The Moro War

For 11 years, starting soon after the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. Army fought to defeat a determined, highly religious, technologically inferior insurgency on the island of Mindanao in the Philippine archipelago, a war largely unnoted by journalists or Americans at the time. It involved an ancient Muslim culture, seen by Americans as primitive, violent, and greatly in need of Westernization. Arnold (Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq) shows how the U.S. Army, new to the role of colonial overseer of the Philippines, had to figure out how to defeat the Moros (the island's Muslim inhabitants) militarily and at the same time alter the economic and social factors (e.g., slavery and factionalism) that defined the Moro insurgency. General John J. Pershing; Leonard Wood, governor of Moro Province; and many others eventually defeated the Moro rebellion, but echoes of the uprising endure with today's Muslim resistance to central government.