Another blog post from William “Chip” Sayers. The opinions presented are his own, and he is not shy. My one editorial comment is in brackets.
The blog post and William F. Owen article he references is here: The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud ? – The Dupuy Institute and The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
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On (Maneuver) War
Recently, Chris brought up an article entitled, “The Maneuver Warfare Fraud” by William F. Owen. That took me back to a bright summer day in 1998 when I was walking through the Gray Research Center on my way to class at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College (C&SC) in Quantico, Virginia. Imagine my surprise as a Department of Defense civilian and former Air Force officer when I ran across a shrine to USAF Colonel and fighter pilot John Boyd! It had a mannequin wearing his flight suit, sporting his Fighter Weapons School patch and his squadron scarf the Navy loves to laugh at (they have no room to boast with their mock turtlenecks). I was unaware that morning of the Marines’ obsession with Maneuver Warfare, but I was about to be indoctrinated. I not only attended C&SC, but I stayed to attend the second-year course, the School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW) and, risking questions about my judgment, I went back after a decade to finish my trifecta at Marine Corps War College (MCWAR). I have given my academic resumé to impress upon the reader that I was essentially raised in the belly of the beast, as it were.
While I was vaguely aware of the concept, its attachment to Bill Lind and the “Military Reform” movement of the 1970s and 80s put me off, so I hadn’t — until my arrival at Command & Staff — studied the concept. It would be fair to say that I was skeptical that Lind and Co. had come up with something new in the way of warfare.
From its early days, the nascent Military Reform movement (or “Fighter Mafia” as they styled themselves, then) was mostly concerned with the disastrously wrong concepts of tactical aircraft procurement. In the wake of the Vietnam War — where sophisticated U.S. interceptors were perceived to have difficulty with basic MiGs — the Reformers believed implicitly that cheaper, simpler aircraft were better than more sophisticated and expensive aircraft. One of the Reformers went so far as to say that the Air Force could buy five 1950s-era F-5 day-fighters armed with basic weapons for the price of one F-15. He went on to project that the simple F-5 could fly twice as many sorties as the more complex aircraft, and therefore an F-5 force could be 10 times as effective as an F-15 based force — implying that buying a fleet of F-5s five times larger than the planned F-15 buy was a valid option.
There were several things wrong with such simplistic thinking. First, by the time that the Reformers were making this argument in the late 1970s, the issues they had with the USAF’s fighter force were being solved by the F-15: the new aircraft had an effective radar that was simple to use, it had great visibility and the agility to match it, and it had weapons that proved to be far more reliable and deadly by a shift to solid-state electronics. It was as if the Reformers were stuck in the previous war, having failed to learn the lessons the USAF was rapidly integrating.
The Reformers, overly proud of their USAF fighter community origins, seemingly failed to understand that the F-5 was a day fighter, unable to fight for air superiority in typical European weather. As long as the Soviets intended to invade only on sunny days, we would be fine. Finally, we most certainly would not replace the intended F-15 fleet on a 5 to 1 basis. In fact, the infrastructure required to support such a large fleet of aircraft in an era of irresponsibly low defense spending strained credulity to the breaking point. It is virtually a given that their biggest fan, Senator Gary Hart [Hartpence] (no relation to B. H. Liddell Hart), and others like him would have made sure the exchange would have been 1 for 1, leaving the Soviets with an overwhelming advantage in numbers and at least parity in aircraft quality. Fortunately, clearer minds prevailed and the F-15 program went forward unchecked.
Two other programs were influenced by this group: The F-16 and the A-10. When the F-15 program got away from them, the Fighter Mafia claim to have “forced” the Air Force to hold a Light-Weight Fighter competition. The truth is that, after the Fighter Mafia successfully imposed their “Not a pound for air-to-ground!” policy on the F-15 program to ensure that it was a single-mission air superiority aircraft, the USAF was going to need somebody to haul its bombs. The winner of the LWF competition was going to be a multi-role fighter from the outset. The Fighter Mafia was overjoyed that the prototype YF-16 had a nose that was “too pointy” to house a radar. However, General Dynamics and Hughes conspired to dash their hopes when the F-16A appeared on the ramp with a slightly larger nose that housed a miniaturized, but very capable multi-mode radar.
