The New American Way of War

Abstract

THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR. That phrase-popularized by the military historian Russell Weigley in his 1973 book-has come to refer to a grinding strategy of attrition: the strategy employed by Ulysses S. Grant to destroy Robert E. Lee's army in 1864-65, by John J. Pershing to wear down the German army in 1918, and by the U.S. Army Air Force to pulverize all the major cities of Germany and Japan in 1944-45. In this view, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II were won not by tactical or strategic brilliance but by the sheer weight of numbers-the awesome destructive power that only a frilly mobilized and highly industrialized democracy can bring to bear. In all these conflicts, U.S. armies composed of citizen-soldiers suffered and inflicted massive casualties. Much the same methods characterized the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, though with decreasing levels of success; the former being a costly draw, the latter a bloody failure. The first GulfWar was much more successful, but in many ways, it still fit the traditional, fire power-intensive mode: more than five weeks of relentless bombing was followed by a massive armored onslaught. Although the left hook that swept around Iraqi forces entrenched in Kuwait showed some operational flair, it was hardly a gamble-the eight-division allied force was so heavy that it simply crushed everything in its path.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 105 citations exist upstream.