This is the first in a series of articles designed to expose the wargame player to the concepts of "maneuver warfare" which form the basis of the US Army's AirLand Battle doctrine first articulated in 1982 with that year's edition of FM 100-5 Operations. While the concepts are as old as warfare itself, recently, they have been expressed more clearly than ever before. Most I have to say in these articles is founded on the work of William S. Lind and his book Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Westview: 1985) and a handful of other works I was able to run across in the last eight years or so.

Maneuver Warfare (MW), in its modern conception, received a bad name from day one. While it tends to describe the process of battle in a way better than any previous effort, its advocates approached it in a rigid and dogmatic fashion which left a bad taste in many a mouth. Like any other theory of warfare, when MW is used in a rigid manner it fails to work correctly. Also, MW manages to go against the gain of centuries of western thought.

MW stresses hitting your opponent when he's down and kicking hardest at the weak and helpless- hardly chivalrous behavior! As late as the 1991 Gulf War, a few American commanders desired a good "clean" fight to all this flanking nonsense. Old ideas take the longest to die.

So what is this MW stuff and how does it relate to the games I play? In this article I'll give a brief overview of the whole subject. Follow-on articles will address each point and give examples of how they might be applied to game play. Certain concepts (such as the intent of the commander) will have little meaning in most wargames-since typically in games the overall commander and the subordinate commanders are one in the same person. Most of these ideas can help game play and also give the gamer (who I can assume is also a student of military history) some things to think about when analyzing campaigns of the past.

The basis of MW theory is the work of Colonel John Boyd. For the Air Force, he examined the 10: 1 kill ratio of air to air combats in Korea to come up with a reason why. His research hit upon what is now called the Boyd Theory, decision loop, or cycle. In many of the traditional measurements of aircraft performance-turning ability, rate or climb, etc.-North Korean aircraft were on par or better with US types. No good case could be made that their pilots were inept.

The key, Boyd discovered, was in the mundane function of flight controls in conjunction with the F86's excellent bubble canopy. US aircraft had highly robust and responsive hydraulic controls. Korean aircraft had slow push rod types. The result? Whenever a US pilot made some maneuver, the Korean would attempt a response. Because of his slower controls, the Korean would fall behind the American and, as the US pilot switched from maneuver to maneuver, his actions would eventually cause him to either panic and do something stupid which would give the US pilot an opportunity to exploit. This, Col. Boyd refers to as an "OODA Cycle."

This cycle consists of Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action. The pilot observes his surroundings, orients himself to them, makes a decision on what to do, and acts on that decision. This follows with an observation of the effect of his action and a determination of the changed circumstances-which generates another loop of the cycle. This Boyd Cycle can also be applied to ground warfare, where a force through executing one or more cycles can eliminate the other side's will to act due to the helpless state of confusion inflicted on it. Since this is a dynamic process with both sides executing Boyd cycles as quickly as they can, a side with a superior "cyclic rate" will have a decided edge. As Dr. Lind states:

If one side in a conflict can consistently go through the Boyd Cycle faster than the other, it gains a tremendous advantage. By the time the slower side acts, the faster side is doing something different from what he observed, and his action is inappropriate. With each cycle, the slower party's action is inappropriate by a larger time margin. Even though he desperately strives to do something that will work, each action is less useful than its predecessor; he falls further and further behind. Ultimately he ceases to be effective.

Many examples through history can show the effects of unmatched OODA processes. For instance, the French in 1940 could never quite react to the German onslaught that unfolded on them--from the time they first believed the thrust would be from the north until they finally realized that the Ardennes was the main attack, only to be caught completely by surprise by Guderian's drive to the sea. Eventually, even with superior numbers and many better tanks, the Allies ceased to be a factor in their own defense.

Certainly, any attack that has the backing of surprise starts out way ahead when it comes to Boyd Cycles. Surprise itself is a manifestation of how offguard a side was for the eventuality that hit it. Offguard meaning ill-prepared or ill-equipped to deal with the problem and a measure of the degree of change in posture required to meet the unexpected thrust. An example would be the act of identifying the German main effort in 1940, then having to turn around all the columns driving north into Belgium so they could deal with it-no small logistical feat. This effect is much akin to the over-used phrase applied to Judo of using your opponent's weight against him.

Much of the rest of Dr. Lind's book is devoted to how a modem military can obtain faster Boyd Cycle rates in order to use them to win. For our purposes, a few of his ideas are most helpful: the concept of a Schwerpunkt, Surfaces and Gaps, the use of firepower (and especially his definition of combined arms), counterattacks, and the use of reserves. Also of use to us wargamers are the concepts of a culmination point and "center of gravity" which are given a fuller use and description in FM100-5.

I will dispense with the detailed discussion of the structure of the infantry squad, the reconstruction of the five-paragraph field order so as to obtain "mission-type" orders and the examinations of how MW can and should be applied to the United States Marine Corps. These have a proper place in his book given the purpose it served but will be of little use to us here.

In later articles I will address each of the topics listed above. In the case of this particular article I wish to more fully develop the concept of the OODA loop as applied to wargames. In most games, Boyd Cycles do not matter. Each playerfollows the turn sequence, takes as long as he wants to decide what to do, it happens right away, and so on. Any discrepancy between forces might be handled as a differing movement or combat value between units of either side and is rigidly determined before play. In the early development of the OCS system I looked long and hard at this issue-wanting to come up with something better. I gave units ratings based on their "speed" which allowed them to move/ fight in differing phases. A good unit might move/ fight three times in a turn and a poor one once. This path was abandoned long ago since the slow side was boring to play and the turns took far too long. What remains of that in the OCS system is the action rating which still allows better units more frequent access to the "Exploitation Phase" as well as better chances at surprise and combat in general.

In the TCS system, OODA's were added directly and in the form they take in real life. In this case, the side's Command Rating isan OODA speed. Both sides can see the current situation but the side with the faster rating will be able to do something about it earlier. Then when the slower side's plan kicks in, it will be inappropriate. Better yet, the game system allows some players to be paralyzed while playing catch-up--they constantly are found ditching old plans because they are not relevant in order to start working up new ones which will suffer the same fate, all the while their units are languishing inactive.

The CWB inflicts the same delay system but does so in a leader by leader fashion which is more accurate for the times.

Without umpires and games with built-in allowances for OODA's there is little a player can do to out-loop his opponent. An elaborate deception plan might lure your opponent into throwing his best units into part of the map from which they will be a long time in getting to the real action-but such events are hard to pull off and once your master plan is unveiled, it won't be long before those units are in the thick of it.

In the OCS, even without the complex sequencing of earlier versions, the logistical system makes it difficult to divert large forces rapidly enough to meet any unexpected assault. In the TCS, and to a lesser extent CWB, reaction times are slow enough that a duped opponent will not be able to re-face his anny to meet your attack if it comes from an unexpected direction.

MW, as said earlier, is not new in application-only in description. The methods of the German Blitzkrieg make good sense when examined in the light of MW. Extremely strong attacks on limited frontage, deep exploitation, countless recon probes in directions away from the current line of advance which allow the main effort to follow a line of least resistance, and the constant changing of direction of the main effort as it exploits these lines of least resistance. The combination of effects here is some- thing that armies unused to such fighting simply cannot deal with. By the time the slower force identi- fies the attack at village A, the enemy main effort is switching direction to hit road junction B. The slower force sends troops to village A and then later redirects them to road junction B. Having exploited these two weak points already, the fast force is already on its way to C. And so on...