Maneuver: Part 1

Last time I spoke of some of the underpinnings of maneuver warfare and presented the whole subject with a very broad brush. This article hopes to flesh out the actual theory of maneuver warfare (as well as its antithesis, attritional warfare) in much greater detail. I am uniquely assisted in this task by the recent publication of Leonhard's book (see "For Further Reading" at the end of this article) which clarified the subject in my own mind better than any work I have read before.

Dr. Lind's work (as referenced in the last article) spoke of maneuver warfare, but did so through the filter of German war theory as used in World War II. In doing so, Dr. Und leaves the impression (as he did with me) that what he was talking about was maneuver warfare as a whole-not a small segment of it. That clarification made, and armed with a more broadly based understanding of the theory itself, here we go.

Attrition vs. Maneuver Warfare

The two basic forms of war (or at least conceptions of how to win) can be considered to be attritional warfare and maneuver warfare. Both seek to win, but both the method of defining winning and the means of obtaining it are the differences between the two theories. The key difference is that attritional warfare seeks to win by destroying the enemy's mass. Maneuver warfare, on the other hand, seeks to win by defeating the enemy and (more importantly) it contends that defeat does not require destruction of the enemy.

Since our army has traditionally espoused an attritional based concept of warfare, it has looked upon battle as the end point of operational planningthat the goal of all operations is to bring on a battle with the enemy, which we will attempt to win. In this view, the operational and strategic realms of war are driven by the tactical level's needs. The disconnect in the train of thought of such thinking is that it assumes that the war will be won by the side which obtains the most "tactical victory points" or that the side which wins the most little tactical engagements will win the war.

Attritional warfare thinking sees beating the enemy in head-on battle as the way to win. Thinking of this sort will inevitably devolve upon such things as force ratios and exchange rates as indicators of winning or losing. An attrition minded commander will try to obtain the best possible force ratio and a favorable exchange rate--then he will sit back assured that he will "win" because his opponent will be algebraically destroyed before he himself will. "Bleeding the enemy white" and other such concepts from World War I come to mind.

Doctrinal assumptions can make attritional warfare inescapable. In the seventies and early eighties US army doctrine concentrated on "winning the first battle of the next war." Aside from the potentially incorrect political and military structures built into that statement, there is also the blatant assumption that there would be a "first battle." This is also represented in American thought whereby captains and lieutenants are charged with fighting and winning the battle, higher echelons merely feed reinforcements, supplies, and fires into the battle to assist them. The attrition minded would see battle as two forces leaning into each other with their full weight with the better winning by out-lasting the enemy.

As the opposite of attrition, maneuver warfare questions the very need of any battle at all-and desires to avoid it if possible. If I may paraphrase Sun Tzu: to win a hundred battles does not show great generalship, to win campaigns without fighting a battle does. Certainly there are plenty of times where head-on battle cannot be avoided, or that the only way to win the thing is to destroy the enemy where he lies, the point is that winning and enemy destruction must be separated from each other.

Example

A brief example may help to illustrate the differences between the two theories, as well as bring out an important underlying requirement of attritional warfare. Imagine two tank forces across a common border. Behind each force is its sole supply source a massive dump located near a port. The attritional solution is to see the enemy force as the objective and to seek battle with it in order to destroy it. The maneuver warfare solution would be to swing around the enemy tank force and destroy the enemy's dump.

In the first case, the commander is relying on optimal performance of his tank crews, his vehicles, and his lower commanders to win the day-especially if the two tank forces are evenly matched. In the second case, the maneuver minded commander will destroy the dump (provided his plan for getting there is good, and he avoids letting the enemy get his dump!) even with mediocre crews and vehicles-the proverbial one-eyed monkey hanging from a balloon could get the job done. The attritional solution will attempt to grind the enemy until they go away. The maneuver solution will remove the enemy ability to fight (tanks without supply are essentially useless) before he has a chance to use it.

