Maneuver warfare
Maneuver warfare (American English) or manoeuvre warfare is a concept of warfare that advocates attempting to defeat an adversary by incapacitating their decision-making through shock and disruption. Its concepts are reflected in a number of military strategies throughout history.
Methods of war stand on a continuum between maneuver warfare and attrition warfare, the focus on achieving victory through killing or capturing an adversary. These two apparent opposites are identified as complementary by military writers. Maneuver warfare concepts have historically been stressed by militaries which are smaller, more cohesive, better trained, or more technically able than attrition warfare counterparts.
The idea of using rapid movement to keep an enemy off-balance is almost as old as war itself. With development of cavalry and mechanized vehicles, maneuver warfare came to play an increasingly important role on the battlefields.
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Concepts
With some exceptions, battles between established armies have historically been fought based on attrition warfare. Attrition warfare involves moving masses of men and material against enemy strongpoints, with the emphasis on the destruction of the enemy's physical assets--success as measured by enemy troops killed, equipment and infrastructure destroyed, and territory taken and/or occupied. Attrition warfare tends to utilize rigidly centralised command structures that require little or no creativity or initiative from lower-level leadership (also called top-down or 'command push' tactics). The semi-static, large scale battles of the American Civil War (with the exception of Vicksburg), Crimean war and World War I are classic examples of attrition warfare.
Maneuver warfare is the opposite of attrition warfare. Maneuver warfare advocates that the defeat of an opposing force is not necessarily accomplished by simply contacting and destroying enemy forces until they can no longer fight. Instead, the destruction of key enemy targets (command and control centers, logistical bases, fire support assets, etc.) is combined with isolation of enemy strongpoints and exploitation of enemy weaknesses. Bypassing and cutting off enemy strongpoints often results in the collapse of that strong point even if the physical destruction is minimal. Firepower, which is used primarily to destroy as many enemy forces as possible in attrition warfare, is primarily used to suppress enemy positions at breakthrough points during maneuver warfare. Infiltration tactics by conventional or special operation forces may be used extensively to cause chaos and confusion behind fixed enemy lines.
Since tempo and intiative are so critical to the success of maneuver warfare, command structures tend to be more decentralised, with more tactical freedom given to lower-level unit leaders. This decentralised command structure allows 'on the ground' unit leaders, while still working within the guidelines of commander's overall vision, to exploit enemy weaknesses as they become evident (also called 'recon-pull' tactics or directive control).
History and implementation
For the majority of history armies were limited in their speed to that of the marching soldier, about equal for everyone involved. This meant that it was possible for opposing armies to simply march around each other as long as they wished, with supply conditions often deciding where and when the battle would finally be fought. Perhaps the most famous example of this ended with the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, prior to which Henry V of England avoided combat while marching to Calais to resupply, allowing him to pick the battlefield.
This began to change with the domestication of the horse, the invention of chariots and the increasing military use of the cavalry from approximately 2nd century AD. The next major step would be Napoleon's improvement of logistics, which changed the nature of warfare considerably. Now the invading army was not under the same sort of timing pressure to bring the opposition to battle as soon as possible. This allowed his forces to attack where and when they wanted, often giving him the advantage of terrain. It also allowed him to form much larger armies because they were no longer straining the local economies directly.
Napoleon's fame as a general, and indeed his powerbase to become head of the French state, was based on a powerful and fluent campaign in Northern Italy principally against the numerically superior Austrians. He cited Frederick the Great as one of his major sources of his strategy. He trained a normal, if rather undisciplined, French Army of Italy to be able to move faster than most thought possible, certainly likely. In part this was because his Army lived off the land and had no big logistical 'tail'. His ability to move huge armies to give battle where he wanted and in the style of his choosing became legendary and he seemed undefeatable even against larger and superior forces. It was these and later defeats that caused the major re-evaluation by the Prussians under Carl von Clausewitz on the revealed power of maneuver warfare.