Shattered by two losses in a row, the Fighter Mafia made sure that the A-10 program included none of the modern conveniences — no avionics, no laser-guided bombs, no hydraulics, and no hope on the modern battlefield. While the F-15 and F-16 defied the Military Reformers’ doomsaying throughout the 1990s, the A-10A proved unable to withstand a 1970s-era air defense system manned by Iraqis and its perceived success was due entirely to the AGM-65 Maverick missile. In the early 2000s, the Air Force finally admitted defeat and upgraded the entire fleet to A-10C standard by putting in all of the avionics that the Fighter Mafia so assiduously avoided in the 1970s.
With Senator Gary Hart and other acolytes on Capitol Hill joining the fight, Bill Lind — then a legislative aide for Hart — joined forces with the Fighter Mafia and transformed the crusade into the Military Reform movement. The movement now had clout, media attention and, briefly, the influence to take on not just major programs, but the institutions themselves. Make no mistake, once politicized, the movement was more about slashing the Defense budget than it was about improving the fighting capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The Reformers next took on the U.S. Army’s the M-247 Sgt York DIVAD Self-Propelled Antiaircraft Gun (SPAAG) and the M-2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) was established by Congress — largely through the influence of Sen. Hart and the Reformers — to test weapon systems under “combat” conditions including “live” fire against vehicles. In the past forty years, DOT&E has proven to be useful, but its first several projects were sketchy, at best.
First, the Reformers set their sights on the Sgt York. The M-247 was the poster-child for off-the-shelf procurement: the hull and powertrain were repurposed from obsolete M-48 Patton tanks, the 40mm Bofors guns were 1950s-era upgrades of the famed WWII weapons, and the radar was from the F-16 fighter aircraft. Surely this was a weapon the Reformers would love. Not so. The stories of its test failures were the stuff of legends, almost too outlandish to be true — the gun locked on to latrine fans, slewed towards the grandstands, drones had to be equipped with radar reflectors to allow them to be tracked, etc., etc. As it happens, I had the opportunity to interview one of the test personnel and it turns out, the stories were too good to be true. None of the stories were true as related — most had the barest kernel of truth in them. Nevertheless, SECDEF Cap Weinberger was in trouble with Congress for “never having met a weapon he didn’t like,” so after all the bad press, he offered up the Sgt York as a sacrificial lamb.
The tests on the Bradley IFV were immortalized by the James G. Burton book and subsequent TV movie, The Pentagon Wars. Burton was a USAF Lieutenant Colonel at DOT&E and conducted the tests on the Bradley. While it may have been commendable that the test director was outside the Army’s chain of command in order to insure objectivity, Lt Col Burton displayed a distinct lack of understanding of the tactics associated with IFVs when he subjected the Bradley to live fire tests by Main Battle Tank (MBT) guns and Antitank Guided Missiles (ATGMs). The Bradley was not designed to stand up to rounds larger than 30mm, so when hit by rounds over three times that size, the results were predictable. Nevertheless, Burton recommended that the Bradley be better protected by rearranging ammunition and fuel stowage and adding armor. Of course, this led to an increase in weight which slowed the vehicle’s tactical mobility and led directly to its loss of amphibious capability and several infantrymen. In the desert against incompetent and demoralized Iraqi troops, this loss of capability went unnoticed. It can be imagined, however, that the inability to cross rivers or keep up with friendly tanks might have directly led to great deal more casualties in a war in Europe. Burton could have complained that the Army’s IFV should have had the same survivability as the M-1 tank and have had a legitimate point: Who came up with the idea that 10 Americans in an IFV deserved less protection than four Americans in a tank?
Operation DESERT STORM proved the Reform movement wrong about U.S. weapons on virtually every point. However, by this time, Bill Lind had put together his theory of Maneuver Warfare and captured the mind of the Marine Corps. One of the great issues I’ve always had with the Marines’ fascination was Lind’s promotion of the German concept of Auftragstaktik. This concept calls for the pushing decisions concerning the battle down to the lowest possible level and trusting the man at the leading edge to act not just autonomously, but even in defiance of orders based on his superior understanding of the battle. This requires a phenomenal amount of trust in one’s subordinates. The problem is that it is simply inconceivable that any U.S. military officer would actually give a subordinate that kind of freedom and responsibility. Yet, my classmates at Quantico greatly admired the German system, seemingly unaware of the irony.
