Uncomfortable Experience: Lessons Lost in the Apache War.

摘要

The study of history serves multiple purposes. From the military perspective, history provides the opportunity to apply lessons from the past to meet modern challenges. After action reviews leverage immediate history, but the lessons are often anecdotal. Absent context, they may only apply to the current operating environment. Study of historical campaigns provides context and the ability to test hypotheses against multiple situations to determine if they merit doctrinal consideration. Unfortunately, broadly characterizing the era of conflict that supported United States western expansion as the Indian Wars created the popular misperception that the many wars fought on the North American continent, against multiple Native American nations to secure the present day boundaries of the United States were nothing more than a series of battles in a broad campaign through American soil. This misrepresentation of history, along with the uncomfortable methods that western expansion adopted, contributed to the military's reluctance to incorporate the lessons learned through over a century of warfare into modern practices.1