Notes

America, or more accurately the very, very loose group of quite different colonies that stumbled into a war of rebellion individually out of broad consumer boycotts and protests on their empire’s economic development and taxation schemes (taxes to pay for defending those colonies against the French and Indians in the 1757–1765 war) had no strategy. The closest to a strategy was end British occupation of key cities over the course of the war (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, etc.) and convince British and Tory military units in the countryside to give up and go back to England. It was an endlessly changing and improvised war of attrition, much like the 1861–1865 Confederate strategy, the Afghans against the British, Russians, and US, the Vietnamese strategy against the French and Americans, the Boer strategy against the British, etc…make it so costly and maddening that they give up and leave.

The British strategy was also piecemeal to each commander in each far separated theater of the war, destroy the largest units of the armed rebellion using a combination of Empire troops, hired mercenaries from Germany (“Hessians”), local loyalists (who comprised a third or more of the total troops, making it as much a civil war as a rebellion), slaves offered freedom if they fought, and the tribes along the colonies’ Western regions.

Masterful overarching war strategies are a mix of pretensions and clueless fantasies at national capitals’ military bureaucracies or what people looking back afterwards shape actual chaos into apparent order in their memoirs and histories. Endless improvisation to rapidly changing constraints, opportunities, and confusion seems to be what really happens in war.