Drawdown

The American Way of Postwar

Jason W. Warren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479860715
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Analyzes the cultural attitudes, political decisions, and institutions surrounding the maintenance of armed forces throughout American history While traditionally, Americans view expensive military structure as a poor investment and a threat to liberty, they also require a guarantee of that very freedom, necessitating the employment of armed forces. Beginning with the seventeenth-century wars of the English colonies, Americans typically increased their military capabilities at the beginning of conflicts only to decrease them at the apparent conclusion of hostilities. In Drawdown: The American Way of Postwar, a stellar team of military historians argue that the United States sometimes managed effective drawdowns, sowing the seeds of future victory that Americans eventually reaped. Yet at other times, the drawing down of military capabilities undermined our readiness and flexibility, leading to more costly wars and perhaps defeat. The political choice to reduce military capabilities is influenced by Anglo-American pecuniary decisions and traditional fears of government oppression, and it has been haphazard at best throughout American history. These two factors form the basic American “liberty dilemma,” the vexed relationship between the nation and its military apparatuses from the founding of the first colonies through to present times.
With the termination of large-scale operations in Iraq and the winnowing of forces in Afghanistan, the United States military once again faces a significant drawdown in standing force structure and capabilities. The political and military debate currently raging around how best to affect this force reduction continues to lack a proper historical perspective. This volume aspires to inform this dialogue. Not a traditional military history, Drawdown analyzes cultural attitudes, political decisions, and institutions surrounding the maintenance of armed forces.

Part I

Building the American Military Ideal

1

The Art of War

Early Anglo-American Translation, 1607–1643

Kevin McBride with Ashley Bissonnette

Two paradigms dominate the historiography of the Pequot War (1636–1637)—the earliest war fought between English colonists and Native Americans in northeastern North America.1 The first is that Indigenous warfare in southern New England, described as “a Skulking Way of War,” was kin based and ritual in nature with limited goals and objectives that were primarily related to revenge, prestige, and captive taking, and resulted in relatively few casualties.2 A corollary of this perspective is that southern New England was a relatively peaceful place until the arrival of Europeans in the early seventeenth century, after which Native groups began to compete for dominance in the fur and wampum trade. The second paradigm is that New England (primarily Connecticut) colonists who decisively defeated the Pequot, at the time the most powerful tribe in southern New England, were with the exception of a few experienced officers ill trained and inexperienced men drawn from trainbands and provided with weapons they barely knew how to use. In this narrative, the colonists achieved victory over the Pequot largely because of superior military technology and, from a colonial perspective, “Gods Providence.”3

Neither of these perspectives accurately portrays the events and conduct of the Pequot War, nor how 77 Connecticut soldiers and 250 Mohegan, Wangunk, and Narragansett allies were able to march into the middle of Pequot country and decisively defeat the Pequot, who could field almost a thousand men against the English and allied Indian force. Connecticut’s decisive victory over the Pequot in the Mistick Campaign was a radical departure from the existing Anglo-American military-militia system in a number of ways. The campaign drew heavily upon the ranks of combat veterans in the Connecticut settlements, relied heavily on their native allied contingent for support and intelligence, and adapted European weapons and tactics to the enemy and terrain of the New England frontier. The Mistick Campaign (May 18–May 27, 1637) was the decisive campaign of the war, and consisted of two battles fought over an eighteen-hour period. The Pequot lost more than five hundred warriors in these battles, virtually destroying their military capability and leading to their defeat and near annihilation six weeks later.

An analysis of the Mistick Campaign integrating information gleaned from Pequot War battle narratives and recent battlefield archaeological surveys provides important new insights into the campaign and calls into question long-held assumptions about the nature, organization, and experience of Connecticut’s militia and the capabilities of its citizen soldiers. Connecticut, as well as the other New England colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts, had a complex and divisive relationship with the professional soldiers in their respective colonies, and Connecticut’s soldiers played an important role in the defense of English settlements. Jason Warren (in this volume and in his recent book Connecticut Unscathed) persuasively argues that during King Philip’s War/Great Narragansett War (1675–1676), New England’s militias formed around the English trainband model, and with the important exception of Connecticut, were woefully inadequate to protect settlers and property from Indian attacks. He argues further that an ill-prepared militia dependent on citizen soldiers and an underfunded military structure based on Anglo-American traditions and beliefs led to near disaster in King Philip’s War, proportionally the second most devastating conflict in American history.4 The same could well have been the case in the Pequot War if not for the constellation of a unique set of circumstances that seemingly argues against Warren’s basic premise but in fact fully supports it.

Connecticut achieved victory over the Pequot because of a cadre of experienced officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers who served in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in the Lowlands of Europe and settled in the Connecticut River Valley between 1634 and 1636. These veteran colonists were present by both design and circumstance and comprised a fairly high percentage of the English population in the Connecticut colonies on the eve of the Pequot War, contributing as much as one-quarter of the Connecticut soldiers who served in the Pequot War. The officers and men who planned the attack on the fortified Pequot village at Mistick and subsequently led the English allied force through a ten-hour, six-mile fighting withdrawal through the middle of Pequot territory drew upon their collective experiences in the Thirty Years’ War. These men also relied upon their recent experiences fighting the Pequot, and designed a tour de force of an offensive campaign that led to the complete defeat of the Pequot. The successful planning and execution of the Mistick Campaign were achieved because of the commanders’ ability to successfully translate their experiences from the battlefields of Europe to the terrain and enemies of the New World. In any other circumstance, colonial trainbands, trained and organized for home defense, would have been incapable of planning and executing a complex offensive operation such as the Mistick Campaign. Connecticut and Saybrook colonies’ reliance on veteran soldiers during the Pequot War was a significant departure from the English tradition of using trainbands for homeland defense and sending the more undesirable men overseas with the militia. Connecticut’s victories forty years later in King Philip’s War were built upon the lessons learned in the Pequot War and led to a new frontier mentality characterized by a greater reliance on experienced soldiers and Native allies.5

