Archives: Gazette Magazines

by Marinus Era Novum

The choice of style of prose, pseudonym, platform, and every other choice in writing makes it clear that these authors intend this series of essays to discuss nothing less than the soul of the Marine Corps and the doctrine we hold so dear as an institution. This response is not intended to be antagonistic but rather add to the dialectic that the author Marinus suggests is necessary when examining institutional changes. It is clear we are at an inflection point and this discussion is necessary. I hope to remain succinct and clear in my points while responding to points made, questions raised, as well as bringing forth some new ideas for consideration.

A word of caution to the reader, in raising questions—some of which may go against the grain—it is important to not think in absolutes. Black and white thinking rarely give us a full picture when there are so many shades of gray. When questioning ideas, especially those ideas held so dear, it is best done with an open mind and to not let the irrationalism and fear that can accompany absolute reasoning to cloud our judgement.

That is my largest complaint with “What Marines Believe About Warfare: A Declaration.” The article makes a total of 37 assertions that the reader is to take as foundational to who we are as Marines. This is not a rebuke of those 37 points—remember to avoid absolutes. But in this time of institutional change, I challenge others to reread those points with a different lens. Why anchor our beliefs so broadly when we have the opportunity to think so freely?

The overarching goals of the paper, “Marine Corps Maneuver Warfare: A Historical Context,” seem less concrete than the absolute declaration made by the later article for discussion. The article provides historical context to the maneuver warfare movement and leaves open to question whether this doctrine should be questioned and reconsidered, a timely topic and one which is getting much attention .  . Marinus makes few absolute statements, and it seems to promote thought and debate. In answering Marinus’ final question is where I wish to make my only absolute statement. Yes, it is time to reconsider our basic doctrine.1

 

Iraq as a Case Study of the Possible Incompleteness of Maneuver Warfare Doctrine

Marinus raised the question about the mixed results of maneuver warfare doctrine in practice but chose to leave that question addressed in another debate. I will offer a brief examination of the Iraq War as a case study in the failure of maneuver warfare in practice. No doubt that many will point out the stunning results of initial tactical success in the 2003 invasion. This seemingly quick and decisive victory would also seem to align to assertion number five of the Two Manueverists, that “war is an instrument of policy” and is political in nature. The swift defeating of Saddam’s regime seemed to be just the type of victory that would excite the short attention span of the American public. After all, it would seem harder to gain much support beyond that for a war that was largely a war of our own choosing and not that of an existential crisis. It seems more textbook example of MCDP 1 could not be given than the actions of Marine and Coalition forces between 20 March 2003 and 1 May 2003 beginning with crossing the line of departure in Kuwait and ending with the bold and infamous declaration of, “Mission accomplished.” And indeed, it is taught to be viewed as a glowing success in professional military education to young officers, as a stop in any Expeditionary Warfare School seminar would demonstrate. And when viewed narrowly, we can easily see the allure of this thinking.

Consider the following passage from MCDP-1:

Rather than wearing down an enemy’s defenses, maneuver warfare attempts to bypass these defenses in order to penetrate the enemy system and tear it apart. The aim is to render the enemy incapable of resisting effectively by shattering his moral, mental, and physical cohesion—his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole—rather than to destroy him physically through the incremental attrition of each of his components, which is generally more costly and time-consuming. Ideally, the components of his physical strength that remain are irrelevant because we have disrupted his ability to use them effectively. Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease because we have eliminated his ability to fight effectively as a force.

This seems to be an almost Nostradamus like foretelling of the invasion. The enemy system, viewed as centered around Saddam and his regime, was rendered ineffective and resulted in the stunning tactical victory that culminated with the Capturing of Baghdad and the toppling of the Saddam’s Regime. But re-read the  end of the passage:

Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease because we have eliminated his ability to fight effectively as a force.

The outmaneuvered enemy in this case turned into a violent insurgency and fueled a civil war. As it turned out, it was not an enemy easily defeated in small units and not a situation that made securing strategic objectives easy. Did a destabilized Iraqi State, increased radicalism, and Iranian influence meet our political objectives? Some may point to the emergence of other factors like religious factions and sponsorship from other state actors like Iran, but remember those factors were at one point effectively under control of a single entity in the Saddam Regime. We cannot view the complexity of the will of a people as simply through the state as Clausewitz may have been able to from his historical lens.2 Tearing apart an enemy system may not be fracturing a system with a unified will at all. As was the the case with Iraq, this tearing apart of a system may expose how complex the will of those components are. And in defeating an enemy in this way, there exists the possibility that the strategic landscape is far less clear than before as a direct result of tactical victory. Was this war just better left unfought? Or could a different choice of tactics have produced a different result? What if Iraq was more completely defeated while Saddam was still in power before being fractured into so many disparate wills? Was this an anomaly? A failure of political leaders? Perhaps a mixture of many things, but can a doctrine be said to be timeless if one of its largest tests can be viewed as a failure?           The possibility is presented here that failure to gain decisive strategic advantage following the 2003 invasion is not as a consequence to fail to adhere to the tenants of maneuver warfare but, rather, how adherence to that doctrine demonstrates that maneuver warfare is not complete as a warfighting philosophy. Particularly, that it has failed to demonstrate a connection between tactical victory and decisive strategic victories in anything less than wars with limited objectives. It may seem the argument presented is to revert to an attrition mindset. Do not think so absolutely. As Marinus pointed out, all warfare will contain some elements of attrition. Perhaps we should not look at maneuver and attrition in such juxtaposition. Perhaps there are shades of gray worthy of consideration. And just perhaps, the changing character of war calls for us to move past attrition and maneuver.

 

On Military History

The discussion of military history and theories by Marinus and Two Manuverists reveals an odd trend that seems to also be present at the center of our current institutional changes—with the discussion of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Julian Corbett, John Boyd, and even Baron de Jomini. Discussion of conflict includes success of the German Army in World War II, planning for potential conflict with the Soviet Union, and brief mentions of Vietnam and other conflicts. This would seem a brief but compelling anthology of ground warfare but is missing a very key component—any influence from a naval perspective. How did it come about that a historical context of our fundamental warfighting philosophy as a Marine Corps can be summed up without a whisper of Alfred Thayer Mahan or Major Pete Ellis? That the main conflicts of interest are that of land wars? Where is the mention of perhaps the most epic naval contest in history, the Pacific in World War II? Is the battle of Guadalcanal not a compelling example of the necessity of an amphibious force to prosecute a naval campaign?

The answer is likely that the analysis conducted to bring about the maneuver warfare movement was conducted during a time which can be considered a historical anomaly. At that time, a credible threat to the predominance of U.S. Naval power did not exist. Conflicts from the later half of the 20th century on have been largely at the time and place of our choosing due to uncontested control of the sea. Under this unique global paradigm, it is understandable and perhaps even excusable that the primary focus was not on the Marine Corps’ role in importance of securing that Naval supremacy. So much of our energies have been dedicated to thinking primarily of conflict primarily on land, but if the widely discussed shift in the global paradigm is even remotely true, it is unwise to assume that we will be able to fight when and where we want with unopposed access from the sea. Are all those tenants learned from our study of land warfare easily transferable? If we have a doctrine whose main historical foundations leave out any maritime component, should we not reconsider the conclusions drawn as we seek to return to the sea?

In his conclusion, Marinus points out, “The future evolves from the past.” Statements similar to this have been made about the study of history for as long ago as Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian Wars. Thucydides hoped to have his histories serve as, “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”1 Contemporary historian John Gaddis Lewis offers this interpretation of Thucydides words and points out the key difference between resemblance and reflection. There is a difference in “patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time.”3 Can we conclusively say that the study of history in context to the maneuver warfare movement picked up on those patterns which survive across time? Or do they only represent some repetition that with time will fade?

 

On Identity

The Two Manueverists assertion number 35 describes our Spartan qualities as an institution. It is true that most Marines do hold these Spartan qualities dear. The Spartan society was built on a culture of warfighting. But perhaps when we look back at the ancient Hellenes, we have as much to learn from the Athenians, who after all were a maritime people. The Athenians were able to build an empire based off naval power. While the qualities of the Spartan warrior culture are not on trial here, the Marine Corps’ identity  is. As with our study of history and theory, there seems to exist an institutional tendency to fetishize ground combat and ignore naval heritage. While we can celebrate the ethos of the Spartans, we should recognize that the sea power of the Athenians brought them prosperity and power beyond that of their Spartan counterparts. Yet, we must also learn from the mistakes and misapplications of Athenian sea power, primarily in the form of the Sicilian expedition. A belief in the infallibility of their fleet and the underestimation of emerging threats lead to grave miscalculation with devastating consequences.

It is my sincere hope that we find no analogy of our own Sicilian Expedition, but that threat exists. Indeed, it is possible that the institutional pain Marinus points to in the post-Vietnam Marine Corps can see how dangerously close Vietnam was to our Sicily.4 There may even be room to argue that our two decades long sojourn in the Middle East was near to our own Sicilian expedition. Though that depends on the future and how we let this recent experience define us. Are the lessons learned here timeless patterns? Or merely repetitions, soon to be degraded by time? Perhaps a combination, but it is important to understand this distinction and to not let the short-lived repetitions define our identity.

As we have focused on conflicts over the past seven decades where our dominance at sea has not required the Marine Corps to fight as a apart of a naval campaign, we should ask if we draw from this patterns or repetitions. Do current changes to the global paradigm necessitate more than lip service to returning to our naval roots as an institution? Will this cause an institutional identity crisis? It seems that we are already in the midst of this identity crisis as we make declarations about our beliefs and seek to give them so much context. While in the midst of this crisis, perhaps we should consider learning from the maritime Athenians as well as the warlike Spartans, the good and the bad.

 

On Forms of Education and Thinking Other Than Military History

Marinus briefly mentions the maneuver warfare movement as emerging in a time where military operations research thinking dominated our defense complex. This is true, but perhaps should not be so quickly disregarded. As where we have not seen a direct link in maneuver warfare and strategic advantage, this is not the case for operations research. For the sake of succinctness, I will leave it to say that victories in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union are arguably the most important strategic outcomes of the 20th century, and they can both be tied to the application and development of operations research.

Marinus is right to point to the emergence of complexity science as key to the maneuver warfare movement. Indeed, in his essay “Destruction and Creation,”6 Boyd demonstrates how much his theories are influenced by thermodynamics. Thermodynamics being one of the many fields in the interdisciplinary field of complexity science, which includes others like economics, physics, biology, computation, information theory, psychology, cognition, and yes operations research. The beauty of Boyd’s efforts is how well he was able to demystify this topic, tie it so closely to the human decision making process, and meld it with such a comprehensive view of conflict in his landmark presentation, “Patterns of Conflict.”7 While this turn to military history Marinus pointed to was important for the maneuver warfare movement, it should not necessarily mean the divorce from other disciplines that can provide further rigor to our analysis. Rather, we should seek a more renaissance approach to our intellectual pursuits and be informed by a wide array of fields. Indeed, many buzzwords of the day including machine learning and artificial intelligence are modern applications and developments of operations research and more broadly complexity science.

To ignore the importance of this interdisciplinary approach may see us lose critical advantage in emerging technologies. Two Manueverists assertion number 32 acknowledges the importance of technology but values the human component more. That point is not to be disputed, but overreliance on the human without looking at how changing technology can change the character of war in which humans engage could have possibly disastrous effects for those humans. One should not prefer a bow and arrow to gunpowder for a belief in human will. Nor can we rely on the accuracy of a rifled barrel without a skilled marksman. The interaction of humans and technology makes capability and changes the character of war. The risk of falling behind in this sphere real and the consequences have the potential to be extremely damaging.7 The presence of these emerging threats is perhaps more than power point deep. Two Manueverists’ assertion number 28 states that militaries have been unsuccessful in predicting the changing character of war and that a Marine Corps we should prepare for a wide range of possibilities and adapt quickly when conflict arrives. Again, it is not the position to say that this assertion is entirely incorrect but point out the possibility that being behind the curve in certain emerging technologies may present the dilemma where adaption when conflict arises is not enough.

Assertion number 29 of the Two Manueverists points to the importance of learning for a leader and the life-long commitment to learning needed in the profession of arms. This may be the assertion with the least amount of room to give debate. I would expound on this though, to say that this learning must not be constrained to a single discipline. While we should look for the patterns of history to provide insights to the future, we should also study other disciplines to inform our perceptions. This approach provides the best defense from but being caught unaware of emerging technological threats and provides leaders with necessary technical literacy. The same informed approach to emerging technologies in discovering patterns and repetitions is needed as it is in our study of history.

 

Conclusion

 

Writing in 1888 at the dawn of a new era of global competition, Alfred Thayer Mahan had following to say.

Our new Navy is preparing now; it can scarcely be said, as regards its material, to be yet ready. The day of grace is still with us – or with those who shall be future captains and admirals. There is time yet for study; there is time to imbibe the experience of the past to become imbued, steeped, in the eternal principles of war, by the study of its history and the maxims of its masters. But the time of preparation will pass; some day the time of action will come. Can an admiral then sit down and re-enforce his intellectual grasp of the problem before him by a study of history, which is simply a study of past experience? Not so; the time of action is upon him, and he must trust his horse sense. 9

There are many similarities for us today as a Marine Corps. The experience of naval officers of this era, to include Mahan, was predominantly from the civil war, but they were being asked to create a new Navy to project sea power across the globe. A challenge they proved up to during the Spanish-American War and in doing so drastically changed the global landscape at the onset of the 20th century. In our similar time of grace, will we be able to prepare ourselves for what comes next? It is widely suggested that the next fight will be drastically different than the last. Should we carry with us the same possibly incomplete doctrine with us to the next fight? Either way we must take advantage of this time to prepare, and much of that preparation will come in the form of learning, education, and shaping our identity. In doing so we should take a renaissance approach to learning. Being informed by history as well as by what technical disciplines may teach us about emerging technology and the evolving character of war. As we continue to study and learn, much will depend on our ability to pick up on those patterns across time that will prove a useful guide without falling victim to repetitions that could lead us astray. As we take on this challenge it is necessary, as Marinus suggests, to ask the tough questions about our doctrine and identity to ensure the Marine Corps will be ready to meet the demands of the nation.

 

Notes

6. An opinion that seems to be gaining traction as we can see from articles in recent issues, specifically The Fantasy of MCDP 1 by LtCol Thaddeus Drake Jr. and MCDP 1, Conflict by Maj Leo Spaeder.
7. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton, NJ,: Princeton University Press, 1984). In opening definitions in chapter 1 of On War, Clausewitz expressed that physical violence is only made moral by the state and the law. This definition which preceded so much subsequent analysis may not be wholly appropriate in all views of modern warfare.
8. Thucydides as quoted from John Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2018).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. John Boyd. “Destruction and Creation,” 1976.
12. Coram, Robert. Boyd: the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2004).
13. Christian Brose, “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare,” (New York, NY: Hachette Books, 2020). Provides compelling arguments to look at how we may be falling short in our information capabilities and the impacts to the character of war.
14. Allan F. Westcott, Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1941).

by 1stLt Adam D. Taggett

One point of frustration amongst lieutenants at The Basic School is the seeming contradiction between the Marine Corps warfighting philosophy taught early in the course and the actual tactics taught in conducting rifle platoon operations later on. With MCDP 1 Warfighting’s emphasis on maneuver warfare, tempo generation, and subordinate initiative in the decentralized execution of a commander’s intent, I was at first somewhat disappointed by the severe emphasis placed on “sequencing events,” “setting conditions,” and coordinating with adjacent and supporting units in our platoon-level tactics. How can small unit leaders expect to freely exploit opportunities as they arise if they must constantly coordinate and synchronize their actions with the remainder of the force? Indeed, John Boyd himself protested the inclusion of synchronization in the Army’s AirLand Battle operational concept during its development in the early 1980s, understanding this element to be entirely contrary to the spirit of his ideas.1 Is The Basic School guilty of “backsliding into attritionist habits,” as Capt Daniel Grazier argues the U.S. military at large is doing?2

In short, no. While maneuver warfare in theory may imply that combat leaders must subordinate considerations of coordination and synchronization to those of tempo and subordinate autonomy, the historical record of success in conventional warfare demonstrates that a successful application of maneuver warfare in reality must balance these competing elements. This article seeks to demonstrate how success in conventional combat requires us to approach the theoretical extremes of maneuver warfare with caution by illustrating how that success is impossible without a degree of synchronization and coordination between forces. It then explores the significance of this finding, offers suggestions as to how we may better synthesize these paradoxical elements of our warfighting philosophy, and ultimately concludes that our best path forward in the circle of professional military education is to emphasize the predominance of context-specific factors in determining the optimal conduct of future wars. This article borrows heavily from the experiences gained from German operational methods in World War II, partially due to my own familiarity with that history but also to the decisive influence these methods had in the conception of maneuver warfare theory. Because of the decisive role played by combined arms and logistics in producing success in conventional conflict, the successful application of maneuver warfare requires us to balance considerations of subordinate autonomy with those of cooperation.

