Archives: Gazette Magazines

by Marinus

            Warfighting steals a page from Clausewitz’s On War by proposing the Zweikampf, or “two-struggle,” as the essential, universal definition of war.1 It defines war as a violent clash between two independent and hostile wills—each trying to impose itself upon the other by force and constrained only by its own limits and the countervailing efforts of the other. In Clausewitz’s time, the term Zweikampf was used to describe wrestling matches, duels, trial by combat,2 and even the fights between Achilles and Hector before the walls of Troy. A critical insight of the term is that it is a serious mistake to think of the enemy as an inanimate object to be acted upon like an anesthetized surgery patient—a seemingly obvious point that has been violated repeatedly throughout history. Instead, the enemy is an intelligent will that does everything in its power to achieve its own objectives. Maneuverist No. 2, “The Zweikampf Dynamic,” (MCG Oct 2020), argues that the two-struggle is inherently nonlinear and that that nonlinearity makes war fundamentally uncertain, unpredictable, and frictional. It also argues that this way of thinking about war is foundational for, and may even be distinctive to, Marines. (See Figure 1.)

The Zweikampf implies cohesion within each fighter and symmetry between fighters. Once we involve more than a single actor on each side, however, we find ourselves dealing with alliances or coalitions of various sorts—whether between states, within states, or among actors of any kind. This, of course, leads to Sunzi’s notion of attacking alliances and Boyd’s of attacking cohesion. Moreover, while belligerents in the two-struggle may have different strategic objectives and may employ different capabilities in different ways, the Zweikampf is essentially symmetrical in that both belligerents are attempting to get their way by applying force directly against the other. This certainly seems to be true for Clausewitz, as both metaphors he uses when introducing the concept, wrestling and dueling, are symmetrical.3 Clausewitz was an observer of the Napoleonic wars after all, and so his natural focus would be on regular armies maneuvering directly against each other. The assumptions of cohesion and symmetry do not in any way weaken the concept of the two-struggle.

 

Is the Zweikampf really universal after all?

But after witnessing nearly twenty years of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, we cannot help but question if the Zweikampf is a universal construct after all. It strikes us as something of a stretch to argue that the two-struggle has applied cleanly to those conflicts—as well as to many others throughout history. Perhaps the Zweikampf applies more narrowly to what we now call regular warfare, and there is an entire other category of war that the Zweikampf construct does not capture in its essence and for which another construct might provide more and better insights. We speak of various forms, now most commonly called irregular warfare, in which the belligerents, in addition to fighting each other, must also struggle for control over a contested population.4

 

The Dreikampf

For these other forms of warfare, we propose a construct we will call the Dreikampf, or “three-struggle,” in which the third actor in the struggle is the common population that both belligerents struggle to impose themselves upon in addition to struggling to impose themselves upon each other. (See Figure 2.)

            Dreikampf as we propose it is not simply any conflict with more than two combatants—which is actually most wars. Wars with multiple combatants are commonplace, but they will tend to coalesce into two-struggles as the various combatants align into two camps based on their overlapping interests. The alliances may be relatively stable and enduring, as were the Allied and Central Powers in the First World War, or they may be continuously shifting, as with the various actors in the Syrian conflict today. But the point is that at any particular time and place, the multifaceted struggle will tend to coalesce into two camps, and the Zweikampf dynamic will prevail. As an example, the Chinese Nationalists and Communists fought for control of China in the 1930s. In 1937, Japan invaded, adding a third actor to the struggle, and the two Chinese factions, irreconcilable enemies up until that point, formed a united front against Japan. The Nationalists and Communists eyed the other with suspicion, and even clashed occasionally, but generally cooperated in the defeat of Japan, which both saw clearly as the greater, common threat. Once Japan was defeated, they returned to fighting each other in an existential struggle the Communists eventually won in 1949.

 

The Nature of the Three-Struggle

The characteristic essential for a three-struggle as we have proposed is the existence of a common, contested population that seeks to maintain its independence from either of the belligerents. The existence of the Dreikampf in no way invalidates the key lessons of the Zweikampf but rather is additive to them—or, more accurately, multiplicative. The nonlinearity that leads to unpredictability and friction in the Zweikampf is also inherent in the Dreikampf—only much more so. The simple addition of a third variable to the equation multiplies the complexity; we know from physics that, in contrast to two-body problems, three-body problems do not submit to closed-form solutions and in fact are chaotic under most conditions.5 (The classic demonstration of scientific chaos, which Clausewitz almost certainly witnessed, is a magnetic pendulum suspended over three magnets: the pendulum follows an erratic and seemingly random path, pulled by the three magnetic fields, sometimes captured briefly by one of them before careering off wildly again, never repeating the same path.) This may help explain why so many such conflicts historically have defied ultimate solution and instead required prolonged management over time.

More important than the addition of a third independent will to the struggle is the fundamentally different nature of the population from the other two belligerents. We are not fans of the term asymmetrical warfare to describe different operational approaches, but here the relationships genuinely are asymmetrical. Where the relationship between the two-struggle belligerents is essentially symmetrical, as we have said, the relationship between each belligerent and the population is far from it—and this diversity increases the complexity and difficulty even more. The interactions among the three interlocked wills are more varied, and these greater degrees of freedom are a primary driver of complexity. (See the discussion of complexity in Maneuverist No. 3.) The population generally does not attempt to impose defeat on either belligerent through force because it usually possesses neither the capability nor the interest. It must be subtler and more indirect, employing influence rather than coercion. Most often, its aim is not to impose itself on a belligerent but to maintain and maximize its own freedom of action vis a vis that belligerent. Basic power theory says that all power relationships are reciprocal even if they are far from balanced. Even a prison population finds ways to exert influence against its armed guards, and so it is with the Dreikampf.

Finally, populations are not likely to be as monolithic as the two other belligerents, nor as consistent and coordinated in their actions.6 The contested population almost always will comprise multiple subgroups, each with different, if potentially overlapping, objectives, means, and methods. Again, this variability only tends to increase the complexity of the dynamics.

The three-struggle itself may be transitory, as once the contested population falls under the control of one belligerent or the other the conflict reduces to a multifaceted Zweikampf, as discussed above. But we suggest that, even if sometimes transitory, the three-struggle is an important concept because it manifests different dynamics than the two-struggle.

The Zweikampf is a deceptively simple model that produces surprisingly complex dynamics. The Dreikampf is a more variable and complicated model that multiplies that complexity geometrically. It is not surprising, therefore, that Western armies traditionally have shown little interest in Dreikampf conflicts, after which they are quick to return to preparing for “real war”—which of course means Zweikampf. We have seen this in the U.S. military. Most recently, we seem to have forgotten the hard lessons learned in the Vietnam War—“No more Vietnams!”—only to have to go through the pain of relearning them in Afghanistan and Iraq. We do not dispute the rise of potential peer adversaries today, but we cannot help but wonder if the desire to return to “real war” is contributing to the current single-minded focus on Great Power conflict—or to the belief that it will be strictly regular. Even in future warfare against peer adversaries—even totalitarian states—we suggest that the popular will is likely to exert itself directly. Hostilities are not likely to end with the defeat of an enemy state’s regular military forces. In an age when societies are simultaneously fragmented and empowered by the democratizing effects of information technology, populations are less likely to abide by the decisions reached by their governments or the results achieved by governmental military forces—as we witnessed in Iraq in 2004. Dreikampf is not likely to disappear, no matter how hard we may wish it. To paraphrase a popular life quote: “Dreikampf is what happens when you’re planning for Zweikampf.” We suggest that we ignore that at our own peril.

 

Dreikampf and Insurgency

            Dreikampf is not synonymous with insurgency/counterinsurgency, although we suggest it may provide insight into the dynamics of many such conflicts, just as the Zweikampf continues to provide insight into regular warfare. Not all insurgencies are three-struggles. Nor do all insurgents employ irregular methods, although many do because they lack the resources to engage the established order on an equal footing, at least initially. Although not often thought of as such, the American Confederacy, for example, was an insurgency seeking to establish its independence from the United States. But the American Civil War was a classic Zweikampf fought primarily using regular warfare. The Confederacy could fight this way because it was able at the outset of the conflict to appropriate the national warmaking resources located in the Southern states.7 The Civil War was not a three-struggle because the American people were not an independent entity (or a unitary one). When Gen William T. Sherman cut a destructive swath through the South on his March to the Sea in 1864, he understood that the population of the South was an integral part of the Confederacy and not a separate thing. No application of population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine would have won the Southern populace over to the Northern cause. The same was true of the Northern population.

Conversely, not all three-struggles are insurgencies. The War in Afghanistan was a conflict between the United States and the Taliban in which the Afghan population, at least initially, had little interest beyond wanting to be left alone to pursue its interests without the interference of any national government.

The point is that the proposed Dreikampf is not simply synonymous with insurgency or even narrowly a construct of insurgency. Not all insurgencies are Dreikampfe, and not all Dreikampfe are insurgencies. There is, however, a class of insurgency in which the popular will is central, protracted popular war,8 which is common enough that it is synonymous with insurgency in many people’s minds. Which is another way of saying that Dreikampf will remain a frequent challenge in the future.

 

Implications of the Dreikampf

The key insight of the Dreikampf is this: Just as the Zweikampf asserts that the enemy is not an inanimate object to be acted upon, so the Dreikampf asserts that neither is the population an inanimate object to be controlled or influenced at will. The population is not merely “human terrain” to be fought through or a prize to be won, but rather is a third independent, or at least semi-independent, will with its own interests that do not align with either belligerent. (If they did align with one of the belligerents, the conflict would not be a Dreikampf.)

As with the Zweikampf, it is not merely the characteristics of the individual contestants in the three-struggle that give the conflict its essential nature but the even more complex and now asymmetrical interactions among the three. We suggest that this makes the Dreikampf dynamic chaotic and exceedingly challenging.

Importantly, the Dreikampf model is not necessarily an argument for a hearts-and-minds, population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine. One of the requirements the tripartite construct imposes on each belligerent is how much time or effort to devote to the other belligerent and how much to the population. For the latter, the question is how much effort, and what kind, to exert against either of the two belligerents. And for all parties, there is a question of how the two efforts relate to each other within the broader concept of operations.

One key implication is the critical importance of understanding the true dynamics of the conflict at hand. There are a few ways to go wrong. It is always an option—a temptation even—to treat a Dreikampf as a Zweikampf either by ignoring the contested population and focusing on defeating the enemy militarily or by treating the population as part of the enemy even when it is not. The former risks ignoring a potentially valuable ally, which may or may not be a fatal mistake. The latter likely will drive the population into the enemy’s camp, becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. The converse mistake is to treat a Zweikampf as if it were a Dreikampf, wasting time and effort trying to win over a population that has already sided with the enemy. Similarly, it is a serious miscalculation to underestimate the population’s determination not to be controlled by either belligerent, wasting time and resources that could better have been put to defeating the enemy. In either of the last two cases, a tendency to try to win over a population that will not be won over seems to be a dangerous tendency of population-centric counterinsurgency doctrines. Some populations may not be co-opted, only subjugated.

The overriding insight of the Dreikampf model, again, is the importance of recognizing the population as an independent will with its own interests and objectives, always maintaining the ability to adapt and surprise.

 

Conclusion

We have argued that Chapter 1 of Warfighting, “The Nature of War,” is the most important in the book because it establishes for Marines a common and compelling understanding of the nature war, which is a fundamental prerequisite for determining how to fight. Foundational to that description in Warfighting is the concept of the Zweikampf with all its implications. Warfighting starts by asserting the Zweikampf and then proceeds to discuss its subject consistently in that context. Nowhere does it address specific forms of warfare, such as regular and irregular, but many readers over the years have inferred a regular warfare bias. The Zweikampf model itself may help explain that interpretation. (While it may have attempted to address war in timeless and universal terms, FMFM/MCDP 1 was a product of the Cold War era, as were most of its early readers.)

We sense from recent and historical operational experience that the Zweikampf may not be a universal model after all, and we wonder if it may be time to expand the taxonomy of war to acknowledge a class that is better described by the Dreikampf model. In fact, an increasing number of Marines who are not products of the Cold War seem to be arguing, on these pages and elsewhere, that MCDP 1 as written does not meet current requirements. If Warfighting is to be revised, we suggest that this issue might be worthy of consideration.

 

Notes

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
2. An obsolete method of Germanic law to settle accusations in the absence of witnesses in which two disputing parties fought in single combat, and the victor of the fight was proclaimed to be right.
3. Ibid.
4. “Irregular warfare: A violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s). Also called IW,” DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, s.v. “Irregular Warfare,” available at https://www.jcs.mil.
5. Deterministically chaotic. See Maneuverist No. 3, (MCG Nov20).
6. Not that the armed belligerents will necessarily be all that coordinated.
7. Insurgencies in which the insurgent and establishment fight on more or less equal, conventional terms are often called civil wars. (E.g., the American Civil War.)
8. See Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency & Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare, (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1990).

by Two Maneuverists

Marines have fought many of the Nation’s most difficult battles over nearly two-and-a-half centuries and reflected on those experiences afterward. Marines have also been astute students of classical military theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Julian Corbett, as well as of modern masters like Col John Boyd. They have synthesized this experience and study into their own unique doctrine.

Marines have also led the way with innovative concepts in amphibious warfare, vertical lift, and counterinsurgency operations, often employing cutting edge technologies such as amphibious fighting vehicles, helicopters, radar-controlled bombing, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and remotely piloted vehicles.

It is fitting at a time when the Marine Corps is considering major institutional changes to pause and—drawing upon all that we have experienced and understand—codify our beliefs about war and warfare.

This declaration is one attempt to assert what we as Marines believe to be true about war and warfare. We argue that these fundamental beliefs should guide all aspects of operations and force development, especially doctrine development.

Our goal is to energize a conversation about the core beliefs that animate the Marine Corps. We encourage feedback.