On the eve of the Pequot War, the Pequot numbered approximately four thousand people, reduced by as much as 30–40 percent from the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634. The Pequot resided in twenty-six villages of varying sizes along the coast and estuaries of Long Island Sound in southeastern Connecticut. The two chief sachems of the tribe, Sassacus and Momoho, resided in the two fortified villages at Weinshauks and Mistick, respectively.6 In the decades before the Pequot War, the Pequot forged a powerful confederacy of dozens of tributary and allied tribes along Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River Valley.7 The Pequot gained control of the lucrative fur and wampum (shell beads fashioned from marine shell) trade in southern New England by subjugating dozens of tribes through coercion and warfare.8 By the eve of the Pequot War, the Pequot were the most powerful tribe in southern New England, and the Pequot military was well organized and highly experienced after decades of warfare with their Native neighbors, and a brief war with the Dutch in 1634.

The Pequot War

The Pequot War was the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Europeans in northeastern North America. The war lasted eleven months and involved thousands of combatants who fought several battles over an area encompassing thousands of square miles. The most significant battles of the war took place during the Mistick Campaign of May 18–26, 1637, when an expeditionary force of Connecticut soldiers and Native allies attacked and burned the fortified Pequot village at Mistick, killing 400 Pequot (225 men) in less than an hour, half of whom burned to death. The “Mistick Massacre” is widely cited by historians as the major battle of the Pequot War that led directly to the disintegration and defeat of the Pequot tribe as they fled their homeland following the massacre.

The Pequot War began in September of 1636 when a force of twenty soldiers from Massachusetts Bay sailed to the Pequot (Thames) River to demand that the Pequot turn over to English justice the murderers of several English from two years before.9 The Pequot believed the killings were justified and refused to turn over any of those involved. The English disembarked, and after many hours of fruitless negotiations arrayed themselves in battle formation and attacked the Pequot, killing several and, as the English reported, burning two villages—and “thus began the wars between the Indians and us in these parts.”10

While the attack was the first time the English confronted Native battle formations, tactics, and weapons in New England, such was not the case for the Pequot, who had fought a brief war with the Dutch two years earlier. Although muskets were superior to Pequot bows in terms of range and penetration, the Pequot were able to use the terrain to their advantage and employ a number of tactics to negate the English advantage in firearms. The English would suffer dozens of casualties in the first six months of the Pequot War before they were able to adapt their Old World military experiences to the battlefields of the New World and win a decisive engagement against the Pequot. The Native allies of the English played an important role in this process as the English relied heavily on their more trusted Mohegan and Wangunk allies (including two Pequot) for guides, intelligence gathering, and scouting. On several occasions, the Native allies helped the English find the enemy under circumstances best suited to effectively utilize European firepower and battle formations.

In retaliation the Pequot laid siege to the nascent Saybrook Fort and colony at the mouth of the Connecticut River, cutting off most of the river traffic to the upriver colonies at Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor. Saybrook Fort and colony were settled in late 1635, less than a year before the Pequot War began. The Saybrook proprietors planned a potential refuge for a group of wealthy and influential Puritans whose politics and religious convictions were counter to those espoused by Charles I and the bishop of the Church of England. Fearing for their safety the proprietors contracted with like-minded Puritans such as Reverend Hugh Peters and John Winthrop Jr. for “makinge of fortifications and buildinge of houses at the Riuer Connecticut and the harbor adjoyninge, first for ther owne present accommodation and then such houses as may receive men of quality which latter houses we would have to be builded within the fort.”11 Peters and some of the Saybrook proprietors were also veterans of the Thirty Years’ War who knew many of the chaplains, officers, and men serving in English regiments in the Lowlands and drew extensively upon them to plan and settle the fort and colony at Saybrook and a settlement at Windsor twenty miles upriver. In 1634, Saybrook proprietor Sir Richard Saltonstall recruited twenty-one men for his Windsor venture, of which ten would serve in the Pequot War, although it is not known how many of these men were veterans of the Thirty Years’ War.12 In 1635 Sergeant Lion Gardiner (later a lieutenant) was hired by the Saybrook proprietors to oversee “the drawing, ordering, & making of a city, towns, or forts of defense” at Saybrook.13 Lion Gardiner, an experienced and capable noncommissioned officer, served for several years as an “engineer of fortifications” under Frederick Henry, prince of Orange, during the Thirty Years’ War.14 Of the twenty or so men who served with Gardiner at Saybrook Fort during the Pequot War, at least six are identified as veterans of the Thirty Years’ War (see table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Saybrook Garrison: Men with Military Experience
Name	Lifespan	Previous Old World Experience	Fort Task
Lion Gardiner a	b.1599–d.1663	Military Engineer, Holland	Fort Engineer
Robert Chapman b	b.1616–d.1687	Surveyor, under Lion Gardiner, Holland	Sentinel
James Rogers c	d.1689	“Soldier, traveler and scholar”	Garrison
John Spencer d	b.1595–d.1648	Gunner	Gunner
John Wood e	d.1639	Ensign	Garrison
Thomas Pell f	b.1608–d.1668	Surgeon, Lieutenant, Holland	Surgeon

a. Lion Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, W. N. Chattin Carlton, ed. (Hartford, CT: Hartford Press, 1901).

b. Anne Sweet, Robert ...