Success in conventional conflict is impossible without combined arms coordination, and in producing this coordination, we must depart from a theoretically pure application of the concept of subordinate autonomy as advocated by maneuver warfare. Combined arms requires synchronization, which in turn relies upon a violation of certain maneuver warfare principles:3 if commanders want their subordinate units to synchronize their actions, it is necessary and inevitable that they give their subordinate leaders much less autonomy in accomplishing their tasks however the subordinate deems fit. This complicates the subordinate unit’s tasks, requiring precise timing, less independence in adapting to unforeseen circumstances, and a mechanical approach to combat that is ultimately discordant with the uncertain, fluid, chaotic nature of warfare. Theoretically, a synchronized advance can only move as fast as its slowest unit and is thus not optimized for the high-tempo, disorientation-producing types of operations envisioned by Boyd as the essence of the maneuver warfare concept in the first place.

Yet in practice we see that success relies heavily upon a combined arms approach that incorporates a significant degree of synchronization. The key to success for German operations in World War II that restored mobility to the battlefield and inspired maneuver warfare theory was not the tank, the airplane, or even the doctrine behind it but rather the invention and widespread integration of the radio that enabled cooperation between these combined arms elements.4 Robert Citino in Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare attributes Erwin Rommel’s successes less to his aggressive style and more to the “triumph of German combined arms working in close cooperation.”5 As Stephen Biddle describes in Military Power, the effective employment of one’s forces in modern operations depends on mutually supportive elements cooperating as coequals: the suppressive effect of indirect artillery fire interacts with the flexibility of the infantry to restore maneuver to the battlefield and enable a breakthrough in the enemy lines.6 Biddle goes on to illustrate quantitatively how this “modern system force employment” is the decisive factor in determining battlefield success in modern conventional conflicts. Essentially, the reality is that we cannot reasonably expect to punch through modern enemy defenses nor to fully exploit those breakthroughs in the absence of combined arms cooperation. Without this cooperation, we risk producing fruitless advances or even fratricide. While a premium must remain on encouraging our leaders to exploit opportunities and to act decisively when unforeseen circumstances arise, we must not allow this to blind us to the opportunities made possible through combined arms.

The success of maneuver warfare in practice also relies upon an emphasis on logistical considerations, which also requires a temperance of subordinate autonomy and tempo. If combined arms cooperation is required to enable a breakthrough against modern enemy defenses, logistical cooperation is necessary to sustain the exploitation of that breakthrough. In a purely theoretical application of maneuver warfare concepts, a subordinate should be able to act aggressively and decisively in advancing once an advantage presents itself. Pausing to coordinate with higher units to confirm the logistical feasibility of an advance runs entirely contrary to the spirit of this maneuver warfare tenet. Indeed, MCDP 1-3, Tactics, presents us with the cautionary tale of MG John Lucas at Anzio and his failure to press forward in the wake of logistical considerations.7 Yet, Tactics goes on later to discuss the decisive role of logistics and supporting units in enabling speed.8 This evident ambivalence perhaps inadvertently highlights the dichotomy explored in this article, but it also raises an entirely valid point about a key shortcoming of maneuver warfare theory. Without coordination with higher and supporting units who understand the “bigger picture” about what initiatives have a reasonable chance of being sustained logistically, those initiatives will either be fruitless or even entirely counterproductive. Indeed, the greatest vulnerability of a force that has achieved a breakthrough is the tenuous connection to the rear support units enabling the advance.9 To return to the example of Rommel, his failure to recognize the centrality of supply and logistics led directly to his failure to capture Tobruk or break through at Alamein and Alam Haifa during the North Africa campaign. Spread too thin, his advances ground to a halt—leaving him overextended and unable to capitalize on his successes.10

It is thus clear that a fundamental tension exists between the drive for subordinate autonomy and initiative in maneuver warfare theory with the need for cooperation and synchronization in practice. This is made especially clear upon an investigation of the role played by combined arms and logistics in modern conventional conflict. This tension is one that must be discussed and investigated further. While Warfighting and Tactics never explicitly emphasize this dynamic, the tactical tenets found in Tactics capture this apparent paradox well. We need to know when to cooperate and leverage combined arms dilemmas into an advantage as well as when to sacrifice cooperation for the sake of adaptability and being faster. To return to the context of The Basic School, the stress placed on setting conditions and sequencing events at the platoon level is entirely appropriate. After all, how much can truly be decided by a rifle platoon operating in isolation of its supporting and higher units? However, the course would benefit from highlighting the apparently contradictory nature of our warfighting philosophy’s various maxims and forcing students to consider the tough questions. Under what circumstances do we subordinate one consideration to the other? How does the increasingly information-rich operating environment affect these considerations? This latter question will prove to be especially crucial, as our forces grow increasingly inter-connected and capable of sharing information about the battlefield. A proper exploitation of Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act framework will require us to be mindful of changes to our environment in formulating an appropriate observation to begin the cycle.11

More than anything, we should emphasize how context-specific factors need to predominate all other concerns in our prosecution of future wars. Some cases will call for extreme aggressiveness and initiative at the lowest levels, while others will merit a more coordinated approach that takes full advantage of the Marine Air Ground Task Force’s combined arms capacity. The German operational methods that inspired maneuver warfare theory were tailored entirely to fit Germany’s geostrategic position and tied inextricably to German culture and traditions engrained in the officer corps centuries prior to World War II.12 When conditions failed to lend themselves to the way of war produced by this officer corps’ warfighting philosophy, even great commanders like Guderian (in Tula during Operation Typhoon) and Rommel (in Tobruk during Operation Crusader) remained tied to their cultural background and failed to adapt.13 Capt Grazier is correct in stating we must be cautious of the American military culture’s natural tendency towards attrition. Equally important, however, is that we think critically before blindly adhering to maneuver warfare theory without deliberating on context-specific considerations of the next war in which we find ourselves. Kein Schema, or “not a formula,” was a common admonition in the prewar period amongst the German staff that evidently was forgotten once the bullets started to fly. We owe it to our nation to not fall victim to the same mistakes. While much of this article has drawn from the experiences of World War II, it seems most appropriate to close with a quotation from a pre-war French corps commander, Gen Victor Cordonnier: “The instruction given by professors of military schools will never furnish a model that need only be reproduced in order to beat the enemy … He who remains in abstractions falls into formula; he concretes his brain; he is beaten in advance.”14

 

Notes

1. Frans Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).
2. Daniel Grazier, “A Maneuver Renaissance: Overcoming the attritionist tendency,” Marine Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA: June 2015).
3. Alan Hastings, “Mission Command and Detailed Command: It’s Not a Zero Sum Game,” From the Green Notebook, (2017), available at https://fromthegreennotebook.com.
4. Robert Citino, Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
5. Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm.
6. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005).
7. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 1-3, Tactics, (Washington, DC: 1997).
8. MCDP 1-3.
9. Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, (Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1987).
10. Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2012).
11. Paul Tremblay, Shaping and Adapting: Unlocking the power of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA Loop, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 2015).
12. Robert Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
13. The German Way of War.
14. United States Army, Infantry in Battle, (Washington, DC: The Infantry Journal Incorporated, 1939).

by Capt Devon Sanderfield

With multiple conflicts in the Middle East coming to a close and the Commandant refocusing the Corps attention to naval integration and a future conflict with China, the time has come to evaluate our Marines understanding of our foundational doctrine: MCDP 1. Maneuver warfare is central to our Warfighting philosophy. Characterized by speed, fluidity, surprise, and the focusing of combat power against an identified enemy weakness, our Warfighting doctrine requires initiative and sound decision making down to the small unit level.1 With many of our enlisted Marines having never critically read this little white book that describes how we should think and make decisions on the battlefield, it is time to take a pause and educate the force. Leaders throughout the Marine Corps should initiate a stand-down to educate every Marine under their charge on our foundational warfighting doctrine and how these concepts must be applied at every level in both garrison and in combat.

Marines are used to stand downs. Each year, Marines pile into the base theater or auditorium for a days-long discussion on hazing, violence prevention, social media use, and local wildlife.2 Marines are even forced to sit through a brief titled 100 days of summer: a yearly requirement that warns troops of the dangers of water sports and proper way to utilize a grill.3 Yet, when was the last time a unit conducted a stand down to ensure that every Marine understood the tenants of our warfighting doctrine? As you read this article, when was the last time you read the most important foundational document we have (MCDP 1)? When was the last time you talked to your Marines about it? It is time for leaders across the Marine Corps to step up and address this educational gap.

Marine Corps officers were the driving force behind the rigorous debate that led to the adoption of Warfighting and the concept of maneuver warfare in 1989, but the concepts were meant for all Marines. In the foreword to MCDP 1, Gen Krulak directs that, “all Marines, enlisted and commissioned, to read this book, understand it, and act upon it.”4 Sadly, we have not met this vision. As a Staff Platoon Commander for the Warrant Officer Basic Course, I had the privilege of leading a group of seasoned gunnery sergeants and staff sergeants as they transitioned from enlisted to officer. These warriors were the best of the best of their assigned MOS. While they were smart, mature, and experienced, they admittingly lacked an understanding of maneuver warfare and our warfighting doctrine. Despite over a decade of service, many acknowledged they had never thoroughly read MCDP 1. This is not a surprise when the discussion of our warfighting doctrine at the Recruit Depots is limited to one hour and Corporals Course spends six times as long on sword manual as it does discussing MCDP 1. This is no longer acceptable. The stakes are too high. Without prioritizing a service-wide understanding of our warfighting doctrine by every leader of every MOS, we could fail at the time when our country needs us the most.

The Commandant has identified the need for increased Distributed Operations in the face of an enemy that is capable of detecting and targeting our forces with long range precision guided weapons.5 Young leaders will be spread across the battlefield with increased responsibility whose decisions will have greater operational and strategic implications than ever before. With forces distributed in this manner, there will not always be time to request permission to act and doing so may emit an electromagnetic signature that could result in enemy detection. All leaders will be trusted to understand the commander’s intent to allow them to take bold action in the absence of orders. Bill Lind writes about the importance of trust in applying maneuver warfare in The Maneuver Handbook. He states, “Such trust is molded by a shared way of thinking.”6 For Marines, our shared way of thinking is driven by our warfighting doctrine. It is what teaches them how to think about problems: to avoid enemy strengths and utilize speed and surprise to put them in a position of advantage. We need leaders who will ruthlessly exploit fleeting opportunities as they arise on the battlefield. Yet, for many Marines across our Corps more time is dedicated to the dangers of smoking than on understanding how they are expected to think and make decisions in combat.

While PME has a role to play in increasing Marines understanding of maneuver warfare and our warfighting Doctrine, leaders in the fleet must do more. Force the Marines under your charge to read MCDP 1 and facilitate discussion groups that can help clarify its contents and how it can be applied in the completion of their everyday job. Incorporate decision making exercises into the daily schedule—there is no excuse not to. This is a great opportunity to empower the NCOs, who should not only understand the concepts within MCDP 1 but should be able to teach it to their young Marines. Sadly, it is not just the junior Marines who need reeducation on the lessons of maneuver warfare. With the ever-increasing centralization of decision making at the higher levels, continued micro-management of the troops, and inability to accept risk by officers at every level, all would benefit from a refresher of our doctrine.

The Marine Corps does seem to be going in the right direction with the increased emphasis and incorporation of decision-making case studies and force-on-force exercises to allow leaders to think and make decisions against a living, breathing, thinking adversary. The recent MWX 1-20 exercise and its emphasis on decision making is a great example.7 This exercise and those like it are necessary and should be replicated. Unfortunately, these exercises have predominately been executed at the battalion-level or higher and take months to plan and put into motion. Weekly training at the small unit level must be similarly designed to test our young leaders’ ability to think, not just execute predetermined battle drills on a cookie-cutter live-fire range that resembles more of a golf course than a battlefield. This is not a task for only the infantry. All MOSs must do better, and it starts with ensuring that all Marines are well versed in our Warfighting doctrine and are applying them during in training exercises as well as in garrison.

This is an issue that must be addressed Service-wide, and there is an easy solution. It simply requires leaders in the fleet to step up and make the education of the Marines a priority. Undoubtedly, there are excellent leaders throughout our Corps who are already doing this, but more must be done to reach every Marine. Much like maneuver warfare’s emphasis on focusing combat power at a particular time and place, we need leaders to focus their efforts on making all of our Marines “maneuverists” who are able to not only apply the concepts on the battlefield but within the walls of the barracks. Leaders throughout the Marine Corps must initiate a stand-down to educate every Marine under their charge on our foundational warfighting doctrine and how it must be applied at every level in both garrison and in combat. There is no time to wait. This is long overdue.

 

Notes

1. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP1, Warfighting, (Washington, DC: 1997).
2. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCBUL 1500, Annual Training Requirements, (Washington, DC: April 2017).
3. Headquarters Marine Corps, MARADMIN 360/20, 2020 Summer Safety Campaign, (Washington DC: June 2020).
4. MCDP 1.
5. Gen David H. Berger, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (Washington, DC: July 2019).
6. William Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook, (New York, NY: Westview Press., 2018).
7. Chris Niedziocha, “Fighting a Peer Adversary Part II: Observations and Recommendations from MAGTF Warfighting Exercise 1-20,” Marine Corps Gazette (Quantico, VA: July 2020).

by Marinus

Maneuverist No. 2, “The Zweikampf Dynamic” (MCG Oct 2020), addressed the central problem that Warfighting endeavors to answer: How to prevail in the dynamic, nonlinear conditions created by the interactive struggle of two hostile, interlocked wills? This paper will explore that nonlinearity more deeply through the lens of the dynamic, nonlinear sciences, especially chaos and complexity theory, that emerged in the 1990s and which significantly influenced the revision of Warfighting in 1997. Although the basic theory and philosophy of maneuver warfare first described in FMFM 1 in 1989 remained intact with the publication of MCDP 1 in June 1997, the ways in which Marines were to think about war and warfare changed in some important ways. These new ideas were largely implicit in the earlier manual, but the revision made them more explicit. These ideas coupled with the insights that nonlinearity affords make the second edition of Warfighting conceptually deeper than the first.

War is chaotic. War is complex. These are obvious truisms. But there is deeper meaning here because the terms have different levels of definition. In everyday usage, chaos refers to something that is disorderly, confusing, or apparently random. In everyday usage, complexity describes anything that is complicated, elaborate, or consists of many parts. But the terms also have more specific meaning. Chaos and complexity are branches of the dynamic, nonlinear sciences that came to prominence in the 1990s. They describe a vast array of phenomena in the natural world that have steadfastly defied explanation by classical science—including war and warfare.

