Marine Corps Maneuver Warfare - Marine Corps Association
MANEUVER WARFAREMarine CorpsManeuver WarfareThe historical contextby MarinusThis article is the first in a series we call The Maneuverist Papers, discussing maneuver warfare doctrinein the Marine Corps. Under the leadership of Commandant Gen Alfred M. Gray, the Marine Corpsfirst codified maneuver warfare as Service doctrine with the1989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM1), Warfighting, although the significant intellectual effortthat produced the underlying concepts had begun well overa decade earlier. In 1997, Gen Charles C. Krulak oversawthe revision of Warfighting as MCDP 1, which clarified andelaborated on select ideas from the original but did not changethe essence of maneuver warfare in any way. Maneuver warfare doctrine has thus served the Marine Corps for over threedecades. Much has happened in those years, especially twolengthy wars that saw significant changes in the conduct ofwarfare. In contrast, during the same period of time, U.S.Army doctrine has evolved from AirLand Battle to FullDimensional Operations to Full Spectrum Operations to nowUnified Land Operations over a span of nine capstone fieldmanuals. Now the Marine Corps is set to undertake arguablythe most dramatic changes to structure and capabilities inover a half century.This begs the question: Is it time for the Marine Corps torevise its doctrine? Several Gazette articles in recent years haveargued so. The aim of The Maneuverist Papers is to energizethat conversation. The Maneuverist Papers will continue thediscussion begun with “What We Believe About War andWarfare” in the June Gazette by describing the developmentof and elaborating on key maneuver warfare concepts, providing historical context for the development of Warfighting andthe maneuver warfare movement in general, and discussingrecent changes to the face of war that may justify a doctrinalrevision.The maneuver warfare movement must be judged as aninstitutional success in that maneuver warfare became MarineCorps doctrine and has remained so for over three decades.Moreover, the movement brought other lasting changes—mostnotably in the area of professional military education—infull view today. In some areas, such as training, the impactof maneuver warfare, with its emphasis on free play, forceon-force exercises, arguably has been less enduring. In otherareas, such as personnel management, the movement seemsto have had little impact at all. A broader issue is operationaland tactical success. From Grenada in 1983 through the GulfManeuver warfare doctrine has served the Marine Corps for over three decades. (Photo by LCpl Cedar Barnes.)Marine Corps Gazette September 2020www.mca-marines.org/gazette85
MANEUVER WARFAREWar to Afghanistan and Iraq, the historical record has beenmixed. But is this an indictment of maneuver warfare itself? Isit a result of the Marine Corps no longer embracing maneuverwarfare in practice? Or never having truly embraced it in thefirst place, as some have argued? Or is the mixed record theresult of some completely external factors, such as the growing ineffectiveness of combat as a decisive factor in resolvingconflict in general? That is a topic for another debate.The Historical ContextIt is important to understand that the maneuver warfaremovement emerged at a particular moment in history. Afterthe Vietnam War, the Marine Corps underwent a period ofinstitutional introspection. The maneuver warfare movementwas a response to the institutional and operational dysfunction of the Vietnam experience that sought, among otherthings, to put the Marine Corps approach to war on a solidhistorical and theoretical footing.Gray, of course, was the leading exponent of maneuverwarfare, providing impetus and top cover. Retired Air ForceCol John Boyd was the movement’s intellectual godfather.Civilian Bill Lind was chief provocateur and proselytizer. Butthe core was a grassroots movement comprising a combination of Vietnam veterans who had remained on active dutyafter the war to see things set right and young officers whosaw maneuver warfare as empowering. Of the active dutymaneuverists, Col Michael Wyly was the most prominent.Other early thought leaders included then-Capts StephenMiller, G.I. Wilson, and William Woods.The Marine Corps was not alone in reforming. Each of theServices, and the broader Defense establishment, respondeddifferently to the Vietnam experience. Not surprisingly, theArmy and Marine Corps, which bore the brunt of the warand experienced its dysfunction most keenly, eventually enacted the most extensive reforms, although the first reformsactually came out of the Navy, or more precisely the NavalWar College, where ADM Stansfield Turner reformed thecurriculum almost immediately upon assuming the presidencyin 1972. Three curriculum reforms were most significant forour purposes. The first was the reintroduction of strategicthought, which the Services had mostly abrogated to civilianacademics by then and which had largely become focusedon nuclear strategy. The second was the rediscovery of thegreat Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose