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War (as the struggle was known in America), as a leader of high-risk raids and countless long-range reconnaissance patrols deep in enemy territory. In an age when campaigning was limited to milder seasons, he and his small companies operated year-round, on snowshoes and ice skates in winter. He is still lionized today as the father of the U.S. Army Rangers, all of whom know virtually by heart the twenty-eight rules of his famous “plan of discipline” for irregular warfare. 7 Many of them instruct how to move in rough country without being detected, or how to react when ambushed.

    The Seven Years’ War in North America
    But for all his codification of the rules of bush fighting, Rogers did not actually initiate the practice of “ranging” the colonial frontier to protect settlers from Indian and French-Canadian terror attacks upon the innocent. Ranger units had been forming and operating for many decades before Rogers, in a growing effort to curtail the increasingly bloody depredations that reflected a calculated French effort to deter the westward expansion of the British colonists. Indeed, from 1690 on, French policy in North America was driven by an effort to “scourge the borders and embroil the savages with the English.” 8
    Perhaps the most infamous incident of this early terror war was the French-inspired raid, fomented by a fanatical Jesuit priest, that led to the Deerfield Massacre of February 1704. In this horrible action, fifty-three colonists were killed and more than a hundred taken captive and marched through the snow from their homes in Massachusetts to locations some hundreds of miles away in Canada. The raid and its aftermath were recounted in heartbreaking detail by a survivor, Pastor John Williams, ransomed after two years of captivity, in his tale THE REDEEMED CAPTIVE RETURNING TO ZION . This atrocity, and countless others like it, drove the rise of rangers. What Rogers was able to do, half a century later, was to elevate bush fighting to a completely new way of war.
    Where rangers had come into being largely for defensive and deterrent purposes—to protect frontier settlements—Rogers saw their offensive and punitive possibilities. He envisioned companies of green-clad woodsmen reporting every enemy movement, raiding small outposts, even striking deep into French territory to chastise the Indians for the atrocities they had committed. Throughout the war he and his rangers did all these things, their most famous action being the retaliatory raid on the Abenaki village of St. Francis, depicted so vibrantly in Kenneth Roberts’s classic NORTHWEST PASSAGE . This attack required Rogers and his force of fewer than two hundred to infiltrate well over a hundred miles behind enemy lines, on foot and by canoe, then strike swiftly and make their way back. All this was done with French and Indian forces chasing them on the way to St. Francis—the rangers’ canoe cache having been discovered at an early point—and harassing them almost all the way back. This action alone highlights two of the most important elements of modern irregular warfare today: “long-range penetration” and the ability to “observe, orient, decide, and act” more quickly than one’s foes. Today this latter phenomenon is commonly called the “OODA loop” and is recognized as a key element in military effectiveness. Although it is generally associated with a twentieth-century fighter pilot, John Boyd, it may really have begun with Robert Rogers.
    While British military leadership in this era has often been portrayed as hidebound and unwilling to innovate—Braddock being the iconic figure for this point of view—the truth is more complex. Braddock may only have stated the need for improvement with his dying breath, but other British soldiers had come to this conclusion earlier and had a far more complete grasp of the fundamentally irregular nature of warfare in the wilderness. The first senior officer to embrace bush fighting