It was the application of lessons learned during the Civil War, where General Sherman’s March to the Sea and Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign had demonstrated the effectiveness of attacking the material and economic foundations of an enemy’s war-making capacity rather than seeking decisive military battle.

Sheridan had commanded in the Shenandoah.

He had watched Sherman march to the sea.

He understood, from direct experience, what it meant to destroy an adversary’s supply base, transportation network, and economic infrastructure.

When he applied that understanding to the problem of off-reservation resistance on the Southern Plains, he translated it into specific operational terms: find the camps, burn the lodges, destroy the food, capture or kill the horses.

The application of this strategy to the Southern Plains in 1874 was more effective than previous Army campaigns had been for a specific reason: the material base of the Southern Plains peoples was more concentrated than the Confederate war economy had been.