Join the National Museum of the United States Army for a discussion with historians Wayne Lee, David Preston, Anthony Carlson, and David Silbey, co-authors of the recently published “The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat”, which illuminates the American experience of fighting in “irregular” and “intercultural” wars. The authors focus on the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)–conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in “irregular” warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure–victory and defeat–in entirely different ways. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate.

Register for “The Other Face of Battle” book talk