Settle and conquer: the ultimate counterinsurgency success

Matthew J. Flynn

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2021, vol. 32, issue 3, 509-534

Abstract: American westward expansion so thoroughly undermined Native people and cultures that it has earned a place in history as the ultimate counterinsurgency success. The creation of a new American reality did not arise from a punitive act of waging war on an adversary so much as from an unkept promise of assimilation of the Native culture into the new nation. This process left all parties swapping missions of insurgent and counterinsurgent, until the young nation no longer needed Natives to enable settlement. Then, conquest arose as an inaccurate label masking a failed military effort to wage ‘total war.’ That narrative was established when the civilian tide of frontiersmen, militia, explorers, and pioneers teamed with soldiers to control ‘Indian country.’ That demographic end state became a broken analogy that dictates American efforts at counterinsurgency today.

Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2020.1829871

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