 

Science and Military Theory

Military theorists have frequently turned to science to try to help understand and explain war. Sunzi frequently employed analogies from nature to explain his military concepts. He would not have recognized the field of science per se (physics as we know it would not be created for some two thousand years), but he relied on the observable laws of nature when he wrote:

He who relies on the situation uses his men in fighting as one rolls logs or stones. Now the nature of logs and stones is that on stable ground they are static; on unstable ground, they move. If square, they stop; if round, they roll. Thus, the potential of troops skilfully commanded in battle may be compared to that of round boulders which roll down from mountain heights.1

 

Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness. And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.2

The first passage reflects Sunzi’s intuitive understanding of gravity and friction, while the second reflects a rudimentary appreciation for fluid mechanics (although he would not have recognized any of the terms).

Carl von Clausewitz also relied heavily on the physical sciences to explain his military concepts. On War is filled with science metaphors. For example, using analogies from both chemistry and classical physics, Clausewitz wrote:

War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy. War moves on its goals with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for the influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another.3

Here in the same passage, Clausewitz used the metaphor of an explosive chemical reaction followed immediately by the metaphor of physical bodies acting upon each other as if by the force of gravity.

Two of Clausewitz’s most important concepts, friction and the center of gravity, come directly from the cutting-edge science of his day, which was classical Newtonian mechanics.

Closer to home, the godfather of maneuver warfare theory, John Boyd, was a trained engineer steeped in science. The second law of thermodynamics, Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle especially proved foundational to Boyd’s thinking.4 Boyd’s theories largely hinged on his deep appreciation of the nonlinear nature of war, as his briefing slides and annotated copies of his personal books confirm.5 In fact, Boyd strongly opposed any suggestion that nonlinear theory was a “new science.” He reluctantly accepted the term “20th century science,” although he observed that early thinkers had begun to explore nonlinear science as early as the 18th century.

 

Background

Entering the last year of his Commandancy in September 1994, Gen Carl E. Mundy, Jr. recognized that his successor would face significant challenges with a short planning horizon to address them and so crafted a seven-month series of general officer workshops to consider the Marine Corps’ future. He directed the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen Richard D. Hearney, to lead the effort—soon titled the “Vision 21” project—and assigned all the Corps’ lieutenant generals and several major generals to participate. One of these generals would become the next Commandant. Whoever that officer was, he would have the advantage of already having considered how he might move the Corps in a particular direction. Furthermore, the other senior officers supporting him would be intimately familiar with the knowledge that informed the new Commandant’s thinking. In April 1995, the Vision 21 participants produced a draft report, which the new Commandant, Gen Charles Krulak, drew on heavily for parts of his Commandant’s Planning Guidance (dated 1 July 1995), the first such guidance from a Commandant.6

Among several consultants brought on board to facilitate workshops were futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute, noted science writer M. Mitchell Waldrop, and military historian Roger Beaumont, a scholar of the U.S. military.7 These three men introduced the Vision 21 participants to the emerging sciences of nonlinearity. Gen Hearney took a particular interest in this developing science and hosted follow-on meetings with various authorities from a number of fields. He also encouraged other senior officers to familiarize themselves with the basics of nonlinear dynamics. In July 1995, the Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command directed an examination of nonlinear science as it relates to war and warfare. Waldrop’s book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos became must-reading at Marine Corps Combat Development Command.8 One important initial product was a report from a Marine Corps Combat Development Command-sponsored Center for Naval Analyses study titled Land Warfare and Complexity.9 Marine Corps Combat Development Command also established an ongoing relationship with the Santa Fe Institute, the mecca for the study of complexity.10 The result of these efforts was an understanding of war as a deeply nonlinear phenomenon and of military forces as complex adaptive systems. The insights Marines derived from exploring this nascent science proved profound and found their way into Marine Corps doctrine and the curricula of professional military schools.

 

Systems

We will spend a lot of time here discussing “systems,” the concept of which is important to understanding both complexity and maneuver warfare. For our purposes, a system is a collection of things that stand in relation to one another and can be conceived as constituting a larger whole. Systems are everywhere: economic systems, political systems, ecological systems, computer systems, home entertainment systems, and social systems. Systems can be natural or artificial, biological or technological, concrete or abstract. An automobile is a system comprising transmission, braking, suspension, cooling, electrical, and more components that are themselves systems. Every animal, from the smallest insect to the blue whale, is a system comprising multiple subsystems that together promote its growth and survival. A religion is a system of beliefs and moral practices, while a theory is a system of related concepts. A rifle squad is a deadly system of thirteen Marines working together toward the accomplishment of an assigned task. A Marine Air-Ground Task Force is a system of command, ground, aviation, and logistics components operating complementarily toward the accomplishment of the mission. For that matter, war—a hostile interaction between two military systems—is a system.

While we see systems everywhere, in another sense, there are no actual systems in the world. What exist in the world are matter, energy, and information. “System” is a mental construct that we impose on that matter, energy, and information to provide structure and understanding so we can better function in that world. In that sense, how we define the systems around us is up to us, and some ways of defining those systems are more useful than others.

Maneuver warfare is a highly systemic doctrine.11 It requires conceiving of the enemy as a system of components functioning together to generate combat power and apply it against us. It involves locating the criticalities and vulnerabilities in that system and attacking them to disrupt—or, literally, to “dis-integrate”—the coherent functioning of the system rather than grinding it down from the outside. Or, as Boyd was fond of saying, “to tear the enemy system apart from the inside.”

 

Linearity and Nonlinearity

Nonlinearity is defined in terms of what it is not: linear. Linear systems exhibit two fundamental properties: proportionality and additivity.12 Proportionality means that causes and their effects are proportional—a large input to the system results in a correspondingly large output, and vice versa. Additivity means that the whole equals the sum of the parts—the system exhibits no synergistic qualities. Additive systems, therefore, can be understood by deconstructing the system into its constituent parts, understanding the parts, and reassembling the parts to understand the whole system. Linear systems tend to be predictable—and therefore are perceived to be more knowable and controllable. Compared to nonlinear systems, their behavior is “tamer,” more reliable, and more logical. The very terms suggest that linearity is the rule and nonlinearity the exception, but in reality the world we live in consists mainly of nonlinear systems. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam once remarked that the term “nonlinear science” was about as useful as categorizing the vast majority of the animal kingdom as “non-elephants.”13

As discussed in Maneuverist No. 2, war is deeply nonlinear. Clausewitz understood this intuitively. He wrote that

success is not due simply to general [i.e., major] causes. Particular factors can often be decisive—details only known to those who were on the spot. There can also be moral factors which never come to light; while issues can be decided by chances and incidents so minute as to figure in histories simply as anecdotes.14

 

S.L.A. Marshall describes the same phenomenon in his Men against Fire:

For the infantry soldier the great lesson of minor tactics in our time … is the overpowering effect of relatively small amounts of fire delivered from the right ground at the right hour. The mass was there, somewhere in support, and the mobility was needed to put the vital element in the right place. But the salient characteristic of most of our great victories (and a few of our defeats) was that they pivoted on the fire action of a few men.15

 

As for nonlinearity’s violation of the additive property, Clausewitz wrote: “But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.”16

Importantly, nonlinear systems generally are characterized by pervasive feedback, which can be positive or negative. Positive feedback produces reinforcing or multiplying effects whereas negative feedback produces damping or balancing effects. As compared to linear systems, which tend to have minimal feedback mechanisms, war is characterized by a complex, hierarchical system of feedback loops, some designed but many unintended and unrecognized. Whether positive or negative, feedback results are by definition nonlinear.17

 

Chaos and Complexity

Nonlinearity manifests itself in behavior that is chaotic or complex. Roughly speaking, chaos theory refers to inanimate systems that adhere to (often simple) deterministic rules that result in seemingly random, unpredictable behavior. Chaotic systems are nonlinear and sensitive to initial conditions, meaning that the minutest change in conditions—immeasurable even—leads to a very different outcome. If all the starting conditions could be recreated exactly (which they cannot), the system would behave in exactly the same way, and that behavior could be confidently predicted. There is no free will or “deciding” involved. The ultimate example of a deterministically chaotic system is the weather, about which mathematician-turned-meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the term “The Butterfly Effect”: a “butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”18

While some chaotic dynamics exist in war, much more interesting for the purpose of understanding war is complexity theory. Scientifically, complexity deals with the study of systems that exhibit interactively complex, self-organizing adaptation. These systems are known by a variety of names, most commonly complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive system is any system composed of numerous interacting parts, or agents, each of which must act individually according to its own circumstances, and which by so acting changes the circumstances affecting all the other agents. A colony of ants is a complex adaptive system. A market economy is a complex adaptive system. (A command economy is what you get when you try to “linearize” a market economy.) A soccer team is a complex adaptive system, as is the other team. A combat patrol, changing formation as it moves across the terrain and reacting to the enemy situation, is a complex adaptive system. The world fairly teems with complex adaptive systems: jazz bands (but not orchestras), swarms of bees, wolf packs, societies, communities, flocks of birds.

And of course, military units at any echelon are complex adaptive systems—or ought to be. Calling something a complex adaptive system does not necessarily mean that it adapts well. Some might better be called complex maladaptive systems, but those tend not to survive for long. The complex adaptive systems that have continued to survive and thrive in their environment have learned to adapt effectively. They tend to have built-in redundancies that protect them against single-point failure.

Nobel economist F.A. Hayek called such systems extended orders because they are intrinsically distributed.19 An extended order “constitutes an information-gathering process, able to call up, and to put to use, widely dispersed information that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess or control.”20

Complex systems are driven by the numerous individual “decisions” of their agents. In an excellent description of complexity theory, Clausewitz wrote:

The military machine—the army and everything related to it—is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each piece is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction … A battalion is made up of individuals, the least important of whom may chance to delay things or somehow make them go wrong.21

Notice that Clausewitz casts this distributed nature in negative terms, as a source of friction, but it can also be a positive if individuals or small-unit leaders exercise initiative to exploit opportunities.

Complexity is a function of the freedom of action of the individual components of the system: in general, the greater the freedom of action, the greater the complexity. Under the right conditions, even a system with only a small number of parts—even a Zweikampf—can produce complex behavior. The number and variety of components can contribute to complexity but cannot create it. An F/A-18 Super Hornet has a multitude of systems and subsystems, but they have no latitude in how they interact. They interact in only one way—as envisioned by the engineers who designed the aircraft. Such a system is exceedingly complicated, but it is not complex. When performing as designed, the aircraft is precisely and reliably controllable. But when the components cease to interact exactly as designed, it may be time to eject.

Critically, complex adaptive systems exhibit a quality known as emergence. Emergence is a qualitatively different system behavior rising out the interactions of agents in a complex adaptive system. Consider a flock of starlings—countless individual birds each acting and reacting individually according to its own local circumstances, and yet the aggregate acts like a single entity, zigging and zagging and turning back on itself with instantaneous agility—as if it has a single, controlling mind. The flock has a quality all its own. But the starlings have no concept of “flock.” There is no structure to it that is imprinted on their DNA. The behavior of the flock emerges out of the individual birds being birds.

Emergence is a form of spontaneous structure and control. It allows individual agents to form into meaningful higher-order systems. It is a violation of the additive property in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In complex systems, structure and control thus emerge from the bottom; they are not imposed only from the top, which in warfare has implications for command and control.

Healthy complex adaptive systems are said to exist at the “edge of chaos”—the fluctuating balance point between order and chaos. The edge of chaos, according to Waldrop, is “the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive.”22 If a complex system has too much order, it becomes rigid and nonadaptive; too much chaos and it becomes directionless and incoherent. A healthy complex adaptive system never quite locks into equilibrium but never spins out of control. Complex adaptive systems at the edge have enough structure to sustain themselves and enough fluidity to adapt to a variety of circumstances. It is at the edge of chaos that unpredictability, innovation, and creative emerge.

The emerging nonlinear sciences provided new insights into the nature of war. We submit that chaos and complexity do not merely provide metaphors for war but that war qualifies as deterministically chaotic and dynamically complex. These insights quickly found their way into Marine Corps doctrine. MCDP 1 included discussions of nonlinearity, complexity, and systems, which were missing from the FMFM.  (We believe the discussion of nonlinearity deserved greater treatment.) MCDP 5, Planning, and MCDP 6, Command and Control, contain similar examples. The endnotes of all three manuals reference important works on nonlinear systems.

 

Why does it matter?

Maneuver warfare theory as it developed in the Marine Corps predated the widespread recognition of the nonlinear, dynamic sciences—although some people, like John Boyd, clearly understood the implications. The nonlinear sciences, however, strongly confirm maneuver warfare theory. They reinforce the point that war and warfare are innately uncertain and unpredictable, regardless of how much information we gather or how much technology we apply to the situation. Chaos and complexity teach us, as Warfighting does, that rather than trying to impose certainty, order, and efficiency, we are ultimately better off learning to operate despite the friction, uncertainty, and disorder that are inherent to warfare.

Complexity especially suggests that centralized command is incompatible with the essentially distributed nature of warfare. It constitutes an attempt to linearize warfare to make it more controllable. In the end, it makes operations less adaptable—and another key lesson of chaos and complexity is that adaptability is absolutely essential. That adaptability is best achieved by empowering subordinate units with as much freedom of action as possible. The dynamic, nonlinear sciences tell us that a system is most adaptable, unpredictable, and creative when it is surfing at the “edge of chaos.” But U.S. operations routinely sacrifice those qualities for the sake of order and control. The property of emergence suggests that adaptive command and control must be bottom-up as well as top-down.

The dynamic, nonlinear sciences suggest that linear planning approaches that attempt artificially to deconstruct a situation into categories—think DIME and PMESII—will often fail to grasp the totality of the situation, and that more holistic approaches, such as systemic operational design (at least as originally envisioned), show more potential.23

Finally, as we mentioned in Maneuverist No. 2, chaos and complexity argue that a key aspect of maneuver warfare is the ability to conceive the enemy (or the situation more broadly) as a system and to find or create and exploit nonlinearities as a way of tearing that system apart.

Fortunately, we have seen signs over the last 25 years that some Marine leaders grasp the significance of a nonlinear view of war and warfare. Gen James Mattis in his approach to operations certainly has shown that he has a nonlinear mindset. He recently stated, “The inherent chaos caused me to leave a lot of detail out of my plans when, through study, I really understood Warfighting and its implications.”24 The same can be said of Marine commanders at various echelons of command, although how widespread that understanding is has been a matter of debate.

 

Looking Ahead

As we would expect, seventeen years of war have caused Marines to focus on the practice of warfare more than the theory that underlies it. Does this mean that Marines no longer need be cognizant of those theories? No, for theories describe and explain important concepts that influence action. In fact, all professions rely on theories in their practice. Marines must be knowledgeable of maneuver warfare theory as they study and practice the profession of arms.

As the Marine Corps begins to adjust its organizations, weapons systems, and operational approaches to counter new adversaries in the future, Marine leaders should understand the concepts and theory that underlie its current approach. To accomplish this task, they will need to appreciate nonlinear science and the ways it affects war and warfare.

