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

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.