World of War: A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror

By William Nester

World of War is an epic journey through America’s array of wars for diverse reasons with diverse results over the course of its existence. It reveals the crucial effects of brilliant, mediocre, and dismal military and civilian leaders; the dynamic among America’s expanding economic power, changing technologies, and the types and settings of its wars; and the human, financial, and moral costs to the nation, its allies, and its enemies. Nester explores the violent conflicts of the United States—on land, at sea, and in the air—with meticulous scholarship, thought-provoking analysis, and vivid prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jan 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9780811773799

William Nester

Dr. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of thirty-seven books on history and politics. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award for 2013, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the New York Military Affairs Symposium's 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.

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Introduction

Americans are among history’s most war-prone people. Over four centuries, few years passed when they were not fighting some enemy state, tribe, movement, or group, and often allies among them; the bloodiest conflict was the Civil War, in which more Americans died than in all their other wars combined. That history began when warriors fired arrows at Captain John Smith and other colonists after they first stepped ashore and they returned fire with their arquebuses. That history is as recent as the latest drone strike against a terrorist suspect or intelligence fed to Ukraine’s army to obliterate a Russian military target. As Americans warred, those wars shaped and were shaped by American identity, traditions, principles, and policies.

What is worth fighting for? Americans never lacked reasons. Although a unique array of mingled interests, principles, and emotions motivated each war, sometimes one dominated. Two wars involved the nation’s existence: America’s war for independence from 1775 to 1781 established the United States, and America’s Civil War from 1861 to 1865 reestablished it. Freedom of the seas and international trade partly explained wars against France from 1798 to 1800, Tripoli from 1803 to 1805, Britain from 1812 to 1815, and Germany from 1917 to 1918. Liberating other people from oppressors (often accompanied by eliminating odious regimes) justified wars against the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865; Spain in 1898; Germany, Japan, and Italy from 1941 to 1945; North Korea and China from 1950 to 1953; North Vietnam from 1964 to 1975; Panama in 1990; Iraq in 1991; Afghanistan from 2001 to 2022; and Iraq from 2003 to 2011. Conquering foreign territories and peoples characterized wars against Mexico from 1846 to 1848 and the Philippines from 1898 to 1903. Every Indian war from 1607 to 1890 eventually ended with the tribe’s defeat, loss of territory, and transfer to a designated reservation. At times a lofty ideal animated a president. Woodrow Wilson insisted that the United States enter World War I to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy, while George W. Bush sought a global war against terrorism.

How a president justifies a war and why it is fought often differ. For instance, President George H. W. Bush advocated building and leading a coalition to drive Iraq’s army from Kuwait to restore democracy to Kuwait. Actually, Kuwait was no Jeffersonian democracy before Iraq’s invasion. Secretary of State James Baker honestly explained the national interests at stake: Jobs, jobs, jobs! (which oil-rich Iraq’s conquest of oil-rich Kuwait threatened with skyrocketing petroleum prices and global inflation).

During a cold war, each side does what it can, except directly war against the adversary, to contain, diminish, and (ideally) destroy it. That effort often involves using surrogates to fight the other. Washington waged cold wars against the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, Cuba from 1960 to the present, Iran from 1979 to the present, and Russia from 2022 to the present. The United States backed Afghan rebels against the Soviets as they struggled to conquer Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Against Cuba, Washington recruited, trained, and landed a Cuban exile force that was decimated at the Bay of Pigs and subsequently failed to get Cubans to assassinate communist dictator Fidel Castro. Against Iran, Washington backs Israel, which conducts sabotage and assassinations in Iran. Against Russia, Washington has led NATO in imposing economic sanctions and giving tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Ukraine.

War is a relative term. Many of America’s wars involved relatively smallscale campaigns and limited strikes. Among the larger and more prolonged little wars was the one against Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, which included a long blockade, a dramatic raid to destroy a captured American ship in Tripoli’s harbor, and an epic 440-mile march by eight marines and a couple hundred mercenaries led by Lieutenant William Eaton from Alexandria to capture Derna. Another was the 2,200-man American contingent that joined the 15,500-man international coalition that landed at Tientsin, China, to crush the Boxer Rebellion and rescue the besieged embassies in Beijing’s foreign quarter in 1900. President Wilson sent General John Black Jack Pershing and ten thousand troops against Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco Pancho Villa after he raided Columbus, New Mexico; the operation lasted from March 1916 to February 1917, during which the Americans clipped the tail (but never crushed the body) of Villa’s forces. Wilson deployed fifteen thousand troops to secure supply depots at Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok for White Russian armies fighting the Red Army that had taken power from 1918 to 1920, and they got into some firefights with communist guerrillas. During the mid-nineteenth century, Washington twice wielded gunboat diplomacy to try to force an isolated country to open itself to trade and investments, peacefully and successfully with Japan in 1854 and violently and unsuccessfully with Korea in 1876.

Marines conducted around 180 landings in foreign countries, mostly in Central America and the Caribbean, from 1800 to 1934.¹ Usually they went ashore to wipe out a militant group that threatened American business interests and the friendly government that protected them. The initial fighting rarely lasted long but at times was followed by long occupations, as in Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. Washington justified those interventions with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which declared the Western Hemisphere an American sphere of influence) and the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary (which asserted the right to protect threatened American economic and strategic interests).

