WI native american british army

[Mrstrategy]

what would happen if the British trained native Americans on how to fight like Europeans after the american revolution to help back the small number of troops they have in canada

• the British train the Indian to fight like European troops
• the British provide guns an powder
• the British send some Indians to see how war is fought in Europe

 

[telynk]

fighting like Europeans only helps if the battlefield is like European battlefields. the terrain on which north Americans fought was lightly populated, heavily forested and had few trails and no good roads. you can't really assemble a european-style army in this terrain without a much greater logistical capacity than native Americans had.... they raiding tactics used by native Americans were actually pretty well-suited for the terrain in which they fought (not that all native Americans used the same tactics or fought on the same terrain... this is clearly an overgeneralizatiom)

 

[deathscompanion1]

fighting like Europeans only helps if the battlefield is like European battlefields. the terrain on which north Americans fought was lightly populated, heavily forested and had few trails and no good roads. you can't really assemble a european-style army in this terrain without a much greater logistical capacity than native Americans had.... they raiding tactics used by native Americans were actually pretty well-suited for the terrain in which they fought (not that all native Americans used the same tactics or fought on the same terrain... this is clearly an overgeneralizatiom)

Also the Americans would love their enemies gathering large numbers of their fighting men in one place and deploying for a conventional battle that they would probably lose thanks to numbers and artillery and be broken in one big go instead of taking years and years hunting down small fast moving groups scattered over thousands of miles.

 

[Mrstrategy]

Also the Americans would love their enemies gathering large numbers of their fighting men in one place and deploying for a conventional battle that they would probably lose thanks to numbers and artillery and be broken in one big go instead of taking years and years hunting down small fast moving groups scattered over thousands of miles.

The British would give the cannons

 

[deathscompanion1]

The British would give the cannons

That's nice. Who keeps them in working order and supplied and who replaces the officers and men manning them once they die. There is a reason artillery is usually a dedicated arm its not something you can just give someone.

 

[Behemoth]

The British would give the cannons

And? I think the point that the previous posters are trying to make is that even with cannon, rifles, etc. it would not improve the Native Americans' situation. You can attempt to train them in the tactics of a European army but those tactics, as previously stated, are better suited for Europe and not the American continent during that time.

 

[Isfendil]

Why can't they just not training them in army tactics that they don't need but then still employ them and supply them?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

what would happen if the British trained native Americans on how to fight like Europeans after the american revolution to help back the small number of troops they have in canada

• the British train the Indian to fight like European troops
• the British provide guns an powder
• the British send some Indians to see how war is fought in Europe

In the War of 1812, Tecumseh managed to pull together a total of some 2,000 fighters. This was like half of the entire fighting age male population of the nations involved.

Native populations were TINY in North America.

There just isn't the man power to make a difference.

The Brits can get more people off a single street in London than all of BNA.

 

[The Gunslinger]

It could have been possible to have the Blackfoot send irregular parties against the Cree in the Riel Rebellion. So technically they'd be British. "Technically"

 

[BBadolato]

Yeah, the thing is the European way of warfare didn't work in the Americas, the native had better tactics at least before the Europeans managed to adapt where the natives would fight in small units with hit and run tactics similar to guerilla warfare. What the natives needed was better access to maintain the weapons chiefly gunpowder.

 

[yulzari]

Yeah, the thing is the European way of warfare didn't work in the Americas, the native had better tactics at least before the Europeans managed to adapt where the natives would fight in small units with hit and run tactics similar to guerilla warfare. What the natives needed was better access to maintain the weapons chiefly gunpowder.

So would that explain Washington's military strategy?

 

[James XI]

Also the Americans would love their enemies gathering large numbers of their fighting men in one place and deploying for a conventional battle that they would probably lose thanks to numbers and artillery and be broken in one big go instead of taking years and years hunting down small fast moving groups scattered over thousands of miles.

This is a slight misconception. Outside of the Swamp Fox's domain, the Brits managed to force and win most conventional battle even in NA terrain...also true of French/Indian War...and w/o the French rebalancing the scales probably take it. Kinda like Macedonia vs. Persia...if the defenders play to attrition, maybe they have upper hand, but they also needed political legitimacy which meant taking the field when needed. The comic ideal of clever/worldly Yanks picking off naive/antiquated Brits has been fostered by an American need to avoid crediting Franc (cheese-eating surrender monkeys!) and acknowledge that they were losing on merit, not as the forefront of a new more rational school of warfare.

