Blood Warriors American Military Elites

Overview Elite combat units are not an innovation of the American military. Since the dawn of warfare, commanders have assembled special men into special units to perform special missions. According to legend, English King Arthur surrounded himself with a few dozen carefully selected armed soldiers who become known as the Knights of the Round Table. The earliest commander for whom reliable records of military operations survive took advantage of the skills of elite* warriors. In 539 b.c. Cyrus the Great, while king of Persia, combined small units of archers and cavalry to defeat larger units armed with pikes and swords. By the time of his death ten years later Cyrus controlled much of the civilized world and ruled over history's first great empire. Two centuries later Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered the Persian Empire. His elite sarissas units fought with pikes twice the length of ordinary spears and established the tradition for the next fifteen hundred years whereby military elites were those employing innovations in weaponry. Fernandez Gonzalo de Cordoba used a small, elite unit of infantrymen armed with heavy, shoulder-fired muskets known as arquebuses to gain a Spanish victory over the French on April 28, 1498. * The English word elite comes from a similar French word meaning "the choice" or "the most carefully selected." Historically its most common use has been in reference to social classes. Its military usage has occurred only in the past one hundred years. Elite units with superior weapons and equipment again proved successful a short time later. Hernan Cortes, with fewer than six hundred Spanish soldiers supported by twenty horses and ten small cannonlike muskets, conquered an Aztec Empire populated by more than five million people in 1519, giving Spain claim to all of Central America. In 1531 another Spaniard, Francisco Pizarro, defeated the Incas with an elite force of only two hundred men. In addition to spears and swords Pizarro's warriors carried three arquebuses and twenty crossbows. For a significant span of time special units armed with the most modern weapons and equipment of the day continued to win battles. However, advances in technology and the integration of musket-armed infantrymen, artillery, and cavalry greatly changed the scope of warfare. Kings and commanders discovered that small elite forces, even when properly armed, could not survive against large standing armies, even if the latter were poorly trained and armed. Size and numbers do make a difference; huge armies consistently prove victorious over small forces. As the scope of warfare changed, the need for more numerous forces followed. Armies of a few thousand men could no longer decide wars with a single battle fought in an area of only a few miles where commanders could see, command, and participate in the entire fight. By the eighteenth century wars were fought on multiple land and sea fronts between armies and navies of tens or even hundreds of thousands. Elite units still guarded their kings, admirals, or generals, but they played less and less of a role in the actual outcome of battles. Instead of designating a single elite knight in shining armor, a dozen special pikemen, or even a company of musketeers, the elite title expanded to entire regiments and divisions. Single ships, or fleets of vessels under command of a single captain, also began to be mentioned among the elite. The record of elite military warriors in America coincides with the arrival of Europeans on the continent. The settlement of colonial America brought a brief return of small elite units as key forces in combat. North America's huge space of uncharted forests and waterways far exceeded the capability of any army or navy of the period to dominate. Its population of Native Americans, loosely organized into more than five hundred tribes, relied on stealth and indiviLanning, Michael Lee is the author of 'Blood Warriors American Military Elites' with ISBN 9780345448910 and ISBN 034544891X.