Sometimes, when raiding is appropriate to the situation and the desired ends, and sometimes not.William F. Owen posted: Raiding is the acme of MW is it not? Translations of Mao, and Sun-Tzu?
Project?? Sorry if I mislead you with my simplified explanation, but the introduction of MW into the Corps was not a ‘project’. I think I am not too far wrong when I suggest that rather than it being a project, that it was more of a ‘fight’ than anything else. MW was very controversial, and strongly resisted in many parts of the Corps, for a variety of reasons (if you are interested in some of the reasons I can do a ‘cut and paste’ - heck if Steve Metz can do that, smart person that he is, then so can IWilliam F. Owen posted: Obviously there was a need to do things better and do better things, so why didn't the project start with the aim of researching this?).
So let me elaborate a bit more on the ‘it was more complicated than this’ part of my previous failed attempt to explain.
The so-called ‘maneuvrist vs attirionist’ debate, which I mentioned above, rolled in public along from 1980/81 to late 1984, at least in the pages of the Gazette (it does not vanish, only fades a fair bit) but I expect it continued in the places where most of that debate occurred – the officers mess, officers club, bars, street corners, training exercises, and so on. Moreover, the hierarchy of the Corps, particularly from 1983 (Commandant Kelly) was broadly resistant to adopting MW. Pressured by the Defence Reform Caucus in Congress, the Corps allowed that MW was amongst its repertoire of warfighting approaches, but there is real sense that this ‘admission’ was grudgingly given at best. I do not think that had one of the Marine Generals that were seen as one of the likely ‘next possible Commandant’ that the Corps would not have eventually moved to adopt MW (if only because the Army had adopted its version earlier) but certainly it was the surprise appointment of Gray (who was not seen by anyone as one of the ‘next possible commmandant’) that meant that it happened when it did.
(Worth mentioning as an aside is that while there certainly were interconnections and cross fertilization between various communities with in the Corps that were advocating MW, these communities can not be seen as being unified. Rather they were disparate communities that over time might be said to have become a ‘movement’ in support of MW.)
With Gray’s appointment, the old debate over MW vs methodical battle (ie 'attrition' was the derogatory term for this) erupted in to the public sphere again. Gray, in part as he was preoccupied with other issues (some stemming from the Corps having suffered due to Lebanon and the Moscow Marine security guards) but also in part because he did not think that the Corps needed an official MW document/doctrine, only in early 1989 started to move to generating what was to become MCDP-1, Warfighting. I believe I am on reasonably firm ground when I suggest that a reason, though certainly not the only one, for this decision to move to promulgate MW officially as the Marines warfighting doctrine, was concern by his staff at the degree of institutional push back on MW.
Indeed, such was the push back that it took at least until 1993 before it was possible to say, as a Marine officer did in the pages of the Gazette that year, that the Corps had finally accepted MW (Commandant Mundy continued to drive the institutionalization of MW). So, no, not a project - more of a fight.
I confess that I am not entirely sure what you are getting at here. Certainly Gray, van Riper (who supported MW), Wyly and other Marines based their thinking on their reading of military history and their operational experiences. All three of these named officers were very well read – and that probably grossly understates how well read they were – in military history, and this along with their own experiences was the basis of their developing perspectives on ‘a better way to fight’. Gray in his thinking and indeed practice (of his commands) was well on his way towards MW by 1976 (or thereabouts), and all three had adapted in Vietnam in ways that also pointed them towards MW. It is Boyd, obviously, who crystallizes MW into a more systematic body of thought, and he certainly influenced these gentlemen, and others, but not because what he was saying was stunningly new to them, rather because Boyd’s conceptions pulled together what they had been thinking and learning from their reading of history and their own operational experience. And Boyd, if this needs to be said, read and based his thinking on mil history, and then read even more widely to flesh this out.William F. Owen posted: Why were concepts, some flawed, grouped together as MW, without someone saying "hold on a god**m second!", and re-write its doctrine emphasising what the historical and operational record told them, as being useful?
