Maneuvering around Warfighting

Philosophers address the problem of infinite regress with an often-told story that goes as follows: A child asks his grandmother what the world rests on. “The world rests on the back of a giant elephant,” the grandmother replied. “What does the elephant stand on?” asks the child. “A large turtle,” replies the grandmother. When the child starts to ask, “What does the—” the grandmother interrupts: “Don’t bother asking. The answer is turtles. It is turtles all the way down.”¹

The Marine Corps version of the story might go this way: A young second lieutenant asks a major, “What is the key to understanding our profession?” Without hesitation, the major responds, “MCDP 1: Warfighting, of course.” The lieutenant follows with, “What makes Warfighting the key?” Again, without hesitation, “Maneuver warfare.” “What does—” interrupting, the major replies impatiently, “The answer is maneuver warfare. Go read Clausewitz. What are they teaching at The Basic School these days?”²

If this story contains hyperbole, it is only very slight. The Marine Corps has its theory of everything, and it can be found in a little white book, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication (MCDP) 1, which provides an elegant and compelling description of the Marine Corps’ philosophy of maneuver warfare. If there is a turtle on which all conceptions of warfare can rest, the Marine Corps believes it is a maneuver warfare turtle.

The Commandant, General David H. Berger, has demonstrated a strong commitment to change. At the center of this change are concepts such as expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO), returning to a maritime focus, and great power competition. The Commandant has been personally active in promoting these changes in official publications, including The 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, Force Design 2030, Proceedings articles, and appearances on podcasts.³ Though for all the change he has called for, he has not set out to remove or displace the turtle at the bottom of the service’s intellectual conceptions of warfare. His writings endorse maneuver warfare and even refer to Marines as “Maneuverists.”⁴ But in a recent statement praising the legacy of Warfighting, he left the door open to evolving the Marine Corps’ approach to the subject.⁵

As with any organization attempting to change, the Marine Corps has faced resistance to its new ideas and direction. The criticisms have come in diverse forms supported by varied reasoning. One group of critics has been consistent and loud, basing the criticism on the theoretical underpinnings of the new approach. These authors assert that maneuver warfare is and should always be the central philosophy of the Marine Corps—going so far as to claim new concepts are incompatible with this philosophy.⁶ This argument has been in plain view for the past two years; the Marine Corps Gazette has given the most vocal critics front-page attention through the series of articles titled “The Maneuverist Papers” written by the pseudonymous Marinus.⁷

This series of articles has sought to reestablish and re-enshrine the merits and history of the maneuver warfare philosophy. While the series has offered some thought-provoking pieces, it has mainly been a thinly veiled attempt to discredit current developments through the lens of praising the accomplishments of a past organizational transformation, when maneuver warfare became official Marine Corps doctrine in the late 1980s.

In “Maneuverist No. 19: Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations—Is the Marine Corps Abandoning Maneuver Warfare?” Marinus stated in the clearest terms yet the opponents’ objections to current concepts. Thinking in only the limited terms of attrition versus maneuver, Marinus attempts to discredit EABO by comparing it to the infamous Maginot Line. The argument goes further, suggesting that maneuver warfare is built on a foundation that understands the true nature of war, while new concepts are not and are thus flawed.⁸ In other words, Marinus is suggesting General Berger is standing on the back of the wrong turtle.

To an outside observer, this disagreement may seem trivial. For Marines, however, this is something akin to a debate over religious dogma, and it is hard to overstate the importance of MCDP 1 and the philosophy it describes to the service’s organizational culture. Thus, whatever possible inconsistencies between philosophy and change exist should be explored. But debaters should not turn current doctrine into something it is not for the sake of justifying or resisting change. Theory and history should be investigated in a manner that challenges the current understanding. Perhaps, in the end, the Marine Corps will find that there is indeed something new and insightful underneath its stack of turtles.

Maneuvering To Intimidate

Maneuver warfare theory became the official doctrine of the Marine Corps with the publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual (FMFM) 1 in 1989, just before the Iron Curtain fell. It has strong influences from military history and theory, especially German military history and theory. What is conspicuously absent from the doctrine of this maritime service is any evidence of influence from naval history or theory. This is perhaps a forgivable omission, as the Marine Corps was more concerned with a possible land war in Europe than with the Soviet Navy. As it has always done, the Marine Corps adapted to the threats the nation faced, and so doctrine focused on the possibility of fighting and deterring a continental war in Europe. There is, however, an irony to this omission of naval influence: It was only the creation and success of naval power in the preceding decades that allowed the Marine Corps to overlook it.