From the late twentieth into the twenty-first century, the United States launched scores of retaliatory missile or bombing strikes, such as against Libyan president Muamar Gaddafi for his terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and against terrorist groups like al Qaeda, al Shabab, and Islamic State. Cruise missiles and drones let Washington hit enemies without fear of losing pilots—and subsequently public support for such strikes.

As in any political conflict, victory in war goes to the side that best musters and asserts power. Power includes two vital dimensions: hard or measurable physical power like armies, navies, economies, and populations, and soft or unmeasurable psychological power like leadership, skills, morale, strategy, tactics, and intelligence gathering, assessment, and application. Smart power is a leader’s skill in selecting, mobilizing, and wielding the mix of hard-and soft-power resources with the best chance of prevailing.

If both sides have roughly equal hard power, that side with greater soft power will win. Indeed, throughout history, smaller military forces have defeated far greater ones because they excelled at soft power. Diminutive David killed the giant because his confidence and skill at slinging a stone exceeded Goliath’s size and strength, along with his confidence, reputation, and skill at wielding a sword and shield. Indeed, Goliath may have literally and figuratively lowered his guard when the shepherd boy approached, having slaughtered scores of far stronger and more skilled enemies.

Any war’s object is to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. Just how to do that varies among wars and those fighting them. Military strength alone rarely wins a war unless it is overwhelming. The greatest chance of success involves asserting diplomatic, economic, and political power that complements military power. Military, diplomatic, and political leaders design strategies as the longer and broader set of means for the immediate battles that they design tactics to win. Strategies and tactics can differ among wars and even during the same war.

Although some scholars believe in an American type or way of war, actually there is not one but many.² Attrition or steadily demolishing the enemy with overwhelming military and economic power was America’s broad strategy during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Some American generals waged brilliant maneuvers that outflanked and defeated the enemy, like George Washington in his Trenton and Princeton campaign; Winfield Scott in his Mexico City campaign; Ulysses Grant in his Vicksburg campaign; George Patton in his Sicily, France, and Germany campaigns; and Norman Schwarzkopf in his Kuwait campaign. Other combat leaders excelled at special operations warfare, like Benjamin Church in the Wars of King William and Queen Anne, Robert Rogers in the French and Indian War, and George Rogers Clark and Francis Marion in America’s independence war.

A key choice of offensive strategies involves either a broad front that attacks the enemy at various shifting vulnerable places or a narrow front that masses forces at one vulnerable position. During the Civil War and World War II, the White House eventually adopted a broad-front strategy that took advantage of America’s ability to mass-produce soldiers, sailors, weapons, supplies, warships, and transportation better than the enemy. That advantage empowered army commanders to shift and concentrate troops as opportunities arose on their respective fronts. In doing so, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt rejected enormous pressure, respectively, by American general Henry Halleck and British prime minister Winston Churchill and his generals for a narrowfront strategy.

September 11 prompted America’s latest way of war. Al Qaeda was an international terrorist organization headquartered in Afghanistan with cells in around seventy countries worldwide. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda had relatively fixed positions within the ruling Taliban regime and army. The campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda was a postmodern war that combined real-time intelligence, special forces, anti-Taliban militants, and smart bombs and missiles. Elsewhere, America’s intelligence services and financial institutions teamed with those of other countries to track down, ideally capture, and if necessary kill al Qaeda operatives and their supporters while eliminating their sources of income. Ultimately, the United States devastated al Qaeda and killed bin Laden. Yet, from those ruins, Islamic State emerged to overrun most of northern Syria and Iraq. Eventually, the United States and other countries using similar methods devastated Islamic State.

America’s ability to wage war changed over time with its expanding financial, manufacturing, invention, and innovation power. As ever more American merchants reaped riches buying and selling in markets around the world, American interests globalized with those sources of wealth. Economic expansion fueled victorious foreign wars that fueled economic expansion. The United States developed increasingly sophisticated hard and soft power to fight others. Yet America’s power is hardly unlimited. America’s recent attempts at state building and nation building failed, most disastrously in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The key reason was Washington’s failure to master counterrevolutionary warfare. A successful revolution involves simultaneous and complementary military and political strategies. As military cadres destroy an existing regime, political cadres build an alternative regime on its ruins. Mao Zedong explained a revolution’s military dimension: The strategy of guerilla war is to put one man against ten, but the tactic is to put ten men against one.³ This strategy involved three stages. First came hit-and-run raids by small numbers of guerillas against isolated enemy positions. Ideally, that provoked the government to launch retaliatory attacks that indiscriminately slaughtered or imprisoned civilians and provoked enraged survivors to join the insurgents. Once the rebels acquired enough troops and civilian support, they could take and hold ever more rural regions and city districts against enemy offensives. The final stage arrives after the insurgents have battered the enemy and now hold the initiative. They then launch offensives that encircle and destroy government forces in one base or city after another until they overrun the entire country.

The Americans failed to develop and implement a successful strategy to prevent that outcome from happening. An unidentified American major fighting in Vietnam epitomized that failure when he insisted that it became necessary to destroy the village to save it.⁴ That statement symbolized Washington’s ultimately self-defeating emphasis on the hard power of attrition rather than the soft power of conversion. The standard-issue military retort against any discussion of the counterinsurgency hearts and minds strategy of nurturing the population’s loyalty through economic and political development is Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.

