Maneuver Warfare Is More Than Rapid Movement

Maneuver Warfare is a way of thinking in and about war that should shape our every action.

—Marine Corps Doctrine Publication 1: Warfighting

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has prompted much criticism of the West’s embrace of maneuver warfare—a concept that requires unpacking. Russia’s strategy was to use penetrating maneuvers to take Kyiv and bring an end to the war in a matter of weeks. Its failure, critics say, is a sign that maneuver is dead, the victim of technology and shifting geopolitical landscapes.¹ Defenses characterized by holding positions of advantage and efficiently inflicting great cost on an opponent are supposedly regaining their place in the methodological toolbox of war.² 

Shallow interpretations of maneuver warfare—or outright misreading of it—have led to a straw-man argument: Maneuver warfare is a narrow theory of victory that will limit what retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Amos Fox calls leaders’ “ability to be true artists in warfare.”³ Maneuver warfare is much more than rapid movement to surprise an adversary and gain a positional advantage from which to reduce his ability and will to resist. It is a philosophy that first focuses on the enemy, then theorizes how best to undermine the moral commitment to his cause, and finally defeats him through the tactical application of a customized mix of methods.⁴ It should continue to be the guiding philosophy of Marine Corps operations. 

What It’s Not

Maneuver warfare is not the opposite of attrition, but the opposite of attrition warfare. The latter seeks victory by destroying as much of a belligerent’s people and equipment as possible until it is compelled to sue for peace.⁵ Concentrations of enemy force are continuously sought out and maneuvered against because they offer the largest targets.⁶ Carl von Clausewitz argues that “ingenious way[s] to disarm or defeat an enemy without much bloodshed” are fallacious.⁷ 

Clausewitz’s take accords with modern critics’ claim that maneuver warfare’s supposed avoidance of attrition hollows out its utility when applied to major state conflict.⁸ By narrowly defining maneuver warfare as an indirect approach that relies heavily on an asymmetric movement advantage, critics reduce it to what Fox and Marine Corps Major Christopher Denzel call big “men who stare at goats” maneuvers—doing “something so cool [the enemy will] throw up [his hands] and say . . . What just happened?”⁹ Maneuver warfare embraces attrition, even frontal attacks, as necessary in war.¹⁰ 

Maneuver warfare does not depend on a specific type of war, technology, or operating environment; it is not simply the application of modernized blitzkrieg. A core argument against maneuver warfare is that it is one-dimensional and does not consider how changes in the operational environment affect how operations are designed and battles conducted.¹¹ It is true that 20th-century proponents of maneuver warfare heavily referenced blitzkrieg, physics equations, and Cold War contingencies to explain the concept. If those were the only foundations, it would be easy to see why the concept would not be likely to scale or adapt. 

However, one cannot read John Boyd’s synthesis of the works of Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, T. E. Lawrence, J. F. C. Fuller, and Mao Zedong, among others, and logically conclude that it is bound to only a few circumstantial applications. Maneuver warfare is not conditioned by the operational environment. It requires the practitioner to manipulate that environment to his advantage. 

Finally, maneuver warfare is not pseudoscience.¹² Maneuver warfare sees the physical and mental dimensions as avenues through which to affect the moral dimension, which is the chief target, characterized by intangibles: morale, trust, and will. Admittedly, theoretical writing on human will is necessarily qualitative. But this no more invalidates maneuver warfare than applying quantitative measures to the social sciences invalidates them as scientific endeavors capable of contributing to superior decision-making. Identifying quantitative measures of effectiveness for a maneuver-warfare-based operational approach is necessary and possible. Detecting mismatches in enemy responses to probing, desertion rates, changes in discourse with neutral nations, and incoherence in the rhetoric of decision-makers are just a few observable means of driving adjustment to a maneuver warfare approach.¹³ 

Maneuvering to Emerge 

The German answer to the problem of stalemate in World War I—infiltration tactics that later gave birth to blitzkrieg—demonstrated many of maneuver warfare’s elements but could not produce strategic victory.¹⁴ In the interwar period, the Allies sought technological solutions such as the tank. The Germans’ blitzkrieg was a doctrinal solution seeking to make the strength of the enemy irrelevant by shattering his cohesion and compelling his forces either to surrender or be destroyed piecemeal.¹⁵ However, the Germans failed to apply the logic of blitzkrieg to a strategic concept for winning a lasting peace.¹⁶ Enjoying battlefield success, they systematically alienated allies, neutrals, and their opponents’ populations alike. Ultimately, they spectacularly failed to produce a theory of victory that accounted for human will.

Emerging in the mid-20th century, John Boyd’s theories established a framework for the maneuver warfare movement. It recognized the primacy of moral conflict as part of a trinity that also includes attrition and maneuver conflicts (elsewhere Boyd uses the terms moral, physical, and mental conflicts, respectively).¹⁷ His foundational assumption was that human behavior is shaped by the goal of ensuring survival on one’s own terms.¹⁸ This survival requires appropriate decisions, which are constructed and refined through thought and experience. Failure to construct increasingly accurate models of reality results in inappropriate decisions. If such failure can be induced by an actor who also creates, exploits, and magnifies menace, uncertainty, and mistrust, the result will “destroy the moral bonds that permit an [opponent’s] organic whole to exist.”¹⁹ 

Building on this foundation, the Marine Corps’ seminal doctrinal document Warfighting recognizes that each opponent is not unitary but a complex system made up of innumerable mental, moral, and physical components, the combination of which determines a unique character.²⁰ Understanding the enemy as a unique system, degrading enemy decision-making within that system, and destroying the moral bonds that hold the system together comprise the kernel of maneuver warfare. 

