More on why the US fights unwinnable wars

This post was prompted by this article. This article, like many others of the genre, identifying the faults that lead to defeat in Afghanistan, tend to take a somewhat myopic view of American history, rarely going back beyond the Vietnam war. However, there was a time in the United States’ own history when it played a role similar to that of Vietnam or Afghanistan as the underdog fighting for independence from a major imperialist power. I believe that there is a common misconception about the American Revolutionary War that I rarely if ever see included in such types of lists, yet correcting this misunderstanding could help avoid entering into such unwinnable conflicts in the future. The misconception doesn’t revolve around a single fact, but (if I would be allowed to broadly interpret public sentiment without any underlying data for a moment) rather concerns the general sense of the progression of the American Revolutionary war, and the factors that allowed the Continental Army to emerge victorious over the British.

American history is heavily mythologised. The grade-school version of history delivered at most American schools is designed more to prop up American civil religion than to accurately deliver facts about the history of the United States. When history is moulded to serve an ideological agenda, rather than being presented as a simple exploration of what actually happened and what the consequences of historical events/figures were, people can end up with a distorted idea of what the outcome of current events might be. Plans based upon such misconceptions might be perfectly logical in the minds of their creators, and yet fail spectacularly in ways that might easily have been predicted by someone working with a set of assumptions based on the actual course of history. I want to explore what I believe to be one such distorted view of history, and how this distortion contributed to the United States entering unwinnable wars. That distortion is the narrative of how the Patriots won the American Revolutionary War.

The conventional American telling goes as such: In 1774, Great Britain was deeply in debt from its many recent wars. It responded to this debt by attempting to squeeze its American colonies for more revenue by taxing tea and stamps. The American colonists, rightly indignant that these new taxes had been levied upon them without their consultation or approval, rebelled, throwing their tea into the sea, raiding the British garrison at Lexington and Concord, and shocking the world by going on to defeat the most powerful army on the globe.

It’s that last part of that sentence that I want to focus on. Now I don’t want to suggest that the Americans didn’t actually beat the British – obviously that’s not true, they did really win a war-ending battle at Yorktown to finally drive the British out of the rebellious colonies (this is sometimes phrased as driving the British off the continent, but the British would maintain Florida, Nova Scotia (incl. Modern-day New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), Quebec, Rupert’s Land, and Newfoundland, as well as Bermuda, and their Caribbean island colonies). It’s what happened in between the battle of Lexington and Concord, and the stretch leading up to the final victory in 1781 that is the problem.

The conventional American narrative focuses on a couple of victories for the Continental Army, painting these as the stepping stones towards that final victory at Yorktown. Battles such as Bunker Hill, Monmouth, Camden, Trenton, and of course Saratoga all bringing the American army closer to that final victory. However, this obscures the fact that for most of the war, the British army held a decisive advantage over the Continentals. The British won most of the Battles and they won most of the pitched battles of the early war. 1778 was especially dire for the Americans with the British winning battles throughout the entire theatre, and this after the famous winter of 1777-8, where Baron von Steuben drilled the Continental troops into a supposedly superior fighting force. As Wikipedia (what sources were you really expecting?) says, “As a whole, American officers never equalled their opponents in tactics and maneuvers, and they lost most of the pitched battles. The great successes at Boston (1776), Saratoga (1777), and Yorktown (1781) were won from trapping the British far from base with a greater number of troops.”

Graphic showing British vs. US victories by year. I took the chart from Wikipedia and coded each battle as a victory for the British, the US, or indecisive. I also excluded the battles listed that weren’t between US and British forces when possible (i.e. battles between the British and French or between Patriots and Loyalists were excluded). The years 1776-1778 are especially dire fore the Patriots. Guess Steuben didn’t have as much of an impact as is sometimes attributed to him.

Far from the typical narrative of great American victories leading the way to the final surrender, most American victories were very small scale raids on British supply lines or forts. George Washington became known as “the American Fabius” (this is not necessarily a compliment), for his constant pestering of the superior British forces, while avoiding (for the most part) pitched battles. In fact, Washington lost more battles than he won during the war. Major American cities were occupied during the war, including New York for almost the entirety of the war, and Philadelphia, the former capital from 1777-1778. In Europe, the occupation of the capital would typically have meant the end of the war and the negotiation of terms, but not so for the Americans.

Which leads me to the main point that is lost from the way the traditional American narrative presents the war – in a colonial war, the key to winning the war is not to militarily defeat your opponent, which, from the colonists’ perspective, is very unlikely (at least without foreign military intervention, like in the case of the Americans), but rather to simply keep an army in the field. Indeed, this is what made George Washington the extremely valuable general that he was – he was not the most successful commander from the perspective of winning battles (arguably that may actually have been Benedict Arnold), his value lay in his unequalled ability to keep his troops in the field, despite their late or entirely lacking pay, poor winter quarters, and poor military record. He was able to prevent any particular British victory from being the decisive kind that Yorktown would become for the Americans down the line, thanks to those infamous Fabian tactics. After all, how can you win a war if your opponent doesn’t concede after you’ve captured their cities and defeated their army in battle, but instead they continue fighting?

And that is the lesson that American history leaves out – you can’t expect to win a war just by winning all the battles – you need to be able to destroy the enemy’s ability or will to fight. Think how much blood and treasure the US might have saved if they had gone into Vietnam or Afghanistan asking if the war was winnable from this perspective, if they had asked not “can we defeat the enemy’s troops in battle?” but rather “can we destroy the enemy’s will and ability to fight?” Perhaps some other delusion would have lead the US into the wars anyways, but clearing up this mistake would at least bring it one step closer to seeing the world as it truly is.

p.s. No mention can be made of American civil religion without bringing up The Apotheosis of Washington in the United States Capitol:

Somehow I don’t think the real Washington would have appreciated being turned into a literal god