theoriesat that time had been all but forgotten in favor of the moreformulaic and geometric approach of the Swiss military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. The rediscovery of Clausewitziantheory, made much more accessible by the Michael Howardand Peter Paret translation of On War in 1976, was foundational to maneuver warfare theory. The third was the revivalof the study of military history, which had virtually beenremoved from military education after the Second WorldWar in favor of operations research and procedural training.This revival also proved important to the maneuver warfaremovement.For the Army, reform meant, among other things, returning to what it considered to be its primary mission: defeating86www.mca-marines.org/gazettea Soviet invasion of Europe. A new, post-Vietnam edition ofthe Army’s capstone doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100-5(FM 100-5), Operations, introduced the doctrine of ActiveDefense in 1976. Active Defense met with immediate andwidespread criticism within the Army as being too defensive and mathematical. A coordinated, Army-wide effort todevelop a more offensive doctrine ensued. A new FM 100-5introduced AirLand Battle doctrine in 1982, and a revisionfollowed in 1986. Neither manual directly mentioned Europeor the Soviets, but it was clear that was the problem space.AirLand Battle was a rigorously reasoned doctrine—arguablymore so than any of the Army doctrines that have followed.Never executed against its envisioned enemy, AirLand Battleturned out to be highly effective against the Iraqi army during Operation DESERT STORM in 1991. Moreover, AirLandBattle, elevated to the multi-Service level, became the de factojoint doctrine.Where the Army undertook a coordinated and methodical effort to develop AirLand Battle, the maneuver warfaremovement took on more the character of a back-alley brawlconducted on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette—whichin retrospect is probably appropriate. Col John Greenwood,the editor of the Gazette at the time, deserves a lot of creditfor encouraging and managing the debate. Being able to focuson a particular threat in a particular theater allowed the Armyto write in more specific and concrete terms. As the Nation’sforce-in-readiness in the 1980s, the Marine Corps did notenjoy that luxury, and one consequence is that Warfighting ismore abstract and theoretical than the Army capstone manuals have tended to be. It was, as Gray wrote in the foreword,more a “philosophy for action” than a traditional doctrine.Maneuver warfare as described in Warfighting was designedGen Alfred M. Gray. (Official Marine Corps photo.)Marine Corps Gazette September 2020
Marine readers may be looking for more specific guidance from Warfighting. (Photo byto have very broad utility but required significant judgmentin application, which has been a source of frustration forsome Marine readers looking for more specific guidance.Conversely, as a result, Warfighting could be written in moreenduring terms, which goes some way in explaining why theMarine Corps has not found the need to update its doctrineas frequently as the Army has.A second aspect of the historical context of maneuver warfare is that it is a product of the Cold War era and implicitlyreflects that paradigm. FMFM 1’s default was the classicmilitary force-on-force model. It did not explicitly excludeirregular warfare, but it had nothing specific to say about iteither—one of the criticisms of both editions of Warfighting.The 1997 revision acknowledges the possibility of nonstatebelligerents but offers no additional insights into nonclassicalwarfare. It is a credit to the Corps that countless Marines haveextrapolated the classic theory of Warfighting to decades ofirregular warfare. Arguably, Warfighting reflects a worldviewthat became dated when the Berlin Wall fell—or, alternatively,possibly one that is just now coming back into relevance.The Maneuver vs. Attrition DebatePerhaps the biggest controversy to arise during the development of maneuver warfare was the maneuver warfarevs. attrition warfare debate. The early maneuverists choseto describe maneuver warfare by comparing it with its opposite, which they called attrition warfare. In retrospect,this may have been an operational error that delayed theeventual acceptance of maneuver warfare. The simplisticinterpretation of the argument was: maneuver good, attritionbad. In reality, the problem was partly semantic. All warfareinvolves attrition—that is, incremental degradation of comMarine Corps Gazette September 2020LCpl Shane Beaubien.)bat power because of accumulating losses. And all warfareinvolves relational movement, if only to bring weapons intoposition to cause more attrition. Maneuver and attrition arenot a matter of either/or, but that is how proponents came toframe the issue. The Marine Corps split into two camps: themaneuverists and the attritionists. The maneuverists thoughtthey were simply advancing ideas on a better way to fight,but the attritionists felt (with some justification) that theywere being painted as