Spencer Fitz-Gibbon, one time British Green Party shadow Defence Minister, wrote a masterful PhD thesis expounding the virtues of Maneuver Warfare and Auftragstaktik, published as Not Mentioned in Despatches… Fitz-Gibbon made an incredibly detailed study of the Battle of Goose Green in the 1982 Falklands War, showing conclusively that LtCol. “H.” Jones, the commander of the British 2Paras, was a maniacally anal-retentive micro-manager who was actually losing the battle until he was killed — leaving his subordinates the freedom to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat. I’m afraid most U.S. officers are more likely to resemble H. Jones than a Rommel or Guderian. A brutal realization, but admitting the illness is halfway to the cure.
Suffice it to say, nothing the Marines taught or said changed my mind. I remain a skeptic for the exact reasons William Owen describes in his article. Essentially, Owen argues that “Maneuver Warfare” is not only nothing new, it’s not actually in automatic opposition to the Reformers’ construct of “Attrition Warfare.” I always felt that no one in their right mind would choose a bloody frontal attack when a flanking or envelopment maneuver was available, i.e., no one chooses to be an attritionist. When my Marine buddies boasted that the USMC was a maneuver organization as opposed to the enemy — the U.S. Army — who were cast as slaves to attrition warfare. I retorted rather pointedly that in Vietnam, the Marines pummeled the Army for wanting to fix the enemy with infantry and destroy him with artillery and air strikes, as opposed to their doctrine of fixing bayonets and breaking out the grenades. Who was the maneuver force and who was the attritionist, then? In reply, I got a thoughtful “huh.”
In agreement with Owen, I believe the “Maneuver vs. Attritional Warfare” paradigm is a construct that commits the false dichotomy fallacy. The commander in the field does not necessarily need to decide between maneuver and firepower. In fact, the best outcomes happen when he uses both. It’s Tactics 101: one fireteam lays down a base of fire to suppress the enemy and keep their heads down. while the second uses that cover to maneuver to the enemy’s flank or rear and finish the job at close range. Of course, there’s more to Maneuver Warfare than this — I spent my year in SAW contemplating 2,000 years of dirty tricks to use in combat and trying to invent new ones to add to the catalog. While I’m not sure our Army School of Advanced Military Studies counterparts couldn’t keep up with us, this fits into the general maneuverist outlook.
The students in my C&SC class received, along with a small mountain of other volumes, the famous “box of books” which bundled together the slim Marine Corps Doctrinal Publications. I generally agree with Owen’s critique of Marine Corps doctrinal publications. While on the surface, they appear to be well written and clear overall, Owen points out points of weak logic in their doctrine and internal contradictions.
My Command and Staff thesis took the Marine Corps to task for the disconnects in the planning process — particularly when it came to wargaming Courses Of Action (COAs) in the face of doctrine that incessantly claimed that warfare was completely unpredictable. To this I replied that if warfare is so thoroughly chaotic, “who could say if a single elephant might not rout an entire phalanx, or a determined Cub Scout Pack might not be an appropriate weapon to stop an armored division?” Nevertheless, wargaming was an important step in the planning process. Most of my classmates got to that point, simply assumed success and drove on, thus obviating the reason for wargaming COAs in the first place. Apparently, no one ever assumed failure and its consequences. I had a sense of irony that we were attending a planning school that ultimately didn’t believe in planning.
In my two years of working with Marines solving planning problems, I learned that, despite their love affair with Maneuver Warfare, they tended to solve their problems in conventional ways, including some that simply required frontal attacks. As an outsider (civilian with an Air Force background), I threw out numerous solutions that would have caused the Marines to either make unconventional use of their own resources (making the Aviation Combat Element the main effort and using the Ground Combat Element to act in a support role), or to allow outside agencies (allowing Dept. of State and CIA psychological operations to take the lead and reinforcing their actions with maneuver driven by their narratives). The part of Maneuver Warfare that they did generally respect was a whole-of-government approach and at least a toleration of out-of-the-box thinking.
Owen’s reading of Sun-Tsu is interesting. To say that “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” is really referring to diplomacy is, to put it charitably, a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, after over 2,000 years, I find Sun Tzu more interesting as poetry than strategy. It may have been a revelation in his day (though I’ll bet it was not), but it’s already “baked in” to our current military culture.