Is the second plan easy to pull off? Won't the enemy be on the lookout for their one major dump? Sure, and that is pan of the point. The attritional solution is intellectually lazy-coming up with a viable maneuver solution is difficult, even in this overtly simplistic example. In real life (and wargames) it gets much harder. While in the example the identification of the maneuver solution isn't difficult (real world problems are rarely quite as clean), it is obvious that the enemy won't let you pull it off with impuntiy An imaginative and effective solution to the difficulties of actually carrying out the maneuver (should the correct object be identified) might be impossible to obtain.

Maneuver warfare theory seeks victory by using three basic pillars, which are arranged in order of preference: preemption, dislocation, and disruption. Preemption is the act of removing the enemy's will to fight before he has a chance to use his forces at all. If preemption is impossible, the commander seeks to dislocate the enemy such that the enemy strengths cannot be brought to bear at the critical point or for whatever reason cannot be properly brought into play. l,astly, if confrontation with the enemy strength is unavoidable, the maneuver warfare commander will seek to disrupt it so that its full weight cannot be used. In our simple Lank force example, the maneuver solution attempts to preempt the enemy tank force by destroying its base. By doing so, it also dislocates the enemy tank force because (if the maneuver commander did his homework) it will be nowhere near the decisive point of the campaign (the exploding supply dump) but will be off somewhere else looking for the "decisive battle."

Lastly, in the flames of his dump, the attrition force will be disrupted by his lack of supply and easy prey to the clean up pursuit operations of the maneuver commander. I do not mean to imply that the three pillars of maneuver warfare are integrated in this obvious way in each case. They are independent of each other, but may frequently bring about a domino effect on each other if the situation so allows.

Battle and Maneuver Warfare Theory

An easy misconception that one can fall prey to when first examining maneuver warfare is that "maneuver warfare thinks it can win without battle." The point is that maneuver warfare attempts to win using only the violence absolutely necessary to bring about victory. Maneuver warfare is inherently distasteful to western civilizations as it is (in Leonhard's words)

to put it simply, a kick in the groin, a poke in the eye, a stab in the back It is quick, violent for a moment, and unfair. It is decisive, even preemptive, at the expense of protocol and posturing. Maneuver warfare puts a premium on being sneaky rather than courageous, and it is not at all glorious, because it typically flees from enemy strength.

Maneuvcr warfare attempts to bring on the most unfair fight it can bring about-if it can lure your tanks into the middle of a swamp-it will, ambushes, attacks in foul weather, at night, through "impenetrable" terrain. In all ways a commander (or gamer) applying maneuver warfare win attempt to stack the deck in his favor-as well as mark the cards. Does this mean the gamer attempting to apply maneuver warfare should cheat with respect to the game's rules? No, that would be driving the point to the ridiculous. The idea is that when maneuver warfare offers a fight, the opposing side should watch out.

Let me use a historical example to show the workings of strategy and operations and their relationship to tactics in a maneuver warfare environment. Napoleon's favorite operational movement was to force his way between two of his enemy's armies. Ile would then turn on one followed by the other. While this last would involve true battle and heavy losses, he believed (usually correctly) that he could pound one of the armies into submission before the other could arrive to help. In effect, he dislocated a large portion of the enemy force (which would not be around to be in the decisive fight). By the time attention was given to the dislocated force, the other one would be fully disrupted and unable to assist. In each battle offered, Napoleon had stacked the deck in his favor. It has sometimes been said that Napoleon was great at strategy and operations but a bludgeon in tactics. Maybe, but such critics often lose sight of the fact that he won the battles using operations and strategy before he showed up on the field of battle and finished the job. In maneuver warfare tactics slavishly serves operations and operations is totally at the mercy of strategy-not the other way around.

Certainly some Napoleonic actions show the master's plan backfiring (Waterloo serves as the ultimate case), but more often than not he was able to pull it off.

Center of Gravity

A very useful concept in both warfare and wargaming is that of a center of gravity of a force. It also defies easy definition. At face (and incorrect) value it seems to imply the center of mass of the enemy force. A common (but still incorrect) definition is that it is the "source" of the enemy's strength. In other words, it is the portion of the enemy's force without which he would be in the most trouble. A gamer's best units in a particular game would serve as an example. Still that definition falls short as it would imply that you must go after the strongest force of the enemy and bring it to its knees to win (the enemy tank force in the earlier example).