Neanderthals for wanting to kill theenemy. How could attrition inflicted on an enemy possiblybe bad? The attritionists thought the maneuverists were unnecessarily complicating what should be a straightforwardproposition: find the enemy, destroy the enemy. (Frankly,and unfortunately, part of the attritionists’ motivation alsowas a reaction to the confrontational Lind, who was closelyassociated with the maneuver vs. attrition construct. Theterm “attrition warfare” assumed a pejorative connotation,so naturally some Marines adopted it as a badge of honor toshow their opposition.)The issue was not whether it was better to maneuver or toinflict attrition because both again are inherent in warfare.In retrospect, the issue is what you choose as the mechanism by which you propose to impose defeat on the enemy. Theimportant concept of defeat mechanism was not explicitlyrecognized at the time. (A later article will address defeatmechanisms.) The defeat mechanism of attrition warfare wasinherent in the name: you inflicted defeat by cumulativelyeroding enemy personnel and material strength or psychological resolve until he gave up the fight or eventually waseliminated. The maneuverists pointed out that this tended tobe a time-consuming and costly approach. Moreover, it didnot work well if there was a marked asymmetry of interests:www.mca-marines.org/gazette87
MANEUVER WARFAREif one belligerent was fighting merely a war of choice whilethe other fought a war of survival (read: Vietnam), the oddswere significantly stacked.The defeat mechanism of maneuver warfare was muchharder to put your finger on. It certainly was not inherentin the word maneuver, which many understood narrowlyto mean relational movement, but which the maneuveristsimbued with deeper meaning that they sometimes struggledto explain. (A popular attritionist joke was that maneuverwarfare sought to win not by defeating the enemy in battlebut by “driving in circles and confusing him to death.”)For some, the “maneuver” in maneuver warfare suggestedthat the doctrine was defined by the forms of maneuver itemployed, namely envelopments, penetrations, and turningmovements—basically anything other than a frontal attack,which by implication was considered stupid. This was agross misunderstanding. Attritionists complained that themaneuverists could not lay exclusive claim to select forms ofmaneuver, and they resented the implication that they favoredonly frontal attacks. Others equated maneuver warfare withmechanized warfare, likely based on the tendency to associatemaneuver warfare with the German blitzkrieg of the SecondWorld War. (More about the German influence shortly.) Theiconic image of Gray in utilities with desert goggles on hishelmet probably reinforced the misconception.We now understand that the defeat mechanism of maneuverwarfare is systemic disruption—eliminating the enemy’s abilityto operate as a coherent and cohesive whole. According toFMFM 1:Maneuver warfare is a warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatterthe enemy’s cohesion through a series of rapid, violent, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deterioratingsituation with which he cannot cope.Boyd used to talk about “tearing the enemy apart from theinside.”In other words, where attrition warfare attacks the componentsof the enemy system to degrade them, maneuver warfare attacks the relationships between those components to breakthe coherent functioning of the system.Maneuver warfare is a systemic doctrine, which was ahard sell in 1989. The emergence of complexity theory in the1990s, with a host of popular books on the subject, greatlyenhanced the understanding of complex systems. (It alsogreatly enhanced the understanding of both Clausewitz andBoyd. Alan Beyerchen’s masterful “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity,and the Unpredictability of War,” published in InternationalAffairs in 1992, argued convincingly that Clausewitz intuitively understood complex nonlinear dynamics but lackedthe language to describe them. Likewise, the language andconcepts of complexity theory helped us to realize that Boyd’sthinking had been even farther ahead of its time than we hadpreviously appreciated.) The 1997 revision of Warfighting wasmuch more explicitly systemic in its description. It was stilla hard sell.Finally, complicating the issue was the often-misunderstoodannihilation-attrition strategic construct. The German historian Hans Delbruck (1848–1929) posited two basic typesof strategy: Ermattungsstrategie and Niederwerfungsstrategie,which were mistakenly translated in English as strategy ofattrition and strategy of annihilation. The English termsare problematic because they are practically synonymous. Infact, most American readers were probably introduced to theterms in Russell Weigley’s 1973 classic The American Wayof War, in which, the author later acknowledged, he had gotthe terms confused. The former strategy is probably bettertermed strategy of exhaustion, which Delbruck argued was aviable option for a weaker belligerent that lacked the abilityto defeat the enemy outright and instead sought a limitedobjective—to raise the enemy’s costs so high that he waswilling to settle on your terms rather than continue to fight.Maneuver warfare attacks relationships between components to break down the coherent functioning of the system. (Photo by Cpl Tanner Seims.)88www.mca-marines.org/gazetteMarine Corps Gazette September 2020
