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

The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814. By John Grenier. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 232. $30.00, ISBN 0-521-84566-1.)

John Grenier argues that war in the British North American colonies and the early United States was dominated by what we would now call unconventional warfare. Specifically, the colonists and the British and United States forces on the western frontiers of white settlement found it impossible to defeat the Indians in conventional battles between armies, which the Indians could easily avoid. Consequently, Anglo-Americans had to attack native food sources and stockpiles, i.e., villages, in hopes of starving the Indians into retreat or submission. Whites found that the most effective forces for doing so were not conventional regular armies but increasingly specialized and effective citizen-soldier volunteers, whether as rangers (or raiders) under colonial or state authority or as scalp hunters who collected bounties for killing. Frontiersmen made war more, even primarily so, on Indian women and children than on native warriors. Though limited in the number of combatants, frontier warfare was substantially more comprehensive (or total) in its effects than European warfare during most of the era.

Grenier compares and contrasts European and American warfare effectively, making a valuable contribution to the study of eighteenth-century military ideas and expertise, and he argues persuasively that this "first way of war" began due more to frontier circumstances than racism (p. 2). He provides convincing evidence that this was indeed the most effective and most often employed means of defeating Native American opponents throughout the colonial era. However, the origins and erosion of the dominance of the so-called first way of war are open to some debate. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, colonists lacked the resources to create conventional forces capable of overwhelming the Indians. Thus, was the first way of war truly their first choice, or was it an adaptation to conditions? The 1790s and the years 1810-1814, the subjects of Grenier's last fifty pages, provide a test. For all Grenier's arguments in favor of the Kentuckians' roles in defeating the Ohio Indian confederation in the 1790s, this defeat did not occur until a large, effective conventional force, the Legion of the United States, advanced to the heart of the confederation and defeated the Indians in battle. Doing so allowed the Legion, with its ranger auxiliaries, to ravage the native food supplies and prevent the Indians from continuing their resistance. Grenier argues that this ravaging was the most important characteristic of Anthony Wayne's campaign, but it was only possible because the Indians were concentrated around the Maumee Rapids after their defeat by the Legion. Whereas the Virginians drove the Indians from Kentucky with little conventional assistance, they had proved unable to do so in Ohio between 1785 and 1795. The same points can be made of the Tippecanoe campaign and Jackson's campaigns against the Creeks and Seminoles.

So when we reach the nineteenth century, Grenier's first way of war was still present, but it was more so in target and technique than in forces. U.S. regular forces defeated Black Hawk, the Seminoles, and the Plains Indians using the first way of war against native villages and food sources. They could do so because they had the strength, and were paid, to go to the heart of Indian country and stay there, defeating any military challenge in campaigns that were years in length. Citizen-soldiers were rarely willing or able to do so. And, Wounded Knee notwithstanding, the regular forces of the United States generally did so with much less out-and-out atrocity than their irregular predecessors. It is not clear what these developments tell us about the development of the citizen-soldier tradition, but it is clear that the brunt of nineteenth-century frontier warfare was conducted by regular national forces.

Grenier is a serving Air Force officer. His attention to the history of unconventional warfare in America is encouraging and should stimulate reflection on exceptionalism in American military history. Yet one has to calibrate evaluations of change with care: despite the supposed precision of our stand-off weapons, much of the world questions whether "we no longer use the first way of war" (p. 223).

SAMUEL WATSON

United States Military Academy