Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare & Early US Navy, BJ Armstrong (110)

Two centuries before the daring exploits of Navy SEALs and Marine Raiders captured the public imagination, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were already engaged in similarly perilous missions: raiding pirate camps, attacking enemy ships in the dark of night, and striking enemy facilities and resources on shore. Even John Paul Jones, father of the American navy, saw such irregular operations as critical to naval warfare. With Jones’s own experience as a starting point, Benjamin Armstrong sets out to take irregular naval warfare out of the shadow of the blue-water battles that dominate naval history. This book, the first historical study of its kind, makes a compelling case for raiding and irregular naval warfare as key elements in the story of American sea power.

Beginning with the Continental Navy, Small Boats and Daring Men traces maritime missions through the wars of the early republic, from the coast of modern-day Libya to the rivers and inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, Armstrong examines the era’s conflicts with nonstate enemies and threats to American peacetime interests along Pacific and Caribbean shores. Armstrong brings a uniquely informed perspective to his subject; and his work—with reference to original naval operational reports, sailors’ memoirs and diaries, and officers’ correspondence—is at once an exciting narrative of danger and combat at sea and a thoroughgoing analysis of how these events fit into concepts of American sea power.

Offering a critical new look at the naval history of the Early American era, this book also raises fundamental questions for naval strategy in the twenty-first century.

Commander Benjamin "BJ" Armstrong is a Permanent Military Professor and former Search & Rescue and Special Warfare helicopter pilot who has deployed to the 4th, 5th, and 6th Fleet in support of multiple Amphibious Ready Groups, Marine Air Ground Task Forces, and global operations. Ashore he flew as an Advanced Flight Instructor and served in the Pentagon as a strategist and a staff officer in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. He joined the faculty of the Naval Academy History Department during the fall term of 2016. In addition to his teaching and scholarship, CDR Armstrong serves as the Faculty Representative to the Mens Swimming and Diving team and Director of the McMullen Naval History Symposium (2019).

BJ Armstrong Biography:

James Bradford, "John Paul Jones and Guerre de Razzia,"

The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, XIIl, No. 4, (October 2003), 1-15.

Nimitz Library: