The Other Face of Battle

The Other Face of Battle plunges into the jarring and violent experience of America’s “other” wars: the often irregular, unconventional, and intercultural wars that have dominated the American military experience. The national narrative is dominated by the so-called “big wars,” but the other wars are both more common and equally critical to understanding American military history. American wars with enemies from different cultures, fighting with different tactics, have generated shocking battlefield defeats, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. In 1755, George Washington and other Anglo-American soldiers on an expedition to the Ohio Country were catastrophically defeated by French and Indian irregulars at the Monongahela, with resounding consequences for how Americans thought about themselves in combat over the next several generations. In 1898, U.S. troops at the Battle of Manila confronted Filipinos who had just fought and won a revolution against the Spanish—a battle that was but the opening round of a protracted U.S.-Filipino conflict sparked by American occupation and annexation. The unexpected war that followed was both conventional and irregular, an omen for America’s 20th-century wars. In 2010, U.S. soldiers and Afghan allies launched an extraordinarily complex, interservice attack on the village of Makuan in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The battle symbolized the Americans’ struggle to find and pin down the elusive Taliban enemy, despite careful planning, immense firepower, and nine years of experience fighting an insurgency.

The Black Boys and Blurred Lines

In 1765, frontiersmen in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania forcibly prohibited British officials and colonists from participating in the Indian trade, intercepting and destroying goods intended for Native Americans in the Ohio Country. Imperial officials and civil leaders in Pennsylvania condemned the actions of the so-called “Black Boys,” suggesting that they represented a form of insurrection. Close analysis of the Black Boys’ stated motivations, however, suggests that they did not seek an overthrow of royal rule. Instead, they sought a renegotiation of political power on the frontier, one in which local concerns and wishes tempered the exercise of imperial authority.