Leadership—good, bad, and mediocre—is power’s most crucial element. Leadership is as good as the leader’s intellect, values, courage, and charisma. America’s war leadership ultimately depends on the commander-in-chief. A president’s war duties include bringing together experts, assessing varying views of the threat and how to defeat it, making key decisions, ensuring that the administration and Congress implement those decisions, and inspiring those around him, the military, Congress, and the public with why they are fighting and how they will win. As will be seen, Abraham Lincoln was brilliant in that role, and Franklin Roosevelt was excellent; William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson provided adequate leadership; and James Madison, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush were inept leaders.

Chart I.1. Presidents and Military Service

American generals displayed just as wide a range of abilities. Generalship involves an innate and developed mastery of strategy, tactics, logistics, administration, courage, and inspiration. Of course, no one can be equally adept in each of these areas; for instance, George Washington lost more battles than he won. Yet a few were overall brilliant, like Washington, Winfield Scott, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, George Patton, and David Petraeus, along with rebel generals Robert Lee, Thomas Jackson, Nathan Forrest, and J. E. B. Stuart. John Pershing competently led American forces during World War I. Controversial generals who won dazzling victories and suffered disastrous defeats include George Custer and Douglas MacArthur. George McClellan and William Westmoreland were dismal generals who failed to understand the nature of the wars they fought. As for naval leadership, there were dazzling ship-versus-ship battle captains like John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and Thomas Truxtun and excellent fleet commanders like David Farragut, David Porter, Chester Nimitz, Bull Halsey, and Raymond Spruance.

From the start, Americans have vigorously debated all questions related to war and peace along with other critical issues. In his book Special Providence, Walter Mead identified four political philosophies animating that perennial debate named after Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson.⁵ Of them, Hamiltonism is the only realist perspective compared with Jeffersonian isolationism, Jacksonian unilateralism, and Wilsonian internationalism. Circumstances force each president’s policies to be a mix of the four, although one usually dominates.

Hamiltonians advocate a lean, muscular problem-solving national government dedicated to transforming the United States into a global economic power with a military strong enough to deter or, if need be, defeat any enemies. The government provides long-term vision for and partners with the private sector to promote an increasingly diverse, dynamic economy led by financiers and manufacturers assisted by a central bank, a strong currency, sophisticated infrastructure, and incentives for innovators and inventors. The government asserts appropriate power to seize any opportunities or thwart any threats. The United States expands trade and investments with all friendly countries while allying only with those with whom Americans face a common enemy, for as long as that enemy exists. War is a last resort after all other ways to assert crucial American interests have failed. Washington, both Adamses, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon were solid Hamiltonians.

Jeffersonians pursue principles that are harder to realize in an increasingly complex modern interdependent world. Jefferson insisted that the federal government’s power should be skeletal, agriculture should be the economy’s backbone, foreign trade and relations should be minimal, and military power should be confined to militia and gunboats. Yet Jefferson was a Hamiltonian when he purchased the Louisiana Territory, launched the Lewis and Clark expedition, and warred against Tripoli. Likewise, although Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover expressed neoisolationist sentiments, they practiced a mix of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian policies.

Jacksonians believe that the president should be above the law and that an increasingly powerful military should crush any foreign or domestic enemies. Yet Jackson himself was as pacific a president as he had been an aggressive general. However, his administration was a spoils system, with the most notorious being the disbursement of the Second United States Bank’s assets to state banks that politically supported him. He most blatantly violated the law by ignoring the Supreme Court’s rulings on treaties with Indian tribes. Neoconservatism is Jacksonism’s recent expression, with George W. Bush and Donald Trump its avatars, tempered, respectively, by Wilsonian and Jeffersonian policies.

Wilsonians believe that virtually all people desire peace and prosperity and that the United States should work with other countries to establish international organizations dedicated to those ends. To justify America’s entry into World War I, Wilson vowed that we shall fight for… a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and to make the world at last free.⁶ Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were Wilsonian in sentiment but followed a mix of policies.

Realism, or the drive to defend or expand America’s economic and strategic interests by the most appropriate means, has animated most presidents. Theodore Roosevelt succinctly captured realism’s essence: A nation’s first duty is within its own borders, but it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the people that shape the destiny of mankind.⁷ John Quincy Adams was the early nineteenth century’s most prominent realist and expert guided by these principles: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be her heart…. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.⁸ America’s realists were humanists, not cynics. Henry Kissinger spoke for them when he wrote, The true task of statesmanship is to draw from the balance of power a more positive capacity to better the human condition—to turn stability into creativity, to transform the relation of tensions into a strengthening of freedom, to turn man’s preoccupations from self-defense to human progress.⁹ Realist principles included Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, Hay’s Open Door, the Roosevelt Corollary, and Kennan’s containment strategy.

Politics and psychology are as inseparable as war and peace. Kissinger offered this insight: It is a delusion to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience…. The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.¹⁰ In other words, learning new things cannot escape being distorted by the prejudices imprinted in younger minds.

False analogies frequently cloud the thinking of those in power. Mediocre or worse generals are notorious for ignoring the reality that each war is unique and instead try to fight the current conflict as they did the previous war. Why do they do that? Any military leader is haunted by the inevitable mistakes he has made that unnecessarily lost lives and battles. He rethinks those mistakes, determined to avoid them during the next war. But often that next war poses new and unforeseen challenges that render obsolete previous strategies and tactics. Like generals, foreign policy makers fight the ghosts of costly past mistakes. The uncreative ones try a revised version of the same policy for a similar situation. The repentant try to learn from their mistakes.