 

Notes

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. By S.B. Griffith (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1963).
2. Ibid.
3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984),.
4. Boyd once told a future Marine general he could never become a great commander if he did not understand the Second Law.
5. Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. See as an example Boyd’s heavily annotated copy of James Gleick’s, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987).
6. Center for Naval Analyses, Vision-21 Source Book, Volume I: The Process, (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 1996).
7. See https://arlingtoninstitute.org; M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992); and Roger Beaumont, War, Chaos, and History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).
8. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
9. Part II of this study, Andrew Ilachinski’s An Assessment of the Applicability of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems Theory to the Study of Land Warfare, (Alexandria VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1996), was of the greatest interest to many Marines.
10. See www.santafe.edu for more information on the Santa Fe Institute established in 1984. See also https://necsi.edu/ for information on the New England Complex Systems Institute established in 1996. Some have called it the “The Santa Fe Institute of the East Coast.”
11. We draw an important distinction between systemic and systematic. “Systemic” refers to a whole consisting of related parts. “Systematic” refers to something that is thorough, deliberate, methodical, and according to a plan.
12. See Alan D. Beyerchen’s excellent discussion in “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War.” International Security. 17:3. Winter, 1992.
13. See https://physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/research/nonlinear-dynamics.
14. On War.
15. S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978).
16. On War.
17. John F. Schmitt, “Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory,” Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, ed. by David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1997).
18. Quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987).
19. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. by W.W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
20. Ibid.
21. On War.
22. Complexity.
23. Diplomatic-Informational-Military-Economic and Political-Military-Economic-Social-Infrastructure-Information, abbreviations for deconstructing friendly and enemy systems respectively.
24. Private conversation with author on 24 August 2020.

by Maj Brian Kerg

Maneuver Warfare: A Missed Mark

Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM-1), Warfighting, was first published in 1989 at the direction of Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) Gen Al Gray. This document saw print at the culmination of a maneuver warfare movement that arose organically within the Corps in the preceding decade and provided a doctrinal foundation for the Marine Corps’ warfighting philosophy. The establishment of a maneuver warfare philosophy was a seminal moment in the Corps’ history and was monumentally influential as it informed all other aspects of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities. Leaders and planners at the highest levels, when considering key decisions, were compelled to ask, “Does this support maneuver warfare?”

In 1997, FMFM-1 was updated and published as Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (MCDP-1), Warfighting. CMC Gen Charles Krulak wrote in his foreword to MCDP-1 that this document required improvement because, “Doctrine must continue to evolve based on growing experience, advancements in theory, and the changing face of war itself.”1

MCDP-1 requires another revision but not only for the justification provided by Gen Krulak. In addition to recent changes in theory and the character of war, MCDP-1 fails to adequately discuss maneuver warfare as it was articulated by the very strategist who instigated the maneuver warfare movement: Col John Boyd, USAF(ret). Despite a passing mention of certain maneuver warfare concepts, MCDP-1 remains weighted toward discussions of defeating the enemy through physical destruction and conflates maneuver with movement—an error that fails to embrace the key characteristics and potential of maneuver warfare. The Marine Corps must let Boyd speak! MCDP-1 must be revised to account for the future security environment and to appropriately convey the essential elements of maneuver warfare as understood by Boyd. Upon revision, the force must be re-indoctrinated through a deep education and application of maneuver warfare at its formal schools. In this way, the Corps will continue to outmatch adversaries in combat capability and capacity—regardless of enemy size or strength—and do its part to deter and defeat the enemies of our nation.

 

Boyd’s Maneuver Warfare

MCDP-1 defines maneuver warfare as, “a warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a variety of rapid, focused, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope.”2 This concept was drawn largely from the work of John Boyd, who researched, wrote, and lectured exhaustively on maneuver warfare and its implications for military strategy and operations after his retirement from active duty.3 Boyd’s lectures ultimately reached the attention of Gen Al Gray. As the commanding general of 2d Marine Division, Gen Gray sponsored a maneuver warfare society and applied its tenets in force-on-force free-play exercises. Upon his appointment as the CMC, he ordered the writing and publication of FMFM-1.4

Though the definition of maneuver warfare that appears in MCDP-1 is a sound one, how it is exemplified throughout the rest of the document falls short of maneuver warfare as conceptualized by Boyd. Before analyzing MCDP-1 for its gaps, it is first necessary to identify Boyd’s key components of maneuver warfare.

First, maneuver warfare prioritizes a defeat mechanism that is mental or moral in nature, vice one that is physical. Physical destruction can contribute to defeat; however, shattering the enemy in the cognitive domain is how one can best and most decisively win. To achieve this, a belligerent conducts actions that the enemy does not expect and presents him with sudden and unexpected challenges with which he must contend. As an enemy attempts to respond to surprising situations, discord and confusion are sowed, and his ability and willingness to deal with complex, confounding situations is broken.5

Secondly, maneuver warfare requires the exploitation of the element of time, such that the adversary’s dilemma is escalated into a crisis; this manipulation of time contributes decisively to his inability to cope with the situation into which he is being forced. Boyd is most popularly known for the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop, which is a cognitive model of human decision making. The aim of Boyd’s model is to operate inside the enemy’s time scale at a faster tempo than the enemy can.6 Getting inside the adversary’s time cycle inflicts disorder upon him. Simultaneously, we can further outpace an adversary by making ourselves appear ambiguous. This renders an enemy incapable of generating the mental framework needed to deal with the situation with which we are presenting him.7

The third essential element is a fundamental orientation on the enemy, focusing on inflicting effects on him, and ideally making the enemy complicit in his own defeat. We seek to understand the enemy on his own terms, which best positions us to understand how to defeat him. Boyd, pre-eminently influenced by Sun Tzu on this subject, insists on probing an enemy organization to unmask his strengths, weaknesses, and intentions.8 This becomes leverage as we can then mentally imagine what an adversary is most likely to do and take action in anticipation of his intention—as “an army varies its method of gaining victory according to the enemy.”9 Such actions enable a bold commander to defeat a numerically superior opponent.

Finally, maneuver warfare is characterized by the employment of asymmetry. Though commonly understood as the avoidance of pitting force directly against force, the meaning is far more subtle and complex. Here, Boyd applies Sun Tzu’s terms of cheng and ch’i. Cheng is directive, expected, and obvious, while ch’i is indirective, unexpected, and hidden. Boyd makes the analogy with Patton’s colloquialism to “hold him by the nose and kick him in the rear,” calling for the use of cheng and ch’i as a kind of mental combined arms. One is not necessarily superior in isolation; rather, cheng and ch’i are used together to off-balance the enemy, then rapidly strike him.10 Asymmetry exists in more domains than the physical and is particularly potent in the cognitive, time, and human domains. Attacking the mind asymmetrically is the means by which one can win without fighting, Sun Tzu’s (and Boyd’s) acme of skill.11

These are the four principal elements of maneuver warfare, as this philosophy was espoused by Boyd: A moral/mental defeat mechanism, an exploitation of time that creates a crisis for the enemy, a fundamental orientation on the enemy, and the employment of asymmetry. With Boyd’s understanding of maneuver warfare, an analysis of MCDP-1 reveals many shortcomings.

 

A Lack of Maneuver

            MCDP-1 adequately captures the idea that the defeat mechanism is not purely physical but also moral/mental. However, it espouses an application of maneuver that revolves around the use of physical strength.12 MCDP-1 couches maneuver in attrition, noting, “Firepower and attrition are essential elements of warfare by maneuver.”13 Finally, when MCDP 1 discusses applications of maneuver warfare, it weights the conversation in language highlighting how maneuver is used as a tool for destruction: “Even if an outmaneuvered enemy continues to fight as individuals or small units, we can destroy the remnants with relative ease.”14

The inclusion of an element of time contributing to this moral/mental crisis is also present throughout the text, advocating that we should maneuver at a faster tempo than our adversary. However, MCDP-1 fails to speak to the criticality of degrading your adversary’s tempo by inflicting disorder. Mission tactics, commander’s intent, and decentralized C2 are means of reducing our own friction, but MCDP-1 does not inform readers how they might increase friction for the adversary.

Further, though MCDP-1 does briefly mention the importance of being oriented on the enemy, it fails to fundamentally orient the reader on the enemy, nor does it expound on making the adversary complicit in his own demise. It also does not directly connect the centrality of the human dimension to this enemy orientation; that connection exists and it is a logical connection to make, but it is one the reader must make because the two ideas are separated by chapters.

Finally, asymmetry is perhaps the tenet of maneuver warfare that has the weakest representation in MCDP-1. The concept with which readers are probably most familiar is that of surfaces and gaps; avoid the former, attack the latter.15 Though MCDP-1 has one line noting that asymmetry is more than spatial, examples occur only in spatial terms: attacking an enemy’s flank, using combined arms to place him in the horns of a dilemma, and penetrating his lines.16

 

Getting Boyd’s Maneuver into MCDP-1

In short, the most fundamental concepts that characterize maneuver warfare as espoused by Boyd—whose articulation led to the writing and publication of Warfighting—are neither adequately nor comprehensively expressed. Though these concepts are mentioned, the discussion remains fixated on the physical and spatial and is weighted toward defeating the enemy by physical destruction and attrition. The risk is that Marine leaders will pursue the allure of winning by attrition, leading to disaster should they face an enemy who is physically stronger, mentally more agile, or (ironically) one who employs maneuver warfare against them.

Notably, a comparative analysis of FMFM-1 and MCDP-1 shows that the older document, FMFM-1, is more thoroughly maneuverist in nature than MCDP-1, perhaps the reason that the 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance refers only to FMFM-1.17 But the Corps must go back further in time than to FMFM-1—it must go back to Boyd, whose full command and appreciation of maneuver warfare is yet to be surpassed. MCDP-1 must be revised such that the four defining characteristics of maneuver warfare—a moral/mental defeat mechanism, an exploitation of time that creates a crisis for the enemy, a fundamental orientation on the enemy, and the employment of asymmetry—are centrally discussed.

The expertise and capability to cheaply, quickly, and effectively rewrite MCDP-1 exists. While formal doctrinal writing processes are long and tedious, requiring inputs, staffing, and buy-in from senior stakeholders across the force, this would inevitably water the text down and take years to produce—an ironic inversion of the very doctrine it would seek to espouse. Conversely, FMFM-1 was written by one trusted agent, Captain John Schmitt, who had the expertise and analytical skill to synthesize Boyd’s concepts into a widely accessible form.18 Schmitt’s manuscript was reviewed and approved by General Gray, who directed its publication and dissemination. The Marine Corps can do the same by leaning on its own known experts on Boyd and maneuver warfare. Notably, Major Ian T. Brown wrote the inimitable text, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare, which takes the reader through the full story of its subtitle and explains Boyd’s intellectual journey. Major Scott Helminski authored his master’s thesis, “No Room to Maneuver,” which further explains how the Corps missed the deeper points of maneuver warfare. Captain Dan Grazier’s “A Maneuver Renaissance” identifies shortfalls in the manner in which maneuver warfare is espoused in MCDP-1 and articulates how they could be mitigated. A dozen other organic, proven experts in this doctrine could be named, but the point is that the potential trusted agents who might rapidly author an updated version of MCDP-1 are resident within the Marine Corps itself and could be tapped directly by the CMC to make this update a reality.

If executed, this would provide a fuller, more refined, and topical version of MCDP-1 that would be published in time to inform the remaining implementation of the 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, the execution of Force Design 2030, be used to immediately educate new Marines at entry level schools, and to re-indoctrinate Marine Corps leaders across the PME continuum. Only in this way will Marine Corps forces possess the lethality offered them by maneuver warfare and be best positioned to deter and, if necessary, defeat America’s adversaries in the next war.

 

Notes

1. Headquarters, Marine Corps, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1: Warfighting, (HQMC: Washington, DC: 1997), foreword.
2. Ibid.
3. Damian Fideleon, The Road to FMFM-1: The United States Marine Corps and Maneuver Warfare Doctrine, 1979–1989, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University, 2001).
4. Ibid.
5. John Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” Video Lecture, Marine Corps University Archives, Boyd Collection.
6. Frans Osinga, “Getting A Discourse on Winning and Losing: A Primar on Boyd’s ‘Theory of Intellectual Evolution,’” Contemporary Security Policy 34 no. 3, (Routledge: 2013).
7. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” Video Lecture.
8. John Boyd, “Creation and Destruction,” Video Lecture, Marine Corps University Archives, Boyd Collection.
9. Sun Tzu, The Art of Warfare, Roger Ames, trans., (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993).
10. Boyd, “Creation and Destruction,” Video Lecture.
11. Ibid.
12. MCDP-1.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. MCDP-1.
16. Ibid.
17. Headquarters, Marine Corps, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (HQMC: Washington, DC: 2019).
18. Ian Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare, (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2018).

by Maj Sean F.X. Barrett, Mie Augier, & Col Michael D. Wyly, USMC(Ret)

