Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits by John Arquilla Read Free Book Online Page B

Rogers and his rangers had traversed in the war against the French and their Indian allies. He remained a careful recruiter, at one point even catching the rebel spy Nathan Hale, who sought to infiltrate the force and report on British intentions. 17 Ironically, many of the Native Americans whom Rogers had fought in the previous war now allied themselves with the British against the rebels. They added significantly to the Crown’s bush-fighting capabilities, the end result being the rise of an irregular war out of Niagara that for its ferocity made Pontiac’s campaign seem pale by comparison. Indeed, the most savage battle of the Revolution was fought with irregular troops on both sides in 1777 at Oriskany, which featured perhaps the war’s highest percentages of each side’s forces killed or wounded in action. 18
    Rogers eventually alienated his British masters—who had become more enamored of another Tory ranger, one Walter Butler—and left their service while the war was still going on. He returned to the United Kingdom drunk, divorced, and despondent, dying there in 1795. The British erected no great monument to him, nor of course did the Americans. But the ultimate success of the Revolution had nonetheless been critically dependent upon Rogers’s influence. He may have fought against his own people, but the troops who defeated the Redcoats and loyalist Tories grew from the earlier seeds he had planted. As one thoughtful account observes, “all the original rifle units of the Continental Army could be lumped into the ranger class.” 19 These troops held their own in stand-up fights, fended off the irregulars they had to confront, and in the decisive southern campaign, blended traditional battles and insurgent actions in a manner and under a leader, Nathanael Greene, that the British could never effectively counter. For having inspired and helped enable such an innovative approach to war, Robert Rogers deserves an honored place in our memory—if not our sympathy.
3
    FIGHTING QUAKER:
NATHANAEL GREENE

Painting by C. W. Peale, U.S. National Archives website
    In one of military history’s more ironic turns, each side began the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) with considerable capacities for waging irregular warfare, yet both proved oddly reluctant to emphasize this mode of conflict. For their part, the Americans started with a citizen soldiery whose ranks were replete with fine marksmen who also had a great aptitude for operating in the wilderness. Their superiority in firefights, when allowed to aim freely at marks of their own choosing, was apparent in the early engagements in and around Boston and would surface time and again throughout the war. But for some reason rebel leaders from the outset chose to transform these fine natural soldiers into a “proper” (i.e., European-style) conventional army designed along classical lines, closely drilled in ordered movement and massed volley fire. The principal champion of “conventionalizing” the Continental Army, oddly enough, was George Washington, whose early experience with Braddock was apparently not searing enough to tarnish his dream of building a force that looked smart on the parade ground and fought well on the traditional battleground. As a supreme commander he proved quite hidebound about military doctrine.
    Nevertheless Washington enjoyed the full confidence of Revolutionary political leaders and, save for the brief, futile plotting of the “Conway cabal,” which sought to have him sacked, he was able to have his way. The military historian Russell Weigley has thus observed Washington’s position in the early strategic debate with Charles Lee—not one of the Lees of Virginia, but a retired British officer with rebel leanings who had also served under Braddock—about how to wage the war:
Washington rejected the counsel of Major General Charles Lee, who believed that a war fought to attain revolutionary purposes ought to be waged in a