The Army experienced a momentary flirtation with maneuver warfare but soon realized that fire and maneuver are inseparable parts of a continuum, to be employed in measured doses according to the situation—here, as U.S. and Royal Thai Marines rehearse for Cobra Gold ’95.
Sitting through the Naval Institute’s recent symposium, “Maneuvering in the Littorals” (which, for some reason, everyone wanted to pronounce “littorals”), was like a bumpy slide through a time warp.1 The theme of the gathering was how the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps henceforth will break away from patrolling the high seas and conducting old-style amphibious landings and instead will employ “maneuver warfare” to get inside the opponent’s “OODA” loop to clinch its actions with minimum expenditure of blood, sweat, and tears.2
The proceedings seemed particularly unreal as they were taking place just as the Navy was becoming heavily engaged in attrition operations against the tiny Republic of Srpska. Far from getting inside anyone’s loop, the principal aim of the NATO forces in Bosnia seemed to be to convince the opposition to withdraw his weapons from the tortured Sarajevo area and to come to the negotiating table. Fortunately, the Bosnian Serbs reacted favorably, but it is not clear whether they were driven as much by the NATO action as by that of their kindred sponsors in Belgrade, who seemed to be tiring of the struggle. As in Vietnam, the search-and-destroy strategy could have proved desultory for the West.
For those who were not around when the U.S. Army went through this same exercise a decade or two ago, maneuver warfare is supposed to be the opposite of attrition warfare. The former is Good; the latter is Bad. And like the speakers at the symposium, the Army inflated the Good and condemned the Bad, that is, until the laws of physics and common sense caught up with it. The OODA loop is an invention of a thoughtful chap who suggests that commanders in battles must observe their foes, organize to deal with them, decide what to do, and act on that decision. The key, he maintains, is to do that faster than the opposition, so that the other side always will be acting on an out-of-date perception of reality. Neat. And it supposedly fits into maneuver warfare, which should be considered primarily a frame of mind for dealing with operational problems, not merely a technique for moving military units around on the battlefield (or battlewaters).
Here, unfortunately, one begins to get a little grit in the wheels. As soon as we classify maneuver as a Good frame of mind and place attrition at the opposite pole, we have set linear limits to the range of our thinking. Dichotomies tend to rule out a lot of other dimensions. Under this construct, commanders from Hannibal to Schwarzkopf have been one or the other—or possibly something in between. Presumably, winners are more maneuver-ish, losers more attrition-ish. Successful commanders who stood their ground, like Petain (“Ils ne passeront pas!”) at Verdun or Meade at Gettysburg, are viewed as exceptions to the rule—or simply foolish amateurs who didn’t know any better.
At the symposium, the Army’s prime doctrinal manual, FM 100-5 Operations—which reflects a number of ideas surviving the service’s fleeting exposure to maneuver warfare—came in for some spirited criticism. Particularly attrition-ish in some speakers’ views was the Army’s notion of synchronization as an element of operational doctrine (selected from a quadratic including initiative, agility, and depth). The critics either viewed synchronization as incompatible with the other elements or simply were ignorant of them. General Fred Franks’s oft-cited momentary hesitation in the conduct of the left hook attack against the Iraqi Republican Guard in the Gulf War was diagnosed not as a judgment call on the corps commander’s part but as a manifestation of faulty Army doctrine poisoning Army thinking. (The critics apparently found no satisfaction in Colonel Harry Summers’s explanation that it is sometimes preferable to attack with a compact fist than with five extended fingers.)
Considering the virility of the arguments lofted, the intensity of the beliefs aired, and most of all, the fact that there was no one of different mind to speak at the symposium, it should be worthwhile to investigate what happened to maneuver warfare in the Army. If it is of such great virtue, why do the green suiters not speak of it anymore?
The short answer is that they came to realize that fire and maneuver (together with protection—as found in an armored vehicle or by the dispensing of flares by an aircraft avoiding hostile missiles) are inseparable parts of a continuum. The phrase, “Have gun, will travel,” makes sense. The gun may be an encumbrance to a maneuver purist, but the wise man does not leave home without it when headed for a bad neighborhood.
For a more consummate answer one must probe back into the military journals of the 1970s and 1980s. Those were the halcyon years of bumper-sticker strategies in the Army. The Army was breaking out of its decade-long fixation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency. In rapid succession it thrashed its way through:
- Active Defense (to counter the Soviet threat)
- Integrated Battlefield (added weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological)
- Extended Battlefield (soft-peddled nukes, more mobility, deeper operations)
- AirLand Battle (less servicing of targets, still greater mobility)
- AirLand Battle 2000 (looking ahead, paving the way for current thinking)
We need not trudge back through all this underbrush. Suffice it to say, ideas enjoyed high velocity—if somewhat short staying power. Not least among the ideas, although it never made it into the front rank in official literature, was today’s nautical hero, maneuver warfare.