If you are referring to Lind’s Maneuver Warfare book, this is based largely as far I can tell on Lind’s focus on the German military. Lind is an aficionado of the German military (of yore) even to this day, but to be fair the Wehrmacht did seek to systemize MW (or what the Allies termed Blitzkrieg) and applied terms to aspects of it. So in explaining MW there is a tendency, probably understandable, to use the German terms even though any number of them do not really translate to English, simply because there is no analogous English-language term or concept. But, and I think this is a big ‘but,’ MCDP-1, Warfighting and Lind’s book are not the same.
MCDP-1 was written by Capt John Schmitt, under the immediate direction of Gray (apparently many half day and full day one-on-one sessions, with the Cols, etc, sitting in the background), with Gray indicating to Schmitt what he thought, usually expressing concepts and ideas by way of personal operational examples (or those of other Marines) and references to military history. Schmitt further read and included Clausewitz and Sun Tzu (and others) and consulted with a select number of other Marines in writing MCDP-1, including van Riper (Schmitt, in passing, rewrote Warfighting it in 96/97, under the direction of Gen. Krulak, and Lt. Gen. van Riper, in 96-97). Interestingly, while Schmitt sent Boyd copies for comment, Boyd was preoccupied and did not get any comments back to Schmitt. MCDP-1 was meant to be a description of a way to think about war and warfare, not a prescription about how to fight (where Lind’s book is more the latter).
So while many Marines (and Army and other national) officers almost certainly do speak in terms of ‘you do push-pull recon’, etc, and so on (I have talked with officers who talk in this way about MW), that was not what was intended. Sometimes push-pull recon works and is required, other times it is not. To repeat, MW, as laid out in MCDP-1, was meant to be a philosophy or mindset for thinking about war and how best to fight. The Marine’s breaching the Iraqi fortified border defences in GW1 is an example of the MW ‘mindset’ being applied during Gray’s commandancy (see Gen. J. Michael Myatt, ‘Comments on maneuver’, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 82, Iss. 10, Oct. 1998, p. 40ff; and and Lt. Col. G.I. Wilson, ‘The Gulf War, Maneuver Warfare, and the Operational Art’, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol.75, Iss. 6 June 1991, p. 23ff.).
That is the best answer I can give at the moment, for in the end I really do not understand your question: ‘Why were concepts, some flawed, grouped together as MW, without someone saying "hold on a god**m second!", and re-write its doctrine emphasising what the historical and operational record told them, as being useful?’. Certainly over time there is tendency (and a very real one at that) to take ‘concepts’ articulated under the umbrella MW and think that these should always be applied – that is, to see them as ‘prescriptive’.. But that is not how Gray and others intended MW to be understood.
To conclude my overly long disquisition….
Yes, but…… Absolutely critical is getting these ‘effective methods of fighting’ institutionalized. You will find lots of lots of reasons profered on many different threads on this board for why institutionalizing such is usually very, very difficult (see above for one exampleWilliam F. Owen posted:... and like Riper, the USMC created the likes of Evans Carlson, Sam Griffiths and a bunch of other gifted officers, with a clear understanding of effective methods of fighting.), and why such attempts to do so often fail outright.
Cheers
TT
). Rosenau also identifies a range of drivers for this trend, ones that are consistent with SKi's explanation.
. Their answer would be the US, for they were making an effort to convince the American military to pay attention to how warfare was evolving so that it would not be caught out down the road by changes (so to speak), lest being caught out (ie defeated) harm the security and interests of the US. 
Originally Posted by TT
I think it was not von Mellenthin, so maybe Balck (?). But as I said, I really would have root around in my notes to get the specific details of precisely who and when. It is one of those small details in a much bigger analytical narrative I am working on, so what is left of my memory put the specifics aside knowing I have it on paper somewhere.
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