The Munich and Vietnam syndromes, respectively, shadowed two different generations of policy makers and publics. Munich’s lesson was that Washington should never appease but instead confront aggressors. The syndrome was that during the Cold War it led policy makers to oppose any aggressors anywhere and so eventually into the Indochina quagmire against revolutionary communist movements. Vietnam’s lesson was that Washington should avoid unwinnable wars in remote regions with opposed cultures and ideologies. The syndrome was that it made policy makers skittish about asserting any military power anywhere.

No delusion cherished by policy makers was more catastrophic than the domino effect. That core concept of the global containment strategy assumed that Washington had to militarily defend every country around the world against communism, because if a revolution engulfed one, the communists would make it a fortress from which to provoke revolutions in neighboring countries. That concept denied crucial historical, political, economic, cultural, religious, ideological, and leadership differences within and among countries—in other words, reality.

Global containment and the domino effect logically led to America’s crusade in Indochina and the inevitable devastating defeat for the United States across the region. President Johnson knew that America’s Indochina war was a Sisyphean debacle. Yet, rather than cut the nation’s losses and walk away, he kept doubling down. Why? Of many reasons, one likely dominated. As Johnson asserted, I don’t want to be the first president to lose a war.

Stark images often overwhelm even the most reasoned, fact-based analyses or speeches. Some are sources of pride, like those of soldiers surging ashore at Normandy or astronauts stepping from their spacecraft onto the moon. Others are sources of rage and desire for vengeance, like those of burning battleships at Pearl Harbor or the collapsing World Trade Center towers in New York City. There are sources of national shame, like police blasting away civil rights protestors with fire hoses or a weeping naked girl fleeing her napalmed village.

People tend to project their own worst traits onto a hated other. While scapegoating others, one martyrizes oneself. One dehumanizes one’s enemies more easily to kill, rob, exploit, and exile them. All these psychological traits affect whether and how one fights others.

A dynamic animates what we believe and how we behave. We build narratives about our individual and collective lives that help explain and justify them. Beliefs can be provable or mythic but often mesh facts and fantasies. Beliefs motivate and approve behavior that spans from the kindest acts of altruism and self-sacrifice to the harshest acts of dispossessing and even slaughtering one’s enemies.

Culture is to groups as character is to individuals. A culture is any group’s system of related beliefs and behaviors. As such, a culture is a type of ideology. One’s identity often has elements of idealism and even mythology. Historian Richard Slotkin offers this definition: The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called ‘national character.’¹¹ Conveyed by stories and symbols, myths inevitably help construct the identity of any person or group. Myths convey deep truths about human longing that transcend time and place. Slotkin explained, Myth is history successfully disguised as archetype. Those myths convey vital values and beliefs that guide behavior. He argued that understanding a nation’s myths is critical not just to know its history but also to make future tragedies less likely: If we can understand where and how in history the rules of the game originated, what real human concerns and social relationships the rules conceal or distort, and what the historical consequences of playing the game have been, we may be able to respond more intelligently the next time an infantry captain or a senator or a president invokes it.¹² Historian William McNeil presented the dilemma that governments face when their power depends on refutable myths in a skeptical age: Discrediting old myths without finding new ones to replace them erodes the basis for common action that once bound those who believed in a public body capable of acting together…. When assent becomes half-hearted or is actively withheld from such myths, obedience becomes irregular, the predictability of human action diminishes, and the effectiveness of public response to changing conditions begins to erode.¹³

What is the essence of American culture? Humanism, or enlightened individualism, is the core value of Western and thus American civilization. Humanism assumes that everyone at birth is a unique bundle of potentialities, mostly for good, and that our moral duty is to nurture the best and sublimate the worst in each other within a community of like-minded individuals. Yet materialistic individualism also animates American culture, expressed by such terms as rugged individualism, self-reliance, rags to riches, and self-made man.

Americans idealized and romanticized their history to reduce its moral complexity, paradoxes, and contradictions into a simple mythology. American history’s triumphal version depicts Americans as a heroic, enterprising, courageous, good-hearted, and progressive people who expanded across the continent, and then the world, through trade, settlers, principles, and (when vital) war, which vanquished and uplifted a series of savage, inferior, or outright evil enemies. Triumphalists recognized tragedies and mistakes like driving the Indians from their lands, importing African slaves, and discriminating against minority races and religions. But, overall, Americans progressed mostly in a two steps forward, one or two steps back struggle between progressive and regressive forces.

A related core belief is that America is an exceptional, superior country, although others can become American by embracing its values and traditions. That belief has developed over four centuries. In 1630, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop called on his fellow settlers to see themselves as the vanguard of a new civilization in which we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us… in that we are commanded… to love the Lord our God and to love one another… that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land where we go to possess it.¹⁴ In 1765, young lawyer John Adams wrote, I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scheme and design of Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.¹⁵ In 1780, Adams explained to French foreign minister Vergennes the ideals that guided America in war and peace: The dignity of… America does not consist in diplomatic ceremonials…. It consists solely in reason, justice, truth, the interests of mankind, and the interests of the nations of Europe.¹⁶ Jefferson envisioned an American empire of liberty eventually engulfing the Western Hemisphere.

