Non Peer

The US Army has not often faced a peer or near peer opponent.

Most of the time it's facing irregulars and rabble.

It was a surprising realization.

The Indian campaigns.

Philippine insurrections.

20th Century trips to Mexico.

Haiti. 

Some of Vietnam.

Afghanistan.

Latter half of Iraq.

You'd think we'd be better at it.

Because of my research for Sabers and Sorcery, I have been reading a lot about the Philippines.  I can even spell Philippines correctly on the first try most of the time because of it!

How America fights insurrections is to find a pocket of resistance, put overwhelming firepower on it, put out the fires started, bury some bodies and leave the area.

...And let the pocket get all resisty again.

Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.

In most cases we quit before the resistance is completely crushed and dead.

The Indian campaigns being the giant exception here.

I'm getting history lessons on this too.

Something that needs to be said loudly and a lot more often about the American Indian and their clashes with the United States is there was going to be a war between these people one way or another.

One people or the other was going to win that war.

The specifics of how the war started and why it was fought don't really matter as it was going to be something, sooner or later, so why not what actually happened?

It's a conflict that seems entirely too brutal to modern eyes.  What with our Geneva and Hague Conventions and rules of war and such.  It was not exceptionally bloody by the standards of the day.  In fact, the constant willingness to accept a surrender and create the reservations was considered very compassionate.

Eradication was how war would have been fought just a couple hundred years prior; and that manner of warfare was key in why the Sioux were so far west when what we think of as the Indian Wars were going on after the US Civil War.