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The Continental Army used Oneida allies to hunt down and kill deserters during the Revolution. After the Revolution, Henry Knox wrote to fellow members of the Society of the Cincinnati to ask if they would be willing to constitute that private club as a short-term army to repress Shaysite rebels, a question that irregular forces raised by Massachusetts managed to make moot. The U.S. Army used Creek allies to wage war on the Seminoles. Settler paramilitaries drew federal funds to pay for raids on Indian villages. State troops served under federal command, or alongside regular army forces, or alongside pirates hired to fight for the U.S., as in the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.
For decades, the United States found military force anywhere and everywhere, grabbing the capacity to deliver organized violence as the need arose.
Now: Take a look at this post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and pay particular attention to the table of numbers. The U.S. had X percentage of population committed to the military, while European powers had Y percentage; therefore, early Americans were skeptical of military institutions and hesitant to use armed force, and"US military power was comparatively miniscule."
That's it. The numbers were smaller, so Americans declined to adopt armed power. But what does this comparison leave out?
Comparing formal European armies in any particular year to the early U.S. Army of the same year misses any one of a number of points, starting with the composition of native forces that presented the primary military problem for an expansionist United States. As I've said before, there was never much danger that Tecumseh would show up on the battlefield with artillery regiments and a corps of hussars, drawn up in neat formations and using European tactics.
The early American military faced a different set of tactical and strategic challenges than European armies in Europe during the same period, and so the early American military made different tactical and strategic choices. To find ideology at the route of the numerical differences between European armies and the U.S. Army during the period between the Revolution and the Civil War is to make an underexamined assumption.
That table of numbers obscures more than it reveals. Military force does not only come from regular armies, and any question about the size of a nation's military forces has to be answered with a discussion about composition and a nation's many available sources of armed power.
Europeans had bigger armies; Americans summoned all the military force they needed to accomplish the military tasks they sought to accomplish.
To find early American military power" comparatively miniscule" is comparatively meaningless. Early Americans cheerfully embraced substantial coercive power, distributed across a wide range of formal and informal armed forces.
I continue to wonder if America's anti-militarist tradition ever existed.
ADDED LATER:
Related, here's a photo of soldiers from the Royal Dutch East Indies Army. What would we learn about Dutch ideology regarding the use of armed force in the East Indies by examining a chart showing the number of Dutchmen in that army?
Thanks to everyone for these great comments. The thread up above turned into a sprawling mess, so my apologies if I've missed anything.
Chris Bray -
12/24/2008
This is very much on my mind, and something I plan to do. It's a tall order, but definitely a place I intend to get to.
Chris Bray -
12/24/2008
Sure -- it's a fair point, and one I know I'll have to consider.
T F Smith -
12/24/2008
If you are making the case that the 13 colonies/US were in a different strategic setting than the European powers, then perhaps the more valid set of comparisons for your thesis would be other Western settler societies that conquered/occupied the various "new europes" of the world in the 17th-19th centuries:
New France
New Netherlands
British North America/Canada (before and after 1867)
Australia (before and after 1901)
Buenos Aires/United Provinces/Argentina
Brazil (Colonial era/Empire/Old Republic)
Chile
Peru
Mexico
South Africa (before and after 1910)
Central Asia/Transcaspia
Algeria
David Silbey -
12/24/2008
Did the U.S. need a Foreign Legion, or some similar long-term organization of proxy soldiers, to move west and establish control of the continent? Did the early U.S. need massive formal armies to move west, displace native people, and bring land under its power? If not, what does it mean to point out that Europeans had any of this?
You might also contemplate that they *could have* used those things, and didn't.
David Silbey -
12/24/2008
The argument I was referring to was that "I don't believe that conscription = armed power" when, as you clarified, what you meant was that conscription was not the sole way of measuring military power. The latter, I think, is entirely defensible.
Clumsy phrasing on my part, earlier, though -- I don't believe that armed power must include conscription, or that conscription must equal armed power. It can, but there are other alternatives.
Yep.
The question that follows, then, is how much of American reliance on (for want of a better term) non-formal structures of military power was from the necessity argument (as you've laid out) and how much (if any) was from a genuine suspicion of European style methods of warfare? In other words, what is being identified as a general suspicion of military power may be a suspicion of a specific *type* of military power.
Chris Bray -
12/24/2008
It seems to me that the thing many of the comments here have in common is that they start with an assumption about forms of power, and that the assumptions derive from the military history of other places: Europeans had X form of military institution, and the U.S. didn't, so the absence defines the American military. No long-term proxies, no big army, no conscription, so no military power or ideological desire for it.
