"I served over 31 years' active duty with the Marine Corps, saw combat in both Korea and Vietnam, and attended service schools from the Basic School to the National War College. Yet only toward the end of my military career did I realize how little I really understood the art of war. Even as a PFC in Korea, after being medevaced along with most of my platoon after a fruitless frontal assault against superior North Korean forces, it seemed to me there had to be a better way to wage war. Seventeen years later, commanding a battalion at Khe Sanh, I was resolved that none of my Marines would die for lack of superior combat power. But we were still relying on the concentration of superior firepower to win-essentially still practicing Grant's attrition warfare. And we were still doing frontal assaults!"

--Col. John C. Studt

Many Marines are poker players. When you play poker, you often try to control the expression on your face so as to mislead your opponents. We call that a poker face, and you often use it to bluff. You use it to gain a decisive advantage, one that does not come simply from the strength of the cards you hold. That is leverage.

LEVERAGE

Many Marines study martial arts. A major principle of most martial arts is using the opponent's strength and momentum against him. Again, this gains a decisive advantage; it gives you more force than your muscles can provide. That is leverage.

Leverage through a decisive advantage is our next tactical concept. It runs through all tactics. A light infantry force draws an enemy armored force into rugged, wooded terrain. Unable to see more than a couple hundred yards and restricted to moving on roads, the tanks are easy targets for infantrymen who remain invisible. The infantry destroys the armor by gaining a decisive advantage through terrain.

An attack aircraft flies at treetop level, hugging the earth's contour. Recognizing the upcoming bluffs on his right as his reference point, the pilot pops the aircraft into a vertical climb to locate the enemy column at his 11 o'clock. He quickly rolls in to strafe and rocket the enemy vehicles. Despite enemy air defenses, the pilot destroys several vehicles and stalls the enemy convoy. By flying at an extremely low level and climbing quickly, the pilot evaded the enemy's air defenses. Neither radar nor shoulder-launched antiair weapons could acquire a target. The pilot attacked with a decisive advantage.

A Marine Air-Ground Task Force, using a mechanized force and deep air support, successfully penetrates the enemy's forward defenses and immediately exploits the breakthrough. As the force enters the enemy's support areas, it encounters extensive minefields. Few tanks and vehicles are destroyed, but many lose tracks and roadwheels, and the exploitation is threatened. As these mobility kills mount, momentum lessens. However, combat maintenance teams, traveling with the penetrating force, quickly repair the salvageable vehicles. The MAGTF recovers enough lost vehicles to restore its momentum and turns the exploitation into a pursuit, completely routing the enemy force. Marines gained a decisive advantage by being able to return vehicles to service as fast as the enemy could disable them.

Each of these cases illustrates leverage, or decisive advantage. Too often in history, people have thought of war as a jousting contest between medieval knights where rules put each knight on an equal basis. All they were allowed to do was charge head-on at each other. Like all sports, jousting was carefully designed to be fair.

In war, however, we shouldn't play at jousting. Victory goes to the side that fights smart. Creating and making use of decisive advantages is central to modern tactics. What are some ways you can gain leverage through decisive advantages?

ASYMMETRY

A common element in most cases of leverage is asymmetry. Think of a lever: its power comes from the fact that the fulcrum is not equidistant from the ends of the lever. The two arms of the lever are asymmetrical, and by putting force on the longer side, you get leverage.

The same is true of war. Considering a war in Europe, one Soviet specialist was questioned concerning the Soviet answer to the superiority of the U.S. Air Force's F-15 fighter. He replied that the answer was not another Soviet fighter; it was putting a T-72 tank on the U.S. Air Force's runway.

That is asymmetry.

Fighting asymmetrically is not simply a matter of countering enemy forces with unlike forces: aircraft against tank or infantry against armor. Asymmetry also depends upon tactics that use the enemy's weaknesses as leverage. When an infantry force encounters an enemy infantry force entrenched in a linear defense, its leaders need not call tanks forward to apply asymmetry. Attacks by penetration and infiltration are asymmetrical tactics. Instead of attacking frontally, the infantry commander seeks to avoid the enemy's linear strength by either filtering forces through the defensive position for a follow-on attack (infiltration) or by concentrating his efforts on a very narrow front (penetration). He gains leverage by avoiding the preponderance of enemy combat power dispersed across a wide front.

AMBUSH

Perhaps the most common tactical tool for gaining leverage and a decisive advantage is the ambush. All Marines are familiar with an ambush as a type of combat patrol.

In maneuver warfare, ambush takes on a much broader meaning, and the ambush mentality runs through all tactics. The ambush mentality is probably not new to you. You may know the ambush mentality from sports. In football, the trap block is an ambush. You pull an offensive lineman off the line, leaving a hole. When a defender comes through the hole, another lineman suddenly blocks him from the side, usually knocking him down. You blind-side him. That is the ambush mentality.

In basketball, setting up a pick is an ambush. As your teammate drives to the basket, you step into the defender's path from behind, blocking his path, stopping his defense, and momentarily clearing a new lane to the basket. Again, that is the ambush mentality.

The ambush mentality tries to turn every situation into an ambush. In this broader sense, an ambush has several distinct qualities.

First, in an ambush you try to surprise the enemy. Think of a patrol that you ambush. They are walking through the woods when suddenly, out of nowhere, they are under fire from every direction. Probably they are taking heavy casualties. In addition, their thinking may be paralyzed. The psychological effect of surprise has a quality all its own. To have an ambush mentality means that you always try to surprise the enemy, to do the unexpected. Surprise is the rule rather than the exception.