Journalist and newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny in his essay titled Annexation, published by the Democratic Review in 1845. Manifest Destiny was America’s right because of the might of its superior democratic system and enterprising people to expand across the continent. And that was for the betterment of all: We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business, universality of freedom and equality…. Who then can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity?¹⁷

Heroes are central to American culture, as they represent the best of American individualism. America’s pantheon of heroes includes explorers like John Smith, Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark; statesmen like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt; generals like Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and George Patton; and athletes like Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, and Jessie Owens. The emphasis is on physical prowess and courage. Of course, progressive Americans might list as heroes civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis. The Lewis and Clark expedition became America’s version of the Odyssey and the Civil War the nation’s Iliad, with an array of heroes on both sides.

Frederick Jackson Turner presented a variant of the triumphant interpretation during a history conference at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. In his Frontier Interpretation of American History, he argued that the frontier was central to the development of American democracy and nationalism.¹⁸ To survive, let alone thrive, frontier settlers had to be courageous, enterprising, and cooperative. The frontier symbiosis between individuals and communities nurtured the best in each better than anywhere else across the nation. Inevitably, the parade of trappers, traders, miners, farmers, ranchers, and other entrepreneurs exploiting resources succeeded in society with others. Explorers led and soldiers protected that way. At times, organized violence by the army, police, and vigilantes was vital to asserting or restoring order threatened by Indians and outlaws.

A frontier mentality distinguished one’s settled, secure lands from adjacent unsettled lands that concealed dangers and opportunities. Slot-kin describes the myth of the frontier as the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top.¹⁹ Actually, that is no myth. America’s frontier mentality has been a core historical (and thus cultural) reality for over four centuries. What has changed is the expansion of those opportunities from enterprising white males to women and minorities.

One develops one’s identity often in contrast to others. Americans partly defined themselves contrasted with the enemies they fought. Americans justified conquering and exiling Indian tribes in several ways. One was that land belonged to those who improved it. Of course, most tribes east of the Mississippi lived in villages and cultivated crops. Americans dehumanized Indians as savages to justify subduing or killing them and taking their land. Among the earliest genres of American literature was the captivity narrative of those whom Indians seized and forced to live among them until they either escaped or were ransomed. A few captives preferred to remain with their adopted tribe. In her book Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald noted the lineage of the mind-set that justified America’s war in Vietnam with previous wars against native peoples: Americans were once again embarked upon a heroic and (for themselves) almost painless conquest of an inferior race. To the American settlers the defeat of the Indians had seemed not just a nationalist victory, but an achievement made in the name of humanity—the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil, and of civilization over brutish nature.²⁰

Cultural symbols are part of history but rarely accurately convey it. For instance, culturally the battles of the Alamo and Little Big Horn symbolized for most Americans their brave fellow countrymen fighting valiantly to the death for noble causes. The image of Davy Crockett and George Custer leveling their firearms for one last shot is burned into the American psyche. Popular culture amplified those images. Novels and poems extolled them. Huge, framed lithographs of Cassilly Adams’s painting of Custer’s Last Stand adorned hundreds of saloons across late nineteenth-century America. In the twentieth century, films and television shows celebrated both those battles and their leaders. Of course, then and since, Mexicans and Indians hoot at that interpretation, instead citing those battles as rare and temporary defeats of American imperialism that eventually overwhelmed their peoples. Imperialism is the conquest and colonization of one people by another. Many Americans and countless foreigners assert that the United States was born in and sustained by imperialism for its first three centuries. First as English subjects, and then as United States citizens, Americans expanded across the continent in a series of treaties with neighboring powers and native tribes, most resulting from victorious wars. The first wars were on a frontier imposed by invading English settlers. Frontier wars erupted sporadically from Jamestown’s founding in 1607 until the last battle at Wounded Knee in 1890. Then, in 1898, America acquired a small overseas empire by defeating Spain and seizing its colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Although Washington granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946, Puerto Rico remains a second-class dominion rather than either the fifty-first state or an independent nation.

A country is hegemonic when it has and asserts overwhelming economic, military, and cultural power over its neighbors, across a broader region, or around the world. The only global hegemons have been Britain from 1792 to 1914 and America from 1942 to the present, during which London and New York, respectively, served as the world’s financial centers while Whitehall and the White House asserted military power around the world. Hegemonic power inspires more than it imposes. For instance, the eloquence and profundity of America’s Declaration of Independence have caused countless people around the world to seek freedom since 1776.

Marxist-oriented critics denounce something they call American cultural imperialism, or the dominance of American pop culture in music, food, and clothing, but more decisively the democratic ideals of America’s Declaration of Independence. Of course, that notion of American cultural imperialism is false. Americans do not force foreigners to rhapsodize over jazz, blues, bluegrass, country and western, gospel, rock, folk, or show tunes. Mass consumerism, chain clothing and food stores, and credit cards may have started in America, but entrepreneurs in other countries freely embraced and marketed their own versions. Cultural power has its limits. A suicide bomber might be wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of some American rock band just before he pulls the cord in a crowded café or bus.