The 2018 National Defense
Strategy identifies t he “ reemergence
of long-term, strategic
competition,” a weakening
international order, and rapid and
more readily accessible technological advancements
as key characteristics of the
strategic environment that have served
to undermine U.S. military advantage,
which the strategy claims can no longer
be taken for granted. The strategy
serves as a clarion call to awaken the
DOD from “a period of strategy atrophy”
and reset the force a fter a lmost
two decades of armed conflict. Reenergizing
PME and revising antiquated
manpower management practices are
crucial to developing leaders who can
operate effectively in today’s “increasingly
complex global security environment.”
2
Multiple developments since the release
of the 2018 National Defense Strategy
provide reasons for optimism that we
are progressing beyond an industrial era
mindset to prepare for great power competition.
For example, the Department
of the Navy has emphasized the importance
of agility, education, intellectual
preparedness, and talent management to
our warfighting capabilities.3 Similarly,
Gen David H. Berger’s Commandant’s
Planning Guidance (CPG) identifies
the need to fundamentally change the
manner in which we train, educate, and
manage the talent of the force, and the
recently released MCDP 7, Learning,
formalizes continuous learning as an
institutional priority. The CPG even
references the original FMFM 1, Warfighting,
possibly indicating a broader
re-embrace of the maneuver tradition.
However, despite these positive developments,
there are some reasons for
pessimism, too. For one, change in an
organization is always difficult. Military
organizations, in particular, have
been accused of ignoring or misusing
the past,4 or even rejecting it outright,
in order to avoid change.5 To adapt and
learn, organizations must maintain a
balance between “the exploration of new
possibilities and the exploitation of old
certainties.”6 Unfortunately, exploration
and exploitation compete over scarce
resources, and in today’s tight budgetary
environment, which lacks additional resources
to serve as a buffer, exploitation
tends to crowd out exploration since
feedback from exploitation in the shortterm
is greater, more immediate, and
more observable.7 Manpower policies
that necessitate short tours only exacerbate
this desire for short-term impact,
control, and quantifiable metrics, resulting
in an inherent bias toward training Marines only for the specific tasks they
need to perform today instead of educating
them for the decades to come.
Fortunately, organizational change
and innovation are not new to the Marine
Corps. We wish to share some of
Col Mike Wyly’s experiences concerning
education, thinking, organization,
and technology that can perhaps help
the Marine Corps experience a richer
and more authentic re-embrace of its
maneuver tradition and avoid being led
astray by the allure of quick fixes and
the temptation to cut corners. We write
this in a spirit of admiration for the
maneuver warfare movement and its
influence (if mostly temporary) on our
Corps and with the belief the maneuver
philosophy and the reform movement in
which it was embedded are quite fitting
for our times.8
Potential Pitfalls
On the heels of the Vietnam War,
the United States faced a great power
competition with the Soviet Union, the
terrorist threat was burgeoning, inflation
was ravaging the economy, and the
military had to resolve the challenges
posed by the All-Volunteer Force. Vietnam
required an enormous manpower
commitment over a long period time,
cost the Corps over 100,000 killed and
wounded, delayed modernization programs
essential to the Corps’ amphibious
capability, sparked heated internal
debate concerning the Corps’ mission
and standards, and led to unprecedented,
reform-minded public criticism.9
Unfortunately, while many Marines
experienced the limitations of Marine
Corps doctrine and centralized decision
making firsthand and adapted, many at
Headquarters wanted to put Vietnam
behind them, forget any lessons learned,
and revert to the “tried and true,” pre-
Vietnam concepts of conventional warfare.
In the face of war with the Soviets,
Col Wyly found this reversion to old
ideas unacceptable.
Today, the Corps faces a similar
crossroads, once again trying to modernize
as it enters another great power
competition following an even longer
period of combat. Iran and its terrorist
proxies remain a destabilizing influence,
the novel coronavirus has disrupted
the economy, the Corps is integrating
female Marines into combat roles
previously closed to them, and debate
over the future Corps continues to be
waged.10 We do not intend to suggest
a perfect parallel or to provide prescriptive
solutions. Rather, we highlight a
few potential pitfalls and provide some
insights for how the Corps overcame
them in a similarly challenging and
transformative period in our history.
Dilemmas of education. There is a
tendency to talk about education and
learning in ways that are not really
conducive to thinking and judgment.
For example, requirements for schoolhouses
to produce a certain number of
graduates each year can emphasize the
short-term at the expense of long-term
development.11 This focus on metrics
strengthens the institution’s desire to
control, which can undermine feelings
of ownership instructors have for their
curriculum, the flexibility they have to
adapt it to the needs of their students
and the enthusiasm of the students. Col
Wyly’s experiences teaching highlight
the importance of empowering instructors
and developing military judgment.
After an initial tour as a platoon
leader in Okinawa, Col Wyly checked
into 1st MarDiv and was assigned to the
Counterguerrilla/Counterinsurgency
(CG/CI) School, where he grappled
with preparing students for how to
think in combat. The school was the
brainchild of LtGen Victor “Brute”
Krulak, then CG, Fleet Marine Forces
Pacific. It was Krulak’s idea not only to
establish it but also to grant instructors
the freedom to exercise initiative
based on the study of real war as it was
emerging in the 1960s. Krulak provided
guidance for how time should be divided
between the classroom and field
work, and he set the criteria for selecting
instructors. However, he empowered
the junior officers and NCOs on staff
to take ownership of the education and
training experience.12
The focus then was counterinsurgency
because the Soviet Union planned
to expand its influence by fomenting
insurgencies worldwide. As a result, the
staff became experts on the threat of
communism and studied every counterinsurgency
possible, including in
Burma, Algeria, Nicaragua, Cuba, the
Philippines, and South Africa. They
hosted visitors from the French Foreign
Legion, Royal Marines, the Republic
of Vietnam, and Indonesia, and they
traveled to schools and courses on psychological
operations and counterinsurgency
such as those taught at the John
F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and
School to inform and refine their curricula.
They were able to do so because Krulak freed them from bureaucratic
hindrances, and they were thus able
to develop the course as they saw fit,
making it more tailored and relevant
to their students.
In designing the two courses at the
school—one primarily in the classroom
(but incorporating some field work as
well) for officers and SNCOs, the second
a company course in Cleveland National
Forest—Col Wyly found it counterproductive
to offer “school solutions”
at the end of problem-solving exercises.
Such solutions were simply somebody
else’s idea of how to resolve a tactical
situation the student may never encounter.
Col Wyly and the staff viewed their
task as making the students think, not
telling them what to think. In doing
so, they remained open to the students’
ideas, knowing they might well be better
than theirs. The staff motivated the
students by injecting a healthy dose of
realism. The company course, for example,
culminated in a week-long exercise
against aggressors played by the
staff. The staff challenged the students
with tactical problems, enabled them to
experiment with new ideas while searching
for their own solutions, and forced
them to make decisions—even at the
lowest levels.13
After two tours in Vietnam with
1st MarDiv, Wyly attended Amphibious
Warfare School (AWS) in 1973.
The curriculum relied on lectures and
scripted tactical problems with schoolhouse
solutions.14 This left Wyly asking,
“How do they know? And, what
does it matter anyway when the likelihood
of being confronted in real combat
with the same scenario was slim to
non-existent?” Rejecting this approach
to education, Wyly embarked on a quest
of self-study, spending most nights at
Quantico’s library reading military
history. He did not focus on any one
war or period in history but rather read
about everything from Genghis Khan
to Napoleon to Patton and Holland
Smith. This experience reinforced his
belief that a school’s mission was to
teach students how to think and not
what to think. In all the battles, Wyly
identified a recurring theme: finding
the enemy’s weakness and exploiting
it—decisively.
Wyly’s interest in military history
grew stronger when he attended
the Command and Staff College in
1976–1977. Following a WESTPAC
tour, he was assigned to Quantico’s
Education Center and began attending
a graduate program at George
Washington University at night. Then
MajGen Bernard Trainor, Director of
the Education Center, took an interest
in Wyly’s war studies and named
him Head of Tactics at AWS in 1979.
Wyly quickly realized the curriculum
had not changed since he was a student,
and much of the doctrine was precisely
what he had been taught at The Basic
School in 1962–1963. Empowered by
Trainor to do it his way and not fall back
on doctrine, Wyly completely rewrote
the curriculum, focusing on making
decisions, broad reading, and nurturing
questioning minds through active learning
approaches, including historical case
studies, sand table and map exercises,
tactical decision games, terrain walks,
and tactical exercises without troops.
These active learning approaches are
based on the premise that there is a stark
difference between a “manual” that
functions as a “how to” rule book and a
“story” relating facts and circumstances
that enables readers to place themselves
in the minds of the story’s protagonists
and relate the protagonists’ decisions
and actions to the decisions and actions
they might be called upon to make in
the future. Much in line with case-based
and discussion-based approaches to
teaching in general, Wyly never rejected
a student’s solution because it might
not match the school’s—even if it was
drawn from history. Instead, he asked
the student why he made the decision
he did. For students, Wyly believes there
is little more rewarding than watching
a teacher whom he respects listen
to him, think over what he said, and
congratulate him on the quality of the
idea and the progress he is making.
Technologitis. Our focus (sometimes
even fixation) on technology is nothing
new, and neither are technology’s limitations.
However, we tend to overlook the
latter to justify the former. Gen Berger
attributes this capabilities-based mindset
to the end of the Cold War and the
corresponding lack of a threat against
whom to base our analysis.15 Technology
has always offered the promise of
new, seemingly more effective ways of
fighting and shortcuts to get there, but
we cannot know what these new ways
are without a rigorous and systematic
trial-and-error process. Unfortunately,
this process is oftentimes short-circuited,
and military organizations tend
to engage in “peripheral borrowing,”
wherein the potentialities and efficient
use of new technologies are not fully
realized, as evidenced by the way the
French in 1940 treated tanks as accoutrements
rather than as an integral part
of a coordinated military effort.16
Our ability to fight without becoming
over reliant on technology is increasingly
relevant given the potential for our
adversaries to disrupt our communications
and the need for smaller units of
Marines to operate independently. Col
Wyly understood that leaders need to
be prepared to think critically and make
decisions quickly in such an environment.
17 As such, he took a decidedly
“people first” approach, prioritizing
investments in our Marines. For example,
when Wyly first took over at
AWS, reading assignments consisted
of excerpts from khaki colored manuals
that established rules so thinking
was not required. Upon this realization,
Wyly went to LtGen Trainor’s office and
argued that when people go to college,
the first thing they have to do is buy
books, so the captains at AWS should
have to buy (and read) books as well.
The initial reading list consisted of B.H.
Liddell Hart’s Strategy; Robert Heinl’s
Victory at High Tide; Edgar O’Ballance’s
No Victor, No Vanquished on the Yom
Kippur War; and Jeter Isely and Philip
Crowl’s The U.S. Marines and Amphibious
War.18 Reading history, however,
was not an end in itself. Rather, it was intended to provide vicarious learning
experiences that enabled Marines more
readily to recognize patterns and identify
solutions to problems they encountered
on the battlefield. This is necessary
to enable the effective use of technology.
Under Wyly’s tutelage, the captains
transformed into avid readers. One of
these captains, Bill Woods, executed
orders to 2nd MarDiv as Gen Al Gray
assumed command. Gen Gray had himself
already adopted maneuver practice
and thinking and knew Col John Boyd
and his “Patterns of Conflict” lecture.
Woods introduced himself to Gray in
the Officers’ Club at Camp Lejeune and
discussed with him what was happening
at Quantico. Recognizing the importance
of organizational experimentation
and the need to nurture ideas, Gray established
the 2nd Marine Division Maneuver
Warfare Board, which consisted
of Woods and other mostly junior officers,
and declared maneuver warfare the
official doctrine (and way of thinking)
for the division. Wyly also arranged for
Gray to become a regular guest speaker
at AWS. These (and other) activities
helped maneuver thinking take hold in
the organization. It was no longer just
a “new concept” but rather a prelude to
what many graduates would experience
on assignment to the FMF.
Organizational Myopias. If thinking
and learning are the foundations
for individual agility, experimentation
and learning from failures are essential
for organizational agility. Free play
and force-on-force exercises in realistic
training environments are most conducive
to this type of discovery and
help us avoid simply training to meet
minimum requirements (e.g., mission
essential tasks). Similarly, open inquiry,
enthusiastic debate, and a willingness to
hear the viewpoints of others, including
outsiders, is critical for avoiding complacency
and falling into a “competence
trap.”19 This i s e specially important
today given the rate of technological
change.
While at AWS, Col Wyly invited Bill
Lind, a congressional aide to Senator
Gary Hart, down to Quantico to speak
with the captains, some of whom wondered
why they had to listen to a “civilian
hack.” Wyly, however, was open
to ideas from everyone. Lind was welleducated,
even if an outsider, and Wyly
wanted his captains to hear every side
of the maneuver warfare debate. When
the subject of Lind having no experience
came up, Lind gave Col Boyd’s telephone
number to Wyly. Wyly quickly
formed a friendship with Boyd, another
outsider, that endured. They compared
their experiences (Wyly on the ground,
Boyd in the air), thus forming conceptual
comparisons that were instructive
for Wyly’s students.
Col Wyly also established a relationship
with Col John Greenwood, the editor
of the Gazette for 20 years, to use
the medium to facilitate open inquiry
and debate without fear of reprisal. Captains
at AWS began meeting at each
other’s houses on Friday night to reflect,
debate, and then write articles as they
sharpened their ideas. This learning
process was continuous; maneuverists
never rested on their laurels, recognizing
that strategy, organizational adaptation,
and evolution are an ongoing process.
For example, even as Gen Gray signed
FMFM 1 and maneuver thinking officially
became the organization’s way
of thinking, maneuverists were already
thinking ahead to how to make the
movement broader and more enduring,
refining their ideas along the way
through an ongoing learning process.
After all, no victory is permanent but,
rather, must be won again and again.
Re-maneuverizing the Marine Corps:
Lessons From the Past to Inform the
Future
Education and the ability to think
critically, quickly, and decisively are
critical warfighting enablers. While
maybe not as intuitively obvious as
the physical demands, Williamson
Murray argues the military profession
might also be the most intellectually
demanding since military forces rarely
get the chance to practice their profession.
21 FMFM 1 similarly observes
the centrality of the human dimension
in war, reminding us, “No degree of
technological development or scientific
calculation will overcome the human
dimension in war.”22 Recent rhetoric,
strategic documents, and initiatives in
the Marine Corps, the Department of
the Navy, and DOD seem to embrace
the need to move beyond our industrial
era mindset. However, any change in an
organization is fraught with challenges and oftentimes succumbs to the wellintentioned
bureaucratic tendency to
develop processes to track, measure, and
validate “progress” towards an objective,
which usually only serves to stifl e
it. In highlighting the importance of a
bottom-up approach starting and ending
with the individual Marine, Col
Wyly’s experiences hopefully might
inform these efforts.
As a teacher, Col Wyly was empowered
by senior leaders who trusted him
and removed bureaucratic obstacles instead
of adding to them. This is not to
say there was no resistance along the
way. Rather, support from leaders like
Trainor and Gray enabled Wyly to continue
on despite pressures to revert to
the old “tried and true” teaching methods
and tactics. Realism and practicing
decision making, implemented through
active learning techniques, took precedence
over accreditations, quotas, and
degrees. Instead of relying on mundane
lectures, Wyly took ownership of his
curricula, and his enthusiasm proved
infectious. He inspired (and prepared)
his students for a lifetime of learning not
to meet requirements but to live up to
their professional calling. Col Wyly and
likeminded maneuverists were always
seeking to improve, even if this meant
having the humility to take inputs from
nontraditional (even eccentric) sources
and from those they outranked. Perhaps
most importantly, they placed their responsibility
as professionals ahead of
their own professional advancement.
Adapting and overcoming is never easy,
but we have a rich history that might
help guide us.
Notes
1. David Berger, “Marine Corps Readiness
and Modernization,” CSPAN, (October 2019),
https://www.c-span.org.
2. Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018
National Defense Strategy of the United States
of America: Sharpening the American Military’s
Competitive Edge, (Washington, DC: 2018).
3. Department of the Navy, Education for
Seapower, (Washington, DC: 2019); Former
Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly,
“SECNAV VECTOR 7,” (January 2020);
Former Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas
B. Modly, “SECNAV VECTOR 16,” (March
2020); John Kroger, “Charting the Future of
Education for the Navy-Marine Corps Team,”
War on the Rocks, (November 2019), available
at https://warontherocks.com.
4. Williamson Murray, “Innovation: Past and
Future,” Joint Force Quarterly, (Washington,
DC: NDU Press, Summer 1996); Edward L.
Katzenbach, Jr., “The Horse Cavalry in the
Twentieth Century: A Study in Policy Response,”
Public Policy, (Cambridge, MA: John
Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government,
1958).
5. Williamson Murray, “Does Military Culture
Matter?” Orbis, (Amsterdam, NED: Elsevier,
Winter 1999).
6. James G. March, “Exploration and Exploitation
in Organizational Learning,” Organization
Science, (Catonsville, MD: Institute for Operations
Research and the Management Sciences,
March 1991).
7. James G. March, “Rationality, Foolishness,
and Adaptive Intelligence,” Strategic Management
Journal, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, March
2006).
8. We focus on Col Wyly’s experiences in
particular, but we recognize he was just one
member of a key group of people that initiated,
participated in, and led the maneuver warfare
movement. Others included Col GI Wilson,
USMCR; Gen Al Gray; LtCol Bill Woods;
Col John Boyd, USAF; and Bill Lind, among
many others.
9. For more on the Vietnam War and its aftereffects
on the Corps, see Allan R. Millett,
Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States
Marine Corps, rev. ed., (New York, NY: The
Free Press, 1991).
10. For examples of articles both implicitly and
explicitly critical of Gen Berger’s CPG or Force
Design 2030, see Jim Webb, “The Future of the
U.S. Marine Corps,” National Interest, (May
2020), available at https://nationalinterest.org;
Jake Yeager, “Expeditionary Advanced Maritime
Operations: How the Marine Corps Can Avoid
Becoming a Second Land Army in the Pacifi c,”
War on the Rocks, (December 2019), available
at https://warontherocks.com; Mark Cancian,
“Don’t Go Too Crazy, Marine Corps,” War on
the Rocks, (January 2020), available at https://
warontherocks.com; and Dan Gouré, “Will
Commandant Berger’s New Marine Corps Be
a High-Tech Forlorn Hope,” Real Clear Defense,
(April 2020), available at https://www.
realcleardefense.com.
11. For example, excessive hint-giving may help a
student pass a test, but it undermines long-term
progress. See David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists
Triumph in a Specialized World, (New
York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2019).
12. In a similar effort, MajGen William F. Mullen,
CG, TECOM, published a memorandum,
“Training and Education Command Authority
to Experiment With New Learning Practices
Policy,” to grant “to Formal Learning Centers
(FLCs) the authorities necessary to experiment
with new learning practices with respect to innovative
curriculum design, development, and
delivery.”
13. When 1st MarDiv deployed to Vietnam
in 1965, some elements of these units had experienced
the training at the CG/CI School.
Comparatively, they were a small minority, but
to Wyly and others, their effectiveness exceeded
those who lacked the training. Unfortunately,
the CG/CI School instructors deployed with the
division, so there was no such school left behind
to instruct follow-on units and replacement
personnel. As a result, over time, what might
be described as “the Krulak tactics” gave way
to the operational concepts established by GEN
Westmoreland.
14. After each tactical game, students were provided
a typed handout of “The School Solution,”
which was printed on yellow paper and thus
became known as “The Yellows.” The yellow
paper was intended to make it visibly evident
that what was printed on this piece of paper was
special—different—the answer!
15. “Marine Corps Readiness and Modernization.”
16. Oriol Pi-Sunyer and Thomas De Gregori,
“Cultural Resistance to Technological Change,”
Technology and Culture, (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, Spring 1964); James
J. Tritten, “Revolutions in Military Affairs:
From the Sea,” Military Review, (Fort Leavenworth,
KS: Army University Press, March–April
2000). In highlighting the shortcomings of the
technology-driven model of military innovation,
Tritten notes that it assumes military organizations
will always capitalize on new technologies
and recognize the need for new doctrine
or organization. Additional examples of this
mistaken notion include the thought initially
that sustained artillery fi re would defeat the enemy;
however, experience taught that intensive
fi re enabling infantry to close with the enemy
and be “on top of him” before he could recover
was more effective. The machine gun’s sustained
automatic fi re was supposed to enable the attacker
to attack and move through and defeat
www.mca-marines.Marine Corps Gazette • November 2020 org/gazette 41
enemy defenses. Instead, it proved more effective
in the defense until such time as light automatic
weapons that could be carried by infantry were
developed. It was also initially thought that an
enemy could be bombed into submission by
fl ying over him and dropping ordnance, but the
more effective employment of aviation proved
to be providing cover for friendly infantry so
they could move forward during the period
defenders were “hunkered down” when planes
were overhead. Especially relevant today, the introduction
of electronics was supposed to enable
all-knowing commanders in all-knowing command
centers to command from there without
ever having to venture out. This myth began
with the invention of the telegraph, but it soon
became evident that commanders who were not
eye-to-eye with their subordinates were “out
of touch” and often unaware of the drive and
motivation (or lack thereof ) of forces under
their command. Thus, FMFM 1 reminds us
the “commander should command from well
forward” in order to “sense fi rsthand the ebb and
fl ow of combat, to gain an intuitive appreciation
for the situation which he cannot obtain from
reports.” Headquarters Marine Corps, FMFM
1, Warfi ghting, (Washington, DC: 1989).
17. Leaders like MajGen David Furness, CG,
2nd MarDiv, have been working to address the
problem of enemy actions in the electromagnetic
environment and the challenges of command
and control in denied or degraded communications
environments. David Furness, “Winning
Tomorrow’s Battles Today: Reinvigorating Maneuver
Warfare in the 2d Marine Division,” Marine
Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA: November
2019). That being said, “control” is something
of a misnomer. Command is more a matter of
seeking, identifying, and seizing opportunities.
18. Every year, Wyly added more books, which
he picked up from the Gazette store and sold
in the AWS parking lot out of the trunk of his
car. The captains became very enthusiastic and
started coming to his offi ce to discuss what they
read. Soon, the captains started initiating their
own suggestions of what to read. Wyly added
them to the ever-growing list, a prelude to the
Commandant’s Professional Reading List.
19. Daniel A. Levinthal and James G. March,
“The Myopia of Learning,” Strategic Management
Journal, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, Winter
1993). Careerism has a tendency to undermine
debate and exacerbate competence traps. Marines
and the institution must not defi ne “career
success” as getting promoted or retiring with
a comfortable pension. On the contrary, according
to Wyly’s perspective, career success
should be viewed as living a meaningful life
and having accomplished the mission on which
a Marine set out.
20. Gen David H. Berger, Commandant’s Planning
Guidance, (Washington, DC, 2019).
21. Williamson Murray, “MCDP 7: On Learning,”
Marine Corps Gazette, (Quantico, VA:
November 2019).
22. FMFM 1, Warfi ghting.

