For they provide both a window through which we can see more clearly the beliefs of an enemy from the past and also a mirror with which we can more clearly see ourselves today. Army is once again engaged in counterinsurgency campaigns against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, it behooves us to study these extraordinary drawings carefully. The Little Bighorn battle was part of the 1876 counterinsurgency conflict we now call the Great Sioux War. The drawings of Red Horse, a Minneconjou warrior who fought against George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, enable us to see the battle through Lakota eyes. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that it is vitally important to “know your enemy and know yourself.” This essay uses the art of war, quite literally, to reflect on both the horrors of combat and the importance of the rules of war. It is the modern practice of restraint in war–fighting according to ethical and legal rules that seek to spare civilians and protect prisoners–that is, from a historical perspective, highly unusual. Indeed, flagrant and indiscriminate brutality has often been the norm. Such acts of indiscriminant violence shock our moral sensibilities, but they should not be entirely surprising: indiscriminate violence has been commonplace in wartime throughout much of history. Jailers for Islamic State (IS) routinely behead their prisoners, IS fighters force captured Yazidi women to become sex slaves, and Al Qaeda and IS terrorists have attacked the Twin Towers in New York, a sports stadium in Paris, a nightclub in Orlando, a museum and beach resort hotel in Tunisia, and many other restaurants, cafes, and markets in other countries, with the intention to kill as many innocent civilians as possible.
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