Lethality is Not Enough: The Lessons of Little Bighorn
However compelling he remains as a cultural or psychological phenomenon, all this focus on the person of Custer is, for the military or foreign policy practitioner, a distraction from the real lessons of the battle, which remain uniquely valuable and — at least at the strategic and institutional level — still unlearned.
The tactical lessons — reconnaissance, fields of fire, flank security, and mutual support — are so evident and evergreen that Little Bighorn remains an instructive staff ride still today. New technologies continually alter the means, but the fundamentals remain stubbornly recognizable.
The operational lessons, likewise, are no less priceless for being painfully obvious. If every column that was supposed to converge had converged as it was supposed to, Reno and Benteen would have joined Custer as an effective find and fix, while Terry’s Montana and Dakota columns and Crook’s Wyoming column arrived to finish, massing a force on the decisive point that the hostile villages could neither defeat nor evade. Coordination among dispersed elements is far easier with modern technologies, but Custer’s fate is worth remembering as planners once again contemplate fighting in conditions of degraded or denied communications.
Yet those lessons, however valuable, are not the most important legacy of Little Bighorn. The battle’s enduring significance lies at a deeper level. A century and a half later, Americans remain fixated on the same questions that captivated contemporaries: How many warriors did Custer think he faced? Was he reckless or brilliant? Was the disaster caused by arrogance, incompetence, or just bad luck? Fascinating as they are, these are ultimately the wrong questions.
They all fade when we remember that Custer did nothing that day that was not consistent with both contemporary cavalry doctrine and a decade of battlefield validation. The more useful question, then, is not why Custer failed, but how the Army created the conditions under which a routine cavalry mission became a catastrophe.
The answer lies at the intersection of culture, institutions, and assumptions.
Custer was undoubtedly a character, but he was not an aberration: He was, in many respects, the purest expression of what the Army had spent a generation creating. Mid-century America was deeply influenced by the Romantic movement, which celebrated the nationalism of Manifest Destiny, idealized frontier struggle, and, above all, valorized individual heroism. Architects of the 19th-century Army imagined an officer corps grounded in Enlightenment rationalism and republican virtue, but Romantic sensibilities eventually permeated the curriculum, traditions, and even the built environment at West Point. By the Civil War, officers who embodied these qualities had been repeatedly rewarded with promotion, fame, and higher command. If Custer was unique, it was only in that he absorbed these values and followed these incentives more completely than his peers. The lesson extends well beyond the frontier: Institutions don’t get the leaders they say they want — they get the leaders they educate, train, and promote.