1. War is a violent clash of interests between or among political groups characterized by the use of military or paramilitary force. Its essence is a contest between hostile, independent wills, each trying to impose itself on the other and/or upon a common, contested population through violence and other means. This essential nature of war is immutable, but the forms and character it may take are varied and continuously evolving.
2. Universal attributes of war are danger, friction, uncertainty, unpredictability, and disorder. No amount of planning or preparation can eliminate or control these attributes. The requirement is to be able to operate effectively despite—or even to exploit—these conditions. Human factors are paramount in war. War is arguably the greatest physical, psychological, and intellectual trial known to humankind.
3. The enemy will do everything in its power to be inscrutable, unpredictable, and disruptive of your plans. War being a clash between or among independent wills, it is important never to forget that the enemy always gets a say in how things turn out. Flexibility and adaptability are vitally important.
4. As Sun Tzu said: “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you will never be in peril.” The greatest teacher in war is the enemy. Learn from the enemy. Focus on the enemy rather than on procedures and processes.
5. War is an instrument of policy, initiated, guided, and constrained by policy. All war is political, politics being the process of distributing and exercising power in pursuit of interests. The original motive for war will always be political, but war is also a process of human and social interaction, driven by cultural, economic, ethnic, emotional, and psychological factors.
6. Warfare is the conduct of military action in war. Warfare involves the application of art, science, and will.
7. War requires the conduct of several distinct activities: policy, strategy, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures. These generally nest hierarchically, although they cannot properly be assigned to any particular echelons of command. Practitioners should engage in discourse up and down this hierarchy to ensure mutual reinforcement among the activities.
8. There are two basic strategies for applying military force in war: strategy of incapacitation, which aims to render the enemy unable to resist by negating his military capability, and strategy of erosion, which aims to erode the enemy’s will to resist. (Traditionally called strategy of annihilation and strategy of attrition.)
9. Warfare’s many forms fall into two broad categories: regular warfare between generally similar forces endeavoring to obtain and exploit positions of advantage in relation to each other and irregular warfare fought through the people and for the support of the people. Most actual warfare will combine both forms.
10. All military operations, but especially offensive ones, will deplete resources, which if not replenished will cause units eventually to reach a culminating point where they must pause for rest or replenishment.
11. It is critical in war to seize, maintain, and exploit the initiative. All warfare involves the interplay between initiative and response. Taking the initiative allows you to dictate the terms of conflict, pursue a positive aim, and impose your will upon the enemy. If the enemy seizes the initiative, you must respond. The response has the aim of negating the enemy’s positive aims and ultimately of seizing the initiative yourself.
12. It is likewise critical to create advantage. Any such advantage should then be ruthlessly exploited to create even greater advantage for further exploitation—ideally creating a cascading chain of deteriorating conditions for the enemy.
13. Where possible, it is better to defeat an enemy through systemic disruption than cumulative attrition—historically the two basic defeat mechanisms—because disruption can achieve disproportionately greater results for the resources expended. Disruption works by degrading an enemy’s ability to function as a coherent whole, even if individual elements of the enemy remain undefeated. Attrition works through the cumulative wearing down of enemy combat power or will. The two can be nested; for example, attrition of one key enemy element can trigger disruption in the broader whole. The effectiveness of disruption depends significantly on the vulnerability of the enemy to being disrupted.
14. Deciding where, when and how to attack an enemy requires the combined consideration of vulnerability and criticality. Some elements of the enemy system are more vulnerable than others, and attack against those elements would tend to make more and immediate progress. Some elements of the enemy system are more critical to the enemy than others, and successful attack against those would tend to yield greater ultimate results, although they tend to be better protected. The idea is to reconcile this tension by focusing efforts where and when they will be successful but also where they will have the greatest and longest lasting ultimate effects, employing strict economy elsewhere. In practice, this generally means avoiding surfaces and exploiting gaps, applying strength against weakness, and reinforcing success, not failure.
15. Combat power traditionally has been applied against the enemy through a combination of fire and maneuver. Today, the employment of messaging to influence perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of external audiences is increasingly important, sometimes equally or even more important than fire and maneuver. (Messaging refers not to situational information or intelligence used to build situational awareness or to internal communications to direct and coordinate friendly action, but rather to information transmitted externally to influence an enemy or other foreign audience through information products or actions.)
16. Every action sends a message, whether intended or not. What matters is the message received by others and not the message you might have intended to send. Different audiences will interpret the same message differently. Be sensitive to that and act accordingly.
17. Military operations are becoming increasingly transparent because of pervasive media and individual access to information and, as a result, will be increasingly scrutinized and criticized. Consequently, incidents that in the past would have been insignificant will have outsized impact today. As a result, the requirement for discipline in all activities and for discrimination in applying combat power is greater than ever before.
18. Modern warfare takes place in several domains simultaneously—land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Actions in any domain affect conditions not only in that domain but in the other domains as well—and often more significantly in those other domains. Ultimately, such cross-domain actions must affect conditions on the land, where peoples and governments reside and where the final resolution must be sought. The portions of domains in which operations are expected to occur is the battlespace. Within the battlespace, it is essential to employ the elements of combat power—fire, maneuver, and messaging—as combined arms in and across domains without regard to artificial boundaries.
19. Speed, boldness and surprise are force multipliers. With respect to speed, the aim is to generate a higher tempo of operations than the enemy can match. Boldness unhesitatingly exploits opportunities to achieve major results rather than marginal ones. Surprise, achieved through stealth, ambiguity or deception, is a state of disorientation resulting from an unexpected action that degrades the enemy’s ability to react.
20. It is important to have a plan but equally important to be ready to improvise and adapt to unfolding events. The greatest value of planning is the learning that takes place and the shared understanding it builds. The plan is not an inviolable script to be followed but a common point of departure for adaptation.
21. Mission command, a style of command based on assigning a subordinate a mission but refraining from directing how to accomplish it, is the defining feature of maneuver warfare. Mission command, also known as mission tactics, is based on decentralization. It is a principle to devolve authority to act to the lowest possible level capable of effectively exercising that authority. Mission command demands trust between seniors and subordinates. Seniors must trust their subordinates, but subordinates must earn that trust. Without this trust, mission command will fail.
22. By decreasing the requirement for explicit communication up and down the chain of command, mission command helps generate tempo, increases adaptability, encourages creativity, and distributes the responsibility for dealing with uncertainty and friction throughout the force rather than centralizing it in one place.
23. Mission command stems from the mission statement, normally paragraph two in an operation plan or order. That mission statement contains one or more tasks with associated purposes or intents. Of the two, the intent that provides the reason or the why behind each task takes precedence.
24. The intent for a unit is established by the commander assigning that unit’s mission—usually the next higher commander. The purpose of providing intent is to allow subordinates to exercise judgment and initiative—to depart from the original plan when the unforeseen occurs—in a way that is consistent with higher aims. It is important to understand the intent of commanders at least two levels up.
25. Leaders are responsible for accomplishing the mission while maintaining established standards of conduct and behavior within their purview. This requires interpreting orders and, on occasion, may even necessitate disobeying orders. “Following orders” is no justification for doing the wrong thing.
26. Maneuver warfare relies on the exercise of judgment more than the application of procedure. While techniques and procedures are important, it is more important to focus outwardly on the enemy than inwardly on your own processes.
27. Any activity that is not part of the conduct of war is justifiable only as part of the preparation for war.
28. Militaries historically have been strikingly unsuccessful in predicting the charcteristics of the next war. Especially for the Nation’s force-in-readiness, it is generally better therefore to prepare for a range of possibilities and to be able to adapt quickly once conflict arrives.
29. The mind is a leader’s primary weapon; professional military education and experience provide the “ammunition.” The profession of arms requires a keen intellect and a life-long commitment to study and learning.
30. Because decentralization requires that subordinates be willing to act on their own initiative rather than waiting for orders, commanders must promote, develop, and demand a sense of initiative among their subordinates. Commanders should instill a bias for action among their subordinates, judging mistakes of initiative lightly but mistakes of inaction more harshly.
31. To capture the dynamic of independent, opposing wills that is the essence of war, it is important to ensure that exercises and wargames are free-play and force-on-force. There should be a thinking and adaptive “enemy” in every instance.
32. Despite advancements in weaponry and other technologies, most recently in robotics and autonomous systems, war is still waged by humans. Technology intelligently developed, fielded, and employed can provide a potentially important advantage, but there can be a tendency to over-rely on that technology. The most advanced technology is not necessarily the most useful on the battlefield. In some situations, greater numbers of less-capable systems may be more advantageous than small numbers of “exquisite” systems.
33. Frank and open dialogue among all Marines is essential, regardless of rank.
34. “Every Marine a rifleman” is more than a mere saying. It is an assertion of self-identity that every Marine, regardless of MOS or duty assignment, is a warrior first. Fighting spirit is reflected in an open willingness—even a desire—to join in combat and a dedicated pursuit of combat prowess, especially mastery in the use of weapons, as the highest soldierly virtue.
35. Marine Corps culture embraces the spartan qualities of toughness, discipline, austerity, and the willingness to endure—even to embrace—extreme hardship. Marine Corps culture values the unit over self, to the point that the fear of letting comrades down in combat is greater than the fear of death.
36. The core values of honor, courage, and commitment—first learned by all Marines during recruit training and Officer Candidates School—reflect this culture. Honor is living life with integrity, responsibility, honesty, and respect. Courage is the mental, moral, and physical strength to do what is right and necessary in the face of fear. Commitment is unwavering, selfless dedication to mission accomplishment and personal and professional responsibilities.
37. Marine Corps culture includes a deep and conscious awareness of the history of the Corps, including its customs and traditions, and the determination to live up to that heritage at all costs. That awareness is carefully instilled in all Marines, starting again at recruit training and Officer Candidates School. It is every Marine’s duty to maintain and reinforce that heritage, including calling out fellow Marines who fail to live up to its standards.

 

Notes

1. This declaration is adapted from work performed to support a review of Marine Corps Doctrinal Publications.
2. The authors want to note that they are beneficiaries of the mentoring of the first two “Maneuverist Commandants,” Gen Alfred M. Gray and Gen Charles C. Krulak, as well as the intellectual father of maneuver warfare, the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF(Ret).

by Marinus

In the last three decades of the 20th century, the study of German military history, and in particular, the reading of the memoirs of German general officers of World War II, allowed Marines of that era to imagine what maneuver warfare might look like. In the 21st century, a substantial change in the supply of relevant resources raises the question of whether Marines intent upon improving their understanding of maneuver warfare should look for other examples to emulate, experiences to evaluate, and traditions to contemplate.

In 1979, the Old Army Press, a small publisher specializing in the history of the American West, printed 2,000 cloth-bound copies of a book called Tiger Jack. Written by Hanson W. Baldwin, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his work as a war correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, this book told the tale of MG John S. Wood, a U.S. Army officer who, in the course of the last year of World War II, led the 4th Armored Division in a distinctly maneuverist manner. (British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart once referred to Wood as “the Rommel of the American armored forces.”)

Arriving, as it did, during the genesis of the maneuver warfare movement, Tiger Jack should have been of considerable interest to Marines. Notwithstanding the long and happy relationship between Mr. Baldwin and the professional journal of the Marine Corps, no mention of the book appeared in the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette and few, if any, copies found their way onto the shelves of the libraries of Marine Corps bases.1 A few Marines may have run across the reviews of Tiger Jack published in Armor magazine and Parameters: The Journal of the U.S. Army War College. Of these, those who were especially adept at chasing down books might have ordered a copy, whether from a full-service bookseller or directly from the publisher. However, only those who were able to spend several days in the reading room of the National Archives, the archives of Syracuse University, or the library of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College would have been able to delve more deeply into the way John Shirley Wood commanded the 4th Armored Division.

Today, dozens of copies of Tiger Jack can be found for sale on the websites of dealers in second-hand books. Better yet, Marines who wish to learn more about MG Wood and the way he handled his division can find dozens of additional works on the website of the Combined Arms Research Library at Fort Leavenworth. These include monographs that reconstruct particular engagements; after-action reports submitted by the commanders of subordinate, adjacent, and supporting units; and accounts that describe the operational context of the decisions made by MG Wood. A broader internet search will turn up additional resources on the operations of the 4th Armored Division during the last year of World War II. These include four complete histories, three partial histories, three documentary films, two histories of subordinate units, and a table-top wargame—as well as a module for a computer-based wargame.

After feasting on these resources, Marines still hungry for case studies in the effective application of maneuver warfare can easily find much material about Japanese, Israeli, French, Finnish, British, and American battles, campaigns, and leaders. Thus, for example, a Marine interested in the “bicycle blitzkrieg” conducted by the Japanese forces led by LtGen Tomoyuki Yamashita in Malaya in 1942, will, in the course of a short internet search, find enough in the way of papers, podcasts, low-cost wargames, and readily available books to permit an in-depth, multi-sided exploration of that campaign. (Readers contemplating such a project may want to start with the seventeen-episode series of audio programs about the Malayan Campaign produced by the Principles of War podcast.)

The existence of this cornucopia of concepts to contemplate, examples to explore, and paragons to imitate raises the question of whether maneuver-minded Marines of the Information Age need bother at all with the study of German military history. At the very least, those seeking to encourage Marines to devote their precious professional development time to the exploration of the German military tradition will not only have to produce persuasive arguments in favor of this choice but will have to deal with a pair of powerful objections.

The simplest argument in favor of the continued study of the German tradition of maneuver warfare stems from on the same wealth of sources and resources that enables the study of alternative models. In the years between 1979 and 2019, more than two thousand English-language books about various aspects of the German military experience were published. The same period saw the printing of hundreds of board wargames and the creation of dozens of computer games that attempted to replicate, in various ways, the tactical and operational characteristics of German forces. The existence of this body of work makes possible the detailed reconstruction of a wide variety of campaigns, battles, and engagements. At the same time, it facilitates the placement of such events in the broader context of strategy, politics, and culture.

The availability of so much material about the German military tradition greatly reduces dependence upon the memoirs of general officers that loomed so large in the early days of the maneuver warfare movement within the Marine Corps. Most of these suffered from the sort of defects so often seen in the genre of autobiography. That is, they were self-serving accounts that minimized mistakes made by the authors, omitted information that would have been embarrassing, and placed the blame for fiascos on third parties. The worst offender in this regard was Panzer Leader, in which Heinz Guderian took far too much credit for the creation of German armored forces in the 1930s and, in doing so, painted the man most responsible for that development, Ludwig Beck, as a hidebound reactionary. Thanks, however, to the work of English-speaking historians, present-day Marines are in a position to not only recognize this gross mischaracterization but learn about the troubled relationship between the two officers. (General Beck, who had resigned in protest from the German Army in 1938, had been one of the leaders of the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the aftermath of this event, which took place on 20 July 1944, Gen Guderian took aggressive measures to ensure the loyalty of German military officers to the National Socialist regime.)2

A more nuanced case for frequent recourse to the wellspring of German military history rests upon the continuous, consistent, and increasingly central role played by many of the fundamental precepts of maneuver warfare in German military culture. That is, while there were many instances where German military professionals violated one or more of these tenets, a deep appreciation for such things as the inherently chaotic nature of war and the importance of a rapid decision cycle permeated the way that German soldiers fought, thought, and taught for more than a hundred years. Thus, while the American, British, and French practitioners of maneuver warfare often waged war in ways that put them at odds with the cultures of the forces in which they served, German maneuverists could reasonably assume that they were cooperating with superiors, subordinates, and peers who shared their beliefs and biases. Because of this, Marines attempting to imagine a force in which the practice of maneuver warfare is the norm will find more positive examples of such organizational orthodoxy in the annals of German military history than in the tales of mavericks, eccentrics, and doctrinal apostates.3

A more powerful justification for the retention of the link between maneuver warfare in the Marine Corps and the German military tradition begins, paradoxically, with the two most common arguments offered by the opponents of that enterprise. The first reminds us of the large number of war crimes committed by members of the German armed forces during those conflicts. The second rests firmly upon the incontrovertible fact that Germany lost both world wars.

There is no doubt that, during both world wars, members of the German armed forces, acting in their official capacities, violated laws of war that were then in force in a large number of ways. These crimes included the invasion of neutral countries, the aerial bombardment of cities, the sinking of civilian ships, and the collective punishment of civilians. (Outrages of the last types usually took place in the course of attempts to enforce one of the central tenets of the law of war of that era, the rule that civilians may not, under any circumstances, participate in combat.) In the Second World War, moreover, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen served a regime that engaged in the persecution of political dissidents, the maltreatment of prisoners of war, and a gargantuan, frequently murderous, campaign of ethnic cleansing.

As horrible as they were, the war crimes committed by German servicemen in the course of the world wars were far from unique. The armed forces of the victors of the Second World War invaded neutral countries, bombarded cities from the air, sunk civilian ships, maltreated prisoners of war, and engaged in the collective punishment of civilian communities. In addition to these things, they conducted campaigns of mass rape, looting, and indiscriminate murder against civilians they were obliged to protect. In addition to this, they ensured the survival and, indeed, enabled the expansion of the communist regime of the Soviet Union, the crimes of which surpassed in quality, and greatly exceeded in quantity, those of National Socialist Germany.

The war crimes of the armed forces of the alliance that won the Second World War does not, in any way, excuse those of their German counterpart. They do, however, present serious students of the art of war with a conundrum. If German violations of the laws of war prevent us from studying German military history, then the war crimes committed by members of the Allied armed forces during the Second World War should prevent us from making use of the American, British, and Soviet experience of that conflict. Similarly, if connection to a reprehensible regime prevents a military tradition, institution, or personality from offering anything of value to present-day Marines, then we may study neither Soviet military theory nor the campaigns of the Red Army, let alone the memoirs of Georgi Zhukov.

What is true for the question of war crimes also applies to the issue of ultimate defeat. If we limit ourselves to the study of the winners of various wars, then we deprive ourselves of the lessons that we might learn from the study of the achievements of Hannibal, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Robert E. Lee—let alone the strategic contests that we ourselves have lost. What is worse, a one-sided study of history leads easily to the false assumption that everything done by the victors contributed to their eventual triumph and every act on the part of the losers drove another nail into their collective coffin. In other words, it replaces attempts to make sense of the complex interplay of multiple forces with the unthinking embrace of all things, whether help or hindrance, associated with the side that achieved strategic success.

Done well, the study of German military history necessarily produces a great deal of discomfort. Even if a Marine begins with a quest to learn about techniques, tactics, or campaigning, he cannot spend much time with the relevant sources without being reminded of fatal mistakes made in the realms of strategy, policy, and morality. Indeed, it is this “elephant in the room” that makes the study of the German military tradition so valuable to Marines of the 21st century. In the course of helping us learn the nuts-and-bolts of maneuver warfare, it draws our attention towards the higher arts of war.

 

Notes

1. Hanson W. Baldwin (1903–1991) had already written sixteen books on subjects related to national defense and was well known to well-read Marines of the middle years of the last century. Between 1937 and 1980, authors of articles published in the Marine Corps Gazette mentioned him 79 separate times.
2. For a sympathetic biography of Ludwig Beck, see Nicholas Reynolds, Treason Was No Crime (London, UK: Kimber, 1976). For an account of the development of the German armored forces in the interwar period that gives considerable credit to Gen Beck, see Bruce Gudmundsson, On Armor, (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005.)
3. The publicists for the memoirs of German generals published in the English-speaking world in the 1950s, chief of whom was Basil Henry Liddell Hart, took pains to present the authors of such works as nonconformist visionaries at odds with their superiors. This view, however, had less to do with German military culture than with the predilections of those promoters and the prejudices of the readers they were trying to reach. For a short treatment of this phenomenon, see Bruce I. Gudmundsson, review of Guderian: Panzer General (Revised Edition, 2003) by Kenneth Macksey, War in History, Volume 12 Number 4, (October 2005), pages 474–476. For a more extensive exploration, see, among others, John Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

by Marinus

One of the more curious features of the first four decades of the maneuver warfare movement within the Marine Corps is the large role played by artifacts of the German military tradition. Why, after all, should American Marines, who defend a liberal democracy, depend so heavily upon lessons taught by the champions of authoritarian regimes? Why should “soldiers of the sea” in the service of a global maritime power devote so much time to the lore of the army of a continental state? Why should the heirs of the victors of two world wars pay so much attention to the methods of the losers? One possible solution to this conundrum lies in the realm of what might be called “literary logistics” of the early years of the maneuver warfare movement. Marines of 1970s might well have depended so heavily upon books and articles drawn from the German military tradition because such works were familiar to many of them and available to all.

