Wooster makes some specific points. Firstly, military policy toward the Native Americans was shaped by the battle and campaign experiences most of the US commanders had from the Civil War. This led them to conceive of military engagements being based on columns of armed forces, that would overwhelm the enemy in pitched battles. This led them to be illequiped, logisitically and tactically for the type of combat that they would experience against the various Indian tribes. Secondly, the policy of the US army was often shaped by the ideas of its leading figures. In particular Generals Sheridan and Sherman. This meant that prejudices and racism often undermined the miltary's attempts to subdue the Indians. Wooster makes this point regarding the use of Indians in the army itself:
In addition to scouting, native auxiliaries were by the 1880s performing valuable services as reservation policemen, freeing regulars for other duries and prevening unnecessary army-Indian collisions. Later officials... favoured more direct measures, sponsoring new policies that added Indian companies to most of the army's regiments. This last step never gained full favor among line officers. Some opposed it on racial grounds; others... argued that language problems would demoralise Indians and strip them of their individuality, which had been there greatest asset in servving the army [as scouts]. Although the Indian enlistment program failed to meet expectations, it was a logical culmination of continued efforts to assimilate Indians into society as a whole through the miltiary.
It was also the culmination of a deliberate policy of "divide and rule" that saw the US miltiary turn various tribes against each other, or exacerbate differences, in order to undermine them both. The most obvious example of this were the Crow scouts who accompanied Custer to the Little Big Horn and fought on the wrong side. This in turn flowed from the idea that there were good and bad Indians.
Throughtout the period however the Army faced a difficult task. It was undermanned, under-equipped and under resourced. The period immediately after Custer's defeat aside, this was an army that couldn't actually easily do its task and subdue the "enemy". It was also at the whim of politicians whose desire for a military presence in their areas was often more about the jobs and profits that a fort might bring, than any need to subdue the Native Americans locally. As Wooster points out "The military thus influenced the econoimic, social and political structure of the states, territories and communities it protected".
But it was government genocidal policies that eventually succeeded where military organisation was unable.
Although the army was plagued by strategic failures, the near extermination of the American bison during the 1870s helped to mask the mlitiary's poor performance. By stripping many Indians of their available resources, the slaughter of the buffalo severely reduced the Indians# capacity to continue an armed struggle against the United States.
While Sheridan and Sherman "recognised that eliminating the buffalo might be the best way to force Indians to change their nomadic habits", the actual massacre of the animals was mostly done by non-military people. While some officers opposed the killing of the bison, the government actively encouraged it. As the Secretary of the Interior said in 1874, to Congress:
The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilisation.
It is worth remembering that the lessons learnt by the US government and Army in this period were genocidal. Settler Colonialism was always based on mass murder. In conclusion Wooster argues that US Army policy was often confused and contradictory toward the Indians as a whole:
A wide range of political and cultural factors influenced the formulation of that policy. The policy-making process itself was woefully lacking. Neither the federal government nor the army representing it organised institutions to examine Indian affairs in any comprehensive and systmatic manner. The absence of detailed contemporary analysis sowed confusion, mistrust, and disinterest among those involved in making policy.
Where policy was decided it tended to be a response to events - either Indian resistance, or economic - such as the discover of gold in the Black Hills, or the decision that the central US was not "a great desert" but rather an area that could be profitably farmed. These failures led to a brutal and violent experience for the Native Americans, one that the US has yet to redress properly.
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