Historians and small wars
I opened this thread as a way of generally discussing how historians study small wars and the ways they can be lost in the shuffle of the larger picture.
For example, the Frontier period draws a great deal of attention, but in the military sphere it is typically focused on personalities (Crook, Custer, and Miles spring immediately to mind). Only in the past 20 years or so has there been good analysis of individual campaigns and techniques used by the forces in question.
Likewise, there are aspects of the American Civil War that could be fruitful for examination. I'm not an expert by any means in this area (not even a learned ignoramus, I'm sad to say...:o ), but operations in the Kansas-Missouri border area both before and during the War, as well as many operations in Kentucky and Tennessee might repay good examination.
Military historians tend to focus a good deal of their thinking on either personalities or campaigns. More recently there has been a change toward studying doctrine and the ways campaigns are framed and conducted. This is, to me, a boon for the Small Wars community, as many of these conflicts transcend personalities (or overlap many individuals) and cannot easily be sliced into campaigns. In my own study of the Indian Wars I've gotten away from personalities (although Ranald Mackenzie still remains a fascinating study for me) and into patterns of operations. When you do this you begin to see that techniques lauded as belonging to one individual were in fact developed over time by many hands, and the one last on the scene usually grabbed the credit.
Focusing on campaigns can lend an artificial "start" and "end" time to a conflict that may not be accurate, and the same peril lies in examining events from a strictly personality angle. By way of illustration, George Crook is often credited with being "the first" to effectively fight Apaches on their own ground, as well as being the first to use scouts. Both statements are false. Crook expanded on methods developed by Dragoons before the War, California Volunteers during the War, and two over-worked cavalry regiments after the War. He also took care to have one of his aides prepare a very readable account of his operations, something that his predecessors did not do. Scouts had been a fixture in Arizona operations for some years, and certain California regiments were providing arms to tribal enemies of the Apaches years before Crook came on the scene and did the same thing. It's only when you look at the conflict against the Apache in something close to a whole (1847 or so through the late 1880s) that you see the trends.
Just a bit of a ramble down my own pet rocks about history and the way it's studied.:D
Historians and Military Historians
Quote:
"Focusing on campaigns can lend an artificial "start" and "end" time to a conflict that may not be accurate, and the same peril lies in examining events from a strictly personality angle."
Interesting. My area of expertise is diplomatic history and as much as I find that field tends to glaze over the important military implications or action in international events, I sometimes see military history as a field strangely disconnected from the larger picture from which the impetus for war arises.
While professionals are probably most interested in the campaign details of, say, the Mexican War, that war makes little sense outside of the social, economic and political context that produced the Polk administration's aggressively expansionistic foreign policy.
This is a very broad generalization on my part, and I readily admit there are many exceptional military and other subfield historians who contravene my observation. Rarely though, can an author masterfully weave together social, cultural, political and military history along with biographical narrative into a seamless garment. (Alan Schom's _Napoleon_ comes to mind, a work that was ten years in the writing) These are though, perhaps the most informative books for the intelligent layman and remain useful on the shelf of the specialist as well.
More collaboration and research across subfields is in order.
Victoria's Small Wars as a Point of Entry.
I think that the best choice of a period to pick for comparative analysis would be that of Queen Victoria's Empire. We find ourselves today in a situation not unlike 19th Century England--we are the only significant world power and find ourselves forced to uphold "civilization" around the globe. We should probably look a little more closely at the cultural discussions that attend works on Queen Victoria's "little wars" around the globe--Ashanti Wars, Zulu Wars, Opium Wars, Sikh Wars, Operations in Afghanistan, the Sudan, Burma, South Africa--each of these has a lot of interest in terms of how the British were able to maintain the strength of their global presence in the face of a series of conflicts with other, very different cultures.
While much is different in regards to today's world, we are still looking at how to win in a clash of cultures, just as the Britis did in the 19th Century.
We could also look at some of the work of the British administrators of that Empire--Orwell's essays, like "Shooting an Elephant," come to mind as a starter; so do Kipling's writings.
How really different is today's situation ?
Marc,
I'm not sure that two of your alleged differences cut much ice here. Internal support for the British Empire existed in the English-speaking parts of the Empire but much less so in the rest of the Empire--the Boers spring to mind rather starkly, as do the majority of the earlier conquests in India. How many trips did the English have to take into China, the Sudan, Burma, and Afghanistan? They weren't quite as welcomed as your post seems to imply. Regarding the "myth of Progress," I suggest to you a similar myth of progress is driving current efforts by the US. Although it isn't a "White man's burden" per se, Isn't progress largely the thesis of Thomas Barnett's work?
The third difference is also not quite what you portray. We could nuke Iraq and Afghanistan and turn each into radioactive slag if we wished. Our conventional weapons delivery systems are also more than capable of tuerning most of the habitable parts of each country into rubble in fairly short order The folks on the receiving end have no such ability to respond in kind.
What the Victorian era British seemed able to do was to identify the enemy and engage it while keeping the "mugwumps" from joining in on either side.
This did not require overwhelming firepower.
Steve,
I find Roman examples compelling as well, but more because of their success than for the situations that caused them to get involved. I did not pick on the Brits simply because the "small wars" moniker was coined in relation to their 19th Century operations. In the Roman world, there was much less of a clash of cultures than existed in the Brits' situations. Additionally, in the majority of their conquests, the Romans tended to be invited guests by at least one party in a dispute over succession to a kingdom. Only after they had sorted out the "rightful" heir did the Romans eventually supplant that heir. In cases of outright conquest--Gaul, Britain, Hither Spain for example--the Romans were no more successful in quickly pacifying the countryside than the French were in Napoleonic Spain or the USA was in the Philippines.