In 1967, Kenneth Macksey, who had commanded tank units in the British Army during World War II, published a book called Armoured Crusader. Bearing the subtitle of A Biography of Major-General Sir Percy Hobart, this work told the tale of an officer who, after playing a key role in experiments in military mechanization in the 1920s and 1930s, had done much to promote the use of armored vehicles in amphibious operations during World War II. Unfortunately, no publishing firm saw fit to put out an American edition of Armoured Crusader, no American military journal reviewed it, and few American libraries put copies on their shelves. As a result, very few United States Marines, who might otherwise have learned a great deal about institutional reform, armored fighting vehicles, and amphibious operations, ever crossed paths with this extraordinarily useful book.

In 1975, Macksey published a biography that, in many respects, had much in common with his study of the life and work of Gen Hobart. Distributed under the title of Guderian: Panzer General, this second work recounted the trials and triumphs of another interwar armor enthusiast who had gone on to command mechanized forces in World War II, Col-GenHeinz Guderian of the German Army. The following year, a leading New York publishing house published two hard-back American editions of this biography, both of which bore the title of Guderian: Creator of the Blitzkrieg. (One edition, printed on inexpensive paper, was made available to the public through mail order book clubs. The other, bound in better cloth and printed on better stock, was intended for sale to libraries and people who shopped in the independent bookstores that could be found in so many American towns in those days.) In July of 1977, the Marine Corps Gazette listed Guderian: Creator of the Blitzkrieg among the modest number of books that members of the Marine Corps Association could purchase by mail. One year later, in July of 1978, it printed a short, but extremely favorable, review of the book.

Many of the Marines who read Guderian: Creator of the Blitzkrieg were already familiar with the memoirs of its protagonist. An autobiography, with the eye-catching title of Panzer Leader, had been in print in the United States since 1952, favorably reviewed in the Marine Corps Gazette (in March 1953), and available as a mass-market paperback pocketbook since 1957. Even those who had yet to read Guderian’s autobiography would have recognized his name, which had appeared 38 times in the issues of the Marine Corps Gazette published in the quarter century between 1953 and 1978. (By way of contrast, the name of Percy Hobart can be found only once in those 300 issues, in a passing reference so brief that no mention was made of his first name or rank, let alone his many achievements.)

Copies of Guderian: Creator of the Blitzkrieg began to appear on the bookshelves of American Marines at time when a good number of them were actively exploring the possibility of mechanizing substantial portions of landing forces. It was also a time Marines could easily get their hands upon the autobiographies of three of Guderian’s colleagues: Erwin Rommel, Erich von Manstein, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin.1 Like Panzer Leader, these memoirs had enjoyed favorable reviews in the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette in the 1950s and had subsequently become available to the American reading public, in a range of formats, for two decades or more. The Marine Corps Gazette had even published four substantial excerpts from Manstein’s Lost Victories well before copies of the complete book began to roll off of American presses. Because of this, Marines of the 1970s who were in the habit of visiting their base libraries, looking for a paperback to take to the field, browsing in second-hand shops, subscribing to a book club, taking advantage of the Marine Corps Association book service, or perusing back issues of the Marine Corps Gazette would have found it difficult to avoid learning something about the experiences, observations, and achievements of Guderian, Rommel, Mellenthin, and Manstein.

Between 1975 and 1979, the prospect of landing on shores defended by Soviet-style armored forces led many Marines to advocate the mechanization of substantial portions of the Fleet Marine Force. If the articles promoting this point of view that were published in the Marine Corps Gazette at this time are any indication, the partisans of this point of view borrowed much from the already familiar memoirs of Guderian, Rommel, Mellinthin, and Manstein. Indeed, it is articles of this sort that account for the doubling of the rate at which Guderian was mentioned in the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette and the fifty-fold increase in the number references to the memoirs of Mellinthin that appeared each year. (The surge of interest in Mellenthin, who ended the war as a brigadier general, may well have been a function of the scale of the actions he discussed. Where Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein dealt chiefly in the operations of army corps and field armies, Mellenthin paid much more attention to the tactics of regiments and battalions.)

 

Reception of the Memoirs of German Generals in the Marine Corps Gazette2 1950-1999

 

Name	Title of Memoir	Year of First US Edition	Month Reviewed	Other Substantial Mentions (Total for Period| Average Per Year)
				1950-1974		1975-1979		1980-1999
Guderian	Panzer Leader	1952	March 1953	31	1.24	14	2.8	68	6.8
Rommel	The Rommel Papers	1953	September 1953	36	1.44	11	2.2	83	8.3
Mellenthin	Panzer Battles	1955	July 1956	2	0.08	21	4.2	1	0.1
Manstein	Lost Victories	1958	December 1958	17	0.68	5	1	28	2.8

 

 

In the second half of the 1970s, mechanization enthusiasts writing articles for the Marine Corps Gazette tended to advocate both the acquisition of additional armored fighting vehicles and the adoption of German-style methods of leading units equipped with such machines. Capt Ronald C. Brown, for example, authored a “professional note” introducing Marines to the idea of an “assault gun” (turret-less tank), a piece that described a battle won by German GenHermann Balck as a model for the ways that Marines might deal with Soviet armor, and an article that discussed both possible designs for assault guns and Manstein’s operations in the Crimea. William S. Lind, then serving as a legislative aide to Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, sketched out a program for increased mechanization, proposed experimentation with a variety of different kinds of mechanized forces, and urged Marines to devote more effort to the study of operations, tactics, and military history.

In October of 1979, the Marine Corps Gazette published a letter, written by the aforementioned Mr. Lind, that argued that the experimental Marine mechanized forces that had taken part in a recent exercise had fallen short of the standard set by German armored formations of World War II  In the course of doing this, Lind introduced readers of the Marine Corps Gazette to the term “maneuver warfare,” which he defined as attempting “to achieve operational success directly, shattering the enemy command by maintaining an increasing tempo of operations deep in his rear area.” Two months later, the expression “maneuver warfare” appeared again in the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette, this time in the second half of a two-part feature article called “Winning Through Maneuver.” Like Lind, the author of this piece, the same Capt Brown, who had previously written about operations conducted by Manstein and Balck, described maneuver warfare as something that required much more than the mere mechanization.

At the start of the 1980s, writers publishing articles related to mechanization in the Marine Corps Gazette began to specialize—with some focusing on equipment and logistics while others placed far more emphasis on tactics, training, culture, and command. By the middle of the 1980s, members of the second group had come to define “maneuver warfare” as something that was entirely independent of armament. Pointing to the Finnish experience in the Winter War of 1939-1940 and the infantry tactics employed by Erwin Rommel in World War I, these authors argued that the style of fighting practiced by “classic light infantry” was essentially the same as that of the German Panzer generals of World War II.3 Thus, a Marine preparing to fight on foot in the forests of Northern Norway could learn much from reading about employment of armored formations by LtGen Rommel and a Marine anticipating service with a mechanized task force in the Middle East could also benefit from the careful study of the tactics of mountain troops led by 1stLt Rommel.

The separation of the “maneuver warfare movement” of the 1980s from the “mechanization movement” of the 1970s coincided with a huge increase in the availability of media on military subjects.4 Marines who, only recently, had been limited to a relative handful of relevant books and articles were thus able to choose from a wide variety of monographs and memoirs, reprints of classic texts, as well as several handsomely produced magazines, books-on-tape, and videotapes. One result of this phenomenon was that those who wished to delve deeply into the German military tradition had the means to do so. Thus, if mentions made in articles and letters published in the Marine Corps Gazette are any indication, one of the paradoxical results of this bumper crop of military media was a considerable increase in interest in the reminiscences of the German senior officers who had become so familiar to Marines of the years between 1955 and 1980. (The brief-but-brilliant career of the memoirs of Gen Mellenthin may be the exception that proves this rule. In the 1970s, Panzer Battles was one of the few places where a Marine could readily learn about the nuts-and-bolts of German mechanized warfare. By the middle years of the 1980s, it was competing with dozens of other works that provided comparable information.)

 

The military media explosion of the 1980s also made it possible for Marines to explore maneuver warfare traditions other than those of Germany. This same embarrassment of riches also facilitated the study of what might be called “maverick maneuverists,” commanders who, in order to practice maneuver warfare, were first obliged to reject many aspects of the culture of the armies in which they served. Thus, where the maneuver-minded Marine of 1978 would have been hard-pressed to find alternatives to the memoirs of German generals who fought in World War II, his counterpart of 1988 might have been able to learn many of the same lessons from Hanson Baldwin’s biography of MG Shirley P. Wood of the U.S. Army of World War II or the first-hand account, by Israeli LtCol Avigdor Kahalani, of the fights fought by the battalion he led on the Golan Heights in October of 1973.

What was true for Marines of the 1980s was even more true for those of the three decades that followed. Thus, those who wished to immerse themselves in the German military tradition enjoyed an ever-increasing number of opportunities to do that. At the same time, each passing year has provided more in the way of resources to Marines who, for whatever reason, wished to study maneuver warfare without engaging German examples. This latter possibility raises the question of whether the Marines of the fifth decade of the maneuver warfare movement might be able to dispense with the German model entirely. That, however, is a subject for another day.

 

Notes

1. Strictly speaking, The Rommel Papers, which was assembled from surviving correspondence well after the death of its author, should be classified as a “collection of letters” rather than an “autobiography.” However, it is so close to a memoir that Spanish-languages editions of the work bore the title of Memorias.
2. For the purposes of this chart, a “substantial mention” was one which described the accomplishments, whether tactical or institutional, of the German general in question. Thus, for example, a reference to the North African troops serving in French Indochina who had “fought against Rommel” during World War II was not counted.
3. An excellent example of the separation of the “maneuver warfare movement” of the 1980s from the “mechanized warfare movement” of the 1970s is provided by the seventeen articles written (or co-authored) for the Marine Corps Gazette by Colonel Michael D. Wyly in the years between 1981 and 1988. In all of these writings, Colonel Wyly, who was one of the most prominent maneuverists of the 1980s, dealt with a wide variety of issues related to maneuver warfare. None of these articles, however, were chiefly concerned with the operations of mechanized forces per se.  Indeed, a piece that would, at first glance, appear to be an exception to this rule, a book review which appeared, in December of 1986, under the title of “Training for Mechanized Warfare,” made but one mention of mechanized operations and none whatsoever of armored fighting vehicles.
4. If items listed in the world’s most comprehensive union catalog (Worldcat) are any guide, 117 English-language books on the subject of military history had been published in 1970. In 1979, that figure had risen to 139 and, in 1989, to 255. Thus, between 1970 and 1989, the number of books in English that dealt with military history published each year had more than doubled.

 

>Editor’s Note: Maneuverist No. 1 mentioned one of the more controversial aspects of the maneuver warfare movement starting in the 1970s: the heavy reliance on German historical examples and concepts. This paper explores that topic in greater detail.

by Marinus Era Novum

The choice of style of prose, pseudonym, platform, and every other choice in writing makes it clear that these authors intend this series of essays to discuss nothing less than the soul of the Marine Corps and the doctrine we hold so dear as an institution. This response is not intended to be antagonistic but rather add to the dialectic that the author Marinus suggests is necessary when examining institutional changes. It is clear we are at an inflection point and this discussion is necessary. I hope to remain succinct and clear in my points while responding to points made, questions raised, as well as bringing forth some new ideas for consideration.

A word of caution to the reader, in raising questions—some of which may go against the grain—it is important to not think in absolutes. Black and white thinking rarely give us a full picture when there are so many shades of gray. When questioning ideas, especially those ideas held so dear, it is best done with an open mind and to not let the irrationalism and fear that can accompany absolute reasoning to cloud our judgement.

That is my largest complaint with “What Marines Believe About Warfare: A Declaration.” The article makes a total of 37 assertions that the reader is to take as foundational to who we are as Marines. This is not a rebuke of those 37 points—remember to avoid absolutes. But in this time of institutional change, I challenge others to reread those points with a different lens. Why anchor our beliefs so broadly when we have the opportunity to think so freely?

The overarching goals of the paper, “Marine Corps Maneuver Warfare: A Historical Context,” seem less concrete than the absolute declaration made by the later article for discussion. The article provides historical context to the maneuver warfare movement and leaves open to question whether this doctrine should be questioned and reconsidered, a timely topic and one which is getting much attention .  . Marinus makes few absolute statements, and it seems to promote thought and debate. In answering Marinus’ final question is where I wish to make my only absolute statement. Yes, it is time to reconsider our basic doctrine.1

 

Iraq as a Case Study of the Possible Incompleteness of Maneuver Warfare Doctrine

Marinus raised the question about the mixed results of maneuver warfare doctrine in practice but chose to leave that question addressed in another debate. I will offer a brief examination of the Iraq War as a case study in the failure of maneuver warfare in practice. No doubt that many will point out the stunning results of initial tactical success in the 2003 invasion. This seemingly quick and decisive victory would also seem to align to assertion number five of the Two Manueverists, that “war is an instrument of policy” and is political in nature. The swift defeating of Saddam’s regime seemed to be just the type of victory that would excite the short attention span of the American public. After all, it would seem harder to gain much support beyond that for a war that was largely a war of our own choosing and not that of an existential crisis. It seems more textbook example of MCDP 1 could not be given than the actions of Marine and Coalition forces between 20 March 2003 and 1 May 2003 beginning with crossing the line of departure in Kuwait and ending with the bold and infamous declaration of, “Mission accomplished.” And indeed, it is taught to be viewed as a glowing success in professional military education to young officers, as a stop in any Expeditionary Warfare School seminar would demonstrate. And when viewed narrowly, we can easily see the allure of this thinking.

Consider the following passage from MCDP-1:

Rather than wearing down an enemy’s defenses, maneuver warfare attempts to bypass these defenses in order to penetrate the enemy system and tear it apart. The aim is to render the enemy incapable of resisting effectively by shattering his moral, mental, and physical cohesion—his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole—rather than to destroy him physically through the incremental attrition of each of his components, which is generally more costly and time-consuming. Ideally, the components of his physical strength that remain are irrelevant because we have disrupted his ability to use them effectively. Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease because we have eliminated his ability to fight effectively as a force.

This seems to be an almost Nostradamus like foretelling of the invasion. The enemy system, viewed as centered around Saddam and his regime, was rendered ineffective and resulted in the stunning tactical victory that culminated with the Capturing of Baghdad and the toppling of the Saddam’s Regime. But re-read the  end of the passage:

Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease because we have eliminated his ability to fight effectively as a force.

The outmaneuvered enemy in this case turned into a violent insurgency and fueled a civil war. As it turned out, it was not an enemy easily defeated in small units and not a situation that made securing strategic objectives easy. Did a destabilized Iraqi State, increased radicalism, and Iranian influence meet our political objectives? Some may point to the emergence of other factors like religious factions and sponsorship from other state actors like Iran, but remember those factors were at one point effectively under control of a single entity in the Saddam Regime. We cannot view the complexity of the will of a people as simply through the state as Clausewitz may have been able to from his historical lens.2 Tearing apart an enemy system may not be fracturing a system with a unified will at all. As was the the case with Iraq, this tearing apart of a system may expose how complex the will of those components are. And in defeating an enemy in this way, there exists the possibility that the strategic landscape is far less clear than before as a direct result of tactical victory. Was this war just better left unfought? Or could a different choice of tactics have produced a different result? What if Iraq was more completely defeated while Saddam was still in power before being fractured into so many disparate wills? Was this an anomaly? A failure of political leaders? Perhaps a mixture of many things, but can a doctrine be said to be timeless if one of its largest tests can be viewed as a failure?           The possibility is presented here that failure to gain decisive strategic advantage following the 2003 invasion is not as a consequence to fail to adhere to the tenants of maneuver warfare but, rather, how adherence to that doctrine demonstrates that maneuver warfare is not complete as a warfighting philosophy. Particularly, that it has failed to demonstrate a connection between tactical victory and decisive strategic victories in anything less than wars with limited objectives. It may seem the argument presented is to revert to an attrition mindset. Do not think so absolutely. As Marinus pointed out, all warfare will contain some elements of attrition. Perhaps we should not look at maneuver and attrition in such juxtaposition. Perhaps there are shades of gray worthy of consideration. And just perhaps, the changing character of war calls for us to move past attrition and maneuver.

 

On Military History

The discussion of military history and theories by Marinus and Two Manuverists reveals an odd trend that seems to also be present at the center of our current institutional changes—with the discussion of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Julian Corbett, John Boyd, and even Baron de Jomini. Discussion of conflict includes success of the German Army in World War II, planning for potential conflict with the Soviet Union, and brief mentions of Vietnam and other conflicts. This would seem a brief but compelling anthology of ground warfare but is missing a very key component—any influence from a naval perspective. How did it come about that a historical context of our fundamental warfighting philosophy as a Marine Corps can be summed up without a whisper of Alfred Thayer Mahan or Major Pete Ellis? That the main conflicts of interest are that of land wars? Where is the mention of perhaps the most epic naval contest in history, the Pacific in World War II? Is the battle of Guadalcanal not a compelling example of the necessity of an amphibious force to prosecute a naval campaign?