The latter is better termed a strategy of incapacitation. (TheGerman literally means “taking-down strategy,” as in a takedown in wrestling. It does not require reducing the enemy “tonothing,” the literal meaning of “annihilation” from Latin.)The latter strategy involved the outright defeat of the enemy’sability to resist, which Delbruck argued involved the adoptionof an unlimited military objective and was available only tothe stronger belligerent.The German InfluenceAnother controversy during the maneuver warfare movement was the German influence. The maneuverists, somemore than others, were fond of using German historicalexamples and terminology. They made two arguments. Thefirst was that the German army had in fact achieved tacticaland operational excellence using maneuver warfare and wasone of the few modern armies to do so. The second was thatthe German army was the only modern army to codify itsmaneuver doctrine. As a result, any primary source documentstended to be German. For the maneuverists, both argumentsmade the Germans worth studying. The maneuver warfarecanon thus was filled with titles like Mellenthin’s PanzerBattles, Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Manstein’s Lost Victories,Rommel’s Attacks, and Schell’s Battle Leadership.Schwerpunkt (main effort or center of gravity), Auftragstaktik (mission tactics), Flaechen und Luekentaktik (tacticsof surfaces and gaps), aufrollen (rolling up enemy forces fromthe flank after a penetration), and Fingerspitzengefuhl (literally “finger tips feeling,” meaning intuitive flair or instinct)found their way into the discussion, often getting mangledin pronunciation in the process.Fueling the debate was the 1982 publication of Martin vanCreveld’s Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance,1939-1945 (although it was available several years earlier as aDOD-funded study). Van Creveld did an extensive statisticalHeinz Guderian.(Photo taken in Poland, Photog-rapher unknown.)Marine Corps Gazette September 2020analysis of 87 engagements between U.S. Army and Germanforces in the Second World War and concluded that Germanground forces were tactically and operationally superior toU.S. forces. The oversimplified lesson that some took fromFighting Power was that German troops were 1.5 to 2.0 timesbetter than their American counterparts, which did not sitwell with many American readers and may have helped topush some into the attritionist camp. Last, but not least, thecontroversial Lind was an unabashed Germanophile (Prussophile is probably more accurate), and this alone producedantibodies.Another controversy during the maneuver warfare movement was theGerman influence.In the end, Warfighting intentionally avoided the use ofGerman terminology. Thirty years of subsequent experiencehas reduced the need to rely on German examples, and thecontroversy has largely blown over.Why the Maneuver Warfare Movement SucceededThere are several reasons for maneuver warfare’s institutional success, and those may provide lessons for today’ssituation. The maneuver warfare movement came from a point of realinstitutional pain. The origin and motivation of the maneuverwarfare movement, as mentioned, was the pain caused bythe dysfunctional experience of the Vietnam War. It wasthis motivation that sustained the movement. Maneuverwarfare was not merely an intellectual exercise, althoughField Marshal Erwin Rommel. (Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1973-012-43, Erwin Romme.)Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. (Bundesarchiv Bild 183-H01757, Erich von Manstein.)www.mca-marines.org/gazette89
MANEUVER WARFAREclearly it contained an intellectual element. In contrast, manycapability development initiatives today seem like purelyintellectual exercises not motivated by any institutionalpain. They appear to be change for change’s sake. The discourse was extensive, open, and transparent—andfrequently messy. This was critical. The argument took placein the open over more than a decade. It got ugly at times,but this forced the maneuverists to strengthen their caseand in the end helped garner widespread support for thedoctrine. Maneuver warfare was not developed in secret bysome high-level “working group” and then imposed on therest of the institution. In today’s parlance, we might say itwas crowd sourced. The open discourse went a long waytoward socializing, strengthening, and eventually vettingmaneuver doctrine.To understand where you are andwhere you a
in the Marine Corps. Under the leadership of Com-mandant Gen Alfred M. Gray, the Marine Corps fi rst codifi ed maneuver warfare as Service doctrine with the 1989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfi ghting, although the signifi cant intellectual effort
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