Rogers's Rangers — The First Written Irregular Warfare Doctrine in American Tradition

The 28 Rules That Changed How Armies Think About Forests

Robert Rogers was a New Hampshire frontiersman who, during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), commanded a unit of colonial rangers that operated in ways the British regular army could not. They moved in winter, through forests, using small-unit tactics derived from Native American warfare. They ambushed, scouted, raided, and gathered intelligence across terrain that conventional European armies treated as impassable. They were extraordinarily effective.

What makes Rogers historically significant for Boot is not just that he fought this way — many American frontiersmen did. It is that Rogers wrote it down. His "Rules of Ranging" (1757) are the first systematic codification of irregular warfare doctrine in the American military tradition — 28 rules covering movement, formation, scouting, communication, ambush, and retreat under pressure. They established a doctrinal inheritance that runs from Rogers's Rangers through the Civil War's Mosby's Rangers, through WWII special operations, through modern Special Forces.¹

The 28 Rules — Core Principles

Rogers's rules cover operational security, small-unit movement, and tactical flexibility in forest warfare. The highlights:

Intelligence and scouting: Don't trust guides who don't know the terrain; send scouts ahead; use your own judgment about trail safety; never follow the same path twice if you can help it.

Ambush discipline: When you stop, position men in a half-circle facing the direction of potential attack; never mass in a single location; spread out enough that one burst of fire can't kill multiple men.

Fire and movement: Never fire at the enemy at first sight; wait until you have a clear shot and a plan for what happens after the shot; maintain the ability to break contact and withdraw.

Night operations: March at night when possible if enemy is known to be present; move quietly; communication by pre-arranged signals rather than voice.

Withdrawal protocols: When forced to retreat, do not run in a mass; split into small groups going different directions and reconvene at a pre-arranged location; the enemy cannot pursue all directions simultaneously.¹

Why Documentation Was the Innovation

Frontiersmen across colonial America fought in similar ways to Rogers's Rangers. Native American warfare had been employing these tactics against European regulars since first contact. What Rogers contributed was not the tactics but the systematization and documentation of the tactics — converting empirical field knowledge into transmissible doctrine.

This is Boot's key analytical point. The British regular army had no institutional mechanism for absorbing irregular warfare knowledge accumulated by colonial frontiersmen. The knowledge existed; the institution that could capture and transmit it did not. Rogers created the institutional document — the written doctrine — that made the knowledge transmissible to officers who had not personally fought in the forest.¹

This connects to Boot's broader argument about counterinsurgent literacy advantage: states that can document, systematize, and transmit irregular warfare knowledge across generations outperform those that rely on individual practitioners regenerating the same knowledge from experience each time.

The Lineage

The Rogers's Rangers doctrine created a recognizable inheritance:

Civil War: John Singleton Mosby's Confederate partisan rangers (1862–1865) operated through exactly the Rogers principles — small units, fast movement, hit-and-run raids on Union supply lines and communications, dispersion and evasion rather than pitched battle.

WWII Special Operations: The OSS, British SOE, and Ranger battalions all drew on the irregular warfare tradition Rogers codified. Merrill's Marauders in Burma operated in the Rogers mode: deep penetration, living off the land, small-unit harassment of Japanese supply lines.

Modern Special Forces: The US Army Special Forces "unconventional warfare" mission is the institutional descendant of Rogers's doctrine — small teams, indigenous partner forces, operating in denied territory, focusing on intelligence and disruption rather than direct engagement.¹

Tensions

Doctrine vs. culture: Rogers's rules codified what worked in the Northeast American forest. Applying the same doctrine to the Sonoran Desert, the Philippine jungle, or the Afghan mountains required adaptation. The doctrine is more important as a model for how to develop and preserve irregular warfare knowledge than as a specific tactical template.

The British army's rejection: The British regular army in the French and Indian War repeatedly failed to integrate Rogers's tactical knowledge into standard operations. Braddock's 1755 defeat (ambush by French and Indian forces on the Monongahela) is the canonical case: a British regular formation moving through forest in close order, ignoring ranger-style scouting, was ambushed and essentially destroyed. The knowledge existed; the institution refused it.

Cross-Domain Handshakes

Ryu Transmission Lineage System (History): Ryu — Japan's Knowledge Transmission Machine — Rogers's "28 Rules" and the Japanese ryu's hiden (secret doctrine) solve the same problem: how to transmit practical fighting knowledge across generations when the knowledge is normally held implicitly, in the body and accumulated experience of individual practitioners. Rogers chose codification (written document accessible to anyone trained to read it); the ryu chose esoteric transmission (document only accessible to initiated disciples). Both are responses to the institutional preservation problem. The difference: written codification scales better (any literate officer can access it); hiden transmission maintains quality control but sacrifices reach.

Counterinsurgent Literacy Advantage (History): Counterinsurgent Literacy Advantage — Rogers's Rangers is Boot's primary historical case for the documentation advantage. The Americans who learned from Rogers's tradition — Mosby, the WWII Rangers, modern Special Forces — had the Rogers manual as an institutional anchor. British regulars who repeatedly encountered the same guerrilla challenge without a comparable doctrine had to relearn it from scratch each time.

The Live Edge

The Sharpest Implication Rogers wrote 28 rules in 1757 and the US military spent the next 250 years repeatedly rediscovering and losing the same knowledge. Vietnam produced the Phoenix Program's intelligence-driven counterinsurgency; it was shut down and its lessons were not institutionalized. The Iraq surge produced FM 3-24 and the "clear, hold, build" doctrine; within five years of the surge's success the Army had deprioritized COIN training. The Rogers problem — knowledge generated, knowledge lost — is not solved by writing it down once. It requires institutional mechanisms that make the knowledge career-relevant and continuously practiced.

Generative Questions

• Rogers's contribution was converting tacit knowledge (how frontiersmen actually fight) into explicit doctrine (written rules). What other domains of tacit military or strategic knowledge has never been codified — and is consequently being regenerated from scratch by each generation?

Connected Concepts

• Counterinsurgent Literacy Advantage — the broader argument this case supports
• American Colonial Indian Wars — The Skulking Way of War — the broader context of colonial irregular warfare
• Counterinsurgency Doctrine — Ancient Origins — where Rogers fits in the longer history of COIN knowledge accumulation

Footnotes