The theoretical basis for the pivot to American sea power as the 20th century dawned can be found in the writings of navalists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, with backing from political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt. Mahan noted the disproportionate prosperity that control of the sea could bring to a nation and argued a large blue-water fleet is necessary for gaining and maintaining this control.⁹ The first great U.S. sea power success in this era was the destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in 1898. This was a true victory, consistent with the popular understanding of Mahan, in which control of the sea is gained mainly by the destruction of the enemy’s fleet. With victory over Spain in the Philippines and Cuba, the United States found itself in a position to assert more global influence, including through international trade in the Pacific and the ability to enforce the long-hollow Monroe Doctrine. But not until after the hard-won victories at sea during two world wars could the United States claim to be the undeniable master of the world’s oceans.

Much of the Marine Corps’ fighting reputation was built seizing islands in the Pacific as a part of a larger naval campaign in World War II, but the second half of the 20th century posed different security concerns. In 1995, for example, the Clinton administration was faced with Chinese aggression toward Taiwan in the form of escalatory rhetoric and provocative missile tests. Navalist President Roosevelt and Admiral Mahan would have been proud of the U.S. response. Over eight months, multiple ships—including two carrier battle groups—were sent to the western Pacific in a display of overwhelming force. Among them was an amphibious assault ship, the USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3), which transited the Taiwan Strait in July 1995 and again in March 1996. It seems likely that there would have been Marine officers on board rereading their copies of FMFM 1, preparing for some ensuing fight. Yet the show of naval power was enough. The conflict deescalated, and the sovereignty of Taiwan and U.S. interests were protected. While a victory for U.S. sea power, it was highly embarrassing for China—an embarrassment it resolved never to suffer again. In some ways, this display of sea power was the beginning of the end of the era of unchecked U.S. dominance at sea.

Fleet Tactics

Nearly contemporary to the events of the Taiwan Strait crisis, retired Navy Captain Wayne Hughes was analyzing the U.S. fleet and warning of its fragility—warnings that were easy to ignore in the light of such a resounding success in the Taiwan Strait. Hughes’ work focused on tactical models for naval combat with missiles.¹⁰ When he began, Hughes was convinced of the superiority of large ships with exquisite systems and skeptical of claims that called for smaller ships. While he began with one idea in mind, through his work he became convinced of another.¹¹ His efforts demonstrated that a fleet of small vessels that can mass fires can have an advantage over fleets comprising larger ships. His study of naval combat in the missile age can be best summed up with his own words: “Fire first effectively.”¹² A simple and even seemingly obvious statement, though its implications have been difficult to absorb.

U.S. sea power has remained largely unchanged, focusing on power projection with a Mahan-style blue-water navy. With the demonstrated ability to project power in situations such as the Taiwan Strait Crisis and a defense focus on the Middle East, there was little imperative to change. China, on the other hand, had a large incentive to modify its approach and ensure it could not be so easily cowed in its own neighborhood again. China has not stopped trying to compete with the United States as a blue-water Navy, but it has adopted a new approach to the control of areas it considers home waters.

China focused on building a regional and local firepower advantage, if not a blue-water-navy advantage. Today’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities have changed the calculus for any move similar to that of the Clinton administration during the Taiwan Strait Crisis, and such a move would likely not be repeated by another U.S. president. China’s distributed, long-range-missile-centric approach to warfare poses a substantial threat to larger U.S. vessels because it affords an ability to counter mass with firepower—exactly the type of fight Hughes might have advocated for.¹³

Changing Influence

These and other regional changes have reduced U.S. military influence in the region. China continues to push its policy objectives and press local advantages by creating maritime exclusion zones and ignoring or seeking to revise international maritime law. Without a change in approach, the United States risks further erosion of its influence; other nations in the region that have long looked to the United States for leadership will be under the influence of China, by either choice or coercion.