What I've tried to say, however clumsily, is that I think there's a distortion that comes from this starting point -- from the hunt for absences in the United States, as measured against other places. I think -- maybe I should say I suspect -- that the starting with the American context changes the path to an outcome.
Did the U.S. need a Foreign Legion, or some similar long-term organization of proxy soldiers, to move west and establish control of the continent? Did the early U.S. need massive formal armies to move west, displace native people, and bring land under its power? If not, what does it mean to point out that Europeans had any of this?
Comparison is a place to end up, not a place to start.
Chris Bray -
12/24/2008
I don't think it's a different argument. The argument is that the United States used the military power it needed, in the forms that worked in the contexts of the time and place. The size of the formal military was driven by questions about what worked and was needed, not by anti-statist or anti-militarist ideology.
To use and slightly alter your language, the U.S. _did_ have much less of a formal military and stable corps of proxies than (for example) the European powers, but it did so not out of any real civic virtue, but because there simply wasn't a threat on the continent that couldn't be met with the forms of armed power that Americans chose to use.
Clumsy phrasing on my part, earlier, though -- I don't believe that armed power must include conscription, or that conscription must equal armed power. It can, but there are other alternatives.
David Silbey -
12/24/2008
I think that's only true where states faced other states that could do the same, and do so locally
That's a different argument than the one you made above, where you said that you didn't "believe that conscription = armed power." Your response indicates that you do believe that, in certain contexts, conscription does equal armed power.
This also suggests a different flavor to the overall argument, which is that the U.S. _did_ have much less of a military than (for example) the European powers, but it did so not out of any real civic virtue, but because there simply wasn't a major threat on the continent.
Chris Bray -
12/24/2008
I think that's only true where states faced other states that could do the same, and do so locally. There was no other power on the continent that could raise a massive army of conscripts, so there was no need for the United States to do the same. Tecumseh was never going to show up with 100,000 guys; mass conscription wasn't a source of power on the North American continent, except in the eventual context of an internal war.
T F Smith -
12/23/2008
Define "native proxies"...
Under British command, the Indian Army (whether under the EIC, the presidencies, or the Raj) of the 1800s-1900s was a regular, standing force, organized along Western lines, that - ultimately - was used against Western and Westernized opponents, in effect "filling in" for British Army formations. The IA was a force multiplier, because its best units were the equivalent of their British peers, and so on down the line (See 1914-18 and 1939-45 for multiple examples.)
The AUS never really had an equivalent to IA; the closest it ever came were the Philippine Scouts, and they were not part of the AEF in 1917-18, for example, for a variety of reasons. By 1941, of course, the PS were RA all the way, but they were also a diminishing asset, because of the organization of the separate PA (which itself had both RA and AR elements).
Which brings us to the other point: the US, in the 19th and 20th centuries, did not have an equivalent of the mobilizable manpower that made up the West India Regiment or the Gurkha Rifles in Britain's imperial OOB; American citizens (and resident aliens) were mobilized as part of a mass army, period.
Even the IHG regiments of 1862-65 were organized along the same lines as "white" volunteer regiments. The USCT is a special case, of course, but even given the prevailing racism, the post-Civil War 9th and 10th cavalry and 24th and 25th infantry regiments were RA units, not hived off into some sort of "colonial corps."
I don't think that you arguing that (even circa 1862) a Pawnee Scout, or member of the 7th SNY, or one of the Bear Valley Irregulars should be wieghted the same as a measure of national "militarism" as a regular of the 3rd Infantry (Old Guard) or the 1st PA Reserves or the 5th NY Volunteers, are you?
Much less, the same as a member of the Coldstream Guards or their Continental equivalents?
Every nation state mobilizes in wartime, but that is a different strategic situation than peacetime, obviously.
However, peacetime expenditure on a given nation state's full-time, regular establishment can be compared, and by that measure, the US had a very small regular establishment, in comparison to its national wealth and population, than its Westernized peers, throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
You're not arguing against that, are you?
T F Smith -
12/23/2008
Mass armies were the measure of Western military power from the French Revolutionary levee en masse until - arguably - Hiroshima.
The only real exception were the Anglo-French wars, and that was because the British were able to use sea power to generate the cash that allowed their various Continental allies (the Germans and Dutch, especially) to remain in the field.