Genocide and ethnic cleansing differ. Genocide is the mass murder of one people by another people. Ethnic cleansing is the destruction of one people’s culture by another people. Contrary to common belief, with one possible exception, neither the English colonial governments nor the subsequent American government promoted genocide for any one Indian tribe, let alone all tribes. The exception was King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676, when the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth governments, along with allied Indian tribes, did try to extirpate the tribes that warred against them by either sword or capture and sale as slaves to West Indian plantations. They succeeded in killing, enslaving, or driving off about half the Indian population of lower New England. However, the American government did pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing against indigenous peoples. The 1887 Dawes Act sought to transform Indians into Americans by pressuring them to exchange their cultural value of communal ownership of land for private property by individual families, learn to read and write, wear American rather than indigenous clothes, and pray to the Christian God rather than pagan deities.

Chart I.2. Top Ten American Wars Ranked by Total Number of U.S. Military Deaths²¹

Chart I.3. Top Twelve American Wars Ranked by Financial Costs in 2011 Dollars²²

Most Americans may disdain regarding themselves as warlike, let alone imperialistic. They prefer believing they mostly fought to defend themselves, citing attacks by redcoats at Lexington Green, rebels at Fort Sumter, Japanese at Pearl Harbor, and al Qaeda at the Twin Towers and Pentagon as prime examples, or to defend, restore, or promote liberty and justice from aggressive authoritarian states in World War II and the Cold War.

Regardless, the moral costs of any war are highly debatable. Usually the number of deaths and financial costs are far easier to calculate. Americans have paid and inflicted a vast toll in lives and treasure for its wars over four centuries.

World of War: A History of American Warfare from Jamestown to the War on Terror is an epic journey through the nation’s array of wars for diverse reasons with diverse results over four centuries. It explores the crucial effects of brilliant, mediocre, and dismal military and civilian leaders; the dynamic among America’s expanding economic power, changing technologies, and the types and settings of its wars; and the human, financial, and moral costs to the nation, its allies, and its enemies.

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Colonial Wars

As piety cannot be maintained without church ordinances & officers, nor justice without lawes & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers.

—1643 Massachusetts Militia Act

I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound.

—George Washington

The volley fired by a young man in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.

—Horace Walpole

Warfare shaped colonial America’s development.¹ When the colonists did not wage war, they either prepared for or recovered from it. The reason was simple: they were foreign invaders determined to take ever more land from the original inhabitants, ideally peacefully but if necessary violently.

The colonists fought nearly every tribe they encountered as first they established themselves on the continent’s shores and then expanded inland. Indeed, warriors unleashed showers of arrows at the Jamestown and Plymouth expeditions before they reached their first settlement sites. Although the colonists suffered as much or more death and destruction than they inflicted on the tribes from 1607 to 1775, warfare was only existential for them during their first years in the New World. Virginia faced numerous brushes with extinction from chronic disease, starvation, and Indian attacks from 1607 to 1622. The colonial era’s bloodiest conflict was King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676, which pitted New England’s colonies and Indian allies against a coalition of tribes. Although the colonists lost a thousand dead and twenty destroyed towns, they never faced extinction but instead inflicted it on the enemy tribes.

Early Americans also warred against the expanding French and stagnant Spanish empires on North America’s eastern half. In all, they fought three wars against the Spanish and their Indian allies, three wars against the French and their Indian allies, and two wars against all three. The Spanish and Indian wars included Elizabeth’s War (1585–1603), Cromwell’s War (1655–1660), and the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1744). The French and Indian wars included the Huguenot War (1628–1632); King William’s War, or the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–1697); and King George’s War, or the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748). Those against all three included Queen Anne’s War, or the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), and the French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War (1754–1763).

Yet, in nearly all those wars, the fighting was confined to raids by relatively small groups to attack isolated frontier villages or forts and ideally destroy them and then escape before overwhelming numbers of the enemy converged. Americans fought European-style sieges only at Cartagena in 1741, Oswego in 1756, Fort William Henry in 1757, Fort Frontenac in 1758, Fort Niagara in 1758, Montreal in 1760, and Havana in 1762, and open-field battles at Lake George Camp in 1755, Fort Carillon in 1758, and Belle Famille in 1759.

Colonel Henry Bouquet found a stark contrast in how wars were fought in Europe and America:

Those who have only experienced the severities and dangers of a campaign in Europe can scarcely form an idea of what is to be done and endured in an American war. To act in a country cultivated and inhabited, where roads are made, magazines are established, and hospitals provided; where there are good towns to retreat to in case of misfortune; or at the worst, a generous enemy to yield to…. In an American campaign everything is terrible; the face of the country, the climate, the enemy. There is no refreshment for the healthy nor relief for the sick. A vast unhospitable desert… where victories are not decisive, but defeats are ruinous and simple death is the least misfortune.²

William Smith, who accompanied General Henry Bouquet’s 1764 campaign against the upper Ohio valley Indians, captured the essence of Indian tactics and effective American countertactics:

The first, that their general maxim is to surround their enemy. The second, that they fight scattered, and never in a compact body. The third, that they never stand their ground when attacked, but immediately give way, to return to the charge. These principles being admitted, it follows—1st That the destined to engage Indians must be lightly cloathed, armed, and acoutred. 2nd. That having no resistance to encounter in the attack or defense, they are not to be drawn up in close order, which would only expose them without necessity to greater loss. And lastly, that all their evolutions must be performed with great rapidity, and the men enabled by exercise to pursue the enemy closely when put to flight, and not give them time to rally.³

Thomas Hutchins, who fought in Pontiac’s War, explained the dynamic between Indian culture and war:

