America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of U.S. Military Engagements: 1975-2000

by Peter A. Huchthausen

Traces more than a dozen short-term military operations from the past quarter century including the Iranian hostage rescue attempt and the Gulf War, exploring the modern development of American small wars from an insider's perspective. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Military History, War

254 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 2003

About the author

Captain Peter A. Huchthausen (USN, Ret.) was an American naval officer, naval attaché, author and businessman.

He received his commission upon graduation from the United States Naval Academy in 1962, and served in many different positions during his career, including two combat tours of duty during the Vietnam War, first with the United States Navy's Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta and later as Chief Engineer in the destroyer USS Orleck, which provided naval gunfire support to Army and Marine forces along the coast of Viet Nam. After service as a naval attaché in Yugoslavia and Romania, he served as chief of attaché and human intelligence collection operations in Western Europe for the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the late 1980s he was the senior U.S. Naval Attaché to the U.S.S.R.; he retired from the U.S. Navy in 1990.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

America's Splendid Little Wars is what it sounds like. It's a concise history of the period between Vietnam and the start of the Iraq war. It's somewhat dry in places but overall it's a solid work, especially for those of us with large gaps in our knowledge of US military involvements around the world. This book is about the fights that didn't make headlines.

NC

[Michael Gerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good enough read both for the casual reader who tends to dislike long, complex narratives and the analyst who chooses to get a quick reference guide to US efforts to maintain its hegemony, from the end of the Vietnam War to just before the September 11, 2001 attacks and the War on Terror.

[Tom Darrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because I'm a fan of military history, I gave this book a three star rating. Most other people would rate it lower. It doesn't blow your mind, but it does do a good job at explaining its title worthy conflicts in a simple way.

[Liam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I put a lot of thought into deciding whether or not to write this review. The author has been dead for a number of years, and as the old saying goes (DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM), it is not very nice to speak ill of the dead. In addition, it isn't actually a bad book- it is what it is, i.e. popular history, and was clearly never intended to be a scholarly or even journalistic work. The problem is that, in the first instance, just the errors I caught were extensive enough to be cause for concern; in addition, this book was marketed to libraries (and in the case of this particular copy, shelved) as a book appropriate for "young adult" readers. Given that context, one would think that accuracy would be even more important.

I didn't keep a tally of all the (mostly minor) errors in the book, but to my mind the very first one was the most egregious. In the very first chapter, 'Recovering SS Mayaguez and the Fight on Koh Tang', on page nine, it is stated that "the Intelligence Center Pacific (IPAC), located in Hawaii, had estimated that possibly one hundred to two hundred Khmer Rouge infantry, called Khmer Kraham [sic], with small arms supported by heavy weapons, might be present on the north end of the island". On page 15 the author similarly refers to "one Cambodian battalion of Khmer Kraham [sic] infantry". The author, Captain Peter A. Huchthausen (USN, Ret.), had during his time as a naval officer served two tours of combat duty during the war in Viet Nam; the first one in 1967 as a patrol officer with the United States Navy's Riverine Force in the Mekong River Delta area of the Republic of Viet Nam. Leaving the incorrect spelling aside, the term "Khmer Krom" refers to ethnic Khmer people living in or originating from the south-western part of Viet Nam, primarily the Mekong River Delta. Prior to the 18th century, this had been Cambodian territory, part of the area known as Kampuchea Krom (Lower Cambodia). The well-known Cambodian nationalist Sơn Ngọc Thành (7 December 1908 – 8 August 1977), who was at various times during his life a journalist, politician, rebel and government minister was from a Khmer Krom background, for example. Sơn Ngọc Thành was hardly unique; political engagement and a penchant for rebellion were both quite common in the region, on both sides of the border, during the late 20th century. This was particularly true during the Second Indo-China War, and Khmer Krom were involved in much of the fighting, sometimes under the auspices of the U.S. Army Special Forces program known as the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG). In my view, Huchthausen should have had at least a basic grasp of who the inhabitants were within the milieu in which he had served, i.e. the Delta. The Khmer Krom were well known as one of the largest ethno-cultural groups in that area by the late 1960s. In addition, they had been mentioned in several of the nearly innumerable first-person accounts written by Americans who had served in former French Indo-China during the 1960s & 1970s. Many more traditional works of history mentioning the Khmer Krom had also been published by the time this book was written; Wilfred P. Deac's Road to the Killing Fields: The Cambodian War of 1970-1975 (1997) is only one of them. A mistake like this bespeaks a level of carelessness that inevitably changes the lens through which one views the book as a whole, and that view is not a pleasant one...

[Katch · Rating 2 out of 5]

TL/DR: choose 'best in show' accounts for each conflict instead, like Blackhack Down for Somalia. More reading for each, but you will come away satisfied.

My rating may be overly harsh, but it was my 'present sense' sentiment on finishing. I went back and forth between 2 and 3 over the course of the book.

My greatest complaint about America's Splendid Little Wars is that the book is very uneven: it seems almost as if Huchthausen had to go back into American military history as the publishing date neared to find more 'little wars' to balance out the timeline, or maybe missed some stuff and had to scramble to get it written out right before the book went to print. Case in point is his coverage Mayaguez incident, which also supports the larger point about evenness. The chapter is a rushed narrative, without significant pre- or post-historical context, and a very tight policy lens: a fuller assessment of its significance in the face of the recently completed Fall of Saigon and early 70s Vietnamization policies would have been helpful. Contrast that against sections on Panama and Somalia, which have robust discussions of the run up, America political environment, in country histories, interactions with the USA, et cetera.

Another significant problem is the unevenness of military maneuvering discussions - sometimes Huchthausen describes details of the action (e.g. Just Cause). At other times, he's inexplicably high level (Desert Storm, Gothic Serpent). Bosnia and Kosovo are almost entirely political discussions...except for accounts of Serbian and Bosnia Serb maneuvers. As a result, you won't learn a thing about the 'Highway of Death' or the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Balkans conflict. Clinton's response to Bin Laden's first provocations? Huh? Fugghedabowddit...and this is poorly washed away with a literary shoulder shrug at the end about what he could have and chose not to cover.

All that said, America's Splendid Little Wars is kind of like of a collection of Wikipedia entries, so I won't recycle the book immediately (I may change my mind as I add better accounts of each conflict).

[NormaJean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work. I learned a lot. One horribly terrible description of what humans do to the Other will be difficult to erase....but better to be exposed to the truth.

Better transitions - just an additional sentence here and there (between subjects, locations, countries, years) - would have earned five stars. Helpful maps!

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

"America's Splendid Little Wars" offers a summary of major U.S. combat operations from the end of the Vietnam War to the turn of the century. Peter Huchthausen gives a good overview of these conflicts, ranging from the Mayaguez hijacking in 1975 to the intervention in Kosovo in 1999, giving a brief background on each event and the highlights of each battle. (Huchthausen chose the title of the book as a play off of the description of the 1898 Spanish-American War, noting that no war, no matter the length, is ever "splendid.") In general his summaries are clear, although his coverage of each conflict is uneven at times. For example, he gives excellent accounts of the 1991 Gulf War and the 1983 invasion of Grenada, but his chapters on the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1979 and the bombing of Libya in 1986 have a frustrating lack of detail. Despite this, "America's Splendid Little Wars" is a good introduction to this period of American military history; as Huchthausen says in the book's preface, he intends that the deeds of the fighting men and women of each of these battles not be forgotten, and on that level his book succeeds.