Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

Prologue: Injun Country

1. See Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865 (1967; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 5.

2. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Conflict (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), p. 86. Furthermore, the term “strategic corporal” was coined by Marine Gen. Charles Krulak in 1999.

3. Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 7. Gruen is commenting on an essay by Paul Veyne about Roman imperialism. James (now Jan) Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 91.

4. Gruen, Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, pp. 286–87.

5. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 196.

6. Bernard De Voto, The Course of Empire (1952; reprint, New York: American Heritage, 1980), p. 228.

7. Ibid., p. 266.

8. Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), p. 172.

9. International Institute for Strategic Studies (London); U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 6, 2003; and Victoria Thompson, research associate, Council on Foreign Relations, in Max Boot, “Bush Funding Request Would Keep Iraq on Recovery Road,” USA Today, Sept. 29, 2003.

10. Byron Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army: All the Queen’s Men (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 115; Eliot A. Cohen, “Why the Gap Matters,” The National Interest, Fall 2000.

11. John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), p. 24; Robert D. Kaplan, “Fort Leavenworth and the Eclipse of Nationhood,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1996, p. 86.

12. John Keegan, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (New York: Knopf, 1996), chap. 5, “Forts on the Plains.”

13. Ibid., p. 270.

14. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), p. 3.

15. Quoted in Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Indian Wars (New York: American Heritage, 1977), p. 165.

16. Brian W. Dippie, The Frederic Remington Art Museum Collection (Ogdensburg, NY: Frederic Remington Art Museum, 2001), p. 13.

17. Ibid.

18. De Voto, Course of Empire, p. 266.

19. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 28.

20. Ibid., pp. 28–29.

21. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xi. See also Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. xxi.

22. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Vintage, 1982), pp. 282–83, 508, 594.

23. Robert Work, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, briefing on America’s overseas bases, Washington, DC, June 19, 2003. This passage is based on his analysis.

24. Ibid.

Chapter 1—CENTCOM: Yemen, Winter 2002

1. Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 167–69; Malise Ruthven, Freya Stark in Southern Arabia (Reading, UK: Garnet, 1995), p. 19; Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadramaut (London: Murray, 1936). See her acknowledgments.

2. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), p. 103.

3. See my report “Supremacy by Stealth,” The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003.

4. The Economist: World in Figures, 2001.

5. Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 6.

6. Michael Jenner, Yemen Rediscovered (London: Longman, 1983), p. 56.

7. James (now Jan) Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 317; Ruthven, Freya Stark in Southern Arabia, p. 9.

8. Ruthven, Freya Stark in Southern Arabia, p. 9.

9. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), p. 89.

10. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951; reprint, New York: Noonday, 1990), p. 109.

Chapter 2—SOUTHCOM: Colombia, Winter 2003

1. Gen. Shachnow would later publish his autobiography, with Jann Robbins, Hope and Honor (New York: Doherty, 2004).

2. Livy, History of Rome, trans. Evan T. Sage and Alfred C. Schlesinger (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 42.34.

3. A. J. Simons, The Company They Keep: Life Inside the U.S. Army Special Forces (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 29.

4. Col. Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 25, 74.

5. Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 135.

6. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 453. Quoted in Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: The Untold Story of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 270.

7. Simons, The Company They Keep, p. 215.

8. A. J. Bacevich, James D. Hallums, Richard H. White, and Thomas F. Young, American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988), p. 16.

9. Stephen Peter Rosen, “An Empire, If You Can Keep It,” National Interest, Spring 2003; Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

10. Barry Asmus, The Best Is Yet to Come (Atlanta: Ameripress, 2001), p. 97.

11. Bacevich et al., American Military Policy in Small Wars, p. 25.

12. Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 360.

13. Col. Joseph R. Nunez, Fighting the Hobbesian Trinity in Colombia: A New Strategy for Peace (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2001), p. 31.

14. United States Army Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia, Ranger Handbook, July 1992, pp. 6-31–6-35.