Leonhard brings out the best explanation of center of gravity I've ever seen. He defines it as the "enemy's critical weakness", the loss of which would mean the enemy has lost. This would be the enemy's supply dump in our example, or America's public opinion in the case of the Vietnam War.

Identifying the enemy's critical weakness and coming up with an adequate method of destroying it is the chief challenge of maneuver warfare. Once this skill is mastered, the tools of preemption, dislocation, and disruption come unto their own.

Let's look at another historical example which both shows the ability to identify an enemy center of gravity and the difficulty in attacking it effectively. The Allied bombing offensives aimed at Germany in World War II show both. Aside from some sidesteps and tactical misadventures (the carpet bombing attacks, etc.), Allied planners correctly identified a center of gravity of the German war effort--the ball bearing and oil. Both are items without which, modem war machines and mechanized armies literally grind to a halt and neither can be correctly produced without both highly skilled workers and precision (or in the case of oil, big) machines. Even more importantly, neither could be adequately substituted for -- a tank chassis with imperfect ball bearings just doesn't seem the same, etc. Then, after identifying the center of gravity, came the hard part-how to get at it?

The only viable solution of the time was daylight "precision" bombing and that was the method used. It was very imperfect and much ordinance was used for little effect. As the war dragged on, German efforts to avoid the bombers became quite effective--underground factories and by moving things as far away as possible. Towards the very end of the war, strategic bombing concentrated more on oil production and refineries-both much harder to protect from the bomber's wrath and much easier to destroy anyway (the target helps in its own destruction!). While the bombing offensive cannot claim total success in forcing the collapse of the German war effort, no one can argue that the oil restrictions imposed on the German war machine at the very end of the war were without effect.

This goes to show that even if a center of gravity is identified and targeted, getting at it and, more importantly, destroying enough to gain true effect is both difficult and potentially impossible. More than one center of gravity will exist for any one force at one time. Part of identifying a useful center of gravity is the determination of the effect of its loss on the enemy (catastrophic or just irritating--tru centers of gravity tend toward catastrophic) and the ability of one's force to do enough damage to the identified point to make it worth the effort. Few could not help but identify the American industrial base as a center of gravity to the Allied war effort in World War II. Imagining a successful Japanese or German strike at it is pretty difficult, to believe that such a strike would be effective enough to knock that industrial base out of action is near lunacy!

Preemption

This is the pillar of maneuver warfare which gets the most bad press. As Leonhard says "The term preemption, as it relates to warfare, is an unfortunate one. It conjures up images of militaristic and ruthless nations subjecting their pacific neighbors to sudden, unjustified attacks." Furthermore, Leonhard's attempts to find examples of the historical use of preemption brought forward another observation of them. He states that it was difficult to find examples which would not "offend the reader or strike him as foolhardy." Originally, he concluded that this was an "accident of history" but as he continued to catalog events, he was forced to conclude that "preemption by its very nature is often viewed negatively, even if it brings about a dramatic victory." Let's look at preemption in a bit more detail. (I, for one, can't resist a juicy topic.)

The simplest type of preemption is that which most obvious: "the preemptive" strike. That would be an operation such as the 1967 Israeli air attacks on the Arab nations drawing up for war, or Dewey's squadron broadsiding the Spanish in the Manila Bay just after running up the flags announcing that the US was at war. Less obvious would be an action where a force shrugs off all caution and speeds forward to attack the enemy at a place where he feels safe. Jackson's flank march just prior to the Battle of 2nd Manassas and his action of striking at Pope's base at Manassas Junction is just such a case, one in which Jackson's flank security is provided by his very speed.