A Toolbox of Warfares

The physical/attritional conflict, contrary to many critics’ claims, is of extreme importance to the application of maneuver warfare. In fact, maneuver warfare depends on the repeated and rapid destruction of enemy forces at the right times and places to contribute to the eventual collapse of the enemy system.²¹ Under this conception, applying maneuver warfare is plausible even on the front lines of Ukraine today. Take, for a moment, that the greatest threat to the Russian will to fight is internal dissent. In this case, the principal task is to acquire a steady stream of ammunition in the information domain with which to unite powerful Russians around the idea that the war costs more than Putin’s favor is worth. 

At the strategic level, this has been done through a defense that seeks maximally efficient destruction of Russian resources, allies who are willing to impose sanctions that touch every Russian elite, and occasional deep strikes to bring the war’s destructiveness into the Russian mainstream consciousness. At the operational level, periodic and economic attacks such as the Kharkiv offensive are critical to demonstrate the disparity in Ukrainian versus Russian morale, as well as undermine the mental and physical strength of opposing Russian troops and commanders.²² Through this lens, what looks like stalemated trench warfare actually follows a maneuver warfare theory of victory. Attrition is the ante. Holistically undermining the enemy’s will by more than just battlefield action is the answer.

The mental conflict seeks to create uncertainty, surprise, and shock within the enemy system. In conventional warfare, blitzkrieg and its Soviet counterparts simultaneity and desanty—descent: penetrating forces deep into enemy territory, especially by airborne or amphibious operations—produce this effect.²³ Fighting forces generally lose cohesion and initiative when their means of mutual support are severed and they experience restriction in the flow of food, fuel, and ammunition. They have not lost significant overall combat power—a penetration is concentrated on a small segment of a defensive line and initially avoids sources of strength in depth—but they are on the way to being beaten mentally. Unable to collectively make sound operational decisions, the whole is cognitively broken into pieces whose relative combat power has been significantly degraded for the loss of coordination, support, and a unified plan to impose their own will. 

Irregular warfare makes its attacks along mental lines even more consistently than physical ones—an army could be defended against, but an idea can be invulnerable.²⁴ Opposition groups seek to disintegrate the enemy regime’s ability to govern by exploiting logical inconsistencies within its political, alliance, and economic structures.²⁵ Occasional swift and focused military force is required, but only to disintegrate the opposing force and arouse respect within the population.²⁶ When such techniques are executed well, this strategy results in the opposition enjoying popular support while the government is increasingly isolated from its people.²⁷ Some combination of conventional and irregular methods is required to undermine an enemy’s mental sources of strength most effectively, and these can be applied in creative ways regardless of the type of warfare.  

Physical and mental conflicts should not be pursued as objects in themselves, but as avenues to the true object of maneuver warfare: moral conflict. The argument for how particular means undermine moral strength is necessarily qualitative, and the means can vary depending on the makeup of the opponent organism. For example, an effective technique that attacks the moral strength of a nation-state may be entirely ineffective against a stateless ideological group. 

History combined with creativity is an excellent starting point for identifying how to achieve moral effect in any situation. The Mongols’ challenge was how to subjugate widely dispersed empires they could not directly control by force. So, they employed mobility, intelligence, propaganda, and terror to drain the resolve of those who would oppose them.²⁸ T. E. Lawrence’s adversary was numerically superior, so he physically attacked swiftly and at limited scale to continually frustrate them.²⁹ These attacks were complemented by a moral attack in depth on: 

the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them: [as well as] the mind of the nation supporting us behind the firing-line, and the mind of the hostile nation waiting the verdict, and the neutrals looking on. The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.³⁰

The Germans developed blitzkrieg out of recognition that rapidity in conquering their neighbors was critical given Germany’s central position in Europe. Blitzkrieg was effective not because it achieved a breakthrough or threatened lines of communication. It succeeded because the sum of the parts—multiple dilemmas, focused power against vulnerability, superior tempo, and operational ambiguity—was less than the whole effect: disintegration of the enemy system.³¹ These and other examples illustrate the many ways moral strength can be undermined regardless of time, place, or technology. 

Maneuver warfare is by no means dead. Its critics have missed the point that maneuver warfare is a philosophy, not a doctrine. Maneuver transcends the other forms of warfare. It centers on defeating the fighting spirit of the opponent through a unique combination of methods designed for the situation at hand. It offers no recipes and requires a level of creativity and flexibility that few fully grasp. As in the early days of the 20th-century resurgence of maneuver warfare, U.S. armed forces in future conflict are likely to be outnumbered and at a disadvantage in political will. Attrition warfare will not be an option. Teaching all Marines a maneuver warfare mindset builds in them historically informed creativity from which innumerable plans can be developed to strike at the heart of any enemy in ways no other approach can.