This study began as an attempt to address one of early American military history's most perplexing ambiguities and contradictions: the place and relationship between what we today know as unlimited war and what eighteenth-century writers termed petite guerre (little war) in the American military tradition. Unlimited war, in both its modern and earliest American manifestations, centers on destroying the enemy's will or ability to resist by any means necessary, especially by focusing attacks on civilian populations and the infrastructure that supports them. Military theorists now use several different terms in place of petite guerre, including “irregular,” “guerrilla,” “partisan,” “unconventional,” or “special” operations. Today's United States military places those kinds of wars under the rubric of “low-intensity conflict.” But no matter what we call it or how we define it today, early Americans understood war to involve disrupting enemy troop, supply, and support networks; gathering intelligence through scouting and the taking of prisoners; ambushing and destroying enemy detachments; serving as patrol and flanking parties for friendly forces; operating as advance and rear guards for regular forces; and, most important, destroying enemy villages and fields and killing and intimidating enemy noncombatant populations.

Military historians long have sought to describe Americans' approach to war. Russell F. Weigley has been the most influential of the scholars to suggest that Americans have created a singular military heritage. Indeed, his seminal book The American Way of War established the paradigm that most scholars use to explain the American military tradition.