David Silbey -
12/23/2008
The United States military today uses absolutely no conscription at all, and is the most powerful military in the world. I don't believe that conscription = armed power
We should probably be careful about reading the lessons of today back into the past. At that time, I think a fairly strong case could be made that military power rested on mass armies, and that mass armies were only created through conscription.
Chris Bray -
12/23/2008
Also, with regard to European " national service/mass conscription armies," I wonder how well the scope of conscription serves to measure armed power. The United States military today uses absolutely no conscription at all, and is the most powerful military in the world. I don't believe that conscription = armed power.
Chris Bray -
12/23/2008
How much does "long term involvement" matter? If the U.S. used X native people as proxies in one conflict, andf Y native people as proxies in another a short time later, but they weren't a stable group of native proxies with a single consistent identity in an unchanging group, does that mean that the U.S. didn't use native proxies?
I noted a chart that compared regular troops to regular troops, and argued that it omitted consideration of the availability of proxy forces.
T F Smith -
12/23/2008
Also worth pointing out that the variius European "native" auxiliaries were, for the most part, organized and equipped along Western lines as part of a standing army, and were used against both other "native" peoples and European opponents (and those Europeans' own local/colonial proxies) in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In contrast, other than the Philippine Scouts in their later (Regular Army) iteration, the "native auxiliaries" raised by the AUS were essentially scouts, guides, and (at most) irregulars, and barely had any corporate existence beyond a given conflict.
T F Smith -
12/23/2008
So if LGM's time frame is inappropriate, what time frame would you pick to support your thesis?
As far as the concept that "when the U.S. needed less military force, it had less military force. When it needed more, including more auxiliaries, it had more," mobilization in wartime has been a standard concept for every state throughout history - how does this statement support your point?
I think that there is a case for American exceptionalism to be made here, in the sense that the United States, although always a trading nation, could have been an autarky for most of its history. Few of the European powers ever had that option.
Also, of course, the founders and subsequent decision-makers in the early life of the republic had the history of Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries (and of South America in the 19th Century) to draw their strategic lessons from - first and foremost that a balkanized continent would result in constant international warfare.
Have you read PAC Koistenen's series on the American war economy?
Andrew D. Todd -
12/23/2008
Ah, the last paragraph, "Another example would be the , dating from 1857..." should read "Another example would be the Tirailleurs Senegalais, dating from 1857..."
Chris Bray -
12/23/2008
Measuring from 1877 to 1893 is kind of a funny choice, though isn't it? If you start the clock a few years earlier, or let it run a few years later, the numbers would look very different. Aside from the years the U.S. needed armed force and developed the substantial armed force that it needed, the U.S. didn't have much armed force. When the house wasn't on fire, it didn't burn.
"And the regular Army had declined sharply after the French withdrew from Mexico and the end of Reconstruction." When the U.S. needed less military force, it had less military force. When it needed more, including more auxiliaries, it had more.
Andrew D. Todd -
12/23/2008
The United States Army really does not have anything comparable to the sheer long-term involvement of the British and French armies with their native and auxiliary corps.
The oldest regiment of the Indian army dates from 1751. The Gurkha regiments of the British-Indian Army go back to 1817. In the last year or so, a sharp little civil rights campaign was fought to force the British government to extend full British citizenship to Gurkha veterans.
The French Foreign Legion dates from 1830. All recruits in the French Foreign Legion take false names upon enlistment, as an expression of solidarity with those of their number who are actually fugitives from justice, and as a means of avoiding invidious social distinctions. "Legio Nostra Patria," as the Legion's motto says, or, to put it in American English, "Ya Found a Home in the Army." The Legion's great holiday is Camerone Day, the anniversary of a small battle in a small Mexican village on April 30, 1863, in which sixty-two legionnaires fought to the death against two thousand Mexicans.The legion still has, as one of its sacred relics, the wooden hand of their commander, Captain Dangou. The closest American analogy to Camerone Day might be the United States Marine Corps' Birthday Ball. Camerone was part of a small obscure war whose purpose was to compel the Mexican government to pay debts allegedly owed to French bankers. Does this sound oddly familiar?
Another example would be the , dating from 1857, and lasting until the independence of French West Africa, circa 1960. The closest thing I can think of in the American tradition would be the Philippine Scouts, from after 1901.
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It is definitely worth reading John Masters, of course, who might fairly be described as the Kipling of the twentieth century.
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Geoffrey Bocca, _La Legion!_, 1964. A journalistic history at the time of the Legion's retreat from Africa.
