The Other Face of Battle

James Sandy

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Military history and its practitioners were long derided for their obsession with battle. The bugles and banners style of operational history, the standard approach of the discipline until the mid-1970s, has cast a long shadow of exclusion and dismissal upon military historians and their purpose. That all changed when John Keegan’s The Face of Battle was released in 1976. Keegan’s seminal work centered on the soldiers’ experience and the multi-faceted consequences, costs, and havoc wreaked on the individual in combat. Keegan uses three critical British battles, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, to disprove mythologies, track the impact of new technologies, and present a more accurate representation of the realities of combat. Keegan literally changed the game, launching first the social and then the cultural turn in the discipline, both of which have created a forever richening scholarship seeking a deeper understanding of warfare, its realities, and widespread consequences.[1]

Wayne Lee, Anthony Carlson, David Preston, and David Silbey come together in The Other Face of Battle to present the next step in Keegan’s cause while highlighting a serious flaw in his objective. This book and its four authors, all of outstanding reputation and pedigree, stand on the 40-year foundation set by the cultural turn. In a masterful homage to Keegan and with eyes to the future, Lee, Carlson, Preston, and Silbey take the iconic work and its framework into the present by asking questions that are as difficult as they are important. While Keegan spotlights the soldiers’ experience in combat between culturally linked opponents on European battlefields, this new inquiry does the opposite: it explores the jarring and much more prevalent encounter when the enemy is the “other.”

American military personnel and their respective institutions remain obsessed with their own cultural pillars, which convinces them that the next war will be symmetric.

The Other Face of Battle offers its readers a look behind the curtain of American myth and offers a final call to learn from America’s most common conflicts: asymmetrical wars against cultural others. By drilling down to examine the cultural differences between American military forces and their opponents, the authors highlight a fundamental flaw in both American military history and its study: America’s regularly misguided and painful mistake in entering combat and relying upon unexamined cultural understandings and assumptions. American military ventures from the 1700s to the present have been overwhelmingly asymmetric and intercultural in form and function, but military commanders and soldiers alike have largely ignored this fact. Instead, according to Lee and friends, American military personnel and their respective institutions remain obsessed with their own cultural pillars, which convinces them that the next war will be symmetric.

Building on Keegan’s framework from the 1970s, The Other Face of Battle contains case studies of three forgotten, according to the authors, American battles: The Battle of Monongahela in 1755, the Battle of Manila in 1899, and the Battle for Mankuan in 2010.

The Other Face of Battle defines symmetric warfare as any situation where both participants field similarly organized and equipped forces, employ like-minded strategies, and generally view objectives and acceptable behaviors in the same way. Asymmetric conflicts are those against non-state actors or over-matched opponents, and those relying on differing approaches and metrics of victory. Perhaps the most enlightening and useful part of this discussion centers around the competing definitions and understanding of “battle.”[2]

This conversation distills competing meanings of battle and combat between two opposing forces. This work highlights a series of assumptions made by American military personnel about the meaning, means, and objective of combat, and the difficulties arising when one’s opponents approach and understand battle differently. Whether in the Pennsylvania backcountry or the Zhari district of Afghanistan, achieving meaningful success in battle proved difficult for American forces who assumed their opponents spoke “the same language” of success and significance in combat.[3] These failed assumptions and the inability of the American military to first recognize and then learn from them form the core of The Other Face of Battle’s message: even though the majority of America’s martial past is composed of asymmetrical and intercultural conflicts, the American military consistently believes the “next one” will be a large-scale symmetrical war against an adversary that thinks and behaves the same as it does.

Building on Keegan’s framework from the 1970s, The Other Face of Battle contains case studies of three forgotten, according to the authors, American battles: The Battle of Monongahela in 1755, the Battle of Manila in 1899, and the Battle for Mankuan in 2010. Each chapter is broken down into sections that present the relevant context and background. Building upon its namesake, this book first and foremost is about the experiences of those on the ground. Each section of the case studies rely heavily on personal correspondence and other intimate viewpoints of these battles. In between the case studies, the authors provide a brief interlude that carries the narrative from one battle to the next. These interludes, in some of the work’s tidiest sections, place the battles and their lessons on the overall timeline of American military history. They create a larger stage for the authors; the first discusses the lasting effects of Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela on the understanding and formation of future English and American armies in North America.[4]

Braddock’s defeat is the first battle analyzed, and the most recognizable and well-studied of the three. The abject chaos caused by the French and Native assault on Braddock’s conventional column resulted in one of the most significant victories for Native Americans against any European foe. The result highlights the initial stubborn arrogance of the British towards war on the North American continent, as they vastly underestimated their French and Native adversaries and the difficulties of fighting in the backwoods. Braddock’s defeat pushed the British to accept the need for irregular troops of their own to even the playing field. Each of the successive studies by the authors builds progressively from the foundation established with the Battle of Monongahela and serve to demonstrate the paucity of institutional learning that was taking place as the United States pushed its frontier west and into its role as a world power.

