We look with repugnance on the Serbians who drove the ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo and pillaged their land.  We judge these as genocidal acts that fall far outside the norm of American behavior.  When we look into our military past and see events like the My Lai Massacre, we can rationalize it as anomaly or the result of an overzealous and deranged junior officer like Lieutenant William Calley, not as a grim waypoint in the evolution of the American way of war.

The First Way of War is an important corrective to prevailing assumptions about American military history, but it is also an immensely readable detailing of an early American history that remains largely unacknowledged, written by a scholar whom no one could label as the kind of leftist historian we are forever being warned about by David Horowitz and Bill O’Reilly.  John Grenier is an Air Force officer and Air Force Academy History Professor, in a position like few others to write the book he has.  And to give us pause as we move into another period of continual warfare, particularly one which the likes of Robert Kaplan is referring all-too-sanguinely as the new “Indian wars.”
Benjamin Whitmer is a Denver area author.