On an aside, if you buy that mythos, the terrorists/irregular warfare practitioners are the modern 'Patriots' vs. the conventional superpower frustrated bbtheir unwillingness to line up and die/lose the wAy the US/UK does/did.

 

[deathscompanion1]

This is a slight misconception. Outside of the Swamp Fox's domain, the Brits managed to force and win most conventional battle even in NA terrain...also true of French/Indian War...and w/o the French rebalancing the scales probably take it. Kinda like Macedonia vs. Persia...if the defenders play to attrition, maybe they have upper hand, but they also needed political legitimacy which meant taking the field when needed. The comic ideal of clever/worldly Yanks picking off naive/antiquated Brits has been fostered by an American need to avoid crediting Franc (cheese-eating surrender monkeys!) and acknowledge that they were losing on merit, not as the forefront of a new more rational school of warfare.

On an aside, if you buy that mythos, the terrorists/irregular warfare practitioners are the modern 'Patriots' vs. the conventional superpower frustrated bbtheir unwillingness to line up and die/lose the wAy the US/UK does/did.

Uhh...what are you talking about?

I was saying that the Americans would fight and win conventional battles against the Indians.


But as an aside the Americans and French won the revolutionary war conventionally. It certainly wasn't guerrillas that all but destroyed the British military in North America.

 

[James XI]

Uhh...what are you talking about?

I was saying that the Americans would fight and win conventional battles against the Indians.


But as an aside the Americans and French won the revolutionary war conventionally. It certainly wasn't guerrillas that all but destroyed the British military in North America.

But would it not be Indians + Brits? Maybe I misunderstood...agree with everything else you wrote, and agree that Natives' style if wRfare suited them best.

 

[Planet of Hats]

First Nations warriors were actually at an advantage fighting in their style. They knew the terrain and how to fight in the North American forests - most of Upper Canada in particular was heavily wooded at the time, though it's largely been clear-cut today to make way for farmland if you're anywhere south of Muskoka.

The numbers Tecumseh was throwing around aren't all that there were, mind; the British had an entire department dedicated to sending contractors up into the north of the Canadas to hire bands of First Nations allies and bring them south to join the war. It's why you had situations like the Kahnawake from Quebec fighting down in Niagara during the War of 1812, usually under the command of an Indian Department staffer. The British would pay them with a cut of the spoils taken from the enemy armies and that would be that. On balance it was less expensive for them than maintaining large numbers of regulars, though there were always some Redcoats in the area.

It's also not true the First Nations didn't have any modern equipment. They may not have had Redcoat-standard stuff but they did have guns.

I can mostly speak to 1812 and the First Nations experience there, but really, especially in calendar year 1812 and early 1813, First Nations contractors and the small number of British regulars on the scene were the ones doing most of the fighting, and the First Nations groups scored some important victories, often by ambushing the Americans or otherwise attacking out of the wilderness. Because of how they fought, they would sometimes rout or capture the entire American unit with minimal casualties on their side - see also Beaverdams, when 300 Kahnawake and 100 other Mohawks ambushed 600 Americans and took almost the entire unit prisoner while only losing about 10 guys.

The other thing here is, the First Nations seriously terrified the American militia for, basically, racist reasons, which the British played up. Again going back to 1812, there's a point in the battle for Fort Detroit where Isaac Brock literally sent Hull a missive threatening that he had a large army of natives attached to his force and he'd lose control of them once the attack started.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Which they were countered by local European settlers well skilled in navigation of the back country who employed basically the same tactics. Or at least, that was the ideal which the United States wanted to go for, but it was expensive to go shape frontier units into effective ranger-type soldiers hence why they weren't used as much as they could've been (the early United States having a very limited military budget).

I don't think the American Indians necessarily had an advantage against those Euroamerican units trained in fighting in that style, or else they'd have a better record against the Americans 1790 - 1820.

But I think the key point is, that's the main strength of American Indian units, since training them in European fighting style is pretty worthless when you can just raise units from your own population like that instead of ignoring the obvious skill of the natives.

 

[Dave Howery]

My book on the war of 1812 claims that the most effective military force on the battlefield bar none was the combo of British regular troops allied with native warriors acting as scouts and irregulars. Training the natives to be regular troops would have negated this. Not sure adding the natives as regular soldiers would be worth doing that...