Preemption "strives to snatch a victory impolitely before the game has properly begun" (Leonhard, pg 63.) In wargame form, preemption is difficult to achieve. The nearest example I can think of is in the TCS. In that series, a force without orders is essentially helpless. Prepared defenses take time to implement, a lot of time, and during that period, the force which is digging in is in the unhappy position of having to sit in place without orders. (Really skilled players can prepare for this period by issuing hasty defense orders and what-not ahead of time. They will be rewarded for their preparedness.) An astute opposing gamce might be able to identify the force which is digging in and be able to implement a quick attack order to get at them before they are done. If it works, he has preempted the enemy's defensive works, if not he throws an attack into the teeth of a dug in defense. Its a risk. It might work, and then again it might not. At any rate, we never promised it would be easy.

Dislocation

Compared to preemption and all of its attendant baggage, dislocation is easy to define. Essentially, it means "hitting 'em where they ain't." More specifically, dislocation forces the enemy's strength to be irrelevant to the fight at the decisive point. In other words, if he has a strong navy, defeat him on land. Dislocation is meant by (but ill defined in) the notion of "hitting 'em where they ain't." That simple phrase, however, makes no reference to the critical requirement that "where they ain't" is also a point of decisive importance, Dropping a B-52's load on a rice paddy pretty much insures that they ain't, but it hardly constitutes a decisive point.

In games, getting the enemy's strength somewhere other than the decisive point is quite difficult-both of you know the victory conditions. However, game situations can develop where the enemy's strength is off somewhere else when the decisive event occurs. As an example, in GB as the Germans go racing ahead toward Tula, there is a significant chance that they will forget about rear security in an effort to bring all force to bear on the front.

Implied in that decision is that some critically important rear facitities (notably Konotop and Smolensk) may end up with a less than optimum garrison or none at all. This is a gamble the German player is making. Should the Soviet player call him on it and scrounge up a raiding force capable of capturing one (gulp, both) of these spots, the "decisive point" will rapidly shift to these German supply heads, and away from the frontal advance. German forces strung out between Orel and Tula may not be able to influence the critical fight for their own supply base. Though they might be powerful units, they just are not available where the important event occurs.

In Harpoon, a player might be able to cause his opponent to expend all or most of his heavy ordinance against targets of lesser importance. Running a bunch of smaller ships into him might cause him to unload his heavy missiles. This will spell disaster for the light ships-its a hard life being baitbut it might open the enemy heavies to a disastrous friendly salvo. This also illustrates why dislocation is difficult to achieve in wargames. In the Harpoon example, dislocation was only possible since the asset being expended (missiles) were of finite supply and irreplaceable. In most games, even if you manage to get the enemy to deploy his strength where it doesn't matter, he will soon have things turned around and you'll be in a force on force situation again.

Disruption

The final pillar of maneuver warfare theory is disruption. The above pillars point out that disruption is a last resort. First, you want to try to take away his ability to use his strength (preemption). If that fads, you want to force him to place his strength where it does him no good (dislocation). Disruption, the last resort, is the act of taking away the enemy strength's ability to function at best efficiency. This can involve the common game "disruption" effect-where unit fires pin or otherwise mess up enemy units-or not. Disruption can also include the use of combined arms. Making his forces fight where they are less effective is also disruption. Making his leg units fight on an open plain or his tank units fight in a forested swamp is an example of this effect. One can also disrupt by fire (suppression), by aircraft influence (interdiction), or by rear area actions (cutting off supply, etc.). Many games show all or some of these since disruption ius a common game design effect.

In Conclusion...

The art of maneuver warfare can be applied to game play in order to make us both better game players and to make our games more correctly represent reality. If a game does not show the above effects and all you can do is go after the enemy toe-to-toe, something is wrong and chances arc its the game or its system.

For Further Reading:

Robert Leonhard, The Art of Maneuver. Presidia Press, Novato CA, 1991.

The outstanding work on the subject of maneuver warfare and its application. The analysis of both the Gulf War and the concepts of AirLand Battle alone are worth the price of this book. Copies may be obtained in many bookstores as well as the Articles of War listed in the Dealers section of this issue.

More Maneuver

Maneuver: Part 1
Maneuver: Part 2
Maneuver: Part 3
Maneuver: Part 4