The Other Face of Battle : America's Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat

The Other Face of Battle plunges into the jarring and violent experience of America’s “other” wars: the often irregular, unconventional, and intercultural wars that have dominated the American military experience. The national narrative is dominated by the so-called “big wars,” but the other wars are both more common and equally critical to understanding American military history. American wars with enemies from different cultures, fighting with different tactics, have generated shocking battlefield defeats, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. In 1755, George Washington and other Anglo-American soldiers on an expedition to the Ohio Country were catastrophically defeated by French and Indian irregulars at the Monongahela, with resounding consequences for how Americans thought about themselves in combat over the next several generations. In 1898, U.S. troops at the Battle of Manila confronted Filipinos who had just fought and won a revolution against the Spanish—a battle that was but the opening round of a protracted U.S.-Filipino conflict sparked by American occupation and annexation. The unexpected war that followed was both conventional and irregular, an omen for America’s 20th-century wars. In 2010, U.S. soldiers and Afghan allies launched an extraordinarily complex, interservice attack on the village of Makuan in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The battle symbolized the Americans’ struggle to find and pin down the elusive Taliban enemy, despite careful planning, immense firepower, and nine years of experience fighting an insurgency. Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)--conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in "irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure--victory and defeat--in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate.War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold in common as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever. Taking its title from The Face of Battle , John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)--conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in "irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure--victory and defeat--in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold in common as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever. Focusing on three battles, each reflective of asymmetrical, intercultural, and irregular warfare, this provocative, harrowing, and illuminating book shows how American soldiers have experienced combat in which the "standard" rules of engagement did not apply.