“If you look at the entirety of American military history, big battles like Gettysburg, the Meuse-Argonne, and Pearl Harbor have proven the exception rather than the rule.”

By Wayne E. Lee, Anthony E. Carlson, David L. Preston & David Silbey

WARS ARE horrifically violent. Bullets shred human bodies, explosions mutilate and rend them and firepower leaves bloody markers on all it touches. At one time, histories and movies about war and battle skipped over much of that violence. Hollywood showed soldiers dying quickly, quietly, and without visible blood or viscera, while historians seem fixated on epic battles and great captains.

Dissatisfied with this state of the field, British historian John Keegan published The Face of Battle in 1976. In it, he argued that traditional battle narratives ignored the human experience of combat and preferred metaphor to realistic description. He lambasted authors who described blocks of undifferentiated soldiers moving, charging, or, in one notorious example, dissolving “like a loosened cliff.” Instead, Keegan pioneered a new approach, one that emphasized the individual soldier, as well as his mental, physiological, and moral capacity to withstand the stresses of combat.

To make his point, Keegan surveyed three iconic British battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). In each case, he placed the reader at the soldier’s eye level, often via paired combatant types such as archer versus knight, or in­fantry square versus artillery.

In his conclusion, Keegan questioned whether the growing intensity of firepower on the battlefield had rendered battle obsolete. The human frame and the bonds of cohesion within groups could no longer function in the whirlwind of steel.

As we too sadly know, battle is far from obsolete. Instead, the United States of the 21^st century has been involved in seemingly endless conflicts and violence.

The battles of these endless wars are not Keegan’s epic showdowns between the great powers of their days, each side fighting along similar lines, with similar understandings, and with progressively larger armies and deadlier weapons. But that reflects the fundamental limits of Keegan’s original paradigm. His examples were all symmetrical: all of the combatants possessed similar technological capacities and came from within the cultural sphere of western Europe.

That technological and cultural symmetry had long fed a cycle of what some historians have called “gigantism,” in which the response to an enemy challenge was to go for more and to go “bigger”— but basically along the same lines. In these long-term symmetrical competitions, ships displaced more tonnage, cannon fire became more accurate and destructive, tanks got more armour, rifles fired faster, and so on. When Keegan envisioned the unendurable future battlefield, he imagined the ongoing escalation of gigantism.

That has not been the American experience in the 21^st century. In fact, if you look at the entirety of American military history, big battles like Gettysburg, the Meuse-Argonne, and Pearl Harbor have proven the exception rather than the rule.

Americans in combat, from colo­nial times to the present day, have almost always faced unexpected enemies—foes from different cultures who fought in unfa­miliar ways. Those intercultural contests also very often produced asymmetric warfare, simply because the enemy brought to bear different modes of recruitment, equipment, engagement, notions of acceptable conduct, and crucially, different definitions of success or victory.

Such wars and such foes usually contradicted expectations and assumptions about combat, and generated a different medley of experiences, sometimes with traumatizing effects.

Duncan Cameron, a British soldier fighting at Monongahela in 1755, later recalled the extremity of that battle, deeming it “the most shocking I was ever in”— this from a man who had already served in the horrendous battles of Cartagena, Dettingen, Culloden and Fontenoy. Fontenoy, fought between the British and French armies, was one of the bloodiest until World War I. As many as 18,000 men out of 100,000 who fought on both sides were killed or wounded on that single day in 1745. Yet, for Cameron, Monongahela proved worse, not because of the sheer number of men killed or wounded but because of its unsettling nature.

War, Cameron learned, wasn’t just in front of you or waiting for you at the top of a hill marked by an enemy standard. It was everywhere and nowhere. It was the strange primeval forest of the New World, the enemies’ ululating war cries, the flickering of deadly shadows moving and firing among the trees, combined with the agonized pleas of the wounded and dying men, some scalped, whom the living abandoned on the battlefield or along the retreat route. A terrifying four-hour battle against invisible irregulars had rendered two-thirds of the British force casualties and mortally wounded its commander, Major General Edward Braddock.

By studying battles against unexpected enemies, whether at Monongahela, in the Philippines, or in Afghanistan, we gain a better sense of why Americans have so often struggled to achieve decisiveness in battle and in war.

Civilians and professional soldiers alike almost always prepare for the next war based not on the last war, but on the assumption that the next war will involve someone who resembles themselves. Techniques, tactics, weapons development, and, most crucially, expectations have all been built on an assumption of cultural and tactical symmetry. Recognizing that the next enemy will likely again be the one we don’t expect matters. It shapes how we understand and grapple with the past, and it influences how we craft future strategy.

In 2021, the American military seems to be focused on fears of losing a “big battle” against a conventional enemy such as Russia or China, not unlike how military planners in America, Europe, and elsewhere were for centuries fixated on planning for a decisive battle and a short war, usually against the expected enemy. We are focusing on the familiar rather than on the likely. If history is any guide, the other face of battle, the one we are almost always unprepared for, will reemerge.

It will not be the first time. The American military, after each irregular, uncomfortable, and usually indeci­sive “other” war, has quickly forgotten or dismissed its lessons. Part of that forgetting is American institutional, political, and cultural preference for quick and decisive wars and impatience with long, grinding and strategically inconclusive ones.

In the 1970s, for ex­ample, instead of using Vietnam as a lesson in the problems of fighting an insurgent enemy while propping up an unpopular govern­ment, the American military gratefully turned to planning for a familiar conventional enemy: the Soviets on the plains of Germany. And now, in the wake of still-uncertain outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, the U.S. Army is deemphasizing the small wars of American history in its education, training, doctrine and procure­ment.

As the United States is set to withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, we argue that the human experience of intercultural combat powerfully informs the strategic complexities of small wars. The Taliban could not defeat the United States and its allies on the battlefield. But as the Taliban’s reemergence and survival clearly show, the meaning of combat and assumption of decisive battle are culturally derived.

As former British officer (Royal Gurkha Rifles) and historian Emile Simpson reminds us in War from the Ground Up: Twenty- First Century Combat as Politics, “force is simply another way to communicate meaning, another language.”

Within that language “the meaning of an action in war (the outcome of a battle, for example) may be mutually recognized, just as two people may well agree on the meaning of a text or speech.” Or they may disagree.

Battles can define wars only if their combatants define battles that way. If one side refuses to accept battles as the defining component of war, as in Afghanistan, the strategic competition becomes asymmetric, and instead “both sides are now in competition to construct more appealing strategic narratives of what the conflict is about.” War then requires a strategy of persuasion, and destruction of the enemy armed forces becomes merely a single line of the argument.

About the authors:

Wayne E. Lee, Anthony E. Carlson, David L. Preston, and David Silbey are the authors of The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat.

Wayne E. Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of many books, most recently Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History (OUP 2016). He is a veteran of the U.S. Army, and was the 2015-16 Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. 

Anthony E. Carlson is an Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, Ft. Leavenworth, KS. Having previously served as a historian and analyst at the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute, Carlson has interviewed hundreds of soldiers who fought in Afghanistan.

David Silbey is the Associate Director of the Cornell in Washington program and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Cornell History Department. He has written books on the British Army in World War I, the Philippine-American War, and the Boxer Rebellion in China.

David Preston is General Mark Clark Distinguished Professor of History at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the author of Braddock’s Defeat (OUP, 2015), which won the Gilder-Lerhman Prize in Military History and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.