The joint force must provide options to policy-makers and assurances to partners in the region that it has the means to counter Chinese aggression by focusing on limited political objectives and seeking to compete while also deterring conflict. These things would be hard to do with a fleet designed mainly for Mahanian destruction of the enemy’s fleet and a Marine Corps bound to a maneuver warfare tradition and obsessed with imitating the warfighting approach of continental powers.

A Bias Toward Action

Sir Julian Corbett’s theoretical foundation for sea power is quite relevant to the current environment. He does not view the fleet’s purpose as the destruction of the enemy’s fleet. Rather, he sees this destruction as one means (among others) to protect sea lines of communication, which is important for the ends of preserving a nation’s commerce. For Corbett, loss of sea control by one belligerent does not equate to control being gained by the other.¹⁴ In this view, decisive battle is not the only purpose of naval forces.

Intrinsic to maneuver warfare is a strong bias toward decisive action. The action need not necessarily be directed at the enemy’s force, which would be associated with the idea of attrition warfare. The action should focus on speed and have disruptive and decisive effects against weak points in the adversary’s system. While maneuver warfare has application across the spectrum of conflict, the focus on systematic disruption lends itself more readily to high-end combat. In practice, systematic disruption can lead to total collapse—and not necessarily to the strategic advantage of the United States.¹⁵

U.S. strategic goals do not call for control of the South China Sea—or for total systematic disruption of the Chinese military and regime. And it is in the interest of the United States to avoid direct conflict with China. Rather, U.S. strategic focus is on the limited policy objectives of open access to these waters to preserve trade and the rules-based liberal order.¹⁶ This does not require systematic disruption, and the days of an overwhelming show of force through the Taiwan Strait are gone. Yet, as Corbett suggests, sea control is not some binary distinction in which, when the United States loses it, the adversary gains it. Forces and concepts can be adapted to meet these more limited objectives and provide additional methods for competition.

The Marine Corps has demonstrated a strong institutional willingness to address these challenges. Criticism that the Marine Corps is attempting to build a Maginot Line on the first and second island chains could not be more ridiculous.¹⁷ The goal of EABO is not to destroy every Chinese ship that dares pass through the first island chain. It is instead to provide options to policy-makers and demonstrate to partners that the United States can and will challenge aggression to the status quo with- out necessarily sending a carrier strike group into every potential dispute, which would be risky and might cast the United States as an aggressor. Instead, EABO conceives of moving forces considered risk worthy—in terms of U.S. lives and treasure—where they can feasibly hold the adversary at risk, denying it full control of the sea.¹⁸ With U.S. forces working with regional partner nations to protect their interests, China would be the aggressor when it takes actions such as seeking to create maritime exclusion zones in contested areas. This would place the onus of escalation on the adversary.

Concepts such as EABO seek to keep competition below the threshold of armed conflict, but they also must be prepared to succeed should deterrence fail. The goal in such a case would not be to create an impenetrable barrier for the enemy fleet. Rather, it would be to provide fires that will continually place the adversary’s fleet in a dilemma between an asymmetric ground-based threat and a mobile threat posed by the fleet. Marines providing fires could also provide critical reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance capabilities to the fleet—a critical component of the ability to fire first effectively. All this can be done by placing risk-worthy forces inside the enemy’s weapon engagement zone.¹⁹

Is this maneuver warfare? Perhaps there are elements from maneuver warfare that can be applied, and perhaps there are others that do not fit so nicely. What is being discussed is certainly not the type of maneuver warfare employed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (if that even is a model worthy of emulation). It probably would require some mental gymnastics to say that EABO embodies maneuver warfare in the way Marines have traditionally thought of it—at least, since 1989.

But if the Marine Corps is not talking about employing maneuver warfare, what is it talking about? If this turtle is removed from the stack, will the stack crumble? It seems unlikely. Current concepts have a strong foundation beyond a warfighting philosophy written for and during a specific historical paradigm. War and military actions short of war must be rooted in a political purpose and should be tailored to meet stated policy objectives.²⁰

The Marine Corps is developing operational concepts to address strategic objectives that are more than a passing fad. Strength in the Indo-Pacific has been a stated priority of the past three U.S. administrations. With this policy as the foundation, there is a strong basis to continue the necessary campaign of learning. We can look to current realities, history, and theory for guidance, and we should do so without fear of disrupting the stack of turtles.