The love of liberty is innate in the savage, and seems the ruling passion in the state of nature. His desires and wants, being few, are easily gratified, and leave him much time to spare, which he would spend in idleness if hunger did not force him to hunt. That exercise makes him strong, active, and bold, raises his courage, and fits him for war, in which he uses the same stratagems and cruelty as against wild beasts, making no scruple to employ treachery and perfidy to vanquish the enemy.⁴

Each treaty had a tenet requiring Indians to release any captives. Returning captives provoked joy for their American families, sorrow for the Indian families who had adopted them, and often mixed feelings among the captives. William Smith witnessed such a scene: There were seen fathers and mothers recognizing and clasping their once-lost babes, husbands hanging around the necks of their newly recovered wives, sisters and brothers unexpectantly meeting together after long separation, scarce able to speak the same language. Meanwhile, the Indians delivered up their beloved captives with the utmost reluctance, shed torrents of tears over them…. Their regard to them continued all the time they remained in camp. They visited them… with… the most tender affection…. But it must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return… and… afterwards found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns.⁵

Frontier war was often merciless, as each side sought to massacre the other. Captain John Underhill offered this rationalization: It may be demanded, why should you be so furious (as some of you have said). Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David’s war…. When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but… puts them to the sword… the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…. We have had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.⁶ At times colonial governments offered rewards for scalps. For instance, in 1755, Massachusetts lieutenant governor Spencer Phips issued this declaration:

I do hereby require His Majesty’s subjects of this Province to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians…. For every Penobscot above the age of twelve years that shall be taken… to Boston, fifty pounds. For every scalp of a male… above the age aforesaid, forty pounds. For every female… taken… and for every male under twelve… taken… twenty-five pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years… twenty pounds.⁷

Americans had to defend themselves alone through nearly the entire colonial period. Whitehall did not send over large numbers of troops until the last war from 1754 to 1760. For self-defense, each colony established a militia that required all able-bodied white men from sixteen to sixty years old—usually with exceptions such as ministers, magistrates, doctors, teachers, college students, and fishermen—to serve for an annual four to six days of inspection and training. Each town had one company, and cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York had increasing neighborhood companies as their populations expanded. Each company elected its captains and lieutenants, while governors usually appointed colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors.

Massachusetts was probably the colony best organized for war. The governor and his council established the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1638. The 1643 Militia Act stated that, as piety cannot be maintained without church ordinances & officers, nor justice without lawes & magistracy, no more can our safety & peace be preserved without military orders & officers.⁸ Initially, companies were split between one-third pikemen and two-thirds musketeers, but eventually all men were musketeers. Pikes were ineffective against Indians firing arrows in woods, while muskets became more reliable and cheaper as flintlocks replaced wheel-locks and arquebuses.

Americans suffered worse horrors than they inflicted on the Indians, French, and Spanish because most were amateur militiamen who lacked the training and experience to be effective. Rangers were the exception as experts at wilderness survival, hunting, and shooting. The most brilliant ranger leaders were Miles Standish, Benjamin Church, and Robert Rogers, who respectively led a dozen, couple dozen, and several score successful raids.

Warfare was crucial to shaping a distinct American identity that strengthened with each generation removed from the first immigrants. Charles Tilly succinctly explained the development of European nation-states with this dynamic relationship: The state made war and war made the state.⁹ If Europeans made war and war made their states, Americans made war and war made Americans. In her brilliant book The Name of War, historian Jill Lepore explored how wars forged American identity: English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonists like the Spaniards nor savage natives like the Indians. Later on, after nearly a century of repetition on successive American frontiers, this triangulated conception of identity would form the basis of American nationalism.¹⁰ She explained the dynamic among the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples…. How wars are remembered can be just as important as how they were fought and first described…. Waging, writing, and remembering a war all shape its legacy, all draw boundaries.¹¹ She argued that the trauma, existential threat, and united efforts to destroy the Indian alliance in King’s Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676 transformed the essence of colonial identity from English to American. A century later, that American identity was so powerful that they would rebel against Britain and form their own country.

What became the United States of America began with Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, established on May 13, 1607.¹² However, that was not England’s first colonial venture. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth chartered a company led by Sir Walter Raleigh to establish the colony of Virginia. An expedition established Roanoke a hundred miles south on North Carolina’s outer bank on Pamlico Sound in 1585, but the settlers mysteriously disappeared, most likely carried off by Indians, by the time a supply vessel arrived in 1589. The ultimately successful effort emerged after two related investment groups received charters from King James I on April 10, 1606, with the London branch to settle anywhere between the thirty-fourth and forty-first parallels and the Plymouth branch anywhere between the thirty-eighth to forty-fifth parallels. The London group organized a voyage first.

Three small vessels packed with 144 men and supplies sailed from London toward the mid-Atlantic North American coast on December 19, 1606. Captain Christopher Newport commanded the expedition and its seven-man governing council, whose names were in a locked box to be opened once they reached land. Virginia Company instructions included this prescient warning: Have great care not to offend the naturals and in no case suffer any of the native people of the country to inhabit between you and the sea coast for… they will grow discontented with your habitation, and be ready to guide and assist any nation that shall come to invade you.¹³ Those tenets proved to be problematic. The colonists most feared a Spanish attack. The Spanish had half a dozen settlements across northern Florida from Saint Augustine on the Atlantic Ocean to Pensacola on the Gulf of Mexico. England and Spain had warred throughout most of the late sixteenth century, although recently in 1604 they had signed a peace treaty.