by Marinus

This is the second article of a series called The Maneuverist Papers. Maneuverist No. 1 summarized the history of the post-Vietnam reform movement that produced maneuver warfare theory and eventually resulted in the publication of FMFM 1, Warfighting, in 1989. The current article begins to address the substance of maneuver warfare theory, starting at the beginning, with the definition and description of war.

If you were to ask which is the most important chapter in MCDP 1, Warfighting, most Marines would probably say Chapter 4, “The Conduct of War.” This makes sense; after all, it is Chapter 4 that actually explains maneuver warfare—introducing key concepts like mission tactics, commander’s intent, main effort, and surfaces and gaps. We submit, however, that Chapter 1, “The Nature of War,” is the most important because it captures the problem, commonly agreed upon by all Marines, to which maneuver warfare is the logical solution. And reaching a common and compelling understanding of the challenge facing the organization is critical to meeting that challenge.

Maneuver warfare theory starts with a clear-eyed look at the nature of war as it exists in reality and from there proceeds logically to develop a philosophy designed to deal specifically with that true nature. Arguably, the single greatest effect Warfighting has had is to establish a common understanding among Marines of the nature of and the challenges posed by war. We suggest that in an era of growing homogeneity among the services, this distinct understanding of the nature of war may be one of the key factors that today distinguishes the Marine Corps. While other services may talk about fog and friction, for Marines these qualities are articles of faith that inform our every decision.

 

Framing the Problem

At the risk of getting a bit philosophical, problems do not actually exist in the world. What exist in the world are situations or, in the words of systems thinking pioneer Russell Ackoff, “messes.”1 A mess only becomes a problem when someone, with a particular perspective and set of interests, looks at the mess and decides it is unacceptable. “The Problem” is a framework that we impose on the mess, and the way we choose to frame that problem matters significantly. In the words of Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial, his classic book on complexity and design, “solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”2  In other words, the way you formulate the problem points to the solution. If you can develop a clear and compelling understanding of the problem facing you, the solution becomes self-evident. Frame the problem in the same old way, and you will get some variation of the same old solution. If you want a new solution, find a new way to frame the problem. We believe this is the fundamental value of Warfighting—it framed the problem in a new (at the time) way that pointed to a new way of operating.

One of the early criticisms of FMFM 1 was that it was merely common sense. The argument was that the maneuver warfare concepts described in Warfighting were nothing more than any Marine with common sense would come up with on his or her own. But if maneuver warfare were merely common sense, military organizations the world over would have adopted it spontaneously—but they have not. We do agree, however, that there is a certain apparently simple reasonableness to Warfighting’s argument. We suggest that is mainly because the manual depicts the challenge—that is, frames the problem—in a way that is clear,  compelling, and rings true. Maneuver warfare per Warfighting only seems like common sense because it is the logical solution to the problem described in Chapter 1. What is that problem?

 

The Zweikampf Dynamic

            Warfighting starts with an essential definition of war:  a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other by force.

Of note, FMFM 1 defines war in terms of a clash between nations. MCDP 1 expands that definition to the more general “political groups,” acknowledging that the belligerents may not be nation-states (as historically they often have not been). In fact, throughout history state-on-state conflict has been the exception and nonstate warfare the rule, whether the belligerents were intrastate factions, multinational coalitions, or surprastate organizations such as the United Nations or al Qaeda. Both FMFM 1 and MCDP 1 use the phrase “between or among” to acknowledge that there may be more than two belligerents to any conflict. This again has often been the case, although we note that multiple belligerents have tended to align into two opposing camps out of strategic expediency, even if only reluctantly, partially, and temporarily.

MCDP 1 adopted the Clausewitzian term Zweikampf (literally “two-struggle”), which was absent from the original FMFM 1.3 The dynamics of the Zweikampf may be the single most important idea in Warfighting. The concept of the deeply interactive struggle of two hostile, interlocked wills may seem obvious today, but during the post-Vietnam era it represented a dramatic shift in thinking. (Recall that Clausewitz was only emerging from obscurity at the time.) The prevailing mindset, on full view during the Vietnam War and strongly influenced by operations research methods, tended to see war as a fixed engineering problem rather than as a dynamic, interactive struggle between two opposing wills. Some operational concepts still take that fixed-problem approach today.

To make his point, Clausewitz likened war to a pair of wrestlers locked in a hold, each attempting to gain leverage over the other and together achieving contortions that neither could achieve alone.4 It is not the characteristics of the individual contestants that give war its essential nature but the interaction between them. In this sense, war is what complexity theory calls an emergence, a whole that is the product of the interaction of its parts but whose nature is not inherent in any of those parts. As historian Alan Beyerchen pointed out in his seminal article “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” Clausewitz provides an image that brings to mind a great deal of nonlinear interaction (more about which in a later paper) and the possibility of sudden reversals.5 In recognition of this truth, Marines are fond of acknowledging that “the enemy gets a vote.” This adage is good as far as it goes, but it does not capture the full extent of the Zweikampf dynamic because the interaction of the two competing wills can yield results that neither belligerent intended. Something altogether different and unexpected emerges.

That is the Zweikampf dynamic. It is the various patterns and sequences—give-and-take, initiative-and-response, action-reaction-counteraction—that result from the direct, intense interaction between the two hostile wills. These patterns are highly nonlinear, which here refers not to positions on a battlefield but to the dynamics of cause and effect in a system. A nonlinear system has two basic properties.6 First, a system is nonlinear if causes and their effects are disproportionate. Second, a system is nonlinear if the whole does not equal the sum of the parts. Minor efforts, made at the right time and place, can have outsized effects—think of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which 300 Spartans (with allies, it must be said) famously held off an advancing Persian army of over 100,000 men. Conversely, massive expenditures in men and materiel can produce little—think of almost any offensive on the First World War Western Front.

Nonlinearity is a primary quality of the Zweikampf dynamic, and from that nonlinearity directly flow other attributes such as friction, uncertainty, disorder, and fluidity. As examples, each belligerent’s attempts to disrupt the enemy’s plans and actions generate friction, while each belligerent’s efforts to appear inscrutable and to actively mislead the enemy produce uncertainty.

At its roots, a big part of the maneuver warfare mindset consists of finding/creating and ruthlessly exploiting favorable nonlinearities—critical vulnerabilities, decisive points in time or space, capability mismatches, or other advantages that, if exploited, offer a disproportionately large payoff for the effort invested. In contrast, some other doctrinal approaches through history have amounted to attempts to “linearize” war in an effort to make its results predictable.

One lesson for today: This discussion should serve as a reminder of war’s fundamental unpredictability, a trait we tend to forget in the pursuit of battlefield certainty through the latest technological advancement. Information technology can help reduce a lot of unknowns, but we suggest it cannot eliminate the uncertainty that is at the very heart of the Zweikampf.

 

Attributes of War

After establishing the essence of war, Warfighting goes on to present a set of attributes that are direct products of the Zweikampf dynamic and that together describe the environment within which the warfighter must operate. FMFM 1 lists friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, and violence and danger. To that list, MCDP 1 adds complexity.

            Warfighting then continues with a discussion of another set of attributes that, if not outputs of the dynamic itself, influence the unfolding of the dynamic within that environment: War is a social interaction reflecting human nature in all its complexities and vagaries. War has physical, mental, and moral/psychological dimensions—in fact, it presents the most physically, mentally, and morally demanding challenge known to humankind. War includes some aspects that are timeless and others that are changeable. Within the context of competing wills, warfare involves the application of both art (i.e., intuition and creativity) and science (analysis and calculation).

 

The Timeless and the Changing

            Warfighting attempts to describe war in timeless terms. While it recognizes that some aspects of war are changeable, it does not address those aspects. It urges Marines to be alert to those changes, but it leaves it up to them to identify what those changes are. While most of the time only war’s outward forms will change, occasionally more profound changes to war’s deeper character can occur as the result of dramatic political, societal, or technological developments. Examples of such developments include national conscription, the invention of gunpowder, the introduction of aviation, and the invention of nuclear weapons. Emerging developments that some expect to change the character of war in the near future include robotic systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the militarization of space. In contrast, tactics and techniques evolve constantly due to mutual adaptation between enemies—in yet another manifestation of the Zweikampf dynamic.

Changes to the character of a conflict tend to have greater repercussions than mere changes to its form, but the former is usually much harder to appreciate than the latter. In either case, as Warfighting says, it is important to stay abreast of the process of change, for the belligerent who first exploits a development in the art and science of war can gain a significant advantage, while the belligerent ignorant of the changing character or forms of war may end up unequal to its challenges.

 

In Conclusion

Synthesizing the above discussion, the problem is: How to prevail in a clash between independent, hostile, and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other through force in the dynamic of the Zweikampf? The dynamic unfolds in an environment dominated by friction, uncertainty, fluidity, disorder, complexity, and violence and danger—even as it creates that environment. It is informed by the various traits of human nature. It requires acting in the physical, mental, and moral dimensions. It demands the ability to understand and balance factors both timeless and changing. And it involves the interplay of art and science.

            This is the challenge that Warfighting sets for itself.  It proposes that the answer to this challenge is maneuver warfare—as described in Warfighting, a “philosophy for action” that better equips Marines to survive and prevail in the Zweikampf and in the conditions it presents—as we will discuss in subsequent papers.

 

Notes

1. Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems (New York, NY: Wiley and Sons, 1974).
2. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Pronounced “tsvai-kampf.” “Zweikampf.”
4. On War.
5. Alan D. Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War.” International Security, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Winter 1992).
6. Ibid.

by Marinus

This article is the first in a series we call The Maneuverist Papers, discussing maneuver warfare doctrine in the Marine Corps. Under the leadership of Commandant Gen Alfred M. Gray, the Marine Corps first codified maneuver warfare as Service doctrine with the 1989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfighting, although the significant intellectual effort that produced the underlying concepts had begun well over a decade earlier. In 1997, Gen Charles C. Krulak oversaw the revision of Warfighting as MCDP 1, which clarified and elaborated on select ideas from the original but did not change the essence of maneuver warfare in any way. Maneuver warfare doctrine has thus served the Marine Corps for over three decades. Much has happened in those years, especially two lengthy wars that saw significant changes in the conduct of warfare. In contrast, during the same period of time, U.S. Army doctrine has evolved from AirLand Battle to Full-Dimensional Operations to Full Spectrum Operations to now Unified Land Operations over a span of nine capstone field manuals. Now the Marine Corps is set to undertake arguably the most dramatic changes to structure and capabilities in over a half century.

This begs the question: Is it time for the Marine Corps to revise its doctrine? Several Gazette articles in recent years have argued so. The aim of The Maneuverist Papers is to energize that conversation. The Maneuverist Papers will continue the discussion begun with “What We Believe About War and Warfare” in the June Gazette by describing the development of and elaborating on key maneuver warfare concepts, providing historical context for the development of Warfighting and the maneuver warfare movement in general, and discussing recent changes to the face of war that may justify a doctrinal revision.

The maneuver warfare movement must be judged an institutional success in that maneuver warfare became Marine Corps doctrine and has remained so for over three decades. Moreover, the movement brought other lasting changes—most notably in the area of professional military education—in full view today. In some areas, such as training, the impact of maneuver warfare, with its emphasis on free-play, force-on-force exercises, arguably has been less enduring. In other areas, such as personnel management, the movement seems to have had little impact at all. A broader issue is operational and tactical success. From Grenada in 1983 through the Gulf War to Afghanistan and Iraq, the historical record has been mixed. But is this an indictment of maneuver warfare itself? Is it a result of the Marine Corps no longer embracing maneuver warfare in practice? Or never having truly embraced it in the first place, as some have argued? Or is the mixed record the result of some completely external factors, such as the growing ineffectiveness of combat as a decisive factor in resolving conflict in general? That is a topic for another debate.