Two novelists:
Percival Christopher Wren (_Beau Geste_, etc) is problematic from an evidentiary standpoint. There is no credible evidence of his ever having been in the Legion, and he seems to have relied on a mixture of legionary memoirs and informal interviews. However, his workmanship seems to have been fairly good. Of course Rudyard Kipling was a newspaper man, and never served in the British Army either. "The onlooker sees most of the game..."
Jean Lartéguy, _The Centurions_ (_Lost Command_), _The Hounds of Hell_ (_Les Chimeres Noires_), etc. World War II service, afterwards, war correspondent, wrote a series of reflective novels about the decline and fall of the French empire.
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You might also look at Charles Miller, _Battle for the Bundu_, for the German equivalent in East Africa. On a more general level, Alfred Vagts, _A History of Militarism_, is a rather problematic book, but you need to address it if you have not already done so.
T F Smith -
12/23/2008
Aren't you missing the point that the Europeans - other than the British, for a variety of reasons - all had or were planning national service/mass conscription armies by 1877? (Isn't it worth noting is that the chart in the post on LGM is from 1877 to 1893?)
The AUS (simply to avoid USA as an acronym) had very few "auxiliaries" during that period - a few companies of "Indian" scouts raised on the western frontier, and that's about it, so there were next to no "native allies" in the 1877-93 period. And the regular Army had declined sharply after the French withdrew from Mexico and the end of Reconstruction.
The state militias/national guards were essentially moribund, as well; the Militia Act of 1903 was a reaction to the results of the 1898 mobilization and the VAUS.
The USN was in a different situation; the first "New Navy" (steel and steam, in part as a response to various European/South American incidents) cruisers were authorized in (IIRC) 1883, by the Arthur Administration, and the Navy progressed quite rapidly - by 1891, at the time of the Baltimore Affair, there were enough modern ships to seriously plan an expedition against Chile.
So if Mr. Bray is looking for periods to justify the thesis that the US was not anti-militarist, I don't think 1877-93 is it.
A long time ago, I read a summation that the US, for most of its history, has been a martial nation, but not militarist; I think that is a fair summation.
For most of its history, (ie, prior to 1945), the US - in peacetime - has maintained a (relatively) high quality navy and a small but professional army that could provide the cadre for a wartime emergency force when necessary; autarky allows that option.
David Silbey -
12/23/2008
Do the numbers include the European colonial armies (ie the Indian Army for the British)?
I think you're right that the numbers are too simple a measure. What it looks like is that the Americans had the equivalent of an imperial army, relying heavily on native allies (like European powers did) but not much of a regular army built primarily of citizens.
Chris Bray -
12/23/2008
Also, the clearest way to gauge the complexity and the difficulty of these comparisons is to look at the books that try to make them: Bruce Porter's War and the Rise of the State, for example, or Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State. I think they both do a pretty bad job with the early United States, and it shows how hard it is to make these comparisons. Charles Tilly compares violence and state development in different places, but ends up with phases and states that march in a teleological line (as my dissertation committee never got tired of pointing out).
I don't know of anyone who has made a successful comparison of state violence in the U.S. and Europe, taking into account regular forces, paramilitaries, native forces in colonial settings, and mercenaries. Tough, tough job to do it -- it sounds like a lifetime's work, to me.
Chris Bray -
12/23/2008
Those questions are all very hard to answer, and some of them might be impossible to answer -- how would you quantify the utility to the state of a European mercenary versus the utility to the state of a Creek warrior, for example? Numbers only say so much, so I doubt that it would help to modify the terms in LGM's chart. The chart, I think, is the problem.
I don't think U.S. and European states are incomparable on these questions, but I think the comparisons have to be a whole lot more careful than that figure of percentage in uniform. And above all, we have to get beyond the assumption that early Americans simply rejected military power. I think we get to the starting line when we move beyond that assumption, and then we can begin to figure out how these uses of irregular forces worked. In very recent years, there have been some extraordinary books on irregular warfare in the early republic: Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors, John Grenier's First Way of War, and a few others.
And finally, I think European powers and the U.S. might be most comparable in the colonial arena. The use of proxies and native forces is ordinary colonial practice, and I think the U.S. used some of the same kinds of leveraging in westward expansion that European powers used overseas.
But "they had more soldiers than we did" is, I'm repeating myself, just not that useful, or doesn't seem to me to be that useful.
Ralph E. Luker -
12/23/2008
Chris, Are you arguing that US and European states' are essentially incomparable in their use of armed forces? If they are comparable, how would you modify the terms in LGM's chart? Wouldn't use of Native American allied fighters be comparable to the European militaries' use of mercenaries?