15. Martin van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 25.

16. Journal of Special Warfare, October 1993.

17. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904; reprint, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1963), p. 195.

18. Safford and Palacios. Colombia, p.7.

19. Ibid., p. 278.

20. Alma Guillermoprieto, Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (New York: Pantheon, 2001), p. 52.

21. Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), p. 11.

22. Dr. Richard W. Stewart, USASOC historian, “Special Forces in El Salvador, 1980–92: A Synopsis,” John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, p. 5.

23. “El Salvador: Military Assistance Has Helped Counter but Not Overcome the Insurgency; Report to the Honorable Edward M. Kennedy, U.S. Senate” (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, Apr. 23, 1991), pp. 3, 4, 26, 21.

24. Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Eagle’s Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

25. Strategic Forecasting LLC, “Colombia: Growing Crisis in Arauca?,” Jan. 30, 2003.

26. “Security in Venezuela: A Lack of Clarity on Terror,” The Economist, Mar. 22, 2003.

27. Linda Robinson, “Terror Close to Home: In Oil-rich Venezuela, a Volatile Leader Befriends Bad Actors from the Mideast, Colombia, and Cuba,” U.S. News & World Report, Oct. 6, 2003.

28. Ranger Handbook, section 5-11.

29. Ibid., sections 6-19, 6-20.

Chapter 3—PACOM: Mongolia, Spring 2003

1. The main source for historical background in this chapter is René Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (1939; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970).

2. B. Batbayar (Baabar), History of Mongolia (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, 1999), p. 8.

3. Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, p. xxix.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. xxiv.

6. Batbayar, History of Mongolia, p. 29.

7. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 6, 1776–88 (New York: Knopf, 1994), ch. 64, part 3.

8. Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, p. 225.

9. Geoffrey Moorhouse, On the Other Side: A Journey Through Soviet Central Asia (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); mentioned also in my book Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus (New York: Random House, 2000).

10. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 6, ch. 64.

11. Ibid., part 4.

12. Batbayar, History of Mongolia, p. 32.

13. Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, pp. 256–57.

14. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 6, ch. 64, part 4.

15. Grousset, Empire of the Steppes, p. 280.

16. David Lattimore’s 1995 introduction to Owen Lattimore’s The Desert Road to Turkestan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).

17. Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 14.

18. See Peter Hopkirk’s chapters on the Mad Baron, and bibliography, in Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (London: Murray, 1984). Also Fitzroy Maclean’s To the Back of Beyond (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), and Charles Gallenkamp’s Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001), pp. 123–24.

19. Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze (New York: Kodansha, 1995), p. 137.

20. See Gallenkamp’s biography, Dragon Hunter.

21. Byron Farwell, The Gurkhas (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 12, 51.

22. Roy Chapman Andrews, Across Mongolian Plains: A Naturalist’s Account of China’s “Great Northwest” (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Fredonia, 2001), pp. 62–63.

23. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 185. And it wasn’t only Stilwell who made this observation. So did Owen Lattimore on the first page of Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

24. Peter Fleming, News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir (1936; reprint, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), p. 18.

25. Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter, p. 141.

26. Chapman Andrews, Across Mongolian Plains, p. 5.

27. Ibid., p. 8.

28. Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan, p. 101.

29. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, pp. 88–89.

30. Fleming, News from Tartary, p. 252.

31. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 95.

32. In addition to Rashid, see Shirin Akiner’s Tajikistan: Disintegration or Reconciliation? (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2001).

33. Lattimore, The Desert Road to Turkestan, p. 149.

34. Chapman Andrews, Across Mongolian Plains, p. 186.

35. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Library Publications), p. 57.

36. Lattimore, Nomads and Commissars, p. 16.

Chapter 4—PACOM: The Philippines, Summer 2003

1. Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 51, 65, 68, 73, 115, 185, 248, 253.