 

The Historical Context

It is important to understand that the maneuver warfare movement emerged at a particular moment in history. After the Vietnam War, the Marine Corps underwent a period of institutional introspection. The maneuver warfare movement was a response to the institutional and operational dysfunction of the Vietnam experience that sought, among other things, to put the Marine Corps approach to war on a solid historical and theoretical footing.

Gray, of course, was the leading exponent of maneuver warfare, providing impetus and top cover. Retired Air Force Col John Boyd was the movement’s intellectual godfather. Civilian Bill Lind was chief provocateur and proselytizer. But the core was a grass roots movement comprising a combination of Vietnam veterans who had remained on active duty after the war to see things set right and young officers who saw maneuver warfare as empowering. Of the active duty  maneuverists, Col Michael Wyly was the most prominent.  Other early thought leaders included then-Capts Stephen Miller, G.I. Wilson, and William Woods.

The Marine Corps was not alone in reforming.  Each of the Services, and the broader Defense establishment, responded differently to the Vietnam experience. Not surprisingly, the Army and Marine Corps, which bore the brunt of the war and experienced its dysfunction most keenly, eventually enacted the most extensive reforms, although the first reforms actually came out of the Navy, or more precisely the Naval War College, where ADM Stansfield Turner reformed the curriculum almost immediately upon assuming the presidency in 1972.Three curriculum reforms were most significant for our purposes. The first was the reintroduction of strategic thought, which the Services had mostly abrogated to civilian academics by then and which had largely become focused on nuclear strategy. The second was the rediscovery of the great Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose theories at that time had been all but forgotten in favor of the more formulaic and geometric approach of the Swiss military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. The rediscovery of Clausewitzian theory, made much more accessible by the Michael Howard and Peter Paret translation of On War in 1976, was foundational to maneuver warfare theory. The third was the revival of the study of military history, which had virtually been removed from military education after the Second World War in favor of operations research and procedural training. This revival also proved important to the maneuver warfare movement.

For the Army, reform meant, among other things, returning to what it considered to be its primary mission: defeating a Soviet invasion of Europe. A new, post-Vietnam edition of the Army’s capstone doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100-5 (FM 100-5), Operations, introduced the doctrine of Active Defense in 1976. Active Defense met with immediate and widespread criticism within the Army as being too defensive and mathematical. A coordinated, Army-wide effort to develop a more offensive doctrine ensued. A new FM 100-5 introduced AirLand Battle doctrine in 1982, and a revision followed in 1986. Neither manual directly mentioned Europe or the Soviets, but it was clear that was the problem space. AirLand Battle was a rigorously reasoned doctrine—arguably more so than any of the Army doctrines that have followed. Never executed against its envisioned enemy, AirLand Battle turned out to be highly effective against the Iraqi army during Operation DESERT STORM in 1991. Moreover, AirLand Battle, elevated to the multi-Service level, became the de facto joint doctrine.

Where the Army undertook a coordinated and methodical effort to develop AirLand Battle, the maneuver warfare movement took on more the character of a back-alley brawl conducted on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette—which in retrospect is probably appropriate. Col John Greenwood, the editor of the Gazette at the time, deserves a lot of credit for encouraging and managing the debate. Being able to focus on a particular threat in a particular theater allowed the Army to write in more specific and concrete terms. As the Nation’s force-in-readiness in the 1980s, the Marine Corps did not enjoy that luxury, and one consequence is that Warfighting is more abstract and theoretical than the Army capstone manuals have tended to be. It was, as Gray wrote in the foreword, more a “philosophy for action” than a traditional doctrine. Maneuver warfare as described in Warfighting was designed to have very broad utility but required significant judgment in application, which has been a source of frustration for some Marine readers looking for more specific guidance. Conversely, as a result, Warfighting  could be written in more enduring terms, which goes some way in explaining why the Marine Corps has not found the need to update its doctrine as frequently as the Army has.

A second aspect of the historical context of maneuver warfare is that it is a product of the Cold War era and implicitly reflects that paradigm. FMFM 1’s default was the classic military force-on-force model. It did not explicitly exclude irregular warfare, but it had nothing specific to say about it either—one of the criticisms of both editions of Warfighting. The 1997 revision acknowledges the possibility of nonstate belligerents but offers no additional insights into nonclassical warfare. It is a credit to the Corps that countless Marines have extrapolated the classic theory of Warfighting to decades of irregular warfare. Arguably, Warfighting reflects a worldview that became dated when the Berlin Wall fell—or, alternatively, possibly one that is just now coming back into relevance.

 

The Maneuver vs. Attrition Debate

Perhaps the biggest controversy to arise during the development of maneuver warfare was the maneuver warfare vs. attrition warfare debate. The early maneuverists chose to describe maneuver warfare by comparing it with its opposite, which they called attrition warfare. In retrospect, this may have been an operational error that delayed the eventual acceptance of maneuver warfare. The simplistic interpretation of the argument was:  maneuver good, attrition bad. In reality, the problem was partly semantic. All warfare involves attrition—that is, incremental degradation of combat power because of accumulating losses. And all warfare involves relational movement, if only to bring weapons into position to cause more attrition. Maneuver and attrition are not a matter of either/or, but that is how proponents came to frame the issue. The Marine Corps split into two camps: the maneuverists and the attritionists. The maneuverists thought they were simply advancing ideas on a better way to fight, but the attritionists felt (with some justification) that they were being painted as Neanderthals for wanting to kill the enemy. How could attrition inflicted on an enemy possibly be bad? The attritionists thought the maneuverists were unnecessarily complicating what should be a straightforward proposition: find the enemy, destroy the enemy. (Frankly, and unfortunately, part of the attritionists’ motivation also was a reaction to the confrontational Lind, who was closely associated with the maneuver vs. attrition construct. The term “attrition warfare” assumed a pejorative connotation, so naturally some Marines adopted it as a badge of honor to show their opposition.)

The issue was not whether it was better to maneuver or to inflict attrition, because both again are inherent in warfare. In retrospect, the issue is what you choose as the mechanism by which you propose to impose defeat on the enemy. The important concept of defeat mechanism was not explicitly recognized at the time. (A later article will address defeat mechanisms.) The defeat mechanism of attrition warfare was inherent in the name: you inflicted defeat by cumulatively eroding enemy personnel and material strength or psychological resolve until he gave up the fight or eventually was eliminated. The maneuverists pointed out that this tended to be a time-consuming and costly approach. Moreover, it did not work well if there was a marked asymmetry of interests: if one belligerent was fighting merely a war of choice while the other fought a war of survival (read: Vietnam), the odds were significantly stacked.

The defeat mechanism of maneuver warfare was much harder to put your finger on.  It certainly was not inherent in the word maneuver, which many understood narrowly to mean relational movement, but which the maneuverists imbued with deeper meaning that they sometimes struggled to explain.  (A popular attritionist joke was that maneuver warfare sought to win not by defeating the enemy in battle but by “driving in circles and confusing him to death.”)

For some, the “maneuver” in maneuver warfare suggested that the doctrine was defined by the forms of maneuver it employed, namely envelopments, penetrations, and turning movements—basically anything other than a frontal attack, which by implication was considered stupid. This was a gross misunderstanding. Attritionists complained that the maneuverists could not lay exclusive claim to select forms of maneuver, and they resented the implication that they favored only frontal attacks. Others equated maneuver warfare with mechanized warfare, likely based on the tendency to associate maneuver warfare with the German blitzkrieg of the Second World War. (More about the German influence shortly.) The iconic image of Gray in utilities with desert goggles on his helmet probably reinforced the misconception.

We now understand that the defeat mechanism of maneuver warfare is systemic disruption—eliminating the enemy’s ability to operate as a coherent and cohesive whole. According to FMFM 1: “Maneuver warfare is a warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a series of rapid, violent, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which he cannot cope.”  Boyd used to talk about “tearing the enemy apart from the inside.” In other words, where attrition warfare attacks the components of the enemy system to degrade them, maneuver warfare attacks the relationships between those components to break the coherent functioning of the system.

Maneuver warfare is a systemic doctrine, which was a hard sell in 1989. The emergence of complexity theory in the 1990s, with a host of popular books on the subject, greatly enhanced the understanding of complex systems. (It also greatly enhanced the understanding of both Clausewitz and Boyd. Alan Beyerchen’s masterful “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” published in International Affairs in 1992, argued convincingly that Clausewitz intuitively understood complex nonlinear dynamics but lacked the language to describe them. Likewise, the language and concepts of complexity theory helped us to realize that Boyd’s thinking had been even farther ahead of its time than we had previously appreciated.) The 1997 revision of Warfighting was much more explicitly systemic in its description. It was still a hard sell.

Finally, complicating the issue was the often-misunderstood annihilation-attrition strategic construct. The German historian Hans Delbruck (1848-1929) posited two basic types of strategy: Ermattungsstrategie and Niederwerfungsstrategie, which were mistakenly translated in English as strategy of attrition and strategy of annihilation. The English terms are problematic because they are practically synonymous. In fact, most American readers were probably introduced to the terms in Russell Weigley’s 1973 classic The American Way of War, in which, the author later acknowledged, he had got the terms confused. The former strategy is probably better termed strategy of exhaustion, which Delbruck argued was a viable option for a weaker belligerent that lacked the ability to defeat the enemy outright and instead sought a limited objective—to raise the enemy’s costs so high that he was willing to settle on your terms rather than continue to fight. The latter is better termed a strategy of incapacitation. (The German literally means “taking-down strategy,” as in a take down in wrestling. It does not require reducing the enemy “to nothing,” the literal meaning of “annihilation” from Latin.) The latter strategy involved the outright defeat of the enemy’s ability to resist, which Delbruck argued involved the adoption of an unlimited military objective and was available only to the stronger belligerent.

 

The German Influence

Another controversy during the maneuver warfare movement was the German influence. The maneuverists, some more than others, were fond of using German historical examples and terminology. They made two arguments. The first was that the German army had in fact achieved tactical and operational excellence using maneuver warfare and was one of the few modern armies to do so. The second was that the German army was the only modern army to codify its maneuver doctrine. As a result, any primary source documents tended to be German. For the maneuverists, both arguments made the Germans worth studying. The maneuver warfare canon thus was filled with titles like Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles, Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Manstein’s Lost Victories, Rommel’s Attacks, and Schell’s Battle Leadership.

            Schwerpunkt (main effort or center of gravity), Auftragstaktik (mission tactics), Flaechen und Luekentaktik (tactics of surfaces and gaps), aufrollen (rolling up enemy forces from the flank after a penetration), and Fingerspitzengefuhl (literally “finger tips feeling,” meaning intuitive flair or instinct) found their way into the discussion, often getting mangled in pronunciation in the process.

Fueling the debate was the 1982 publication of Martin van Creveld’s Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (although it was available several years earlier as a DOD-funded study). Van Creveld did an extensive statistical analysis of 87 engagements between U.S. Army and German forces in the Second World War and concluded that German ground forces were tactically and operationally superior to U.S. forces. The oversimplified lesson that some took from Fighting Power was that German troops were 1.5 to 2.0 times better than their American counterparts, which did not sit well with many American readers and may have helped to push some into the attritionist camp. Last, but not least, the controversial Lind was an unabashed Germanophile (Prussophile is probably more accurate), and this alone produced antibodies.

In the end, Warfighting intentionally avoided the use of German terminology. Thirty years of subsequent experience has reduced the need to rely on German examples, and the controversy has largely blown over.

 

Why the Maneuver Warfare Movement Succeeded

There are several reasons for maneuver warfare’s institutional success, and those may provide lessons for today’s situation.

• The maneuver warfare movement came from a point of real institutional pain. The origin and motivation of the maneuver warfare movement, as mentioned, was the pain caused by the dysfunctional experience of the Vietnam War.  It was this motivation that sustained the movement.  Maneuver warfare was not merely an intellectual exercise, although clearly it contained an intellectual element.  In contrast, many capability development initiatives today seem like purely intellectual exercises not motivated by any institutional pain.  They appear to be change for change’s sake.
• The discourse was extensive, open, and transparent—and frequently messy. This was critical. The argument took place in the open over more than a decade. It got ugly at times, but this forced the maneuverists to strengthen their case and in the end helped garner widespread support for the doctrine. Maneuver warfare was not developed in secret by some high-level “working group” and then imposed on the rest of the institution. In today’s parlance, we might say it was crowd sourced. The open discourse went a long way toward socializing, strengthening, and eventually vetting maneuver doctrine.
• The movement operated as a classic insurgency. While the discourse took place in the open, the maneuver warfare movement itself operated like a classic insurgency, employing an inkblot strategy to gradually expand its influence over time, increasing its profile as it grew stronger. The maneuverists thought of themselves as insurgents, working to subvert the existing order. Maneuverist cells popped up spontaneously around the Marine Corps. With Gray’s succession to the Commandancy, the insurgency became the regime.
• The movement enjoyed a combination of strong visionary leadership and bottom-up, grass-roots commitment. Gray provided a compelling and unifying vision as well as critical top-cover for the insurgents. Meanwhile, Lind drew most of the attritionists’ fire, providing additional cover for the rest of the movement. But the ultimate driving force was the growing number of Marines who supported the new concepts. Maneuver warfare would not have succeeded to the extent it did without both the top-down and bottom-up dynamics.
• Maneuver warfare had strong historical and theoretical foundations. A key attribute of the maneuver warfare movement was the strength of its intellectual foundation. The maneuverists did their homework. People might have bemoaned the number of German historical examples, but there was no shortage of examples. Meanwhile, maneuver doctrine rested on a solid philosophical foundation of Sunzian, Clausewitzian, and Boydian theories. (One of the early criticisms of Warfighting was that there was “nothing new” in it. LtGen P.K. Van Riper used to respond that that was true: there was nothing in Warfighting that wasn’t in Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, or Boyd. The trick of Warfighting was that it managed to synthesize those three disparate theories into a coherent whole.) In contrast, too many contemporary warfighting concepts appear to be no more than PowerPoint deep. Moreover, many seem to be anti-historical, implying or openly asserting that some technological or other innovation has so “changed the fundamental nature of war” that there is nothing to be learned from the past.
• The process involved significant experimentation. Long before there was a Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, Second Marine Division became a maneuver warfare laboratory when Gray took command in 1981 and declared at an all-officers call at the base theater that maneuver warfare was the division’s official doctrine. The pinnacle of experimentation was the annual Combined Arms Operation at Fort Pickett, VA, a completely free-play, force-on-force exercise pitting some combination of battalions against each other. At ENDEX each day, all officers and staff NCOs would drive back to the base theater at mainside for an extensive hotwash moderated personally by Gray, with Lind in attendance like a Prussian Nestor. The Combined Arms Operation and similar exercises went a long way toward creating additional maneuverists.

 

Conclusion

To understand where you are and where you are going, it is important to know where you have been. The future evolves from the past. This short history of the development of maneuver warfare in the Marine Corps may illuminate some worthwhile questions for the Marine Corps today as it faces yet another transition after long period of war: Is there institutional pain today sufficient to drive doctrinal and other reform? Is that pain even a necessary ingredient now as it was then? (Arguably, the effort that led to the initial development of amphibious doctrine in the 1930s was not based on institutional pain but simply on a clear-eyed assessment of the future security environment.) Must any successful reform involve a bottom-up grass roots movement, and must it too take the form of an institutional insurgency? Will there need to emerge another Gray, Boyd, Wyly, or Lind? Should or how should maneuver warfare adapt to recent and emerging changes in warfare? Or, more fundamentally, has warfare changed sufficiently that the Marine Corps should reconsider its basic doctrine? Most Marines would instinctively and emphatically say, “No!”—but does that mean the question should not be asked?

