America’s Art of War

The Continental Army is often stereotyped as a ragtag group of irregulars. Thanks to the French, we are told, the army was sufficiently supplied, funded, and trained to defeat British professionals and win the war. Yet throughout the American Revolution, Patriots exhibited a singular ability to create their own capable military forces ex nihilo. And they ingeniously supplied and equipped local militias in addition to their eventual establishment of a Europeanized and professional army. That national legacy of military adaptation and innovation has characterized almost all subsequent American wars. Indeed, the spirited “army” that began the war at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775 bore little resemblance to the multifaceted and lethal military that defeated the British at Cowpens and at Yorktown in 1781 to end the war.

Such radical evolution has also been characteristic of the later American military, which has often been faulted for entering a war unprepared, naive, overconfident, and poorly led—but never remained so for long. Despite democracy’s innate unease with military culture and standing armies, within a year of America’s entering wars, the nation’s assets of individualism, fluidity between classes, openness to experimentation and innovation, meritocracy, affinity for technological change, economic dynamism, and love of liberty have consistently resulted in rapid adaptation and eventual success over much more experienced enemies.

The American Revolution established the tradition of a flexible military that quickly evolves from a disorganized and confused peacetime militia to deadly wartime soldiers. For example, at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas, July 21, 1861), in the initial engagement of the Civil War, an imposing but disorganized and poorly led Union force of 35,000 raw recruits was routed and humiliated by a smaller but more spirited Confederate army. Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the few heroes that day on the losing Union side, and soon to be a general, left the flotsam and jetsam of Bull Run utterly depressed but still eager to bring about changes. He feared that the North’s armies were so disorganized, poorly equipped, and badly trained that they might never be able to invade and defeat the Confederacy, then about three-quarters the size of Europe.

Yet just over three years later in the autumn of 1864, General Sherman’s Army of the West had accomplished just that, after cutting a destructive swath through the heart of the Deep South from Georgia through the Carolinas before approaching Lee’s army in northern Virginia to help General Grant end the war.