2. James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1951; reprint, New York: Delta, 1998), pp. 15–17, 492.

3. GlobalSecurity.org, reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003.

4. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 55. This book offers the best compendium of American imperialist expansion in mainly small seaborne conflicts, as well as much needed revisionism on the wars in the Philippines and Vietnam.

5. Ibid., chs. 2, 3.

6. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 12, 119.

7. Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 27; Richard C. Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 133–47.

8. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, p. 128.

9. Samuel K. Tan, The Filipino-American War, 1899–1913 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2002), p. 248.

10. Regarding the details of the war, I have relied heavily on Linn’s The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, as well as on Boot, Karnow, and other sources.

11. Taft Papers, series 21, letter dated July 14, 1900; Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, p. 22.

12. Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, p. 46.

13. Ibid., p. 57.

14. Ibid., p. 76.

15. Ibid., p. 85.

16. Ibid., p. 170.

17. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, p. 125.

18. Karnow, In Our Image, p. 140.

19. Boot, Savage Wars of Peace, p. 127.

20. Karnow, In Our Image, p. 197.

21. Tan, The Filipino-American War, p. 256.

22. Ibid.

23. James Fallows, “A Damaged Culture,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1987, pp. 49–58.

24. Karnow, In Our Image, p. 14.

25. Thomas McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 80–81.

26. Ibid., p. 85. Also see Tan, The Filipino-American War, pp. 192, 200.

27. Linn, Guardians of Empire, pp. 35–36.

28. Tan, The Filipino-American War, p. 177.

29. McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels, pp. 43, 44, 104, 112, 143, 144.

30. Raymond Bonner, “Philippine Camps Are Training Al Qaeda’s Allies, Officials Say,” New York Times, May 31, 2003.

31. See Maria A. Ressa’s Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (New York: Free Press, 2003).

32. Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 367.

33. A.J. Bacevich, James D. Hallums, Richard H. White, and Thomas F. Young, American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988), p. 40.

34. Karnow, In Our Image, p. 302.

35. Jones, From Here to Eternity, p. 172.

36. Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj: From the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence: 1858–1947 (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 59–60.

37. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 136.

38. Byron Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army: All the Queen’s Men (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 209.

Chapter 5—CENTCOM and SOCOM: Afghanistan, Autumn 2003

1. Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. xv.

2. Williamson Murray and Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 248.

3. Amy Waldman and Dexter Filkins, “Two U.S. Fronts: Quick Wars but Bloody Peace,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 2003.

4. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 293.

5. Lt. Col. David Maxwell, 1st Special Forces Group, unpublished paper, “How to Fight Counter-Insurgency.”

6. Robert D. Kaplan, “The Lawless Frontier: The Tribal Lands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Reveal the Future of Conflict in the Subcontinent, Along with the Dark Side of Globalization,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 2000.

7. This and the following paragraphs draw heavily on my “Lawless Frontier” and my book on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Soldiers of God (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). See bibliography in Soldiers of God for more.

8. Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550 b.c.–a.d. 1957 (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 255.

9. Kaplan, “Lawless Frontier.”

10. Robin Moore, The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 5.

11. Ibid., p. 200.

12. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 31–34, 38, 43–44, 121–122.

13. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, 1980), pp. 248–49.

14. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 44.

15. Kaplan, Soldiers of God, p. 30.

16. Cash, Mind of the South, p. 56.

17. Ibid., p. 57.

18. Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj: From the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence, 1858–1947 (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 68, 197–98.

19. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 3.

20. Ibid.

21. Farwell, Armies of the Raj, p. 192.

22. Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), pp. 203–204.

23. Ibid., p. 104.

24. Ibid., pp. 214–15.

25. See Alan Warren, Waziristan: The Faqir of Ipi and the Indian Army: The North West Frontier Revolt of 1936–37 (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2000).

26. Callwell, Small Wars, pp. 84, 115, 133, 136, 207.

Chapter 6—From the Army to the Marines—Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Winter 2003–2004

1. Among other articles, see H.D.S. Greenway’s “Embedded with Their Satphones,” New York Times Book Review, Nov. 23, 2003.