His principal strategy being to move fast so as to engage before the enemy had time to organise, to lightly engage whilst moving to turn the flank that defended the main resupply route, to envelop and deploy blocking forces to prevent reinforcement, to defeat in detail those contained in the envelopment. All of these activities imply faster movement than the enemy as well as faster reaction times to enemy activities. His use of fast mass marches to gain strategic advantage, cavalry probes and screens to hide his movements, and deliberate movement to gain psychological advantage by isolating forces from each other and HQ are all hallmarks of Maneuver warfare. One of his major issues was the relatively slow speed of infantry movement relative to the cavalry.
The next major revolution in the concept of maneuver warfare would come as a result of the introduction of various forms of mechanized transport, starting with the steam powered trains in mid-19th century. Logistics have been vastly improved and the opposing armies were no longer limited in speed. A war of maneuver became a real possibility. Some train-borne manoeuvring took place during the American Civil War in the 1860s, but the sizes of the armies involved meant the system could provide only limited support. Armoured trains were among the first armoured fighting vehicles employed by mankind.
In the Franco-Prussian War the Prussian Army, knowing that they could field substantially larger forces than the French, devised a war plan that relied on speed by encircling and destroying/bypassing French strongpoints - the Kesselschlacht or "cauldron battle" - while the remainder of the Prussian army advanced unopposed to seize important objectives such as Paris. If, on declaration of war, they could mobilise quickly, invade and destroy French field forces fast enough, then they would be victorious before the French army could react. This tactic was used to devastating effect in 1870, when the Prussian forces were able to rapidly encircle and defeat two large French forces before they were able to retreat.
Given the success they had in 1870s, it's not surprising that the German battle plan for the First World War would be similar. The Germans attempted to repeat the "knock-out blow" against the French armies in the Schlieffen Plan. However technology had changed considerably in the four decades, with the machine gun and considerably more powerful artillery swinging the balance of power decisively to the defense. While all combatants were desperate to get the front moving again, this proved difficult. The introduction of the tank in a series of increasingly successful operations pointed the way out of trench warfare, but the war ended before the British plans to field thousands of them could be put into place. Germany introduced infiltration and stormtrooper tactics toward the end of World War I, which bypassed resistance to reduce it through indirect means.
During the Second World War, Germany pursued its strategy of blitzkrieg, or "lightning war", perhaps the most famous example of maneuver warfare and derived in part from the theories of British officer Basil Henry Liddell Hart, which the British army had failed to take advantage of. The Soviets used the concept of "Deep Battle" (which they continued through the Cold War). The Western Allies were strategically attrition-oriented, though maneuver-minded commanders included Montgomery and Patton.
The possibility of a massive Soviet offensive in Western Europe led to the creation of the United States Army's AirLand battle doctrine. Though far from focusing on maneuver, it emphasised using combined arms to disrupt an adversary's plans by striking through their depth.
The military doctrine of Rapid Dominance or Shock and awe is a form of maneuver warfare. Shock and awe emphasizes high amounts of communication and rapid strikes using combined arms to create confusion in the enemy. It relies heavily on air power, large amounts of central coordination, and focuses on destroying the enemy's command and control structures rather than its supply lines. Implementing this doctrine in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, overwhelming U.S. mobility and firepower allowed a (relatively) small number of U.S. forces to categorically defeat a much larger opposing force which was fighting from fixed strongpoints. The drive to Baghdad was characterized not so much by the destruction of Iraqi forces as by U.S. forces swarming around and past known enemy strongpoints and capturing key cities, transportation assets, and other centers of tactical importance. The isolation of these strongpoints resulted in massive numbers of Iraqi troops surrendering rather than being killed, a result that had previously been seen during the 1991 defeat of Iraqi forces during the liberation of Kuwait by coalition forces.
See also
References
- Boyd, John. Patterns of Conflict. 1986. Available online, accessed 5 February 2005.
- Simpkin, Richard E. Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare. Brassey's, 2000.
- Lind, William S.. Maneuver Warfare Handbook. 1985. Westview Special Studies in Military Affairs. Westview Press Inc. Boulder, CO. 80301ko:기동전