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In Search of the American Way of War: The Need for a Wider National and International Context
Marc Milner
| Whether one agrees with John Keegan that war is fundamentally a cultural phenomenon or adheres to the more traditional Clausewitzian view that war is all about politics, it is clear that armed forces are raised, equipped, organized, supplied, and commanded by discrete social groups. Therefore, the way wars are fought is inherently cultural: it could hardly be otherwise. So Russell Weigley was right, there is an American way of war: we just do not know exactly what that is—yet.1 |
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If Wayne Lee's objective is to track the cultural roots of American military history, the debate must be broader than what he proposes.2 First, it must be grounded more firmly in what might be called the mainstream intellectual debate over the nature of the American national psyche. Only then can the American conception of the purpose and conduct of war be properly assessed. Secondly, to get a handle on what is distinctly American about America's way of war, the debate must be set in a wider, international context. American military history needs to be informed by the literature, the debates, and the shared experiences of others, including not only America's enemies, but its allies as well. Americans may not always agree with and like what foreigners say about them, but such a debate needs outside perspectives. |
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Lee characterized John Lynn's approach to the problem of culture and war as a dialogue between the nation's discourse on war and the practices of its army. That conception is much too narrow. The dialogue needs to be between the nation's discourse on who and what Americans are—writ large—and how they fight. Despite the existence of a small regular army, the bulk of America's wars have been fought by the great mass of the American people, who carried with them all the baggage of a dynamic, boisterous, and often uncertain society. The roots, then, of a distinctly American approach to war and fighting go well beyond the rather limited confines of the discourse on military institutions. Lee's study, therefore, needs to push into the broader debates over what it means to be American and to be an American at war. James Webb's popular but facile treatment of the subject, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, argues that there is something fundamentally combative deep in the nation's collective psyche. Academics have heard this before. A dissenting voice during the panel discussion on World War II at the 2005 Society for Military History conference complained that America is only content when it is fighting—a comment that drew a pregnant silence. America was not unique in receiving large numbers of settlers from the Celtic fringe of Britain, nor in having a frontier society. Those factors alone cannot account for a distinctly American way of war.3 |
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The works of such scholars as David M. Kennedy and Robert B. Westbrook may be a more fruitful starting place for any discussion on an American way of war, since they and others wrestle with the mentalité of America. Kennedy's Over Here: The First World War and American Society confirms the conventional wisdom that Americans believed they had a better and more advanced society than the decadent and effete ones they went to Europe to rescue in 1917. It also reveals an alarming and concurrent xenophobia and a willingness to suspend civil liberties that seems at odds with America's view of itself. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 extends that analysis into World War II: a war in which American troops—fired by the same notions of superiority—returned to save the world from itself again. It is this combination of hubris and narcissism that often catches the notice of non-American observers. It also, of course, goes a long way toward explaining—as many American military historians have done—the early tactical and operations problems of the U.S. Army in both world wars. The roots of those problems obviously do not lie in the unique culture of the army, but in the culture of the wider society.4 |
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