The War with Iran Has No End

And Lee describes the cutting off way as a response to the fundamental demographic, economic, again, structural pressures that were faced by various native nations.

The long and the short of it is that these nations could not sustain mass mobilization for any length of time.

They could put armed forces into the field, but they needed those guys back.

They needed them back at home working because they were, A, necessary for subsistence, and also they could not easily be replaced.

These were societies under strong demographic and economic pressures, and they couldn't really sustain mass casualties.

So instead, they turned to the cutting off way, the raiding way of warfare, where the objective of any individual raid is to cut off a part of the enemy, to surprise them, to ambush them, to outnumber them, and to destroy that little piece.

of your enemy's way of life and their way of sustaining themselves.

And that might involve killing people or it might involve capturing them and carrying them off.

And this way of warfare could scale, right? Maybe three men might cut off one.

or ten men, four, or a thousand men, four hundred.

From a modern perspective, the cutting off way can look like small potatoes.

The casualties of each individual raid can look quite small.

But carried on as a sustained way of warfare, the cutting off way could be tremendously destructive.

as the war of the Haudenosaunee against the Wendat in 1648 kind of shows where the Wendat were driven off, scattered from their lands, and that area was taken over by the Haudenosaunee.

The targets the cutting off way were not military in the modern sense, not necessarily men at arms in uniform after a declaration of war, but were the fundamental basis of that other society's ability to sustain itself, its people.

It's also critical to note, from a historical perspective, that it all didn't go as planned.

What I've described is a successful raid, but the raiding way of warfare didn't always have successes.

Sometimes it all blew up in your face.

Your raid got caught out, or you got raided yourself, or while your raiding party was away, someone else raided you, or they harried that party on the way home.

Things could go wrong in all kinds of ways.

That's important.

We'll come back to that.