Volume 4, Chapter 3, Guerrilla or Conventional War
After their humiliating defeat at Concord, many leading British officers acknowledged their error in being contemptuous of American military prowess.
But others accused the Americans of not fighting fairly, according to the rules of conventional warfare.
Warfare
Instead of marching out on the open field in an extended line to fire volleys at a similarly
aligned enemy, the cowardly rascals persisted in hiding inside and behind houses, trees
and stone walls, picking off English soldiers with accurate individual rifle fire.
To the European military mind of the day, such actions were sheer murder and therefore
Dishonorable. Behind the almost blatant idiocy of such an attitude, there lay the hard core
of an extremely important problem. For certainly, here had been warfare that upset all the rules
of organized European warfare, in which the armies of the various states were sent out
to kill each other in formal mass array. The tactics employed by the Americans at Concord
reflected a new type of war, revolutionary war by a people in arms, a war that would
naturally take the course unless deflected by conscious purpose of guerrilla warfare,
in which individuals among the masses familiar with the terrain employed their advantage
of knowledge and mass support to achieve mobility and surprise against an army possessed of
of Superior, Firepower.
The Americans at the very outset were therefore faced with a choice of extreme importance
in conducting their revolution.
Unfortunately, they saw their alternatives but dimly, although here and their leaders
could see the vital issues with piercing clarity.
Their choice not only determined the outcome and duration of the war, it also determined
the permanent complexion and structure of any independent America that might emerge.
The colonists might choose either alternative or various admixtures of both. On the one
hand they could fight the war in European fashion, gathering together a standard European
army, organizing it according to European style totalitarian discipline, conscripting
Inventing men and vast supplies to feed and equip the army and then meeting the British
in formal open combat.
On the other hand, they could run a new style of war, a radical people's war of national
liberation, a guerrilla war resting on individual responsibility, mobility and surprise.
A guerrilla war would be enormously less expensive than an orthodox one.
For one thing, the guerrillas would not be full-time soldiers, torn away from productive
labor to require parasitic feeding from an already harassed and burdened population.
They would not be hauled from place to place, region to region.
Instead, they would be part-time soldiers, remaining in production, not requiring taxes
Bureaucracy to direct and supply the armies while draining the production of society.
A guerrilla war could be run individualistically, relying on the zeal of the individual guerrilla
and would entail virtually no central bureaucracy or centralized confiscation of property to
finance the war.
In brief, a guerrilla war would be the libertarian way to fight a war fully consistent with the
American revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality of rights, and therefore the only
way to achieve the libertarian goals of the revolution.
A European-style, orthodox war would be heavily statist and would inevitably lead to the
the resumption of the very statism, the taxes, the restrictions, the bureaucracy which the
colonists were waging the revolution to escape. What is more, guerrilla war would be enormously
more effective, for that is the way any subjugated people, not only libertarians, can best fight
against a better armed but hated foe. The efficiency of guerrilla fighting as against
Most European warfare had not only been demonstrated in the unbroken victories of Ethan Allen and
the Green Mountain Boys in the Vermont Revolution, but also in the victory at Concord, a guerrilla
engagement so individualistic as to be almost completely leaderless.
In contrast stood the slaughter at Lexington, where the Americans had fought in fixed ranks
in the Open. Both moral principle and utility therefore required the choice of a guerrilla
war, but various factors, certainly including the novelty of the dilemma, dictated a different
and Choice.