The answer is likely that the analysis conducted to bring about the maneuver warfare movement was conducted during a time which can be considered a historical anomaly. At that time, a credible threat to the predominance of U.S. Naval power did not exist. Conflicts from the later half of the 20th century on have been largely at the time and place of our choosing due to uncontested control of the sea. Under this unique global paradigm, it is understandable and perhaps even excusable that the primary focus was not on the Marine Corps’ role in importance of securing that Naval supremacy. So much of our energies have been dedicated to thinking primarily of conflict primarily on land, but if the widely discussed shift in the global paradigm is even remotely true, it is unwise to assume that we will be able to fight when and where we want with unopposed access from the sea. Are all those tenants learned from our study of land warfare easily transferable? If we have a doctrine whose main historical foundations leave out any maritime component, should we not reconsider the conclusions drawn as we seek to return to the sea?

In his conclusion, Marinus points out, “The future evolves from the past.” Statements similar to this have been made about the study of history for as long ago as Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian Wars. Thucydides hoped to have his histories serve as, “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”1 Contemporary historian John Gaddis Lewis offers this interpretation of Thucydides words and points out the key difference between resemblance and reflection. There is a difference in “patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time.”3 Can we conclusively say that the study of history in context to the maneuver warfare movement picked up on those patterns which survive across time? Or do they only represent some repetition that with time will fade?

 

On Identity

The Two Manueverists assertion number 35 describes our Spartan qualities as an institution. It is true that most Marines do hold these Spartan qualities dear. The Spartan society was built on a culture of warfighting. But perhaps when we look back at the ancient Hellenes, we have as much to learn from the Athenians, who after all were a maritime people. The Athenians were able to build an empire based off naval power. While the qualities of the Spartan warrior culture are not on trial here, the Marine Corps’ identity  is. As with our study of history and theory, there seems to exist an institutional tendency to fetishize ground combat and ignore naval heritage. While we can celebrate the ethos of the Spartans, we should recognize that the sea power of the Athenians brought them prosperity and power beyond that of their Spartan counterparts. Yet, we must also learn from the mistakes and misapplications of Athenian sea power, primarily in the form of the Sicilian expedition. A belief in the infallibility of their fleet and the underestimation of emerging threats lead to grave miscalculation with devastating consequences.

It is my sincere hope that we find no analogy of our own Sicilian Expedition, but that threat exists. Indeed, it is possible that the institutional pain Marinus points to in the post-Vietnam Marine Corps can see how dangerously close Vietnam was to our Sicily.4 There may even be room to argue that our two decades long sojourn in the Middle East was near to our own Sicilian expedition. Though that depends on the future and how we let this recent experience define us. Are the lessons learned here timeless patterns? Or merely repetitions, soon to be degraded by time? Perhaps a combination, but it is important to understand this distinction and to not let the short-lived repetitions define our identity.

As we have focused on conflicts over the past seven decades where our dominance at sea has not required the Marine Corps to fight as a apart of a naval campaign, we should ask if we draw from this patterns or repetitions. Do current changes to the global paradigm necessitate more than lip service to returning to our naval roots as an institution? Will this cause an institutional identity crisis? It seems that we are already in the midst of this identity crisis as we make declarations about our beliefs and seek to give them so much context. While in the midst of this crisis, perhaps we should consider learning from the maritime Athenians as well as the warlike Spartans, the good and the bad.

 

On Forms of Education and Thinking Other Than Military History

Marinus briefly mentions the maneuver warfare movement as emerging in a time where military operations research thinking dominated our defense complex. This is true, but perhaps should not be so quickly disregarded. As where we have not seen a direct link in maneuver warfare and strategic advantage, this is not the case for operations research. For the sake of succinctness, I will leave it to say that victories in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union are arguably the most important strategic outcomes of the 20th century, and they can both be tied to the application and development of operations research.

Marinus is right to point to the emergence of complexity science as key to the maneuver warfare movement. Indeed, in his essay “Destruction and Creation,”6 Boyd demonstrates how much his theories are influenced by thermodynamics. Thermodynamics being one of the many fields in the interdisciplinary field of complexity science, which includes others like economics, physics, biology, computation, information theory, psychology, cognition, and yes operations research. The beauty of Boyd’s efforts is how well he was able to demystify this topic, tie it so closely to the human decision making process, and meld it with such a comprehensive view of conflict in his landmark presentation, “Patterns of Conflict.”7 While this turn to military history Marinus pointed to was important for the maneuver warfare movement, it should not necessarily mean the divorce from other disciplines that can provide further rigor to our analysis. Rather, we should seek a more renaissance approach to our intellectual pursuits and be informed by a wide array of fields. Indeed, many buzzwords of the day including machine learning and artificial intelligence are modern applications and developments of operations research and more broadly complexity science.

To ignore the importance of this interdisciplinary approach may see us lose critical advantage in emerging technologies. Two Manueverists assertion number 32 acknowledges the importance of technology but values the human component more. That point is not to be disputed, but overreliance on the human without looking at how changing technology can change the character of war in which humans engage could have possibly disastrous effects for those humans. One should not prefer a bow and arrow to gunpowder for a belief in human will. Nor can we rely on the accuracy of a rifled barrel without a skilled marksman. The interaction of humans and technology makes capability and changes the character of war. The risk of falling behind in this sphere real and the consequences have the potential to be extremely damaging.7 The presence of these emerging threats is perhaps more than power point deep. Two Manueverists’ assertion number 28 states that militaries have been unsuccessful in predicting the changing character of war and that a Marine Corps we should prepare for a wide range of possibilities and adapt quickly when conflict arrives. Again, it is not the position to say that this assertion is entirely incorrect but point out the possibility that being behind the curve in certain emerging technologies may present the dilemma where adaption when conflict arises is not enough.

Assertion number 29 of the Two Manueverists points to the importance of learning for a leader and the life-long commitment to learning needed in the profession of arms. This may be the assertion with the least amount of room to give debate. I would expound on this though, to say that this learning must not be constrained to a single discipline. While we should look for the patterns of history to provide insights to the future, we should also study other disciplines to inform our perceptions. This approach provides the best defense from but being caught unaware of emerging technological threats and provides leaders with necessary technical literacy. The same informed approach to emerging technologies in discovering patterns and repetitions is needed as it is in our study of history.

 

Conclusion

 

Writing in 1888 at the dawn of a new era of global competition, Alfred Thayer Mahan had following to say.

Our new Navy is preparing now; it can scarcely be said, as regards its material, to be yet ready. The day of grace is still with us – or with those who shall be future captains and admirals. There is time yet for study; there is time to imbibe the experience of the past to become imbued, steeped, in the eternal principles of war, by the study of its history and the maxims of its masters. But the time of preparation will pass; some day the time of action will come. Can an admiral then sit down and re-enforce his intellectual grasp of the problem before him by a study of history, which is simply a study of past experience? Not so; the time of action is upon him, and he must trust his horse sense. 9

There are many similarities for us today as a Marine Corps. The experience of naval officers of this era, to include Mahan, was predominantly from the civil war, but they were being asked to create a new Navy to project sea power across the globe. A challenge they proved up to during the Spanish-American War and in doing so drastically changed the global landscape at the onset of the 20th century. In our similar time of grace, will we be able to prepare ourselves for what comes next? It is widely suggested that the next fight will be drastically different than the last. Should we carry with us the same possibly incomplete doctrine with us to the next fight? Either way we must take advantage of this time to prepare, and much of that preparation will come in the form of learning, education, and shaping our identity. In doing so we should take a renaissance approach to learning. Being informed by history as well as by what technical disciplines may teach us about emerging technology and the evolving character of war. As we continue to study and learn, much will depend on our ability to pick up on those patterns across time that will prove a useful guide without falling victim to repetitions that could lead us astray. As we take on this challenge it is necessary, as Marinus suggests, to ask the tough questions about our doctrine and identity to ensure the Marine Corps will be ready to meet the demands of the nation.

 

Notes

6. An opinion that seems to be gaining traction as we can see from articles in recent issues, specifically The Fantasy of MCDP 1 by LtCol Thaddeus Drake Jr. and MCDP 1, Conflict by Maj Leo Spaeder.
7. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton, NJ,: Princeton University Press, 1984). In opening definitions in chapter 1 of On War, Clausewitz expressed that physical violence is only made moral by the state and the law. This definition which preceded so much subsequent analysis may not be wholly appropriate in all views of modern warfare.
8. Thucydides as quoted from John Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2018).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. John Boyd. “Destruction and Creation,” 1976.
12. Coram, Robert. Boyd: the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2004).
13. Christian Brose, “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare,” (New York, NY: Hachette Books, 2020). Provides compelling arguments to look at how we may be falling short in our information capabilities and the impacts to the character of war.
14. Allan F. Westcott, Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1941).

by 1stLt Adam D. Taggett

One point of frustration amongst lieutenants at The Basic School is the seeming contradiction between the Marine Corps warfighting philosophy taught early in the course and the actual tactics taught in conducting rifle platoon operations later on. With MCDP 1 Warfighting’s emphasis on maneuver warfare, tempo generation, and subordinate initiative in the decentralized execution of a commander’s intent, I was at first somewhat disappointed by the severe emphasis placed on “sequencing events,” “setting conditions,” and coordinating with adjacent and supporting units in our platoon-level tactics. How can small unit leaders expect to freely exploit opportunities as they arise if they must constantly coordinate and synchronize their actions with the remainder of the force? Indeed, John Boyd himself protested the inclusion of synchronization in the Army’s AirLand Battle operational concept during its development in the early 1980s, understanding this element to be entirely contrary to the spirit of his ideas.1 Is The Basic School guilty of “backsliding into attritionist habits,” as Capt Daniel Grazier argues the U.S. military at large is doing?2

In short, no. While maneuver warfare in theory may imply that combat leaders must subordinate considerations of coordination and synchronization to those of tempo and subordinate autonomy, the historical record of success in conventional warfare demonstrates that a successful application of maneuver warfare in reality must balance these competing elements. This article seeks to demonstrate how success in conventional combat requires us to approach the theoretical extremes of maneuver warfare with caution by illustrating how that success is impossible without a degree of synchronization and coordination between forces. It then explores the significance of this finding, offers suggestions as to how we may better synthesize these paradoxical elements of our warfighting philosophy, and ultimately concludes that our best path forward in the circle of professional military education is to emphasize the predominance of context-specific factors in determining the optimal conduct of future wars. This article borrows heavily from the experiences gained from German operational methods in World War II, partially due to my own familiarity with that history but also to the decisive influence these methods had in the conception of maneuver warfare theory. Because of the decisive role played by combined arms and logistics in producing success in conventional conflict, the successful application of maneuver warfare requires us to balance considerations of subordinate autonomy with those of cooperation.

Success in conventional conflict is impossible without combined arms coordination, and in producing this coordination, we must depart from a theoretically pure application of the concept of subordinate autonomy as advocated by maneuver warfare. Combined arms requires synchronization, which in turn relies upon a violation of certain maneuver warfare principles:3 if commanders want their subordinate units to synchronize their actions, it is necessary and inevitable that they give their subordinate leaders much less autonomy in accomplishing their tasks however the subordinate deems fit. This complicates the subordinate unit’s tasks, requiring precise timing, less independence in adapting to unforeseen circumstances, and a mechanical approach to combat that is ultimately discordant with the uncertain, fluid, chaotic nature of warfare. Theoretically, a synchronized advance can only move as fast as its slowest unit and is thus not optimized for the high-tempo, disorientation-producing types of operations envisioned by Boyd as the essence of the maneuver warfare concept in the first place.

Yet in practice we see that success relies heavily upon a combined arms approach that incorporates a significant degree of synchronization. The key to success for German operations in World War II that restored mobility to the battlefield and inspired maneuver warfare theory was not the tank, the airplane, or even the doctrine behind it but rather the invention and widespread integration of the radio that enabled cooperation between these combined arms elements.4 Robert Citino in Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare attributes Erwin Rommel’s successes less to his aggressive style and more to the “triumph of German combined arms working in close cooperation.”5 As Stephen Biddle describes in Military Power, the effective employment of one’s forces in modern operations depends on mutually supportive elements cooperating as coequals: the suppressive effect of indirect artillery fire interacts with the flexibility of the infantry to restore maneuver to the battlefield and enable a breakthrough in the enemy lines.6 Biddle goes on to illustrate quantitatively how this “modern system force employment” is the decisive factor in determining battlefield success in modern conventional conflicts. Essentially, the reality is that we cannot reasonably expect to punch through modern enemy defenses nor to fully exploit those breakthroughs in the absence of combined arms cooperation. Without this cooperation, we risk producing fruitless advances or even fratricide. While a premium must remain on encouraging our leaders to exploit opportunities and to act decisively when unforeseen circumstances arise, we must not allow this to blind us to the opportunities made possible through combined arms.

The success of maneuver warfare in practice also relies upon an emphasis on logistical considerations, which also requires a temperance of subordinate autonomy and tempo. If combined arms cooperation is required to enable a breakthrough against modern enemy defenses, logistical cooperation is necessary to sustain the exploitation of that breakthrough. In a purely theoretical application of maneuver warfare concepts, a subordinate should be able to act aggressively and decisively in advancing once an advantage presents itself. Pausing to coordinate with higher units to confirm the logistical feasibility of an advance runs entirely contrary to the spirit of this maneuver warfare tenet. Indeed, MCDP 1-3, Tactics, presents us with the cautionary tale of MG John Lucas at Anzio and his failure to press forward in the wake of logistical considerations.7 Yet, Tactics goes on later to discuss the decisive role of logistics and supporting units in enabling speed.8 This evident ambivalence perhaps inadvertently highlights the dichotomy explored in this article, but it also raises an entirely valid point about a key shortcoming of maneuver warfare theory. Without coordination with higher and supporting units who understand the “bigger picture” about what initiatives have a reasonable chance of being sustained logistically, those initiatives will either be fruitless or even entirely counterproductive. Indeed, the greatest vulnerability of a force that has achieved a breakthrough is the tenuous connection to the rear support units enabling the advance.9 To return to the example of Rommel, his failure to recognize the centrality of supply and logistics led directly to his failure to capture Tobruk or break through at Alamein and Alam Haifa during the North Africa campaign. Spread too thin, his advances ground to a halt—leaving him overextended and unable to capitalize on his successes.10

It is thus clear that a fundamental tension exists between the drive for subordinate autonomy and initiative in maneuver warfare theory with the need for cooperation and synchronization in practice. This is made especially clear upon an investigation of the role played by combined arms and logistics in modern conventional conflict. This tension is one that must be discussed and investigated further. While Warfighting and Tactics never explicitly emphasize this dynamic, the tactical tenets found in Tactics capture this apparent paradox well. We need to know when to cooperate and leverage combined arms dilemmas into an advantage as well as when to sacrifice cooperation for the sake of adaptability and being faster. To return to the context of The Basic School, the stress placed on setting conditions and sequencing events at the platoon level is entirely appropriate. After all, how much can truly be decided by a rifle platoon operating in isolation of its supporting and higher units? However, the course would benefit from highlighting the apparently contradictory nature of our warfighting philosophy’s various maxims and forcing students to consider the tough questions. Under what circumstances do we subordinate one consideration to the other? How does the increasingly information-rich operating environment affect these considerations? This latter question will prove to be especially crucial, as our forces grow increasingly inter-connected and capable of sharing information about the battlefield. A proper exploitation of Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act framework will require us to be mindful of changes to our environment in formulating an appropriate observation to begin the cycle.11

More than anything, we should emphasize how context-specific factors need to predominate all other concerns in our prosecution of future wars. Some cases will call for extreme aggressiveness and initiative at the lowest levels, while others will merit a more coordinated approach that takes full advantage of the Marine Air Ground Task Force’s combined arms capacity. The German operational methods that inspired maneuver warfare theory were tailored entirely to fit Germany’s geostrategic position and tied inextricably to German culture and traditions engrained in the officer corps centuries prior to World War II.12 When conditions failed to lend themselves to the way of war produced by this officer corps’ warfighting philosophy, even great commanders like Guderian (in Tula during Operation Typhoon) and Rommel (in Tobruk during Operation Crusader) remained tied to their cultural background and failed to adapt.13 Capt Grazier is correct in stating we must be cautious of the American military culture’s natural tendency towards attrition. Equally important, however, is that we think critically before blindly adhering to maneuver warfare theory without deliberating on context-specific considerations of the next war in which we find ourselves. Kein Schema, or “not a formula,” was a common admonition in the prewar period amongst the German staff that evidently was forgotten once the bullets started to fly. We owe it to our nation to not fall victim to the same mistakes. While much of this article has drawn from the experiences of World War II, it seems most appropriate to close with a quotation from a pre-war French corps commander, Gen Victor Cordonnier: “The instruction given by professors of military schools will never furnish a model that need only be reproduced in order to beat the enemy … He who remains in abstractions falls into formula; he concretes his brain; he is beaten in advance.”14

 

Notes

1. Frans Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).
2. Daniel Grazier, “A Maneuver Renaissance: Overcoming the attritionist tendency,” Marine Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA: June 2015).
3. Alan Hastings, “Mission Command and Detailed Command: It’s Not a Zero Sum Game,” From the Green Notebook, (2017), available at https://fromthegreennotebook.com.
4. Robert Citino, Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
5. Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm.
6. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005).
7. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 1-3, Tactics, (Washington, DC: 1997).
8. MCDP 1-3.
9. Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, (Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1987).
10. Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2012).
11. Paul Tremblay, Shaping and Adapting: Unlocking the power of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA Loop, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 2015).
12. Robert Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
13. The German Way of War.
14. United States Army, Infantry in Battle, (Washington, DC: The Infantry Journal Incorporated, 1939).

by Capt Devon Sanderfield

With multiple conflicts in the Middle East coming to a close and the Commandant refocusing the Corps attention to naval integration and a future conflict with China, the time has come to evaluate our Marines understanding of our foundational doctrine: MCDP 1. Maneuver warfare is central to our Warfighting philosophy. Characterized by speed, fluidity, surprise, and the focusing of combat power against an identified enemy weakness, our Warfighting doctrine requires initiative and sound decision making down to the small unit level.1 With many of our enlisted Marines having never critically read this little white book that describes how we should think and make decisions on the battlefield, it is time to take a pause and educate the force. Leaders throughout the Marine Corps should initiate a stand-down to educate every Marine under their charge on our foundational warfighting doctrine and how these concepts must be applied at every level in both garrison and in combat.

