‘Dreams of Battle’: A Small Window into the Evolution of us Army Tactical Ethics, 1921–2009

Abstract

E. D. Swinton's The Defence of Duffer's Drift: A Lesson in the Fundamentals of Small Unit Tactics, originally published in 1904, uses the device of a series of recurring but progressive nightmares to teach a set of tactical lessons that Swinton derived from his service in the Second Anglo-Boer War. Now a minor classic, The Defence of Duffer's Drift has had an enduring and international impact. The book's popularity has also led to the publication of several narratives inspired by the original, many of them authored by serving members of the US Army. Although this subset of the ‘progeny’ of Swinton's work are focused on teaching tactical lessons, read together they provide a small but fascinating window into the evolution of the US Army's understanding of the ethics of armed conflict at the tactical level. The texts that are the focus of this paper span a period of 88 years, covering the post-First World War emphasis on positional warfare, through the shift to a focus on large-scale mechanized warfare that reached its apogee in the Cold War, to the early approach to fighting insurgents in Iraq and, ultimately, to the population-centric approach of counterinsurgency propounded by General Petraeus and his advisers.