Even some of the Army’s most vocal critics of maneuver warfare had some kind things to say about it. Writing in Army magazine in September 1986, Captain Daniel P. Bolger of the History Department at West Point says:
Certainly, the discussion has been stimulating, and the Army can thank the maneuver warfare reformers for their interest in traditional military methods and thinking. They have contributed to the general rebuilding of the Army following the post-Vietnam doldrums. Even if the reformers’ recommendations are not always of use, their intentions are laudable. The American military is indeed fortunate to have the support and concern of this diverse, patriotic group of thinkers.
Then he states his case: “Maneuver warfare is in fact an invention of the present superimposed on the past. The whole body of thought is a reaction against Vietnam. . . . [Its real problem] is that it promises so much and delivers so little.” He points out:
It has little relevance at lower levels of command. Tactical units (squads, platoons, companies, etc.) encounter much friction and have little time. Abstract ideas such as maneuver warfare, when applicable, fit best at the strategic level, where one does not often encounter continuous lines of hostile forces. Flanks may be turned, important objectives encircled. Seldom do tactical leaders find such conveniences. In conventional operations, tactical leaders usually face what appear to be “just a whole lot of enemy.” They look to their higher commanders to do the fancy stuff.
It focuses on means rather than objectives. The point of warfare is to defeat the enemy. If one must think dichotometrically, a better framework was described by German military historian Hans Delbruck (and endorsed by American historian Russell F. Weigley). He identified strategies of annihilation and of exhaustion. The first is aimed at total destruction of the opposing force. The second has a more limited purpose: survival of the friendly force. Both maneuver and attrition operations are essential for successful accomplishment of either the annihilation or exhaustion strategy. Opportunities to pursue the first might occur in many instances; the latter might more likely arise when one side is far inferior, such as when a guerrilla force is obliged to engage a much larger conventional force.
It pushes on an open door. Maneuver warfare’s exciting tenets of mission-oriented orders, avoidance of enemy strengths, initiative, surprise, economy of force, mass, etc., are all well-known practices and principles of war ingrained in Army officers through careful instruction, study, and practice. So it has been at least since the Mexican War.
“On balance,” Bolger writes,
maneuver warfare is a combination of well-intended suggestions based on traditional military principles; vague exhortations to be flexible, gain the initiative and outflank the enemy; and alluring promises of rapid, one-sided triumphs at little cost. Unfortunately, maneuver warfare exponents are reluctant to distinguish between three levels of war, and their repetitive platitudes offer few revelations to professionals.
In a subsequent edition of Army, another author on the subject, Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Scales, cites an old gunner’s adage: In peace the cry is all for mobility, but in war for weight of shell. He went on to note that B. H. Liddell Hart, himself one of the most prominent maneuverists before World War II, remarked that “the tendency toward underrating firepower . . . has marked every peace interval in modern military history.”
Scales pleads for balance between firepower and mobility. Those two, matched with protection, he argues, are the strengths and the essence of combined arms operations. Firepower both kills and demoralizes. Massed concentrations of bombs and shells have stopped armored advances cold, such as in the case of the 45th Infantry Division at Salerno, Italy. They also have created opportunities for break-out and maneuver, as at St. Lo, Normandy, France, in 1944.
Colonel Scales, an artilleryman, admits that as the lethality of artillery and missiles increases, the need for massing of fires may diminish. However, he points out that new missions for long-range systems are likely to evolve, including the suppression of enemy air defenses, such as we have witnessed by Tomahawk naval missiles in Bosnia, and new applications of firepower to such old problems as neutralizing centers of enemy strength to facilitate deep maneuver. Besides, he says, long-range firepower itself can be used as a form of maneuver—especially when a commander wishes to limit casualties. That may have been what the Navy was really up to (knowingly or unknowingly) in the Adriatic during the conference.
Perhaps what really moved the Army beyond its momentary flirtation with maneuver warfare was the ancient wisdom of Clausewitz. The master cautioned specifically against attempts to transfer intriguing theories, often devised by men with little or no experience, directly to the sodden, bloody field of battle. He wrote:
Friction is the only conception which in a general way corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. . . . Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they teach only what they know—how to walk.
When the naval services emerge from their current fascination with the siren song of maneuver warfare, the Army will be glad to welcome them to the more mature world of joint and combined arms operations, where fire and maneuver are employed in measured doses applicable to the situation.
1 “Maneuvering in the Littorals,” U.S. Naval Institute seminar, 6 September 1995.
2 Colonel John Boyd, USAF (Ret.), created the OODA (observe, organize, decide, act) loop.
General Atkeson is a senior fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare, Association of the U.S. Army, and a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During his military career he served as National Intelligence Officer for General Purpose Forces on the staff of the Director of Central Intelligence, as commander of the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, and as deputy commandant of the U.S. Army War College.