Owen believes that some of the inspiration for Maneuver Warfare has been either misinterpreted or greatly overblown. Marshal Ferdinand Foch of WWI Western Front infamy serves as a whipping boy for the Maneuverists, but according to Owen, wrote military theory that clearly inspired — if not plagiarized by — Maneuverist hero B. H. Liddell Hart (no relation to U.S. Senator Gary Hart). Owen’s revelation about the Foch/Liddell Hart connection confirmed my belief that the latter’s work was derivative and self-aggrandizing. Given the number of times I’ve suffered through Strategy, it was nice to uncover this little gem. Our modern notions of how much we need someone to save us by pronouncing a new strategy largely comes from Liddell Hart and others like him who looked back to WWI’s Western front, when they might better have paid attention to the Eastern and Southern fronts that were far more mobile.
I was forced to endure Liddell Hart at least twice during my Marine Corps schooling and I will never forgive them for that. Like Lind, Liddell Hart passes off weak and obvious ideas as revolutionary principles. His “man in the dark” theory (Clausewitz beat him by 100 years with “the fog of war”) is about as sophisticated as a middle-school football game, while his “expanding torrent” is just embarrassing.
Owen is skeptical of John Boyd and his OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and this is where Owen and I part ways. I’m no fan of Boyd — he was a self-important blowhard — but he did have two excellent ideas, both relating to his background as a fighter pilot. He developed the theory of Energy Maneuverability, measuring the difference between two aircraft’s relative advantages in “dogfighting.” Contrary to claims by Maneuver Warfare advocates, Boyd didn’t invent EM — fighter pilots have always thought in those terms — rather, the engineer in him devised a way to define the differences more precisely and display them graphically in a reasonably easy to digest manner. To be perfectly honest, the EM diagrams his formulae generates are still too complex to be useful in the cockpit but rather must be studied as homework before the battle. And mostly, it comes down to a pilot planning to fight a given opponent above or below a certain airspeed.
One can imagine a time when EM diagrams are loaded into an aircraft’s fire-control computer and compared to data from its Non-Cooperative Target Recognition data to advise the pilot how to duel his opponent. In fact, this is probably the best way to have unmanned, AI-driven aircraft take on other aircraft in combat.
Undoubtedly, Boyd’s biggest contribution was his concept of the OODA loop. During his time as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, Boyd observed that he could out-maneuver enemy MiGs despite the fact that, on paper, the MiG-15 should have been superior to his F-86. He found that while the F-86 had hydraulically-boosted controls, the MiG did not. This allowed the F-86 pilot to roll more rapidly than the MiG, so while the MiG-15 should have been able to turn tighter, it could not keep up with the American fighter in rapid changes of direction. The F-86 could roll one way, and the MiG would be delayed in following due to the MiG pilot’s reaction time and not being able to roll as quickly. Then the USAF pilot would roll the opposite direction, putting the MiG pilot further behind in his reaction. After a few direction changes, the MiG would be so inappropriately positioned that he would pop out in front of the American fighter. This was described as a “scissors” maneuver.
Boyd correctly deduced that, even without the advantage in hydraulically-boosted controls, the pilot who takes decisive action quickly can force his opponent into a reactive mode where his actions become increasingly inappropriate to the actual situation. The true genius was that Boyd recognized that this could be applied to other forms of warfare, and that the U.S. Marine Corps has applied it to its land warfare doctrine. The concept of momentum has always existed in military science — Clausewitz called it “surprise attack,” but in context, it clearly carried the idea of momentum. His famous dictum that “defense is the stronger form of warfare” was due in no small part to the defender’s diligent use of counterattacks.[1] His concept of the culmination of an attack is pinned to two things: inadequate logistics and counterattacks.[2] Put these two discussions together and you get the concept of momentum and its variability.
Boyd believed that when a side built up sufficient momentum, the opponent would become so deeply reactive that it could do nothing to stave off defeat. The Marines believe this and depend on seizure of the initiative and rapid maneuver to win victories over opponents that aren’t mentally prepared to keep up. This is a good construct, particularly well suited to American visions of “hyperwar,” as waged in the 1990s. Now that the forever wars are over, the U.S. military is trying to remember how to do peer, or near-peer force-on-force combat. They would do well to concentrate on this legacy and recreate what we once had. This will not be an easy lift, however, as only a small percentage of active-duty military members were serving prior to the great switchover to a single-minded focus on counterinsurgency.
[1] Clausewitz, On War, Howard, Paret & Brodie, Book Six, Chapters 2 & 3, 360, 363 and 365-366.
[2] Ibid, Book Seven, Chapters 4 & 5, 527-528.