2. See, for example, my criticism of the Army’s strategy: “Think Global, Fight Local: Our Force Is No Longer Light and Lethal in Afghanistan,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 19, 2003.

3. Quoted in James Tobin’s introduction to Reporting America at War: An Oral History, comp. Michelle Ferrari (New York: Hyperion, 2003).

4. Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Drastic Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 115. See Lind’s footnotes as well.

5. My experiences in Afghanistan generally tracked with the views of Lawrence Kaplan (no relation) in his article “Willpower,” The New Republic, Sept. 8, 2003.

6. Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 19.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 64.

9. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 334.

10. Small War Manual: United States Marine Corps, 1940 (1940; reprint, Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1996).

11. These quotes are all taken from the Small Wars Manual, sections 1-6, 1-7, 1-8, 6-1, 6-2, 6-20.

Chapter 7—CENTCOM: Horn of Africa, Winter 2004

1. The historical and geographical background in these paragraphs is adapted from an early book of mine, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2003).

2. Donald N. Levine, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 5.

3. Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 116. In Chapter 9, I go into more detail about the reasons, both technological and historical, driving civilian and military command chains together.

4. See Joshua Hammer, “Keeping the Faith,” The New Republic Online, Feb. 2, 2004.

5. Levine, Wax and Gold, p. 13.

6. Ibid., pp. 5, 17, 250–51.

7. Ibid., p. ix, 82, 174, 242, 251–52, 284.

8. Ibid., p. 16.

Chapter 8—CENTCOM: Iraq, Spring 2004

1. Bing West and Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith (USMC ret.), The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division (New York: Bantam, 2003), pp. 2, 3, 18; Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, trans. Rex Warner (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1949).

2. Michael R. Gordon, “Marines Plan to Use Velvet Glove More Than Iron Fist,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2003.

3. The biographical background on Chesty Puller is drawn from Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 244–48.

4. Matthew 6: 9–13.

5. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964; Harmondworth, UK: Penguin, 1982); citations are to the Penguin edition. The following graphs of historical background are drawn from my book The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York: Free Press, 1993).

6. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 23, 27, 35.

7. Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937; reprint, London: Picador, 1981), p. 46.

8. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 24–25.

9. Freya Stark, Islam To-day, ed. A. J. Arberry and Rom Landau (London: Faber & Faber, 1943).

10. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p.136.

11. Ibid., p. 20.

12. See the various essays on Iraqi tribalism in Faleh H. Jabar and Hosham Dawod, eds., Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2003), pp. 8, 82, 90, 113–14, 138, 283.

13. See, in particular, Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. xii; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; reprint, New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 92–97; and Robert Sherrod, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), photo insert.

14. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 1.

15. Byron Farwell, Mr. Kipling’s Army: All the Queen’s Men (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 79–80.

16. See Keith William Nolan, Battle for Hue: Tet 1968 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1983), pp. ix, 181–85; Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 394–98.

17. Nolan, Battle for Hue, pp. 29, 82, 143, 164; Hanson, Carnage and Culture, p. 395.

18. Nolan, Battle for Hue, p. 167.

19. For a description of marine snipers and their equipment see Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (New York: Scribner, 2003); esp. pp. 54–58, 121–22, 135–36.

20. See Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 75, 80, 82, 84, 195, 196.

21. See Hanson, Carnage and Culture.

22. See Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), pp. 51, 59.

23. Ibid., p. 271.

24. Ibid., pp. 49, 289, 291.

25. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1935; reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), p. 360.

26. See Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 196–97; and Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. 137–38, 151–53.

27. See Lt. Gen. Conway’s own criticism of the administration, which came several months later, as reported by Rajiv Chandrasekan in “Key General Criticizes April Attack in Fallujah: Abrupt Withdrawal Called Vacillation,” Washington Post, September 13, 2004.

28. See Fred Anderson’s brilliant ruminations on imperial control in Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), pp. 741–42.