 

by MajGen William F. Mullen III

With the publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1, Warfighting, our 29th Commandant, Gen Alfred M. Gray, cemented maneuver warfare not only as the Service doctrine, but as a warfighting philosophy to guide all Marine Corps actions. It excelled at shaping how the Marine Corps prepared and pursued war as evidenced by the successes achieved during the Gulf War and beyond. Unfortunately, our ability to think and act as maneuver warfare adherents diminished during the steady state operational periods of the subsequent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and caused our 37th Commandant, Gen Robert B. Neller, to ask, “How do we reinvigorate Maneuver warfare?” This question caused me to think long and hard, and the result was the conclusion that our Marine Corps needs to fundamentally change how it educates, mans, trains, equips, and even perceives its close combat forces. Before we get to those recommended changes though, we need to describe how we arrived at this point.

The Decline of Maneuver warfare

I believe Gen Neller asked the question regarding reinvigorating maneuver warfare for three primary reasons. First, the changes we have seen in the Fleet Marine Forces over the past eighteen years of involvement in Operations ENDURING FREEDOM and IRAQI FREEDOM. After the successful maneuver warfare centric invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency operations required Marines to “fight” from largely static positions. While small units employed maneuver warfare to gain positions of advantage during firefights, large-scale maneuvering was not required, which caused our skills to atrophy overall. These changes were compounded by the increased operational tempo, a great deal more prescription with training requirements, and less time between deployments. The result over time has generated small unit leaders who are less engaged with their subordinate unit leaders and leaders, in general, being more directive because of a lack of trust. These factors also engendered the belief on the part of many of our leaders that they had little to no control over the training in preparation for deployment, so they did not take ownership as much as they should. These factors have also led to a decrease in subordinate initiative where we have subordinate leaders thinking it is acceptable to merely wait for orders instead of taking intelligent initiative based on intent.

The second reason is the growth of technology that enables seniors to reach well down into the lowest tactical levels to direct actions they deem appropriate, as well as the extensive reporting requirements that only seem to grow from year to year. The ability to rapidly communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time is a tremendous temptation that can, and often does, lead to overreach for non-essential and seemingly spurious reasons. Rather than increasing our speed, it causes hesitation and, in some cases, paralysis on the part of subordinates. Reporting is a major factor in this since control from above—real or perceived—inhibits subordinate confidence resulting in a reluctance to take the initiative and act on intent. The growth in both directive control and reporting requirements leads subordinates to feel they are not trusted, and this further undermines our maneuver warfare philosophy because these things lead to the perception that the leaders of our institution do not understand our own philosophy and that our institution itself does not act as if our philosophy matters.

The third reason is that, over the past few decades, our Corps has increasingly allowed a focus on expensive acquisition programs to dominate our thinking, investment priorities, and even worse, to define who we are in our dialogue with Congress and the American people. While driven by the demands of the planning, programming, budgeting, and executing process and understandable to a point, none of these programs define the Marine Corps. Our Marines define the Marine Corps. Even if we had none of these programs, our ethos would enable us to find a way to get the mission accomplished. By allowing the planning, programming, budgeting, and executing agenda to drive our narrative, our internal audience—our Marines—have focused more on the material things they believe they need instead of the requirement for personal professional development of our leaders and the pursuit of tactical competence across our units.

The three reasons mentioned above have also combined with an institutional obstacle that currently stands in the way of enabling maneuver warfare. This institutional obstacle is the way we man units that inhibits the timely building of cohesive teams. The “business rules” approach to manning almost guarantees a lack of available time to form a cohesive unit and build the trust that is essential to the conduct of maneuver warfare. Based on our strategic guidance, the units that need to adhere to our warfighting policy the most are our close combat units, but they consistently seem to be the lowest priority for ensuring the best quality leadership at every level, particularly at the small unit level. We spend a great deal of time and effort selecting lieutenant colonel-level commanders and sergeants major, while spending little to no time ensuring that they have a fully manned and qualified command team all the way down to perhaps the most important point—the squad level.

The challenge with all that has been stated above is that there is perceived to be a “say-do” gap in that we profess to believe in our maneuver warfare philosophy, but, in practice, we are doing things that undermine our ability to adhere to that philosophy for a variety of reasons. This say-do gap creates dissonance within our ranks while undermining the credibility of senior leaders and belief in the institution overall.

Maneuver Warfare’s Essential Ingredients

Our philosophy of maneuver warfare can only exist when essential ingredients are present. The first, most important, ingredient in maneuver warfare is having leaders who possess maturity, intelligence, and a coach/teach/mentor mentality. Also, these leaders must understand our philosophy thoroughly and possesses the ability to inculcate every aspect of it in their units. The lack of such leaders inhibits getting to even the rudiments of our philosophy because if the leader is not interested or does not understand it, no one else in the unit will care. As with just about everything else, it has to start with the unit commanding officer, and since we seem to be suffering from anti-intellectualism where so many of our leaders do not read and study their profession anywhere near enough, many leaders today too often lack the required level of understanding.

The second ingredient is unit cohesion. It comes from a team having all its key leadership positions filled and stable for the entire duration of its training, deployment, and recovery period. It also comes from a solid and challenging training regimen—based on a clearly understood higher purpose—that demonstrates to all on the team that each member can be counted on and assists all leaders in understanding the capabilities and the limitations of their seniors and subordinates. Sun Tzu told us to know ourselves, and this is what cohesion enables. Without knowing ourselves and coming together as a team, we would merely be lucky to beat any opponent.

The third ingredient is competence. Competence on the part of seniors and subordinates needs to come both upon their arrival with a solid base of knowledge regarding the billet they will hold, as well as participating as part of the team during the training period that demonstrates the competence of all the unit’s leaders. This demonstration of competence further enables cohesion. Without competence in the senior leader, subordinates doubt the capacity of the unit to accomplish any mission, and the effect is corrosive in the extreme. Without competent subordinates, leaders distrust their subordinates’ ability to fulfill their intent in an effective way. In both cases, units experience difficulty in building cohesion, and their poor performance reflects this condition during training, or worse, in combat.

When you combine the ingredients above, you gain the trust between seniors and subordinates that is absolutely critical and which enables them to operate as a team with little more than intent to go by as the guiding premise. This trust enables seniors to know that their subordinates will take their intent and accomplish the mission in the best manner possible, regardless of changing conditions, and require little more in the way of guidance unless the intent needs to change. It also enables subordinates to trust that their seniors will not micro-manage them or pull the rug out from under them when they take whatever action is required to accomplish the intent provided. There is a reason why people refer to the speed of trust—when you have it, you need less communication, and it provides for a great deal more initiative which results in greater agility across the organization. Without it, you have leaders hesitant to make decisions and more oriented on protecting themselves than in accomplishing the mission as quickly and effectively as possible.

What is described above can best be stated as the maneuver warfare equation: Quality Leaders + Extended Cohesion + Core Competence = TRUST. This trust is essential to action maneuver warfare. Without trust, there can be no mission command. Without trust, combined arms is dangerous at worst, ineffective at best. Trust is the fundamental fuel that is needed for the future fight. Our Corps’ challenge is that almost every institutional process we utilize works against this equation, and when coupled with a high operational tempo, we will always fall short. With that said though, we do achieve this ideal in some cases with the commanders who “get it” and work to achieve this in the units they command. Absent the institutional processes that standardize and enable the equation above, we will fail to achieve consistent and predictable outcomes. In order to reinvigorate maneuver warfare, we have to change the way we educate, man, train, and equip our close combat forces, which is where we need this capability the most.

Reinvigorating Maneuver Warfare in the 21st Century

To alleviate the challenges mentioned above and thereby enable the Corps to return to fulfilling our maneuver warfare philosophy, we need to treat the close combat forces of the Marine Corps differently. Given our strategic guidance, these forces are our Corps’ direct bid for success when executing daily tasks in the current and future operating environments. As our strategic guidance specifically directs, these close combat units must be educated, manned, trained, and equipped differently from the rest of the Marine Corps. An analogy would be a NFL team. Everyone in the organization is a member of the team, but those who go out onto the field to engage with the opposing team directly are the ones who get the most focus, so they are treated differently from everyone else. They are the team’s bid for success—they win the game through their actions on the field. It is the same for our close combat units, so they must be treated differently also. The changes recommended below apply across the Marine Corps in some cases, but apply to our close combat force in particular:

Education. We need to establish career length PME continuums for our officers and SNCOs, with progress in them tied to promotion and strictly enforced. It has to be more than just attending a formal PME course or accomplishing it through distance education. All of our leaders need to understand that they have joined a profession and that there are career length continuing education requirements that must be accomplished to continue to be a member of the profession of arms. We are currently working on proposals for these continuums, which, if adopted, need to be sustained and enforced across the Marine Corps. We must have more intelligent leaders at every level who truly understand our philosophy and what is required to make it work. This becomes even more imperative as we increase in rank and responsibility. As former Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis once said, “the price of a lack of competence in our profession is filling body bags until we figure it out.” This has never been acceptable, but as the pace of change in the operating environment gets faster and the challenges get more complex, his statement is truer now than ever.

Manning. We need to prioritize stability and cohesion over a longer term in our close combat forces much more than we do now. As soon as a close combat unit returns from post-deployment leave, all of the new members they are going to get should be standing by and ready to join to enable the team to cohere and train throughout the entire work up period. This in particular means leaders at their normal table of organization rank with the training they need to set them up for success accomplished before they arrive at their unit.

Each leader in a close combat formation needs to be periodically evaluated, to include 360-degree evaluations, to eradicate toxic leadership. These evaluations can be used with more junior leaders to influence them to be better leaders if there is a challenge, but as leaders become more senior, they get less of a chance for remediation, especially if they have been counseled earlier in their career for the lack of appropriate leadership. Our Marines deserve only the best, most committed leaders we can provide, and we need to be ruthless in the pursuit of that objective. Again, leaders in close combat units have to be treated differently. We try as an institution to enable stringent screening of commanders, but we continue to see evidence that we still have room to improve.

We need to ensure our small unit leaders are competent and have something that sets them apart from the junior Marines they are leading. We can do this by making the advanced infantry training courses provided by the Schools of Infantry both required and “Ranger School-like” experiences for our junior leaders. This will cause them to realize that before they go, they need to be well prepared, and when they return, they are a different person from the Marine they were previously. The more junior courses should be a requirement for promotion to the next grade with the honor graduate promoted two ranks. This will generate a much better sense of confidence in our junior leaders and will enable the Marines they lead to truly look up to them as someone they can aspire to be—they will also be more likely to be the role model leaders that we need given the guidance we have received. The Squad Leader Development Program is a step in the right direction, but it is not nearly enough.

We need to raise the required GT score as well as the lower age limit for membership in our close combat units so that we get the smarter, more mature Marines we need. The Information Age we are in has generated a sense of transparency through increased access to information which means that more people, to include our Marines, are “influence-able” by the dissemination of disinformation. This is especially true since many of our young Marines are not inclined to dig deeply or think critically about what they are mentally absorbing. If it rhymes with what they want to believe, they are inclined to accept it as fact. As we pursue our national interests across the globe, our Marines must understand the impact of their every action, or inaction, or we will continue to experience challenges in the operational environment. Whether willful or not, ignorance threatens our ability to accomplish our assigned missions, undermines public confidence in our institution, and erodes trust within our ranks.

An adjunct to what was stated above is that the more junior members of our close combat units need to understand that they are not entitled to be there. They should have to earn their spot on the team, and keep it over time, through demonstrated performance in all aspects of training and being a Marine 24/7. Failure to comply means being warned and counseled at first then cut from the close combat team for failure to adjust. When cut, they should be placed in a pool of Marines who have also failed to comply. These Marines will continue to train in order to try and earn a spot in a different unit (as long as there are no legal or behavioral issues) and will have one more chance to be a part of a close combat unit if they are recommended for that chance by the leadership of the training pool. If they fail again, they are given another MOS or a job elsewhere supporting the fleet. This effort is designed to get at the “need to belong” that Dick Couch speaks of in his book A Tactical Ethic (NEED COMPLETE INFORMATION). If Marines know they will have to earn their spot, then protect what they have earned through continuous performance, just like on a football team, most will rise to the occasion with a corresponding rise in the competence and cohesion of our close combat units. Once they realize that they can lose their spot, they will work a great deal harder to stay there and the training pools will not be as large as some might think.

Training. Our close combat units deploy for different reasons and their training is, and should continue to be, oriented on the challenges they will face once deployed. That said, there still needs to be a culminating event that everyone recognizes will likely be more difficult than what they will face when deployed. Whether this is a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation or an Service-level training exercise, it needs to be standardized from the standpoint that the evaluators see many different units and can best judge the unit they are currently looking at by direct comparison. It also needs to be fully instrumented to enable the collection of every aspect of the exercise. This will enable data analysis for identification of trends that need to be fixed across the force. They should also train against a live, thinking enemy, and train to failure at every opportunity—with each event reviewed in the after-action review process and reset to be run again if needed to cement in the lessons that need to be learned.

The physical training for close combat units also needs to be different from the rest of the Marine Corps. To get to the warrior athletes we need, the regimen needs to include aspects of functional fitness as well as hiking and combat endurance courses as part of a regular routine for these forces. It should also include nutrition counseling and the involvement of athletic trainers to prevent injury and help with recovery when injury occurs. We have made a start in this area but need to do more. There should also be a different Combat Fitness Test for close combat units that involves some challenges and tactical tasks coupled with hiking and speed marching to ensure that every member of the team is in peak physical condition and able to keep up under combat conditions. Once again, different rules for the close combat units that are our bid for success on the battlefield.

Equipping. The way we spend money has to demonstrate what is most important to us and that means we should be spending a great deal more on our close combat units. By several estimates that were validated by the Office of the Secretary of Defense continuing and professional education as well as listed in our strategic guidance, these close combat units take 90 percent of the casualties in combat, yet form the smallest percentage of our Marine Corps overall. An accelerated acquisition process coupled with prioritizing close combat units will enable them, and only them, to get the best equipment and technology available in the shortest amount of time. This focus on our close combat units will significantly enhance our chances of winning in combat, but it will also demonstrate to the members of those units that they are indeed our main focus. Special operations forces already have this focus, and the more we can approach what they do for their teams, the better. This is not to make our close combat units a close replica of special operations forces, but to give them more confidence in what they are using in combat and more confidence in themselves as a team. We have to ensure that any fight we engage in with our close combat units is not a fair fight in any way. We have to dominate and win every fight, or we will have lost in everyone else’s eyes. The confidence that comes from clear dominance is priceless.

Enabling and Sustaining

Bureaucracies follow certain predictable behaviors regardless of the requirements levied upon them. As a large, bureaucratic institution we struggle against organizational friction to enact lasting change —the recommendations contained in this article are no exception. Making some or all of the changes recommended in this article has the potential to reinvigorate maneuver warfare, but change of this nature also takes more time than most think—it is a generational shift that must be sustained over time. When we get distracted by a high operational tempo, we tend to lose focus. To prevent this, we should establish maneuver warfare tactical contact teams consisting of recognized experts who visit exercises, talk to the participants, observe operations, and provide relevant lessons learned to all concerned. These contact teams should be the conduit through which lessons are disseminated in all directions and can be the “directed telescope” for the Commandant to be able to measure and influence progress toward enabling the maneuver warfare culture throughout the Marine Corps, but in particular, in our close combat units where it is essential to success.

All of this is a great deal to ask, but so is combat, especially when data indicates that the units we are talking about take the overwhelming percentage of casualties in any fight. Becoming a part of one of these units, as well as continuing to maintain one’s position or move up in one of them has to be something different from the average Marine experience. There are those who will call these changes unfair but so is taking 90 percent of the casualties in any fight. Institutionalizing the measures required to reinvigorate and maintain a culture of maneuver warfare are vitally necessary to ensure that the next close combat fight we engage in is a crushing and thoroughly demoralizing experience for anyone who chooses to be our opponent in that fight.