America was born in war. On April 16, 1607, five Indians fired arrows at thirty Virginia Company men as they stretched their legs on the beach at Cape Henry, Chesapeake Bay’s south entrance, their first landing in the New World. Arrows wounded two of them, while the others fired their arquebuses and then charged, driving off the attackers.

That night, Newport opened the sealed box and was chagrined to find one name among the seven to govern Virginia. Ironically, the man essential for Jamestown’s survival—Captain John Smith—arrived in chains.¹⁴ Suspecting Smith of fostering mutinous sentiments, Newport had him arrested. Jealousy as well as fear motivated Newport. Smith exceeded all the others as a soldier and leader. He fought as a mercenary in the Low Countries in 1600 and the Balkans in 1601 and 1602. During the siege of Modrusch in 1602, he issued a challenge, fought, and killed a Turkish champion before the walls three mornings in a row. For that, Hungarian king Zsigmondy declared him an English gentleman entitled to carry a shield embossed with a three Turks head symbol. Later that year, the Turks captured and held Smith as a slave in various places until he escaped in Crimea in 1603 and, after many more adventures, reached London in 1604. There he invested in the Virginia Company, whose trustees welcomed his military experience.

Although Smith spent only four years in the New World, his enterprise, courage, optimism, curiosity, decisiveness, independence, and vision made him the first American, an archetype. He deeply respected, liked, and increasingly understood the indigenous peoples he frequently fought. He swiftly mastered Indian warfare and diplomacy as he had earlier mastered war against the Turks. He wrote four books on his experiences: A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Happened in Virginia (1608), A Description of New England (1616), The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Islands (1624), and The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630).

The seven council members elected Edward Wingfield among them as the council president. The next step was to sail a hundred miles up a prominent river and settle a site with three qualities: the soil ashore must be rich for crops and pasture, the river must be narrow enough to command with musket fire from both shores, and no tribe must live down-river to the sea. The site they chose met only one of the three criteria. The soil was rich, but the Kecoughtan Indian village was downstream at the river mouth and the river was more than a mile wide. They believed that site would be easily defended because it was nearly surrounded by water, with the river on one side and swamps on the other sides. They named both the river and their town after King James. They began constructing a triangular palisade with hundred-yard-long sides and bastions with cannons at each corner. That palisade was crucial for their survival.

Jamestown was located in the Powhatan Confederation of twenty-eight villages between the James and Rappahannock Rivers from Chesapeake Bay to the fall line. The Algonquian-speaking Powhatans faced enemy tribes like Siouan-speaking Manahoac and Monacan westward and Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock northward. The head chief was Powhatan, whose ceremonial name was Wahunsenacawh, with his capital Werowocomoco village on the York River. William Strachey, the colony’s official chronicler, described Powhatan as having a tall stature… of a sad aspect… fat visag’d with grey hairs…. He hath bene a strong and able salvadge… active, and of daring spirit, vigilant, ambitious, subtile to enlarge his dominions…. Creull he hath bene and quarellous.¹⁵ Powhatan was at once alarmed and fatalistic when he learned of the foreigners establishing a palisade within his confederation. Strachey reported a certayne Propheseise afoote amongst the people enhabiting about us… which his priests continually put him in feare of… how that from the Cheasapeak Bay a Nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire.¹⁶

The closest village was Paspahegh, just half a dozen miles away. Naturally, the intruders enraged and terrified the Paspahegh, who resolved to wipe them out. The settlers repelled an attack by one hundred Paspahegh on May 18 and two hundred on May 26, when they suffered seventeen wounded and one dead before the warriors fled from arquebus fire by men ashore and cannon fire from the ship crews. Yet thereafter disease and starvation surpassed Indians in killing settlers. They drank the brackish surrounding waters where their settlement’s filth drained, while mosquito swarms bore malaria. Half the settlers perished by September. The original seven councilors were reduced to Smith, John Ratcliffe, and John Martin, as the others either died or were deposed for various irregularities. The three made Ratcliffe the president, Martin the deputy, and Smith the military commander who led exploring and diplomatic missions.

Meanwhile, Newport and his crew explored up the James River to its rapids at today’s Richmond. There they excitedly chipped what they believed was gold from the rocky banks. They descended to Jamestown with the good news and then sailed on to London to cash in their gold and gather men and supplies for the return voyage. There Newport received the crushing assay report that his men had laboriously gathered not gold but iron pyrite or fool’s gold.

The Virginians sought to get rich by discovering gold and silver mines just like the Spanish had in the Mexico and Peru colonies of their empire spreading across the Western Hemisphere. They were bitterly disappointed to find only an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of… gold or silver, or any commodities, and careless of anything but from hand to mouth, except baubles of no worth.¹⁷ They also hoped to discover an easy route to the Pacific Ocean, then called the South Sea, whose shores they believed lay not far beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Eventually they would be chagrined to learn that the continent was about three thousand miles wide between oceans.

Smith’s first expedition was to explore the Chickahominy River that flowed into the James River five miles above Jamestown. In December, he and nine men ascended the Chickahominy in a twenty-foot shallop. They rowed twenty-seven miles before fallen trees blocked them. There Smith left seven men in the shallop while he ascended ashore with two others. Pamunkey Indians attacked, killed his two companions, and