America’s First ‘Endless War’ Was Fought in the Philippines
The Moro War, an ill-fated military campaign that began in 1899, is a grim reminder of our long—and ongoing—history of imperialism.
For a decade and a half, the US Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar?
As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Back then, American soldiers fought not the Taliban, but the Moros, intensely independent Islamic tribesmen with a similarly storied record of resisting foreign invaders. Precious few today have ever heard of America’s Moro War, fought from 1899 to 1913, but it was, until Afghanistan, one of America’s longest sustained military campaigns.
Popular thinking assumes that the United States wasn’t meaningfully entangled in the Islamic world until Washington became embroiled in the Islamist Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both in the pivotal year of 1979. It simply isn’t so. How soon we forget that the Army, which had fought prolonged guerrilla wars against Native Americans throughout the 19th century, went on—often led by veterans of those Indian Wars—to wage a counterinsurgency war on Islamic Moros in the Philippine Islands at the start of the new century, a conflict that was an outgrowth of the Spanish-American War.
That campaign is all but lost to history and the collective American memory. A basic Amazon search for “Moro War,” for instance, yields just seven books (half of them published by US military war colleges), while a similar search for “Vietnam War” lists no less than 10,000 titles. Which is curious. The war in the Southern Philippines wasn’t just six years longer than conventional American military operations in Vietnam, but also resulted in the awarding of 88 Congressional Medals of Honor and produced five future Army chiefs of staff. While the insurgency in the northern islands of the Philippines had fizzled out by 1902, the Moro rebels fought on for another decade. As Lieutenant Benny Foulois—later a general and the “father” of Army aviation—reflected, “The Filipino insurrection was mild compared to the difficulties we had with the Moros.”
(Cont'd at link)
Link: America’s First ‘Endless War’ Was Fought in the Philippines
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