Marines are used to stand downs. Each year, Marines pile into the base theater or auditorium for a days-long discussion on hazing, violence prevention, social media use, and local wildlife.2 Marines are even forced to sit through a brief titled 100 days of summer: a yearly requirement that warns troops of the dangers of water sports and proper way to utilize a grill.3 Yet, when was the last time a unit conducted a stand down to ensure that every Marine understood the tenants of our warfighting doctrine? As you read this article, when was the last time you read the most important foundational document we have (MCDP 1)? When was the last time you talked to your Marines about it? It is time for leaders across the Marine Corps to step up and address this educational gap.

Marine Corps officers were the driving force behind the rigorous debate that led to the adoption of Warfighting and the concept of maneuver warfare in 1989, but the concepts were meant for all Marines. In the foreword to MCDP 1, Gen Krulak directs that, “all Marines, enlisted and commissioned, to read this book, understand it, and act upon it.”4 Sadly, we have not met this vision. As a Staff Platoon Commander for the Warrant Officer Basic Course, I had the privilege of leading a group of seasoned gunnery sergeants and staff sergeants as they transitioned from enlisted to officer. These warriors were the best of the best of their assigned MOS. While they were smart, mature, and experienced, they admittingly lacked an understanding of maneuver warfare and our warfighting doctrine. Despite over a decade of service, many acknowledged they had never thoroughly read MCDP 1. This is not a surprise when the discussion of our warfighting doctrine at the Recruit Depots is limited to one hour and Corporals Course spends six times as long on sword manual as it does discussing MCDP 1. This is no longer acceptable. The stakes are too high. Without prioritizing a service-wide understanding of our warfighting doctrine by every leader of every MOS, we could fail at the time when our country needs us the most.

The Commandant has identified the need for increased Distributed Operations in the face of an enemy that is capable of detecting and targeting our forces with long range precision guided weapons.5 Young leaders will be spread across the battlefield with increased responsibility whose decisions will have greater operational and strategic implications than ever before. With forces distributed in this manner, there will not always be time to request permission to act and doing so may emit an electromagnetic signature that could result in enemy detection. All leaders will be trusted to understand the commander’s intent to allow them to take bold action in the absence of orders. Bill Lind writes about the importance of trust in applying maneuver warfare in The Maneuver Handbook. He states, “Such trust is molded by a shared way of thinking.”6 For Marines, our shared way of thinking is driven by our warfighting doctrine. It is what teaches them how to think about problems: to avoid enemy strengths and utilize speed and surprise to put them in a position of advantage. We need leaders who will ruthlessly exploit fleeting opportunities as they arise on the battlefield. Yet, for many Marines across our Corps more time is dedicated to the dangers of smoking than on understanding how they are expected to think and make decisions in combat.

While PME has a role to play in increasing Marines understanding of maneuver warfare and our warfighting Doctrine, leaders in the fleet must do more. Force the Marines under your charge to read MCDP 1 and facilitate discussion groups that can help clarify its contents and how it can be applied in the completion of their everyday job. Incorporate decision making exercises into the daily schedule—there is no excuse not to. This is a great opportunity to empower the NCOs, who should not only understand the concepts within MCDP 1 but should be able to teach it to their young Marines. Sadly, it is not just the junior Marines who need reeducation on the lessons of maneuver warfare. With the ever-increasing centralization of decision making at the higher levels, continued micro-management of the troops, and inability to accept risk by officers at every level, all would benefit from a refresher of our doctrine.

The Marine Corps does seem to be going in the right direction with the increased emphasis and incorporation of decision-making case studies and force-on-force exercises to allow leaders to think and make decisions against a living, breathing, thinking adversary. The recent MWX 1-20 exercise and its emphasis on decision making is a great example.7 This exercise and those like it are necessary and should be replicated. Unfortunately, these exercises have predominately been executed at the battalion-level or higher and take months to plan and put into motion. Weekly training at the small unit level must be similarly designed to test our young leaders’ ability to think, not just execute predetermined battle drills on a cookie-cutter live-fire range that resembles more of a golf course than a battlefield. This is not a task for only the infantry. All MOSs must do better, and it starts with ensuring that all Marines are well versed in our Warfighting doctrine and are applying them during in training exercises as well as in garrison.

This is an issue that must be addressed Service-wide, and there is an easy solution. It simply requires leaders in the fleet to step up and make the education of the Marines a priority. Undoubtedly, there are excellent leaders throughout our Corps who are already doing this, but more must be done to reach every Marine. Much like maneuver warfare’s emphasis on focusing combat power at a particular time and place, we need leaders to focus their efforts on making all of our Marines “maneuverists” who are able to not only apply the concepts on the battlefield but within the walls of the barracks. Leaders throughout the Marine Corps must initiate a stand-down to educate every Marine under their charge on our foundational warfighting doctrine and how it must be applied at every level in both garrison and in combat. There is no time to wait. This is long overdue.

 

Notes

1. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP1, Warfighting, (Washington, DC: 1997).
2. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCBUL 1500, Annual Training Requirements, (Washington, DC: April 2017).
3. Headquarters Marine Corps, MARADMIN 360/20, 2020 Summer Safety Campaign, (Washington DC: June 2020).
4. MCDP 1.
5. Gen David H. Berger, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (Washington, DC: July 2019).
6. William Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook, (New York, NY: Westview Press., 2018).
7. Chris Niedziocha, “Fighting a Peer Adversary Part II: Observations and Recommendations from MAGTF Warfighting Exercise 1-20,” Marine Corps Gazette (Quantico, VA: July 2020).

by Marinus

Maneuverist No. 2, “The Zweikampf Dynamic” (MCG Oct 2020), addressed the central problem that Warfighting endeavors to answer: How to prevail in the dynamic, nonlinear conditions created by the interactive struggle of two hostile, interlocked wills? This paper will explore that nonlinearity more deeply through the lens of the dynamic, nonlinear sciences, especially chaos and complexity theory, that emerged in the 1990s and which significantly influenced the revision of Warfighting in 1997. Although the basic theory and philosophy of maneuver warfare first described in FMFM 1 in 1989 remained intact with the publication of MCDP 1 in June 1997, the ways in which Marines were to think about war and warfare changed in some important ways. These new ideas were largely implicit in the earlier manual, but the revision made them more explicit. These ideas coupled with the insights that nonlinearity affords make the second edition of Warfighting conceptually deeper than the first.

War is chaotic. War is complex. These are obvious truisms. But there is deeper meaning here because the terms have different levels of definition. In everyday usage, chaos refers to something that is disorderly, confusing, or apparently random. In everyday usage, complexity describes anything that is complicated, elaborate, or consists of many parts. But the terms also have more specific meaning. Chaos and complexity are branches of the dynamic, nonlinear sciences that came to prominence in the 1990s. They describe a vast array of phenomena in the natural world that have steadfastly defied explanation by classical science—including war and warfare.

 

Science and Military Theory

Military theorists have frequently turned to science to try to help understand and explain war. Sunzi frequently employed analogies from nature to explain his military concepts. He would not have recognized the field of science per se (physics as we know it would not be created for some two thousand years), but he relied on the observable laws of nature when he wrote:

He who relies on the situation uses his men in fighting as one rolls logs or stones. Now the nature of logs and stones is that on stable ground they are static; on unstable ground, they move. If square, they stop; if round, they roll. Thus, the potential of troops skilfully commanded in battle may be compared to that of round boulders which roll down from mountain heights.1

 

Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness. And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.2

The first passage reflects Sunzi’s intuitive understanding of gravity and friction, while the second reflects a rudimentary appreciation for fluid mechanics (although he would not have recognized any of the terms).

Carl von Clausewitz also relied heavily on the physical sciences to explain his military concepts. On War is filled with science metaphors. For example, using analogies from both chemistry and classical physics, Clausewitz wrote:

War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy. War moves on its goals with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for the influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another.3

Here in the same passage, Clausewitz used the metaphor of an explosive chemical reaction followed immediately by the metaphor of physical bodies acting upon each other as if by the force of gravity.

Two of Clausewitz’s most important concepts, friction and the center of gravity, come directly from the cutting-edge science of his day, which was classical Newtonian mechanics.

Closer to home, the godfather of maneuver warfare theory, John Boyd, was a trained engineer steeped in science. The second law of thermodynamics, Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle especially proved foundational to Boyd’s thinking.4 Boyd’s theories largely hinged on his deep appreciation of the nonlinear nature of war, as his briefing slides and annotated copies of his personal books confirm.5 In fact, Boyd strongly opposed any suggestion that nonlinear theory was a “new science.” He reluctantly accepted the term “20th century science,” although he observed that early thinkers had begun to explore nonlinear science as early as the 18th century.

 

Background

Entering the last year of his Commandancy in September 1994, Gen Carl E. Mundy, Jr. recognized that his successor would face significant challenges with a short planning horizon to address them and so crafted a seven-month series of general officer workshops to consider the Marine Corps’ future. He directed the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen Richard D. Hearney, to lead the effort—soon titled the “Vision 21” project—and assigned all the Corps’ lieutenant generals and several major generals to participate. One of these generals would become the next Commandant. Whoever that officer was, he would have the advantage of already having considered how he might move the Corps in a particular direction. Furthermore, the other senior officers supporting him would be intimately familiar with the knowledge that informed the new Commandant’s thinking. In April 1995, the Vision 21 participants produced a draft report, which the new Commandant, Gen Charles Krulak, drew on heavily for parts of his Commandant’s Planning Guidance (dated 1 July 1995), the first such guidance from a Commandant.6

Among several consultants brought on board to facilitate workshops were futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute, noted science writer M. Mitchell Waldrop, and military historian Roger Beaumont, a scholar of the U.S. military.7 These three men introduced the Vision 21 participants to the emerging sciences of nonlinearity. Gen Hearney took a particular interest in this developing science and hosted follow-on meetings with various authorities from a number of fields. He also encouraged other senior officers to familiarize themselves with the basics of nonlinear dynamics. In July 1995, the Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command directed an examination of nonlinear science as it relates to war and warfare. Waldrop’s book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos became must-reading at Marine Corps Combat Development Command.8 One important initial product was a report from a Marine Corps Combat Development Command-sponsored Center for Naval Analyses study titled Land Warfare and Complexity.9 Marine Corps Combat Development Command also established an ongoing relationship with the Santa Fe Institute, the mecca for the study of complexity.10 The result of these efforts was an understanding of war as a deeply nonlinear phenomenon and of military forces as complex adaptive systems. The insights Marines derived from exploring this nascent science proved profound and found their way into Marine Corps doctrine and the curricula of professional military schools.

 

Systems

We will spend a lot of time here discussing “systems,” the concept of which is important to understanding both complexity and maneuver warfare. For our purposes, a system is a collection of things that stand in relation to one another and can be conceived as constituting a larger whole. Systems are everywhere: economic systems, political systems, ecological systems, computer systems, home entertainment systems, and social systems. Systems can be natural or artificial, biological or technological, concrete or abstract. An automobile is a system comprising transmission, braking, suspension, cooling, electrical, and more components that are themselves systems. Every animal, from the smallest insect to the blue whale, is a system comprising multiple subsystems that together promote its growth and survival. A religion is a system of beliefs and moral practices, while a theory is a system of related concepts. A rifle squad is a deadly system of thirteen Marines working together toward the accomplishment of an assigned task. A Marine Air-Ground Task Force is a system of command, ground, aviation, and logistics components operating complementarily toward the accomplishment of the mission. For that matter, war—a hostile interaction between two military systems—is a system.

While we see systems everywhere, in another sense, there are no actual systems in the world. What exist in the world are matter, energy, and information. “System” is a mental construct that we impose on that matter, energy, and information to provide structure and understanding so we can better function in that world. In that sense, how we define the systems around us is up to us, and some ways of defining those systems are more useful than others.

Maneuver warfare is a highly systemic doctrine.11 It requires conceiving of the enemy as a system of components functioning together to generate combat power and apply it against us. It involves locating the criticalities and vulnerabilities in that system and attacking them to disrupt—or, literally, to “dis-integrate”—the coherent functioning of the system rather than grinding it down from the outside. Or, as Boyd was fond of saying, “to tear the enemy system apart from the inside.”

 

Linearity and Nonlinearity

Nonlinearity is defined in terms of what it is not: linear. Linear systems exhibit two fundamental properties: proportionality and additivity.12 Proportionality means that causes and their effects are proportional—a large input to the system results in a correspondingly large output, and vice versa. Additivity means that the whole equals the sum of the parts—the system exhibits no synergistic qualities. Additive systems, therefore, can be understood by deconstructing the system into its constituent parts, understanding the parts, and reassembling the parts to understand the whole system. Linear systems tend to be predictable—and therefore are perceived to be more knowable and controllable. Compared to nonlinear systems, their behavior is “tamer,” more reliable, and more logical. The very terms suggest that linearity is the rule and nonlinearity the exception, but in reality the world we live in consists mainly of nonlinear systems. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam once remarked that the term “nonlinear science” was about as useful as categorizing the vast majority of the animal kingdom as “non-elephants.”13

As discussed in Maneuverist No. 2, war is deeply nonlinear. Clausewitz understood this intuitively. He wrote that

success is not due simply to general [i.e., major] causes. Particular factors can often be decisive—details only known to those who were on the spot. There can also be moral factors which never come to light; while issues can be decided by chances and incidents so minute as to figure in histories simply as anecdotes.14

 

S.L.A. Marshall describes the same phenomenon in his Men against Fire:

For the infantry soldier the great lesson of minor tactics in our time … is the overpowering effect of relatively small amounts of fire delivered from the right ground at the right hour. The mass was there, somewhere in support, and the mobility was needed to put the vital element in the right place. But the salient characteristic of most of our great victories (and a few of our defeats) was that they pivoted on the fire action of a few men.15

 

As for nonlinearity’s violation of the additive property, Clausewitz wrote: “But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”16

Importantly, nonlinear systems generally are characterized by pervasive feedback, which can be positive or negative. Positive feedback produces reinforcing or multiplying effects whereas negative feedback produces damping or balancing effects. As compared to linear systems, which tend to have minimal feedback mechanisms, war is characterized by a complex, hierarchical system of feedback loops, some designed but many unintended and unrecognized. Whether positive or negative, feedback results are by definition nonlinear.17

 

Chaos and Complexity

Nonlinearity manifests itself in behavior that is chaotic or complex. Roughly speaking, chaos theory refers to inanimate systems that adhere to (often simple) deterministic rules that result in seemingly random, unpredictable behavior. Chaotic systems are nonlinear and sensitive to initial conditions, meaning that the minutest change in conditions—immeasurable even—leads to a very different outcome. If all the starting conditions could be recreated exactly (which they cannot), the system would behave in exactly the same way, and that behavior could be confidently predicted. There is no free will or “deciding” involved. The ultimate example of a deterministically chaotic system is the weather, about which mathematician-turned-meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the term “The Butterfly Effect”: a “butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”18

While some chaotic dynamics exist in war, much more interesting for the purpose of understanding war is complexity theory. Scientifically, complexity deals with the study of systems that exhibit interactively complex, self-organizing adaptation. These systems are known by a variety of names, most commonly complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive system is any system composed of numerous interacting parts, or agents, each of which must act individually according to its own circumstances, and which by so acting changes the circumstances affecting all the other agents. A colony of ants is a complex adaptive system. A market economy is a complex adaptive system. (A command economy is what you get when you try to “linearize” a market economy.) A soccer team is a complex adaptive system, as is the other team. A combat patrol, changing formation as it moves across the terrain and reacting to the enemy situation, is a complex adaptive system. The world fairly teems with complex adaptive systems: jazz bands (but not orchestras), swarms of bees, wolf packs, societies, communities, flocks of birds.

