The American Insurgency

Over the past few years, I've enjoyed reading about the topic of guerrilla warfare, both from the perspective of successful counter-insurgents and from insurgents themselves. Nevertheless, I found it kind of peculiar that, whenever the topic of insurgency is brought up, the US military neglects to mention the obvious example of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution has all the elements of a successful insurgency. You have the perceived sense of the illegitimacy of the British government in the colonies ("no taxation without representation", anyone?) The British Army was far too small to successfully occupy and pacify the vast majority of the American countryside, in opposition to what we now know about successful counter-insurgency. As in many insurgencies, the Colonists received military aid from a foreign power (France), hoping to bankrupt their Britain in a proxy war. Not to mention, the Colonists had a well-trained militia--the Minutemen--ready to marshal at a moments notice, much like the Mahdi Army in Sadr City, Iraq. Most importantly, America's leading general, George Washington, lost the majority of the battles he participated in, yet he found himself the victor in the war, foreshadowing a famous statement made by an NVA officer about the Vietnam War.

I wonder if we simply don't think of the American Revolution as an insurgency because we have a popular image of the war being fought by rows of men marching rank-and-file towards one another. Does anyone have any good books to recommend about the original American insurgency?