Humble folkways and humor can convey important strategic or operational truths. Remember that when you try to communicate some concept to non-military folk. What we do is not some arcane art or science—or shouldn’t be. Oftentimes getting a point across to everyman is a simple matter of finding an everyday metaphor for the concept. Heck, sometimes it’s just about rephrasing that concept in plain language rather than the highfalutin’ jargon and locutions in which practitioners and scholars love to indulge.
Every time the family and I roll southward down I-95 toward Connecticut we pass a reminder of how to express ideas in straightforward parlance: General Nathanael Greene’s homestead in Coventry, Rhode Island. (This week is college move-in week. The empty nest is upon us, alas. Hence a doleful trip to the mid-Atlantic.) General Greene was George Washington’s favorite commander. He’s also Southerners’ favorite Yankee, having run Lord Cornwallis and his redcoats ragged during their Southern Campaign of 1778-1781. You will lose count if you try to tally up the number of towns and counties bearing his name today.
Greene was an early practitioner of “hybrid warfare.” He merged conventional with irregular army troops while expertly combining and recombining forces at points of impact. An ultramodern and esoteric combat theory, right? Wrong. It’s as old as warfare. Greene never won a clear-cut battlefield victory, but it ended up not mattering. His army could afford losses while Cornwallis was at the end of his manpower and logistical tether. Nor did Greene need to stand—and risk it all—in a decisive engagement. Here’s where Washington’s general explained himself through a folksy metaphor: the lowly Narragansett Bay crab native to Rhode Island shores. Of his approach Greene wrote: “There are few Generals that have run oftener, or more lustily than I have done . . . . But I have taken care not to run too far and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our enemy that we were like a crab, that could run either way.”
An army that can skitter in any direction commands serious advantages even if outclassed by conventional measures. It can decide when to fight; it can strike from unexpected axes, and flee if things go badly. All you need is the generalship of a Nathanael Greene—admittedly a rare commodity. Commanders like to win convincing triumphs, garnering laurels for themselves in the bargain. They dislike the crabby approach, which seldom delivers quick renown or strategic results.
The hybrid approach is a humble approach and demands self-discipline. Greene was a fighting Quaker and thus perhaps suited to warmaking methods that postponed gratification.
So render honors the next you barrel through southern New England—and think about how to convey martial concepts through everyday images.