And of course, military units at any echelon are complex adaptive systems—or ought to be. Calling something a complex adaptive system does not necessarily mean that it adapts well. Some might better be called complex maladaptive systems, but those tend not to survive for long. The complex adaptive systems that have continued to survive and thrive in their environment have learned to adapt effectively. They tend to have built-in redundancies that protect them against single-point failure.

Nobel economist F.A. Hayek called such systems extended orders because they are intrinsically distributed.19 An extended order “constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.”20

Complex systems are driven by the numerous individual “decisions” of their agents. In an excellent description of complexity theory, Clausewitz wrote:

The military machine—the army and everything related to it—is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each piece is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction … A battalion is made up of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things or somehow make them go wrong.21

Notice that Clausewitz casts this distributed nature in negative terms, as a source of friction, but it can also be a positive if individuals or small-unit leaders exercise initiative to exploit opportunities.

Complexity is a function of the freedom of action of the individual components of the system: in general, the greater the freedom of action, the greater the complexity. Under the right conditions, even a system with only a small number of parts—even a Zweikampf—can produce complex behavior. The number and variety of components can contribute to complexity but cannot create it. An F/A-18 Super Hornet has a multitude of systems and subsystems, but they have no latitude in how they interact. They interact in only one way—as envisioned by the engineers who designed the aircraft. Such a system is exceedingly complicated, but it is not complex. When performing as designed, the aircraft is precisely and reliably controllable. But when the components cease to interact exactly as designed, it may be time to eject.

Critically, complex adaptive systems exhibit a quality known as emergence. Emergence is a qualitatively different system behavior rising out the interactions of agents in a complex adaptive system. Consider a flock of starlings—countless individual birds each acting and reacting individually according to its own local circumstances, and yet the aggregate acts like a single entity, zigging and zagging and turning back on itself with instantaneous agility—as if it has a single, controlling mind. The flock has a quality all its own. But the starlings have no concept of “flock.” There is no structure to it that is imprinted on their DNA. The behavior of the flock emerges out of the individual birds being birds.

Emergence is a form of spontaneous structure and control. It allows individual agents to form into meaningful higher-order systems. It is a violation of the additive property in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In complex systems, structure and control thus emerge from the bottom; they are not imposed only from the top, which in warfare has implications for command and control.

Healthy complex adaptive systems are said to exist at the “edge of chaos”—the fluctuating balance point between order and chaos. The edge of chaos, according to Waldrop, is “the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive.”22 If a complex system has too much order, it becomes rigid and nonadaptive; too much chaos and it becomes directionless and incoherent. A healthy complex adaptive system never quite locks into equilibrium but never spins out of control. Complex adaptive systems at the edge have enough structure to sustain themselves and enough fluidity to adapt to a variety of circumstances. It is at the edge of chaos that unpredictability, innovation, and creative emerge.

The emerging nonlinear sciences provided new insights into the nature of war. We submit that chaos and complexity do not merely provide metaphors for war but that war qualifies as deterministically chaotic and dynamically complex. These insights quickly found their way into Marine Corps doctrine. MCDP 1 included discussions of nonlinearity, complexity, and systems, which were missing from the FMFM.  (We believe the discussion of nonlinearity deserved greater treatment.) MCDP 5, Planning, and MCDP 6, Command and Control, contain similar examples. The endnotes of all three manuals reference important works on nonlinear systems.

 

Why does it matter?

Maneuver warfare theory as it developed in the Marine Corps predated the widespread recognition of the nonlinear, dynamic sciences—although some people, like John Boyd, clearly understood the implications. The nonlinear sciences, however, strongly confirm maneuver warfare theory. They reinforce the point that war and warfare are innately uncertain and unpredictable, regardless of how much information we gather or how much technology we apply to the situation. Chaos and complexity teach us, as Warfighting does, that rather than trying to impose certainty, order, and efficiency, we are ultimately better off learning to operate despite the friction, uncertainty, and disorder that are inherent to warfare.

Complexity especially suggests that centralized command is incompatible with the essentially distributed nature of warfare. It constitutes an attempt to linearize warfare to make it more controllable. In the end, it makes operations less adaptable—and another key lesson of chaos and complexity is that adaptability is absolutely essential. That adaptability is best achieved by empowering subordinate units with as much freedom of action as possible. The dynamic, nonlinear sciences tell us that a system is most adaptable, unpredictable, and creative when it is surfing at the “edge of chaos.” But U.S. operations routinely sacrifice those qualities for the sake of order and control. The property of emergence suggests that adaptive command and control must be bottom-up as well as top-down.

The dynamic, nonlinear sciences suggest that linear planning approaches that attempt artificially to deconstruct a situation into categories—think DIME and PMESII—will often fail to grasp the totality of the situation, and that more holistic approaches, such as systemic operational design (at least as originally envisioned), show more potential.23

Finally, as we mentioned in Maneuverist No. 2, chaos and complexity argue that a key aspect of maneuver warfare is the ability to conceive the enemy (or the situation more broadly) as a system and to find or create and exploit nonlinearities as a way of tearing that system apart.

Fortunately, we have seen signs over the last 25 years that some Marine leaders grasp the significance of a nonlinear view of war and warfare. Gen James Mattis in his approach to operations certainly has shown that he has a nonlinear mindset. He recently stated, “The inherent chaos caused me to leave a lot of detail out of my plans when, through study, I really understood Warfighting and its implications.”24 The same can be said of Marine commanders at various echelons of command, although how widespread that understanding is has been a matter of debate.

 

Looking Ahead

As we would expect, seventeen years of war have caused Marines to focus on the practice of warfare more than the theory that underlies it. Does this mean that Marines no longer need be cognizant of those theories? No, for theories describe and explain important concepts that influence action. In fact, all professions rely on theories in their practice. Marines must be knowledgeable of maneuver warfare theory as they study and practice the profession of arms.

As the Marine Corps begins to adjust its organizations, weapons systems, and operational approaches to counter new adversaries in the future, Marine leaders should understand the concepts and theory that underlie its current approach. To accomplish this task, they will need to appreciate nonlinear science and the ways it affects war and warfare.

 

Notes

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. By S.B. Griffith (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1963).
2. Ibid.
3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984),.
4. Boyd once told a future Marine general he could never become a great commander if he did not understand the Second Law.
5. Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. See as an example Boyd’s heavily annotated copy of James Gleick’s, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987).
6. Center for Naval Analyses, Vision-21 Source Book, Volume I: The Process, (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 1996).
7. See https://arlingtoninstitute.org; M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992); and Roger Beaumont, War, Chaos, and History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).
8. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
9. Part II of this study, Andrew Ilachinski’s An Assessment of the Applicability of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems Theory to the Study of Land Warfare, (Alexandria VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1996), was of the greatest interest to many Marines.
10. See www.santafe.edu for more information on the Santa Fe Institute established in 1984. See also https://necsi.edu/ for information on the New England Complex Systems Institute established in 1996. Some have called it the “The Santa Fe Institute of the East Coast.”
11. We draw an important distinction between systemic and systematic. “Systemic” refers to a whole consisting of related parts. “Systematic” refers to something that is thorough, deliberate, methodical, and according to a plan.
12. See Alan D. Beyerchen’s excellent discussion in “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War.” International Security. 17:3. Winter, 1992.
13. See https://physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/research/nonlinear-dynamics.
14. On War.
15. S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978).
16. On War.
17. John F. Schmitt, “Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory,” Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. by David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997).
18. Quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987).
19. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. by W.W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
20. Ibid.
21. On War.
22. Complexity.
23. Diplomatic-Informational-Military-Economic and Political-Military-Economic-Social-Infrastructure-Information, abbreviations for deconstructing friendly and enemy systems respectively.
24. Private conversation with author on 24 August 2020.

by Maj Brian Kerg

Maneuver Warfare: A Missed Mark

Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM-1), Warfighting, was first published in 1989 at the direction of Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) Gen Al Gray. This document saw print at the culmination of a maneuver warfare movement that arose organically within the Corps in the preceding decade and provided a doctrinal foundation for the Marine Corps’ warfighting philosophy. The establishment of a maneuver warfare philosophy was a seminal moment in the Corps’ history and was monumentally influential as it informed all other aspects of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities. Leaders and planners at the highest levels, when considering key decisions, were compelled to ask, “Does this support maneuver warfare?”

In 1997, FMFM-1 was updated and published as Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (MCDP-1), Warfighting. CMC Gen Charles Krulak wrote in his foreword to MCDP-1 that this document required improvement because, “Doctrine must continue to evolve based on growing experience, advancements in theory, and the changing face of war itself.”1

MCDP-1 requires another revision but not only for the justification provided by Gen Krulak. In addition to recent changes in theory and the character of war, MCDP-1 fails to adequately discuss maneuver warfare as it was articulated by the very strategist who instigated the maneuver warfare movement: Col John Boyd, USAF(ret). Despite a passing mention of certain maneuver warfare concepts, MCDP-1 remains weighted toward discussions of defeating the enemy through physical destruction and conflates maneuver with movement—an error that fails to embrace the key characteristics and potential of maneuver warfare. The Marine Corps must let Boyd speak! MCDP-1 must be revised to account for the future security environment and to appropriately convey the essential elements of maneuver warfare as understood by Boyd. Upon revision, the force must be re-indoctrinated through a deep education and application of maneuver warfare at its formal schools. In this way, the Corps will continue to outmatch adversaries in combat capability and capacity—regardless of enemy size or strength—and do its part to deter and defeat the enemies of our nation.

 

Boyd’s Maneuver Warfare

MCDP-1 defines maneuver warfare as, “a warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a variety of rapid, focused, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope.”2 This concept was drawn largely from the work of John Boyd, who researched, wrote, and lectured exhaustively on maneuver warfare and its implications for military strategy and operations after his retirement from active duty.3 Boyd’s lectures ultimately reached the attention of Gen Al Gray. As the commanding general of 2d Marine Division, Gen Gray sponsored a maneuver warfare society and applied its tenets in force-on-force free-play exercises. Upon his appointment as the CMC, he ordered the writing and publication of FMFM-1.4

Though the definition of maneuver warfare that appears in MCDP-1 is a sound one, how it is exemplified throughout the rest of the document falls short of maneuver warfare as conceptualized by Boyd. Before analyzing MCDP-1 for its gaps, it is first necessary to identify Boyd’s key components of maneuver warfare.

First, maneuver warfare prioritizes a defeat mechanism that is mental or moral in nature, vice one that is physical. Physical destruction can contribute to defeat; however, shattering the enemy in the cognitive domain is how one can best and most decisively win. To achieve this, a belligerent conducts actions that the enemy does not expect and presents him with sudden and unexpected challenges with which he must contend. As an enemy attempts to respond to surprising situations, discord and confusion are sowed, and his ability and willingness to deal with complex, confounding situations is broken.5

Secondly, maneuver warfare requires the exploitation of the element of time, such that the adversary’s dilemma is escalated into a crisis; this manipulation of time contributes decisively to his inability to cope with the situation into which he is being forced. Boyd is most popularly known for the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop, which is a cognitive model of human decision making. The aim of Boyd’s model is to operate inside the enemy’s time scale at a faster tempo than the enemy can.6 Getting inside the adversary’s time cycle inflicts disorder upon him. Simultaneously, we can further outpace an adversary by making ourselves appear ambiguous. This renders an enemy incapable of generating the mental framework needed to deal with the situation with which we are presenting him.7

The third essential element is a fundamental orientation on the enemy, focusing on inflicting effects on him, and ideally making the enemy complicit in his own defeat. We seek to understand the enemy on his own terms, which best positions us to understand how to defeat him. Boyd, pre-eminently influenced by Sun Tzu on this subject, insists on probing an enemy organization to unmask his strengths, weaknesses, and intentions.8 This becomes leverage as we can then mentally imagine what an adversary is most likely to do and take action in anticipation of his intention—as “an army varies its method of gaining victory according to the enemy.”9 Such actions enable a bold commander to defeat a numerically superior opponent.

Finally, maneuver warfare is characterized by the employment of asymmetry. Though commonly understood as the avoidance of pitting force directly against force, the meaning is far more subtle and complex. Here, Boyd applies Sun Tzu’s terms of cheng and ch’i. Cheng is directive, expected, and obvious, while ch’i is indirective, unexpected, and hidden. Boyd makes the analogy with Patton’s colloquialism to “hold him by the nose and kick him in the rear,” calling for the use of cheng and ch’i as a kind of mental combined arms. One is not necessarily superior in isolation; rather, cheng and ch’i are used together to off-balance the enemy, then rapidly strike him.10 Asymmetry exists in more domains than the physical and is particularly potent in the cognitive, time, and human domains. Attacking the mind asymmetrically is the means by which one can win without fighting, Sun Tzu’s (and Boyd’s) acme of skill.11

These are the four principal elements of maneuver warfare, as this philosophy was espoused by Boyd: A moral/mental defeat mechanism, an exploitation of time that creates a crisis for the enemy, a fundamental orientation on the enemy, and the employment of asymmetry. With Boyd’s understanding of maneuver warfare, an analysis of MCDP-1 reveals many shortcomings.

 

A Lack of Maneuver

            MCDP-1 adequately captures the idea that the defeat mechanism is not purely physical but also moral/mental. However, it espouses an application of maneuver that revolves around the use of physical strength.12 MCDP-1 couches maneuver in attrition, noting, “Firepower and attrition are essential elements of warfare by maneuver.”13 Finally, when MCDP 1 discusses applications of maneuver warfare, it weights the conversation in language highlighting how maneuver is used as a tool for destruction: “Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease.”14

The inclusion of an element of time contributing to this moral/mental crisis is also present throughout the text, advocating that we should maneuver at a faster tempo than our adversary. However, MCDP-1 fails to speak to the criticality of degrading your adversary’s tempo by inflicting disorder. Mission tactics, commander’s intent, and decentralized C2 are means of reducing our own friction, but MCDP-1 does not inform readers how they might increase friction for the adversary.

Further, though MCDP-1 does briefly mention the importance of being oriented on the enemy, it fails to fundamentally orient the reader on the enemy, nor does it expound on making the adversary complicit in his own demise. It also does not directly connect the centrality of the human dimension to this enemy orientation; that connection exists and it is a logical connection to make, but it is one the reader must make because the two ideas are separated by chapters.

Finally, asymmetry is perhaps the tenet of maneuver warfare that has the weakest representation in MCDP-1. The concept with which readers are probably most familiar is that of surfaces and gaps; avoid the former, attack the latter.15 Though MCDP-1 has one line noting that asymmetry is more than spatial, examples occur only in spatial terms: attacking an enemy’s flank, using combined arms to place him in the horns of a dilemma, and penetrating his lines.16

 

Getting Boyd’s Maneuver into MCDP-1

In short, the most fundamental concepts that characterize maneuver warfare as espoused by Boyd—whose articulation led to the writing and publication of Warfighting—are neither adequately nor comprehensively expressed. Though these concepts are mentioned, the discussion remains fixated on the physical and spatial and is weighted toward defeating the enemy by physical destruction and attrition. The risk is that Marine leaders will pursue the allure of winning by attrition, leading to disaster should they face an enemy who is physically stronger, mentally more agile, or (ironically) one who employs maneuver warfare against them.

Notably, a comparative analysis of FMFM-1 and MCDP-1 shows that the older document, FMFM-1, is more thoroughly maneuverist in nature than MCDP-1, perhaps the reason that the 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance refers only to FMFM-1.17 But the Corps must go back further in time than to FMFM-1—it must go back to Boyd, whose full command and appreciation of maneuver warfare is yet to be surpassed. MCDP-1 must be revised such that the four defining characteristics of maneuver warfare—a moral/mental defeat mechanism, an exploitation of time that creates a crisis for the enemy, a fundamental orientation on the enemy, and the employment of asymmetry—are centrally discussed.

The expertise and capability to cheaply, quickly, and effectively rewrite MCDP-1 exists. While formal doctrinal writing processes are long and tedious, requiring inputs, staffing, and buy-in from senior stakeholders across the force, this would inevitably water the text down and take years to produce—an ironic inversion of the very doctrine it would seek to espouse. Conversely, FMFM-1 was written by one trusted agent, Captain John Schmitt, who had the expertise and analytical skill to synthesize Boyd’s concepts into a widely accessible form.18 Schmitt’s manuscript was reviewed and approved by General Gray, who directed its publication and dissemination. The Marine Corps can do the same by leaning on its own known experts on Boyd and maneuver warfare. Notably, Major Ian T. Brown wrote the inimitable text, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare, which takes the reader through the full story of its subtitle and explains Boyd’s intellectual journey. Major Scott Helminski authored his master’s thesis, “No Room to Maneuver,” which further explains how the Corps missed the deeper points of maneuver warfare. Captain Dan Grazier’s “A Maneuver Renaissance” identifies shortfalls in the manner in which maneuver warfare is espoused in MCDP-1 and articulates how they could be mitigated. A dozen other organic, proven experts in this doctrine could be named, but the point is that the potential trusted agents who might rapidly author an updated version of MCDP-1 are resident within the Marine Corps itself and could be tapped directly by the CMC to make this update a reality.