Second, you want to draw your enemy unknowingly into a trap. This will often involve deceiving him. You make one course of action appear inviting when, in fact, that is just where you want him to come because you are waiting for him.

Third, an ambush is invisible. If the ambush is not invisible, it ceases to be an ambush and becomes a target. On the modern battlefield, if you can be seen, you can be destroyed. Whether you are defending or attacking, the enemy must not see you until it is too late, until he is falling to your fires. Surprise often depends upon invisibility.

The reverse slope defense is an example of using invisibility to spring an ambush. The enemy does not know you are there until he comes over the crest of a hill and is hit by your fires. His vehicles are hit on their soft underbellies. His troops stand fully exposed to your weapons. Because he could not see you until the last moment, he could not plaster you with artillery fire. The reverse slope not only protects you from his fire; it protects you from his observation. That is the ambush mentality: do not let yourself be seen.

Fourth, in an ambush you want to shock the enemy. Instead of taking him under fire gradually with a few weapons at long range, you wait until he is within easy range of every weapon. You then open up suddenly, all at once, with everything you've got. He is paralyzed, at least for a time, by the shock. He cannot react. Everything was going fine, no enemy seemed to be anywhere around, and suddenly he is in a firestorm with people falling all around him. Often, he will panic, making his problem worse.

Finally, in the ambush mentality, you always focus on the enemy. The purpose of an ambush is not to hold a piece of terrain. It is to destroy the enemy. You use terrain to effect the ambush, but terrain is not what you are fighting for.

MANEUVER

Gaining a decisive advantage is what maneuver is all about. Fighting by rules and checklists leads to linear defenses and frontal attacks. As you know, frontal attacks and linear defenses tend to be indecisive. To attain a decision, you need a decisive advantage, and you often get it by maneuvering.

What do we think of when we say "maneuver"? The classical view of maneuver is movement in combination with fire to gain advantage over the enemy. [2] It conjures visions of a base of fire that keeps the enemy's head down while a maneuver element moves around the enemy's flank to assault from behind. Most of us recognize this maneuver as an envelopment.

An envelopment represents one general type of maneuver: maneuver in space. We can identify at least one other general type as well: maneuver in time. We can perhaps see each of these best by looking at air-to-air combat.

Classic air-to-air combat, as in a World War I dogfight, illustrates maneuver in space. Through turns, climbs, dives, and other moves, each aircraft seeks to gain an advantage in position--usually trying to get behind the enemy, in his six o'clock. Aircraft that can make tighter turns or climb faster or pull out of a dive better than their opponents have an advantage because they can better maneuver in space to get into an advantageous position.

Maneuver in time is shown in air-to-air combat by varying speed or use of energy. Here, in addition to classic dogfight moves, the pilot also varies the speed of his aircraft, trying to combine turns, climbs, and dives with acceleration and deceleration. The pilot wants to runs his opponent out of energy--to lead him into going slow at a moment when he will need speed. While the opponent needs to accelerate, which takes time, the pilot uses that time to get into an advantageous position to shoot him down.

We see the same tactics in ground warfare. As noted, an envelopment is maneuver in space; you come around the enemy's flank. When we operate at a faster tempo than the enemy, e.g., if we can attack into his depth faster than he can shift reserves laterally to block us, we maneuver in time. Each type of maneuver gives us leverage; when we can combine them, we get still more leverage.

BUILDING ON ADVANTAGE

Once you have used one or another of these tools to create a decisive advantage and gain leverage, you must exploit it. FMFM 1 emphasizes exploiting opportunities to "create in increasing numbers more opportunities for exploitation. " [3]

In tactics, you exploit by seizing and maintaining the initiative to create decisive advantages faster than the enemy can cope with them. That means you must think ahead to your next move and the one beyond it: How are you going to use this decisive advantage to create yet another one? For example, in an attack by infiltration, once you have created one decisive advantage by bypassing the enemy's strength and getting into his rear, you create another by pouring forces through the gap you have found or created, generating the "expanding torrent" Liddell-Hart wrote about. [4]

Rommel recounts in Attacks how during World War I exploiting each advantage in the battle for Kuk in the Carpathian mountains led to yet another opportunity. As his detachment exploited each opportunity and moved farther behind the enemy's lines, it generated more surprise and consequent leverage. It was during this action that Rommel's detachment captured thousands of enemy soldiers with very little fighting, due largely to his unwillingness to lose momentum. One success led directly to another opportunity which he immediately seized. [5]

SUMMARY

As we said, leverage is about fighting smart. It is about using judo against an opponent who thinks he is in a fistfight. It is about overrunning his position with infantry as he prepares his anti-armor defenses. It is about not letting him know you are at his six o'clock with your F-18 until your cannon shells are ripping off his wing. It is about doing an impossible maneuver because you have cut loose from your supply line, knowing your logisticians can take another route and meet you before you run out of supplies.

We often see Marines fight this way in field exercises. Often, their role is that of the opposition forces. They fight smart because they are greatly outnumbered. They are generally effective far beyond their numbers because they fight smart. They infiltrate your lines. They capture your command post. They interdict your supply. They ambush you. In short, they fight only when they have a decisive advantage.

The lesson is: to fight smart, gain leverage. However, to be effective, tactics must go beyond merely gaining the upper hand.