Antulio Echevarria, Reconsidering the American Way of War (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014)
In direct response to Russell F. Weigley’s treatise on a singular American way of war, Antulio Echevarria’s Reconsidering the American Way of War analyzes American military operations from the War of Independence through Afghanistan to determine if the United States has ever followed a singular strategic pattern. After serving as Director of Research for the U.S. Army War College, the author is currently editor of its peer-reviewed publication, Parameters. A graduate of the West Point class of 1981, Dr. Echevarria is a retired armor officer who received a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. Motivated to bridge the gap between Weigley’s history of ideas and the reality of the American military experience, Echevarria succeeds in forcing the reader to ponder if the United States has enjoyed a consistent way of waging war since its inception.
Echevarria’s primary criticism of Weigley is not his broad ideas, but rather what he omitted—the “small wars” and other military actions in places like the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, the Philippines, China, and Russia. To the author, Weigley cherry-picks America’s significant conflicts to advance his thesis. Echevarria’s book, on the other hand, concentrates on strategic and operational practices throughout the entirety of American military history. Echevarria attempts to ground Weigley’s ideas of an American way of war with, as he says, “the more grounded narratives of America’s diverse wars and military actions.” (p. 1) The author, therefore, argues that the American military did not fight apolitical, single-minded wars using one of Hans Delbrück’s two strategies: annihilation or attrition, as Weigley espoused. Instead, he offers that American strategy has been open-ended, consistently engaging in conflicts with political considerations always at the forefront.
Despite the debate over strategic culture and practice, the author shows that if there exists an American way of war, it is one predicated on tactical success. The American assumption is that battlefield victories lead to successful campaigns and victorious war. This very thought leads to a narrow view of strategy and is the root cause of simplistic views about an American way of war. Instead, as Echevarria shows, battlefield success and victorious termination of war are not always compatible, and the failure to acknowledge the nuance of war termination has, as Echevarria says, “caused an American way of battle more than a way of war.” (p. 175)
The author concludes that an American way of battle exists based on the reliance on a link between tactical victories and strategic outcomes. American use of force over the 243-year history of the United States has been driven more by political considerations than simple military-only strategy, and as the author shows, the amount of force employed was rarely decisive. Rather than two strategies, as Weigley asserts, Echevarria offers six: annihilation, attrition and exhaustion, decapitation, coercive diplomacy, terror and intimidation, and deterrence. The author then concludes that American military practice grew from many beginnings and is a blend of both Jominian and Clausewitzian schools of thought concerning the control of positional objectives and the defeat of enemy forces.
More historiographical analysis than original research, Echevarria combines multiple frames of analysis to advance his argument against a singular American strategic culture or way of war. He is thus responding to American strategic literature by using the recent work of his colleagues to show that American strategic culture is not homogenous, and American ways of war are nuanced and flexible to fit the needs of each specific situation. Echevarria breaks his work into two parts and seven chapters. The first part challenges three leading myths across three chapters about American military action: its so-called “way of war,” the American strategic culture, and the idea of an American military art. After deconstructing these myths, Echevarria uses the second section to analyze four periods and more than forty conflicts to advance his argument against a single, coherent American way of war.
In addition to its challenge of Weigley, the book serves as an excellent history of the United States military due to its synopses of American uses of force. Echevarria’s challenge of the idea of a single strategic culture presents a refreshing, lucid interpretation of American military history. Because this book is well organized, readable, brief, it is ideal for students interested in the military aspects of American history. Also useful for scholars of American strategy making, it should be required reading of military officers and other government employees ascending to operational and strategic level positions.