If executed, this would provide a fuller, more refined, and topical version of MCDP-1 that would be published in time to inform the remaining implementation of the 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, the execution of Force Design 2030, be used to immediately educate new Marines at entry level schools, and to re-indoctrinate Marine Corps leaders across the PME continuum. Only in this way will Marine Corps forces possess the lethality offered them by maneuver warfare and be best positioned to deter and, if necessary, defeat America’s adversaries in the next war.

 

Notes

1. Headquarters, Marine Corps, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1: Warfighting, (HQMC: Washington, DC: 1997), foreword.
2. Ibid.
3. Damian Fideleon, The Road to FMFM-1: The United States Marine Corps and Maneuver Warfare Doctrine, 1979–1989, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University, 2001).
4. Ibid.
5. John Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” Video Lecture, Marine Corps University Archives, Boyd Collection.
6. Frans Osinga, “Getting A Discourse on Winning and Losing: A Primar on Boyd’s ‘Theory of Intellectual Evolution,’” Contemporary Security Policy 34 no. 3, (Routledge: 2013).
7. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” Video Lecture.
8. John Boyd, “Creation and Destruction,” Video Lecture, Marine Corps University Archives, Boyd Collection.
9. Sun Tzu, The Art of Warfare, Roger Ames, trans., (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993).
10. Boyd, “Creation and Destruction,” Video Lecture.
11. Ibid.
12. MCDP-1.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. MCDP-1.
16. Ibid.
17. Headquarters, Marine Corps, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (HQMC: Washington, DC: 2019).
18. Ian Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2018).

by Maj Sean F.X. Barrett, Mie Augier, & Col Michael D. Wyly, USMC(Ret)

The 2018 National Defense
Strategy identifies t he “ reemergence
of long-term, strategic
competition,” a weakening
international order, and rapid and
more readily accessible technological advancements
as key characteristics of the
strategic environment that have served
to undermine U.S. military advantage,
which the strategy claims can no longer
be taken for granted. The strategy
serves as a clarion call to awaken the
DOD from “a period of strategy atrophy”
and reset the force a fter a lmost
two decades of armed conflict. Reenergizing
PME and revising antiquated
manpower management practices are
crucial to developing leaders who can
operate effectively in today’s “increasingly
complex global security environment.”
2
Multiple developments since the release
of the 2018 National Defense Strategy
provide reasons for optimism that we
are progressing beyond an industrial era
mindset to prepare for great power competition.
For example, the Department
of the Navy has emphasized the importance
of agility, education, intellectual
preparedness, and talent management to
our warfighting capabilities.3 Similarly,
Gen David H. Berger’s Commandant’s
Planning Guidance (CPG) identifies
the need to fundamentally change the
manner in which we train, educate, and
manage the talent of the force, and the
recently released MCDP 7, Learning,
formalizes continuous learning as an
institutional priority. The CPG even
references the original FMFM 1, Warfighting,
possibly indicating a broader
re-embrace of the maneuver tradition.
However, despite these positive developments,
there are some reasons for
pessimism, too. For one, change in an
organization is always difficult. Military
organizations, in particular, have
been accused of ignoring or misusing
the past,4 or even rejecting it outright,
in order to avoid change.5 To adapt and
learn, organizations must maintain a
balance between “the exploration of new
possibilities and the exploitation of old
certainties.”6 Unfortunately, exploration
and exploitation compete over scarce
resources, and in today’s tight budgetary
environment, which lacks additional resources
to serve as a buffer, exploitation
tends to crowd out exploration since
feedback from exploitation in the shortterm
is greater, more immediate, and
more observable.7 Manpower policies
that necessitate short tours only exacerbate
this desire for short-term impact,
control, and quantifiable metrics, resulting
in an inherent bias toward training Marines only for the specific tasks they
need to perform today instead of educating
them for the decades to come.
Fortunately, organizational change
and innovation are not new to the Marine
Corps. We wish to share some of
Col Mike Wyly’s experiences concerning
education, thinking, organization,
and technology that can perhaps help
the Marine Corps experience a richer
and more authentic re-embrace of its
maneuver tradition and avoid being led
astray by the allure of quick fixes and
the temptation to cut corners. We write
this in a spirit of admiration for the
maneuver warfare movement and its
influence (if mostly temporary) on our
Corps and with the belief the maneuver
philosophy and the reform movement in
which it was embedded are quite fitting
for our times.8
Potential Pitfalls
On the heels of the Vietnam War,
the United States faced a great power
competition with the Soviet Union, the
terrorist threat was burgeoning, inflation
was ravaging the economy, and the
military had to resolve the challenges
posed by the All-Volunteer Force. Vietnam
required an enormous manpower
commitment over a long period time,
cost the Corps over 100,000 killed and
wounded, delayed modernization programs
essential to the Corps’ amphibious
capability, sparked heated internal
debate concerning the Corps’ mission
and standards, and led to unprecedented,
reform-minded public criticism.9
Unfortunately, while many Marines
experienced the limitations of Marine
Corps doctrine and centralized decision
making firsthand and adapted, many at
Headquarters wanted to put Vietnam
behind them, forget any lessons learned,
and revert to the “tried and true,” pre-
Vietnam concepts of conventional warfare.
In the face of war with the Soviets,
Col Wyly found this reversion to old
ideas unacceptable.
Today, the Corps faces a similar
crossroads, once again trying to modernize
as it enters another great power
competition following an even longer
period of combat. Iran and its terrorist
proxies remain a destabilizing influence,
the novel coronavirus has disrupted
the economy, the Corps is integrating
female Marines into combat roles
previously closed to them, and debate
over the future Corps continues to be
waged.10 We do not intend to suggest
a perfect parallel or to provide prescriptive
solutions. Rather, we highlight a
few potential pitfalls and provide some
insights for how the Corps overcame
them in a similarly challenging and
transformative period in our history.
Dilemmas of education. There is a
tendency to talk about education and
learning in ways that are not really
conducive to thinking and judgment.
For example, requirements for schoolhouses
to produce a certain number of
graduates each year can emphasize the
short-term at the expense of long-term
development.11 This focus on metrics
strengthens the institution’s desire to
control, which can undermine feelings
of ownership instructors have for their
curriculum, the flexibility they have to
adapt it to the needs of their students
and the enthusiasm of the students. Col
Wyly’s experiences teaching highlight
the importance of empowering instructors
and developing military judgment.
After an initial tour as a platoon
leader in Okinawa, Col Wyly checked
into 1st MarDiv and was assigned to the
Counterguerrilla/Counterinsurgency
(CG/CI) School, where he grappled
with preparing students for how to
think in combat. The school was the
brainchild of LtGen Victor “Brute”
Krulak, then CG, Fleet Marine Forces
Pacific. It was Krulak’s idea not only to
establish it but also to grant instructors
the freedom to exercise initiative
based on the study of real war as it was
emerging in the 1960s. Krulak provided
guidance for how time should be divided
between the classroom and field
work, and he set the criteria for selecting
instructors. However, he empowered
the junior officers and NCOs on staff
to take ownership of the education and
training experience.12
The focus then was counterinsurgency
because the Soviet Union planned
to expand its influence by fomenting
insurgencies worldwide. As a result, the
staff became experts on the threat of
communism and studied every counterinsurgency
possible, including in
Burma, Algeria, Nicaragua, Cuba, the
Philippines, and South Africa. They
hosted visitors from the French Foreign
Legion, Royal Marines, the Republic
of Vietnam, and Indonesia, and they
traveled to schools and courses on psychological
operations and counterinsurgency
such as those taught at the John
F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and
School to inform and refine their curricula.
They were able to do so because Krulak freed them from bureaucratic
hindrances, and they were thus able
to develop the course as they saw fit,
making it more tailored and relevant
to their students.
In designing the two courses at the
school—one primarily in the classroom
(but incorporating some field work as
well) for officers and SNCOs, the second
a company course in Cleveland National
Forest—Col Wyly found it counterproductive
to offer “school solutions”
at the end of problem-solving exercises.
Such solutions were simply somebody
else’s idea of how to resolve a tactical
situation the student may never encounter.
Col Wyly and the staff viewed their
task as making the students think, not
telling them what to think. In doing
so, they remained open to the students’
ideas, knowing they might well be better
than theirs. The staff motivated the
students by injecting a healthy dose of
realism. The company course, for example,
culminated in a week-long exercise
against aggressors played by the
staff. The staff challenged the students
with tactical problems, enabled them to
experiment with new ideas while searching
for their own solutions, and forced
them to make decisions—even at the
lowest levels.13
After two tours in Vietnam with
1st MarDiv, Wyly attended Amphibious
Warfare School (AWS) in 1973.
The curriculum relied on lectures and
scripted tactical problems with schoolhouse
solutions.14 This left Wyly asking,
“How do they know? And, what
does it matter anyway when the likelihood
of being confronted in real combat
with the same scenario was slim to
non-existent?” Rejecting this approach
to education, Wyly embarked on a quest
of self-study, spending most nights at
Quantico’s library reading military
history. He did not focus on any one
war or period in history but rather read
about everything from Genghis Khan
to Napoleon to Patton and Holland
Smith. This experience reinforced his
belief that a school’s mission was to
teach students how to think and not
what to think. In all the battles, Wyly
identified a recurring theme: finding
the enemy’s weakness and exploiting
it—decisively.
Wyly’s interest in military history
grew stronger when he attended
the Command and Staff College in
1976–1977. Following a WESTPAC
tour, he was assigned to Quantico’s
Education Center and began attending
a graduate program at George
Washington University at night. Then
MajGen Bernard Trainor, Director of
the Education Center, took an interest
in Wyly’s war studies and named
him Head of Tactics at AWS in 1979.
Wyly quickly realized the curriculum
had not changed since he was a student,
and much of the doctrine was precisely
what he had been taught at The Basic
School in 1962–1963. Empowered by
Trainor to do it his way and not fall back
on doctrine, Wyly completely rewrote
the curriculum, focusing on making
decisions, broad reading, and nurturing
questioning minds through active learning
approaches, including historical case
studies, sand table and map exercises,
tactical decision games, terrain walks,
and tactical exercises without troops.
These active learning approaches are
based on the premise that there is a stark
difference between a “manual” that
functions as a “how to” rule book and a
“story” relating facts and circumstances
that enables readers to place themselves
in the minds of the story’s protagonists
and relate the protagonists’ decisions
and actions to the decisions and actions
they might be called upon to make in
the future. Much in line with case-based
and discussion-based approaches to
teaching in general, Wyly never rejected
a student’s solution because it might
not match the school’s—even if it was
drawn from history. Instead, he asked
the student why he made the decision
he did. For students, Wyly believes there
is little more rewarding than watching
a teacher whom he respects listen
to him, think over what he said, and
congratulate him on the quality of the
idea and the progress he is making.
Technologitis. Our focus (sometimes
even fixation) on technology is nothing
new, and neither are technology’s limitations.
However, we tend to overlook the
latter to justify the former. Gen Berger
attributes this capabilities-based mindset
to the end of the Cold War and the
corresponding lack of a threat against
whom to base our analysis.15 Technology
has always offered the promise of
new, seemingly more effective ways of
fighting and shortcuts to get there, but
we cannot know what these new ways
are without a rigorous and systematic
trial-and-error process. Unfortunately,
this process is oftentimes short-circuited,
and military organizations tend
to engage in “peripheral borrowing,”
wherein the potentialities and efficient
use of new technologies are not fully
realized, as evidenced by the way the
French in 1940 treated tanks as accoutrements
rather than as an integral part
of a coordinated military effort.16
Our ability to fight without becoming
over reliant on technology is increasingly
relevant given the potential for our
adversaries to disrupt our communications
and the need for smaller units of
Marines to operate independently. Col
Wyly understood that leaders need to
be prepared to think critically and make
decisions quickly in such an environment.
17 As such, he took a decidedly
“people first” approach, prioritizing
investments in our Marines. For example,
when Wyly first took over at
AWS, reading assignments consisted
of excerpts from khaki colored manuals
that established rules so thinking
was not required. Upon this realization,
Wyly went to LtGen Trainor’s office and
argued that when people go to college,
the first thing they have to do is buy
books, so the captains at AWS should
have to buy (and read) books as well.
The initial reading list consisted of B.H.
Liddell Hart’s Strategy; Robert Heinl’s
Victory at High Tide; Edgar O’Ballance’s
No Victor, No Vanquished on the Yom
Kippur War; and Jeter Isely and Philip
Crowl’s The U.S. Marines and Amphibious
War.18 Reading history, however,
was not an end in itself. Rather, it was intended to provide vicarious learning
experiences that enabled Marines more
readily to recognize patterns and identify
solutions to problems they encountered
on the battlefield. This is necessary
to enable the effective use of technology.
Under Wyly’s tutelage, the captains
transformed into avid readers. One of
these captains, Bill Woods, executed
orders to 2nd MarDiv as Gen Al Gray
assumed command. Gen Gray had himself
already adopted maneuver practice
and thinking and knew Col John Boyd
and his “Patterns of Conflict” lecture.
Woods introduced himself to Gray in
the Officers’ Club at Camp Lejeune and
discussed with him what was happening
at Quantico. Recognizing the importance
of organizational experimentation
and the need to nurture ideas, Gray established
the 2nd Marine Division Maneuver
Warfare Board, which consisted
of Woods and other mostly junior officers,
and declared maneuver warfare the
official doctrine (and way of thinking)
for the division. Wyly also arranged for
Gray to become a regular guest speaker
at AWS. These (and other) activities
helped maneuver thinking take hold in
the organization. It was no longer just
a “new concept” but rather a prelude to
what many graduates would experience
on assignment to the FMF.
Organizational Myopias. If thinking
and learning are the foundations
for individual agility, experimentation
and learning from failures are essential
for organizational agility. Free play
and force-on-force exercises in realistic
training environments are most conducive
to this type of discovery and
help us avoid simply training to meet
minimum requirements (e.g., mission
essential tasks). Similarly, open inquiry,
enthusiastic debate, and a willingness to
hear the viewpoints of others, including
outsiders, is critical for avoiding complacency
and falling into a “competence
trap.”19 This i s e specially important
today given the rate of technological
change.
While at AWS, Col Wyly invited Bill
Lind, a congressional aide to Senator
Gary Hart, down to Quantico to speak
with the captains, some of whom wondered
why they had to listen to a “civilian
hack.” Wyly, however, was open
to ideas from everyone. Lind was welleducated,
even if an outsider, and Wyly
wanted his captains to hear every side
of the maneuver warfare debate. When
the subject of Lind having no experience
came up, Lind gave Col Boyd’s telephone
number to Wyly. Wyly quickly
formed a friendship with Boyd, another
outsider, that endured. They compared
their experiences (Wyly on the ground,
Boyd in the air), thus forming conceptual
comparisons that were instructive
for Wyly’s students.
Col Wyly also established a relationship
with Col John Greenwood, the editor
of the Gazette for 20 years, to use
the medium to facilitate open inquiry
and debate without fear of reprisal. Captains
at AWS began meeting at each
other’s houses on Friday night to reflect,
debate, and then write articles as they
sharpened their ideas. This learning
process was continuous; maneuverists
never rested on their laurels, recognizing
that strategy, organizational adaptation,
and evolution are an ongoing process.
For example, even as Gen Gray signed
FMFM 1 and maneuver thinking officially
became the organization’s way
of thinking, maneuverists were already
thinking ahead to how to make the
movement broader and more enduring,
refining their ideas along the way
through an ongoing learning process.
After all, no victory is permanent but,
rather, must be won again and again.
Re-maneuverizing the Marine Corps:
Lessons From the Past to Inform the
Future
Education and the ability to think
critically, quickly, and decisively are
critical warfighting enablers. While
maybe not as intuitively obvious as
the physical demands, Williamson
Murray argues the military profession
might also be the most intellectually
demanding since military forces rarely
get the chance to practice their profession.
21 FMFM 1 similarly observes
the centrality of the human dimension
in war, reminding us, “No degree of
technological development or scientific
calculation will overcome the human
dimension in war.”22 Recent rhetoric,
strategic documents, and initiatives in
the Marine Corps, the Department of
the Navy, and DOD seem to embrace
the need to move beyond our industrial
era mindset. However, any change in an
organization is fraught with challenges and oftentimes succumbs to the wellintentioned
bureaucratic tendency to
develop processes to track, measure, and
validate “progress” towards an objective,
which usually only serves to stifl e
it. In highlighting the importance of a
bottom-up approach starting and ending
with the individual Marine, Col
Wyly’s experiences hopefully might
inform these efforts.
As a teacher, Col Wyly was empowered
by senior leaders who trusted him
and removed bureaucratic obstacles instead
of adding to them. This is not to
say there was no resistance along the
way. Rather, support from leaders like
Trainor and Gray enabled Wyly to continue
on despite pressures to revert to
the old “tried and true” teaching methods
and tactics. Realism and practicing
decision making, implemented through
active learning techniques, took precedence
over accreditations, quotas, and
degrees. Instead of relying on mundane
lectures, Wyly took ownership of his
curricula, and his enthusiasm proved
infectious. He inspired (and prepared)
his students for a lifetime of learning not
to meet requirements but to live up to
their professional calling. Col Wyly and
likeminded maneuverists were always
seeking to improve, even if this meant
having the humility to take inputs from
nontraditional (even eccentric) sources
and from those they outranked. Perhaps
most importantly, they placed their responsibility
as professionals ahead of
their own professional advancement.
Adapting and overcoming is never easy,
but we have a rich history that might
help guide us.
Notes
1. David Berger, “Marine Corps Readiness
and Modernization,” CSPAN, (October 2019),
https://www.c-span.org.
2. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018
National Defense Strategy of the United States
of America: Sharpening the American Military’s
Competitive Edge, (Washington, DC: 2018).
3. Department of the Navy, Education for
Seapower, (Washington, DC: 2019); Former
Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly,
“SECNAV VECTOR 7,” (January 2020);
Former Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas
B. Modly, “SECNAV VECTOR 16,” (March
2020); John Kroger, “Charting the Future of
Education for the Navy-Marine Corps Team,”
War on the Rocks, (November 2019), available
at https://warontherocks.com.
4. Williamson Murray, “Innovation: Past and
Future,” Joint Force Quarterly, (Washington,
DC: NDU Press, Summer 1996); Edward L.
Katzenbach, Jr., “The Horse Cavalry in the
Twentieth Century: A Study in Policy Response,”
Public Policy, (Cambridge, MA: John
Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government,
1958).
5. Williamson Murray, “Does Military Culture
Matter?” Orbis, (Amsterdam, NED: Elsevier,
Winter 1999).
6. James G. March, “Exploration and Exploitation
in Organizational Learning,” Organization
Science, (Catonsville, MD: Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences,
March 1991).
7. James G. March, “Rationality, Foolishness,
and Adaptive Intelligence,” Strategic Management
Journal, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, March
2006).
8. We focus on Col Wyly’s experiences in
particular, but we recognize he was just one
member of a key group of people that initiated,
participated in, and led the maneuver warfare
movement. Others included Col GI Wilson,
USMCR; Gen Al Gray; LtCol Bill Woods;
Col John Boyd, USAF; and Bill Lind, among
many others.
9. For more on the Vietnam War and its aftereffects
on the Corps, see Allan R. Millett,
Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States
Marine Corps, rev. ed., (New York, NY: The
Free Press, 1991).
10. For examples of articles both implicitly and
explicitly critical of Gen Berger’s CPG or Force
Design 2030, see Jim Webb, “The Future of the
U.S. Marine Corps,” National Interest, (May
2020), available at https://nationalinterest.org;
Jake Yeager, “Expeditionary Advanced Maritime
Operations: How the Marine Corps Can Avoid
Becoming a Second Land Army in the Pacifi c,”
War on the Rocks, (December 2019), available
at https://warontherocks.com; Mark Cancian,
“Don’t Go Too Crazy, Marine Corps,” War on
the Rocks, (January 2020), available at https://
warontherocks.com; and Dan Gouré, “Will
Commandant Berger’s New Marine Corps Be
a High-Tech Forlorn Hope,” Real Clear Defense,
(April 2020), available at https://www.
realcleardefense.com.
11. For example, excessive hint-giving may help a
student pass a test, but it undermines long-term
progress. See David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists
Triumph in a Specialized World, (New
York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2019).
12. In a similar effort, MajGen William F. Mullen,
CG, TECOM, published a memorandum,
“Training and Education Command Authority
to Experiment With New Learning Practices
Policy,” to grant “to Formal Learning Centers
(FLCs) the authorities necessary to experiment
with new learning practices with respect to innovative
curriculum design, development, and
delivery.”
13. When 1st MarDiv deployed to Vietnam
in 1965, some elements of these units had experienced
the training at the CG/CI School.
Comparatively, they were a small minority, but
to Wyly and others, their effectiveness exceeded
those who lacked the training. Unfortunately,
the CG/CI School instructors deployed with the
division, so there was no such school left behind
to instruct follow-on units and replacement
personnel. As a result, over time, what might
be described as “the Krulak tactics” gave way
to the operational concepts established by GEN
Westmoreland.
14. After each tactical game, students were provided
a typed handout of “The School Solution,”
which was printed on yellow paper and thus
became known as “The Yellows.” The yellow
paper was intended to make it visibly evident
that what was printed on this piece of paper was
special—different—the answer!
15. “Marine Corps Readiness and Modernization.”
16. Oriol Pi-Sunyer and Thomas De Gregori,
“Cultural Resistance to Technological Change,”
Technology and Culture, (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, Spring 1964); James
J. Tritten, “Revolutions in Military Affairs:
From the Sea,” Military Review, (Fort Leavenworth,
KS: Army University Press, March–April
2000). In highlighting the shortcomings of the
technology-driven model of military innovation,
Tritten notes that it assumes military organizations
will always capitalize on new technologies
and recognize the need for new doctrine
or organization. Additional examples of this
mistaken notion include the thought initially
that sustained artillery fi re would defeat the enemy;
however, experience taught that intensive
fi re enabling infantry to close with the enemy
and be “on top of him” before he could recover
was more effective. The machine gun’s sustained
automatic fi re was supposed to enable the attacker
to attack and move through and defeat
www.mca-marines.Marine Corps Gazette • November 2020 org/gazette 41
enemy defenses. Instead, it proved more effective
in the defense until such time as light automatic
weapons that could be carried by infantry were
developed. It was also initially thought that an
enemy could be bombed into submission by
fl ying over him and dropping ordnance, but the
more effective employment of aviation proved
to be providing cover for friendly infantry so
they could move forward during the period
defenders were “hunkered down” when planes
were overhead. Especially relevant today, the introduction
of electronics was supposed to enable
all-knowing commanders in all-knowing command
centers to command from there without
ever having to venture out. This myth began
with the invention of the telegraph, but it soon
became evident that commanders who were not
eye-to-eye with their subordinates were “out
of touch” and often unaware of the drive and
motivation (or lack thereof ) of forces under
their command. Thus, FMFM 1 reminds us
the “commander should command from well
forward” in order to “sense fi rsthand the ebb and
fl ow of combat, to gain an intuitive appreciation
for the situation which he cannot obtain from
reports.” Headquarters Marine Corps, FMFM
1, Warfi ghting, (Washington, DC: 1989).
17. Leaders like MajGen David Furness, CG,
2nd MarDiv, have been working to address the
problem of enemy actions in the electromagnetic
environment and the challenges of command
and control in denied or degraded communications
environments. David Furness, “Winning
Tomorrow’s Battles Today: Reinvigorating Maneuver
Warfare in the 2d Marine Division,” Marine
Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA: November
2019). That being said, “control” is something
of a misnomer. Command is more a matter of
seeking, identifying, and seizing opportunities.
18. Every year, Wyly added more books, which
he picked up from the Gazette store and sold
in the AWS parking lot out of the trunk of his
car. The captains became very enthusiastic and
started coming to his offi ce to discuss what they
read. Soon, the captains started initiating their
own suggestions of what to read. Wyly added
them to the ever-growing list, a prelude to the
Commandant’s Professional Reading List.
19. Daniel A. Levinthal and James G. March,
“The Myopia of Learning,” Strategic Management
Journal, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, Winter
1993). Careerism has a tendency to undermine
debate and exacerbate competence traps. Marines
and the institution must not defi ne “career
success” as getting promoted or retiring with
a comfortable pension. On the contrary, according
to Wyly’s perspective, career success
should be viewed as living a meaningful life
and having accomplished the mission on which
a Marine set out.
20. Gen David H. Berger, Commandant’s Planning
Guidance, (Washington, DC, 2019).
21. Williamson Murray, “MCDP 7: On Learning,”
Marine Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA:
November 2019).
22. FMFM 1, Warfi ghting.

