The Series: Beyond Iraq Strategies - Insurgency and 4GW
Section IX. Enhanced Third Generation Warfare: The Warfare of Rapid Maneuver
When confronted with a well-armed opponent in conventional formations, the temptation might be to try to engage and defeat him in a decisive battle, under the assumption that if one wins and enough of one’s forces survive, one can then have one’s way with his country and people. This notion of “bringing the enemy to battle” and defeating him as the goal of war characterizes first and second generation warfare (the difference primarily involving how it is done). One only has to envision the monstrous battles of the U.S. Civil War, World War I and most of World War II to realize that this method, even when successful, leads to high casualties and enormous destruction, clearly what Sun Tzu had in mind when he cautioned that:
The general rule for the military is that it is better to keep a nation intact than to destroy it … Therefore those who win every battle are not really skillful – those who render others’ armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.
Although few would argue this, at least in political circles, many people continue to regard it as an unobtainable ideal if not simply a fairy tale. Interestingly enough, however, there have been any number of successful commanders who operated exactly according to Sun Tzu, even during the bloodiest of wars. An early example of maneuver warfare was the campaign in the south by US General Sherman in the Civil War. From the time he left Chattanooga on May 1, 1864, and entered Savannah (7 months later), Sherman initiated a total of one major battle against a prepared Confederate position – Kennesaw Mountain, June 27, 1864 – which he lost. The entire Atlanta campaign was one cheng / ch’i operation after another. Certainly Sherman was an adequate tactician, capable of fighting battles should they be forced upon him, but that was not his strategy. Sherman so befuddled the Confederate leadership that they replaced Joe Johnston (who had a good idea of what Sherman was up to) with John Bell Hood (who hadn’t a clue). Hood proceeded to launch four bloody battles and lose them all, thereby handing Atlanta (on Sept. 3), the upcoming 1864 election, and most probably the Civil War to Lincoln and the Union.
Maneuver warfare follows Sun Tzu’s admonition that:
The condition of a military force is that its essential factor is speed, taking advantage of others’ failure to catch up, going by routes they do not expect, attacking where they are not on guard.
As encapsulated by one of its creators, the essence of maneuver warfare is:
Warfare directed towards destroying enemy cohesion as opposed to seizing real estate; at taking the enemy force out of play decisively instead of wearing him down through slow attrition; high tempo war; fluid war that has no defined fronts or formations; decentralized armies where troops act on their own with high initiative as opposed to centralized command structures where troops ask permission and wait for orders; war designed to place the enemy in a dilemma, to suck him in to traps of his own creation, taking advantage of his stupidities and weaknesses and avoiding his strengths; war where soldiers act on judgment not on rules; war without rules; war that seeks to penetrate the enemy rather than push opposing lines backwards and forwards; war waged by a cohesive team that is like a family or tribe with a common culture and common outlook; a willingness to fight close, not just applying firepower from a long standoff, but infiltrating when the opportunity arises, as did 1st. Marine Division in Desert Storm. (26.) “In maneuver warfare, we attempt not to destroy the entire enemy force but to render most of it irrelevant.”
Essence of Maneuver Conflict: Create, Exploit, and Magnify – Ambiguity:
Alternative or competing impressions of events as they may or may not be:
– Deception: An impression of events as they are not.
– Novelty: Impressions associated with events/ideas that are unfamiliar or have not been experienced before.
– Fast Transient Maneuvers: Irregular and rapid/abrupt shift from one maneuver event/state to another.
– Effort (Cheng/Ch’i or Nebenpunkte/Schwerpunkt): An expenditure of energy or an irruption of violence—focused into, or thru, features that permit an organic whole to exist.
Payoffs for Successful Manuevers:
– Disorientation: Mismatch between events one observes or imagines and events (or efforts) he must
react or adapt to.
– Disruption: State of being split-apart, broken-up, or torn asunder.
– Overload: A welter of threatening events/efforts beyond one’s mental or physical capacity to adapt or endure.
Aim: Generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as disorient, disrupt, or overload those that adversary depends upon, in order to magnify friction, shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about his collapse; or equivalently, Uncover, create, and exploit many vulnerabilities and weaknesses, hence many opportunities, to pull adversary apart and isolate remnants for mop-up or absorption.
Essence of Attrition Warfare: Create and Exploit
– Destructive Force: Weapons (mechanical, chemical, biological, nuclear, etc.) that kill, maim, and/or otherwise generate widespread destruction.
