Contemporary American vicarious warfare has no simple or clear-cut origins. As we have seen, taking a wide global historical perspective it is even possible to trace elements of vicariousness in war to much earlier times, well before America's emergence on the global scene. This tradition seemingly stands in stark contrast to the presumed ‘American way of war’ centred around large-scale conventional battles, and suffers from an awkward fit with dominant American professional military cultures, especially that of the US Army. It nevertheless feeds off long-standing forms of foreign intervention, ongoing developments in the technical dimensions of warfare, and decades of experimentation in more esoteric areas of American strategic behaviour such as frontier campaigns, gunboat diplomacy, special warfare, covert paramilitary action, discrete operations and various forms of military outsourcing and delegation to proxies.

The genealogy of American vicarious warfare is arguably only properly capable of being perceived retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight and in the light of contemporary practice. That said, we need to be careful not to arbitrarily or anachronistically apply the model in a decontextualized Whiggish manner, forcing earlier periods to conform with how it appears to us today. That is not the intention here. Rather, the purpose of this chapter and the next is to explain how vicarious warfare has iteratively emerged and evolved in an American context. In doing so, the analysis brings into view episodes and events that traditional narratives or popular accounts often leave out. So, contemplating this diverse ‘alternative’ history of American warfare, Echevarria, for instance, has pushed back against the notion that the application of overwhelming force has always been the default option for decision-makers in confronting adversaries. He notes that ‘from the Truman administration onward … the typical model involved imposing economic or financial sanctions, followed by covert or clandestine operations carried out by the CIA, usually augmented by special forces and airpower; conventional forces were normally introduced only as a last resort.’ But, as this chapter will show, we can go even further back than this to trace the roots of such practices. Within the orthodox telling of the story of American force, vicarious warfare is conspicuous in its absence. But the precedents are, in fact, more apparent than dominant interpretations sometimes suggest – the clues were always hiding in plain sight.