by Marinus

This is the second article of a series called The Maneuverist Papers. Maneuverist No. 1 summarized the history of the post-Vietnam reform movement that produced maneuver warfare theory and eventually resulted in the publication of FMFM 1, Warfighting, in 1989. The current article begins to address the substance of maneuver warfare theory, starting at the beginning, with the definition and description of war.

If you were to ask which is the most important chapter in MCDP 1, Warfighting, most Marines would probably say Chapter 4, “The Conduct of War.” This makes sense; after all, it is Chapter 4 that actually explains maneuver warfare—introducing key concepts like mission tactics, commander’s intent, main effort, and surfaces and gaps. We submit, however, that Chapter 1, “The Nature of War,” is the most important because it captures the problem, commonly agreed upon by all Marines, to which maneuver warfare is the logical solution. And reaching a common and compelling understanding of the challenge facing the organization is critical to meeting that challenge.

Maneuver warfare theory starts with a clear-eyed look at the nature of war as it exists in reality and from there proceeds logically to develop a philosophy designed to deal specifically with that true nature. Arguably, the single greatest effect Warfighting has had is to establish a common understanding among Marines of the nature of and the challenges posed by war. We suggest that in an era of growing homogeneity among the services, this distinct understanding of the nature of war may be one of the key factors that today distinguishes the Marine Corps. While other services may talk about fog and friction, for Marines these qualities are articles of faith that inform our every decision.

 

Framing the Problem

At the risk of getting a bit philosophical, problems do not actually exist in the world. What exist in the world are situations or, in the words of systems thinking pioneer Russell Ackoff, “messes.”1 A mess only becomes a problem when someone, with a particular perspective and set of interests, looks at the mess and decides it is unacceptable. “The Problem” is a framework that we impose on the mess, and the way we choose to frame that problem matters significantly. In the words of Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial, his classic book on complexity and design, “solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”2  In other words, the way you formulate the problem points to the solution. If you can develop a clear and compelling understanding of the problem facing you, the solution becomes self-evident. Frame the problem in the same old way, and you will get some variation of the same old solution. If you want a new solution, find a new way to frame the problem. We believe this is the fundamental value of Warfighting—it framed the problem in a new (at the time) way that pointed to a new way of operating.

One of the early criticisms of FMFM 1 was that it was merely common sense. The argument was that the maneuver warfare concepts described in Warfighting were nothing more than any Marine with common sense would come up with on his or her own. But if maneuver warfare were merely common sense, military organizations the world over would have adopted it spontaneously—but they have not. We do agree, however, that there is a certain apparently simple reasonableness to Warfighting’s argument. We suggest that is mainly because the manual depicts the challenge—that is, frames the problem—in a way that is clear,  compelling, and rings true. Maneuver warfare per Warfighting only seems like common sense because it is the logical solution to the problem described in Chapter 1. What is that problem?

 

The Zweikampf Dynamic

            Warfighting starts with an essential definition of war:  a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other by force.

Of note, FMFM 1 defines war in terms of a clash between nations. MCDP 1 expands that definition to the more general “political groups,” acknowledging that the belligerents may not be nation-states (as historically they often have not been). In fact, throughout history state-on-state conflict has been the exception and nonstate warfare the rule, whether the belligerents were intrastate factions, multinational coalitions, or surprastate organizations such as the United Nations or al Qaeda. Both FMFM 1 and MCDP 1 use the phrase “between or among” to acknowledge that there may be more than two belligerents to any conflict. This again has often been the case, although we note that multiple belligerents have tended to align into two opposing camps out of strategic expediency, even if only reluctantly, partially, and temporarily.

MCDP 1 adopted the Clausewitzian term Zweikampf (literally “two-struggle”), which was absent from the original FMFM 1.3 The dynamics of the Zweikampf may be the single most important idea in Warfighting. The concept of the deeply interactive struggle of two hostile, interlocked wills may seem obvious today, but during the post-Vietnam era it represented a dramatic shift in thinking. (Recall that Clausewitz was only emerging from obscurity at the time.) The prevailing mindset, on full view during the Vietnam War and strongly influenced by operations research methods, tended to see war as a fixed engineering problem rather than as a dynamic, interactive struggle between two opposing wills. Some operational concepts still take that fixed-problem approach today.

To make his point, Clausewitz likened war to a pair of wrestlers locked in a hold, each attempting to gain leverage over the other and together achieving contortions that neither could achieve alone.4 It is not the characteristics of the individual contestants that give war its essential nature but the interaction between them. In this sense, war is what complexity theory calls an emergence, a whole that is the product of the interaction of its parts but whose nature is not inherent in any of those parts. As historian Alan Beyerchen pointed out in his seminal article “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” Clausewitz provides an image that brings to mind a great deal of nonlinear interaction (more about which in a later paper) and the possibility of sudden reversals.5 In recognition of this truth, Marines are fond of acknowledging that “the enemy gets a vote.” This adage is good as far as it goes, but it does not capture the full extent of the Zweikampf dynamic because the interaction of the two competing wills can yield results that neither belligerent intended. Something altogether different and unexpected emerges.

That is the Zweikampf dynamic. It is the various patterns and sequences—give-and-take, initiative-and-response, action-reaction-counteraction—that result from the direct, intense interaction between the two hostile wills. These patterns are highly nonlinear, which here refers not to positions on a battlefield but to the dynamics of cause and effect in a system. A nonlinear system has two basic properties.6 First, a system is nonlinear if causes and their effects are disproportionate. Second, a system is nonlinear if the whole does not equal the sum of the parts. Minor efforts, made at the right time and place, can have outsized effects—think of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which 300 Spartans (with allies, it must be said) famously held off an advancing Persian army of over 100,000 men. Conversely, massive expenditures in men and materiel can produce little—think of almost any offensive on the First World War Western Front.

Nonlinearity is a primary quality of the Zweikampf dynamic, and from that nonlinearity directly flow other attributes such as friction, uncertainty, disorder, and fluidity. As examples, each belligerent’s attempts to disrupt the enemy’s plans and actions generate friction, while each belligerent’s efforts to appear inscrutable and to actively mislead the enemy produce uncertainty.

At its roots, a big part of the maneuver warfare mindset consists of finding/creating and ruthlessly exploiting favorable nonlinearities—critical vulnerabilities, decisive points in time or space, capability mismatches, or other advantages that, if exploited, offer a disproportionately large payoff for the effort invested. In contrast, some other doctrinal approaches through history have amounted to attempts to “linearize” war in an effort to make its results predictable.

One lesson for today: This discussion should serve as a reminder of war’s fundamental unpredictability, a trait we tend to forget in the pursuit of battlefield certainty through the latest technological advancement. Information technology can help reduce a lot of unknowns, but we suggest it cannot eliminate the uncertainty that is at the very heart of the Zweikampf.

 

Attributes of War

After establishing the essence of war, Warfighting goes on to present a set of attributes that are direct products of the Zweikampf dynamic and that together describe the environment within which the warfighter must operate. FMFM 1 lists friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, and violence and danger. To that list, MCDP 1 adds complexity.

            Warfighting then continues with a discussion of another set of attributes that, if not outputs of the dynamic itself, influence the unfolding of the dynamic within that environment: War is a social interaction reflecting human nature in all its complexities and vagaries. War has physical, mental, and moral/psychological dimensions—in fact, it presents the most physically, mentally, and morally demanding challenge known to humankind. War includes some aspects that are timeless and others that are changeable. Within the context of competing wills, warfare involves the application of both art (i.e., intuition and creativity) and science (analysis and calculation).

 

The Timeless and the Changing

            Warfighting attempts to describe war in timeless terms. While it recognizes that some aspects of war are changeable, it does not address those aspects. It urges Marines to be alert to those changes, but it leaves it up to them to identify what those changes are. While most of the time only war’s outward forms will change, occasionally more profound changes to war’s deeper character can occur as the result of dramatic political, societal, or technological developments. Examples of such developments include national conscription, the invention of gunpowder, the introduction of aviation, and the invention of nuclear weapons. Emerging developments that some expect to change the character of war in the near future include robotic systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the militarization of space. In contrast, tactics and techniques evolve constantly due to mutual adaptation between enemies—in yet another manifestation of the Zweikampf dynamic.

Changes to the character of a conflict tend to have greater repercussions than mere changes to its form, but the former is usually much harder to appreciate than the latter. In either case, as Warfighting says, it is important to stay abreast of the process of change, for the belligerent who first exploits a development in the art and science of war can gain a significant advantage, while the belligerent ignorant of the changing character or forms of war may end up unequal to its challenges.

 

In Conclusion

Synthesizing the above discussion, the problem is: How to prevail in a clash between independent, hostile, and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other through force in the dynamic of the Zweikampf? The dynamic unfolds in an environment dominated by friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, complexity, and violence and danger—even as it creates that environment. It is informed by the various traits of human nature. It requires acting in the physical, mental, and moral dimensions. It demands the ability to understand and balance factors both timeless and changing. And it involves the interplay of art and science.

            This is the challenge that Warfighting sets for itself.  It proposes that the answer to this challenge is maneuver warfare—as described in Warfighting, a “philosophy for action” that better equips Marines to survive and prevail in the Zweikampf and in the conditions it presents—as we will discuss in subsequent papers.

 

Notes

1. Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems (New York, NY: Wiley and Sons, 1974).
2. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Pronounced “tsvai-kampf.” “Zweikampf.”
4. On War.
5. Alan D. Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War.” International Security, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Winter 1992).
6. Ibid.