– Protection: Ability to minimize the concentrated and explosive expression of destructive force by taking cover behind natural or manmade obstacles, by dispersion of people and resources, and by being obscure using camouflage, smoke, etc., together with cover and dispersion.
– Mobility: Speed or rapidity to focus destructive force or move away from adversary’s destructive focus.
Payoffs for Attrition Warfare:
– Frightful and debilitating attrition via widespread destruction as basis to:
• Break enemy’s will to resist
• Seize and hold terrain objectives
Aim: Compel enemy to surrender and sue for peace.
Essence of Moral Conflict: Negative Factors
– Menace: Impressions of danger to one’s well being and survival.
– Uncertainty: Impressions, or atmosphere, generated by events that appear ambiguous, erratic, contradictory, unfamiliar, chaotic, etc.
– Mistrust: Atmosphere of doubt and suspicion that loosens human bonds among members of an organic whole or
between organic wholes.
Counterweights
– Initiative: Internal drive to think and take action without being urged.
– Adaptability: Power to adjust or change in order to cope with new or unforeseen circumstances.
– Harmony: Interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.
Aim:
Pump-up friction via negative factors to breed fear, anxiety, and alienation in order to generate
many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as subvert those that adversary depends upon,
thereby sever moral bonds that permit adversary to exist as an organic whole.
Simultaneously, build-up and play counterweights against negative factors to diminish internal friction, as well as
surface courage, confidence, and esprit, thereby make possible the human interactions needed to
create moral bonds that permit us, as an organic whole, to shape and adapt to change.
To Summarize
• To employ maneuver conflict, we use force within a fog of ambiguity and a web of deception
to disrupt, disorient, and collapse an opponent.
• Attrition warfare, on the other hand, has a single tool - physical destructiveness - to batter the
opponent into submission. Attrition warfare works, but the cost is often high and “widespread destruction” can sow the seeds of future conflict.
• The factors and counterweights of moral conflict apply to either.
People Issues in Maneuver Warfare
Although people issues are not glamorous like new ships and fighters, and do not provide the opportunities for political engineering and simple pork-barreling inherent in large weapons programs, no credible strategist argues that they are not the heart and soul of an effective military force. There are just too many cases of poorly trained and led soldiers clambering out of their shiny new weapons to escape capture or death. It follows that any “defense review” should focus the bulk of its efforts on these issues.
Both Sun Tzu and John Boyd insisted that people and cultural factors were the keys and would have put the vast majority of their emphasis on these areas. In fact, it is unlikely that Sun Tzu would recognize the U.S. Defense Department as a military force. We now have nearly 300,000 people working in acquisition, for example, compared to 42,000 in combat arms battalions. Personnel are shuffled constantly so that cohesion (the single largest component of force effectiveness) is impossible.
Recent experience shows that the current Army personnel system, which was created in the late 1940s to mobilize massive armies to fight a war with the Soviet Union, cannot deploy rapidly enough to deal with flare-ups like Kosovo. When forces do reach the field, they lack the cohesion that would come from years of training together and the trust this engenders. As both Sun Tzu and Boyd insisted, these virtues are the foundation of success for any military force.
Comments from top-performing junior officers reinforce an impression of increasing mistrust and lack of cohesion:
1. “The Army’s senior leadership has a definite credibility problem. There is a lack of trust.”
2. “Until an officer corps that possesses impeccable character and leads by inspiration is developed, you will continue to see a mass departure of junior officers.”
3. “Even though we have completed the draw down, I still feel that many officers are so worried about their careers that they still back stab. Again, I think this is what many did to get through the draw down. It is now ingrained in these officers.”
4. “Senior officers are willing to throw us under a bus if it would advance their careers.”
5. “We talk about initiative and agility, but we reward officers who follow a rigidly prescribed path to success; being innovative will get you fired unless your results are so outstanding that your boss can’t slam you. Forget about taking risk; we don’t reward risk takers.”
Perhaps the best single indicator of problems in the personnel system is the rate at which the Army’s fastest burners are turning down chances for a general’s star. By the time they qualify for retirement, at 20 years service, many of the Army’s best are declining the opportunity for the command slots that would qualify them for senior rank. As Figure 4 shows, these declinations have escalated to unprecedented levels. Readers should understand that these officers have devoted their entire working lives to the Army and by virtue of their selection to this level of command, had a legitimate opportunity to achieve the pinnacle of their profession, general officer rank, in due course.