The Trouble with Friends: The Franco-American Alliance at the Siege of Savannah 1779

Studying failure to understand success is counterintuitive to our way of thinking, we want to emulate the victors, not understand the losing side's complexities. The Yorktown campaign of the Revolutionary War was the decisive point in the war for independence and is used as a case study in multinational operations, but the often-forgotten siege of Savannah was the father of this moment. While the siege of Savannah failed to capture the city from the British army, it provided the American and French a template of operations to adjust from. The genesis of how future operations would need to be structured and the rapport required between the American and French commanders discovered during Savannah would directly lead to the successes of Yorktown. Without the siege of Savannah there would have been no lessons learned from which to build the architecture of multinational operations that continues to be relevant to our army today. This study will show that the critical failures at Savannah were not the result of tactical decisions but of the failure of the allied command structure to develop the needed interpersonal relationships that we know today as the nature of multinational operations.