A hyper focus on symmetric battle in the world wars and the Cold War dominated the twentieth century and American understandings of conflict.

The second case study investigates the American Army’s conventional victory at Manila in 1899, where the Filipino static defense essentially dissolved in the face of frontal American assault. Cultural and racial assumptions about the Filipino army and its soldiers during and after the battle clouded the American ability to understand the reality of their victory. Americans saw poor marksmanship and continual retreat in the Filipino conventional forces, but were blind to the cultural forces motivating that behavior. This lack of awareness and care equally blinded American command to the ensuing shift towards and real threat of the guerrilla war that followed their victory at Manila.

Despite the hard fought and devastating years of guerilla war and counterinsurgency efforts of the Philippine-American War, American commanders continued to belittle and dismiss the legitimacy of small war as doctrine and prepared only for the next big war. Despite the plethora of small wars in the Caribbean and Central America in the ensuing years, these sentiments were reinforced by the First World War, and a tunnel vision and obsession with western Europe developed a total disregard for any other kind of conflict in American doctrine and military education. A hyper focus on symmetric battle in the world wars and the Cold War dominated the twentieth century and American understandings of conflict. This mindset, according to the authors, contributed to American struggles in Vietnam by hindering our ability to learn from an abundance of experience in asymmetric small wars.

…the authors ask future American commanders to not dismiss a force and culture they do not understand.

The final case study examines the 2010 battle for the Afghan village of Makuan in the opening hours of Operation Dragon Strike. Analyzing the battle for Makuan highlights the intercultural difficulties of fighting the Taliban while working alongside and through the fractured partnership with the Afghan National Army. This operation occurred at a watershed moment in the war following a troop increase and renewed momentum to achieve meaningful results. American commanders’ principal foe was the daunting IED problem, but believed that their 10 years of experience and technological advantages could finally turn the tide. Despite all this momentum, the operation ended in a frustrating and costly tactical victory without strategic dividend. Division between the coalition forces, devastating casualties, and a destroyed Makuan marked yet another moment of cultural disconnect in the frustrating war.[5]

Learning from one's experiences is the clarion call in the book’s final section, which closes with a list of thematic lessons for future American conflicts. Among these, the authors ask future American commanders to not dismiss a force and culture they do not understand. In one of the most difficult lessons presented, they plead with future decision makers to avoid the allure of the bigger is better way of American war. Technological superiority can only take a nation so far. The final two lessons ring the loudest. Asymmetrical and intercultural conflicts are difficult for the United States to fight and even more difficult for the American people to understand and rationalize. These realities combine in creating a gap that the veterans of these conflicts are increasingly slipping through. Understanding the realities of these conflicts will help the country support those bearing the brunt of these difficulties. Finally this book asks its reader to remember America’s history with the unconventional, asymmetric, and intercultural wars and not forget them to plan for the next big war.[6]

While a clear nod to Keegan’s landmark work, The Other Face of Battle relates more appropriately with the debates concerning the “American Way of War,” or more recently labelled American martial culture.

At its best, this book represents the leading edge of military history. It pushes the conversation away from long held assumptions and mythologies of America’s martial past and forces the reader to take an objective look at how the American culture has conceived the very meanings of combat. While a clear nod to Keegan’s landmark work, The Other Face of Battle relates more appropriately with the debates concerning the “American Way of War,” or more recently labelled American martial culture. This discipline, which has its own 40-plus year foundation, is flush with contemporary and powerful works like Adrian Lewis’ The American Culture of War, Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to War, and Mary Dudziak’s War Time.[7]

The Other Face of Battle deserves to join these works and the rich scholarly contributions they make to the field. Together they seek to understand how America and its people experience and understand conflict and the mythologies and misunderstandings clouding that past. This book pushes towards that essential next step by making its primary focus the soldiers’ experience and viewpoint. Here Lee, Carlson, Preston, and Silbey build on the work of James Wright in Those Who Have Borne the Battle, and others who bring the narrow and clouded horizon of the individual soldier into view.[8]

As America leaves Afghanistan, it once again seeks to forget the frustrations and lessons of asymmetrical and intercultural warfare in preparation for the next great power conflict that may never come. Lee, Carlson, Preston, and Silbey clearly present a necessary addition to the field: America’s tradition of ignoring the small wars and their uncomfortable lessons. The Other Face of Battle resoundingly succeeds in its objectives and should leave a profound mark on the field.