Stagnation is perhaps the antithesis of maneuver warfare. Unfortunately, it is also a valid description of what has happened to Marine Corps maneuver warfare doctrine. The seminal text—Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication (MCDP) 1, Warfighting—is 23 years old. Originally intended to be updated over time, it has instead aged. Continuing to base the Marine Corps’ foundational doctrine in an outdated text puts at risk the widespread acceptance and adoption of Maneuver Warfare in the Marine Corps. It needs revision and updating to increase its relevance to today’s Marines.
Maneuver warfare doctrine was never meant to rely on a one-and-done publication. In fact, Warfighting was revised in 1997 by then-Commandant General Charles Krulak, eight years after the original was published. In his preface to the revised edition, former Commandant General Alfred Gray made clear his intent that Warfighting undergo continual revision and updating:
Like war itself, our approach to warfighting must evolve. If we cease to refine, expand, and improve our profession, we risk becoming outdated, stagnant and defeated. [The updated Warfighting] refines and expands our philosophy on warfighting, taking into account new thinking about the nature of war and the understanding gained through participating in extensive operations over the past decade.
If the Marine Corps’ experiences between 1989 and 1997 warranted revising Warfighting, then certainly the experiences since those years do as well. The time passed since the last revision of Warfighting includes almost two decades of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, all operations against the Islamic State, and today’s shift to great power competition outlined in the 2018 National Defense Strategy.
Warfighting has no references to cyber or information operations. It ignores counterinsurgency almost completely. There is no mention of the Marine Corps’ naval purpose or character. It does not refer to the current threats facing the nation or the Marine Corps. This doctrinal stagnation contributes to three primary dangers that impede greater adoption and implementation of maneuver warfare across the service.
First, parts of Warfighting are at risk of becoming irrelevant. The section on “The Nature of War” is timeless. But other sections are already out of sync with the current Commandant’s Planning Guidance. Warfighting introduced a defining feature of Marine Corps operations: “For operations and training, Marine forces will be formed into Marine air-ground task forces (MAGTFs).” The MAGTF is presented as a nonnegotiable tenet of Marine Corps operations. This is in contrast with the thinking of the current Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger. In the Commandant’s Planning Guidance he emphasized, “Likewise, we are not defined by any particular organizing construct—the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) cannot be our only solution for all crises.” The change here can be subtle; the Commandant is not going to throw the MAGTF construct out with the proverbial bath water. But a revised Warfighting could acknowledge that while the MAGTF is a preferred construct, the Marine Corps as an organization is not wedded to it or any other specific organizational construct. Similarly, MCDP 1 does not talk about naval integration or site the Marine Corps in a maritime context—which is increasingly important to the Marine Corps’ identity and operations.
The second risk is that Warfighting is no longer as readable as it once was. In the original forward to Fleet Marine Force Manual (FMFM) 1, Warfighting (MCDP 1’s precursor), General Alfred Gray made it clear that readability was essential and that it should flow with a “natural progression.” He understood that if Marines could not or did not read it, it was worthless. In a lecture on the history of the publication, the primary author, Major John Schmitt, said that he was instructed to write a book that “could be read in one trip to the shitter”—perhaps a stretch for the current 87-page version. Readability and relatability are nevertheless key to the intent, and its “succinct, readable style” was praised early on in the project. But language and usage evolve, and at 23 years old, the document’s readability is more distant now from Marines than it ever has been. A refresh would create the opportunity to improve readability in the language of today’s Marines.
The third—and most threatening—risk to Warfighting is that it no longer matches current Marine Corps thinking about warfare because it is not informed by the Corps’ experiences over recent decades. MCDP 1 makes several references to past conflicts, mostly in the discussion over styles of warfare. The most recent example considered is Vietnam. This made sense in 1989 when FMFM 1 was first written—there were still active-duty Marines who had served in Vietnam. It was the last major conflict the service had been engaged in, and it still weighed heavily on the conscience of the service.
Since then, Marines have been engaged all over the world, but principally in Iraq and Afghanistan. Combined, the Marine Corps has spent nearly four decades in those countries, but neither is referenced in MCDP 1—not even the First Persian Gulf War. These two offer a myriad of examples and case studies that could help flesh out and update MCDP 1, serving as reference points for the Marines who fought there and as examples with which Marines are much more familiar, because many currently serving Marines participated in those conflicts. There are Marines who have retired after 20 years of service, much of it spent in combat, whose experiences are reflected nowhere in the current version of Warfighting.
Worse, it has no reference to the shift to great power competition or the renewed focus on the Pacific. More dangerous still, it was written before the effects of computing technology, automation, and advances in information technology were apparent. Maneuver warfare, as outlined in Warfighting, is an Industrial Age concept. I have no doubt that maneuver warfare continues to apply and we as a Marine Corps need to implement it, but that will be increasingly difficult if our doctrinal publications remain outdated. There is no lack of scholarship on the changing character of warfare; there are new books on cyber warfare, fourth- and fifth-generation warfare, and contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine. Many of them are read by Marines and taught in Quantico, Virginia, and Monterey, California, but in Warfighting they do not exist. Without revision, Warfighting may be better understood as a time capsule into 1990s Marine Corps thought than anything relevant to contemporary doctrine.
In a summary of changes from FMFM 1 and MCDP 1, Major Richard Barclay (then the Deputy Director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School) concluded that the changes were not particularly significant. Rather, they reflected updates to joint terminology and clarification—to improve readability. The concepts remained almost unchanged. He summarized “The differences between FMFM 1 and MCDP 1 do not indicate a major course correction on Warfighting tenets or philosophy.” The early revision showed that MCDP 1 can and should be changed regularly to keep it relevant. As a foundational document, it needs to mesh with contemporary and experiences and operational concepts.
To call for an updated edition of Warfighting is not new. In a 2019 prize-winning article in the Marine Corps Gazette, a Marine second lieutenant similarly asked for updates to make Warfighting more engaging. Central to her argument is the assertion that the language of Warfighting is not as relatable to today’s Marines as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. She did not call for a change to the central concepts but to the language and anecdotes, to the presentation of the concepts. She found that officer students at The Basic School found Warfighting to be “too vague, not engaging enough, and outdated.” And she asserted, “The language used to write Warfighting in the late 1990s is not the language many young Marines grew up using.” This is a fundamental flaw, she argues, because central to the intent of MCDP 1 was accessibility. If, as an organization, the Marine Corps wants MCDP 1 to be read and understood by all Marines, regardless of rank or military occupational specialty, it needs to be a readable, relatable, and engaging document. More recent authors have also called for revisions to MCDP 1 in the Marine Corps Gazette. Major Leo Spaeder called it “a 20th century artifact operating in the 21st century” in one, and Lieutenant Colonel Thaddeus Drake Jr. argued: “The time for revision of [MCDP 1] is now.”,
At its heart, maneuver warfare is quite simple. It seeks the creative application of combat power to achieve disproportionate effects on the enemy. But for the Marine Corps to effectively employ it as doctrine, all Marines need to easily understand it. Authors such as Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini, while brilliant, are difficult to understand through their writing alone; they need to be presented alongside interpretation and given context. The Marine Corps cannot allow MCDP 1 Warfighting to fall out of touch with its operational experiences or to allow it to age past the point where it is easily understood by all Marines, one of its original objectives. Without a relevant, readable, and updated version of Warfighting, the Marine Corps will struggle to fully implement maneuver warfare in the face of new threats, domains, and adversaries.
