William F. Owen asked: As concerns how the USMC came to adopt MW, I would love to know. Any sources of information you could suggest (other than the Boyd Biographies) would be gratefully accepted.
The simple answer with respect to how the Corps came to adopt MW is ‘Vietnam’. Sort of.

It is possible to identify three strands of ‘sources’ (I am using ‘sources’ here fairly loosely and being 'academic'), all of which can be directly or indirectly linked to Vietnam.

First, the first public discussion of MW emerged as a consequence of the ‘heavy upping’ debate within the Corps in the middle to late 1970s. The short explanation of this debate is that Marines were debating how they should go about preparing to fight the Soviets or Soviet military clones, probably outnumbered. This a post-Vietman re-orientation. This debate and the emergence of MW is detailed in ‘“Innovate or Die”: Organizational Paranoia and the Origins of the Doctrine of Manoeuvre Warfare in the US Marine Corps’, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3 (June 2006) pp. 475-503 (sorry, no link, but if you want a copy, PM or email me).

Second, was the Defence Reform movement, which first started to emerge in the mid-1970s and really started to gain political traction in Reagan’s first term. This encompassed a rather broad spectrum of people, but notably included Sen. Gary Hart, Boyd, and Lind. The Defence Reform Movement (though not Boyd in and of himself and his evolving thinking) stems indirectly from Vietnam.

Third, and finally, any number of Marine officers emerged from Vietnam with a view that there had to a better way to fight (ie than methodical warfare). There is no way of knowing how many such officers there were, but those that were so interested were probably very diffused across the Corps. Among the more prominent of such officers were Col. Michael Wyly and Gen. Al Gray (there were others who also fit, more or less, such as Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper who were not vocal – ie writing in the Gazette – proponents of MW).

To keep a long story reasonably short, two of these three ‘strands’ come together, serendipitously, in 1979 and 1980, while the third becomes really apparent in and around 1982/83. To explain, the first mention of ‘MW’ comes out in a two part article (Oct and Dec, 1979) in the Gazette. The article(s) acknowledge a range of actors, from Genghis Khan to Hannibal, among others, but also Boyd. One can semi trace the emergence of the thinking of the author of these pieces (a Marine Capt who disappears a year later) and it is extremely reasonable to assume that he at least heard Boyd give one (or more?) of his famous presentations probably sometime in late 1978 or early 1979 (but the historical record is silent on what other contact he may have had).

Pretty much at the same time as these articles were published, Wyly met Lind at an event (conference?), and Lind then subsequently introduced Wyly to Boyd (who taught at least one seminar of Wyly’s at the C&SC, thereby influencing a group of young officers - among whom were then Capt, now Col., GI Wilson, one of the original authors of 4GW in 1989). A number of these young officers started to meet with Lind to discuss MW (Col. Wilson was one of these). Lind published an article on what was MW in the Gazette in March 1980, thus starting what was referred to in the Corps as the ‘maneuvrist vs attritionist’ debate (publicly played out in the Gazette, though most of the articles were pro-MW). So that is two strands.

The third strand – at least in my thinking – centers on Gray and ‘practice’. Gray was an autodidact who read military history voraciously, and based on his experience and his reading was moving in the direction of MW. Sometime in the second half of the 1970s he met Boyd (I am aware that Gray listened to Boyd give his growingly long presentation at least three times). By 1982 Gray, commanding 2 Marine Division at Lejeune, had made MW the warfighting doctrine for the Division, invited Boyd down many times to give talks (and Lind to do so as well) and formed the MW Board (which generated a reading list of relevant articles and was crossed fertilized by some of the young Marine officers converted by Boyd, Wyly and, yes, Lind). Mostly importantly, he instigated free form, free intelligence, training exercises that converted a great many of his officers to the merits of MW (one example is Lt. Gen. Ray ‘E-Tool’ Smith, who served under Gray and subsequently applied the MW philosophy when he commanded the Marines in Grenada in 1983). Worth noting re the training exercises was that at the end of day there was a discussion of what had happened during the days exercise, with all and sundry able to ask questions, with the emphasis being on what were you thinking and why (Lind was often a participant). In sum, there was a developing practice within the ‘East Coast’ Marines of learning and applying MW. As a consequence of Gray’s efforts, there was at least some diffusion of MW through the Marine Corps by way of the officers who had served under Gray.

But all that said and done, the ‘reason’ why the Marine Corps eventually did adopt MW as its overarching warfighting philosophy was that Gray was unexpectedly (and I mean extremely unexpectedly) named as Commandant in 1987 by then SecNavy James Webb (yes, that James Webb). Webb had asked around about which Marine general who was a ‘warfighting’ general and Gray was named to him. Webb probably fits with those Marines who left Vietnam believing there had to be a better way to fight, for his fiction novel, Fields of Fire, among other things encompasses a critique of the way the Marines fought in that conflict (this book is still on the Commandant’s reading list, but not, I think, because of the critique). The rest, as they say, is history.

This is a very, very rough and ready overview of the ‘sources’ - it is a bit more complicated than I have outlined above.


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elil posted: If I remember right the maneuver warfare doctrine for the Marine Corps! was changing as the MEU concept was unfolding.
Well remembered! You are thinking of the MEU (SOC). Under Gray the Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) was renamed the Marine Expeditionary Unit (which is what it had been pre-Vietnam) and the Marine Corps, in order to forestall Marines being transferred to Special Operations Command, started giving MEU units Special Operations training (so SOC = Special Operations Capable). Of course, today, Marines have been transferred to Sp Ops Command……

William F. Owen posted: If enough USMC officers had read Du-Picq, Foch, Clausewitz, and even the awful Liddell-Hart, I don't think they'd even picked up the Manoeuvre Warfare handbook.
The Marine Corps Association bookstore in Quantico always has copies and seem to sell a fair few of the same. Whether young Marine officers truly understand the MW philosophy is another matter.

Steve Blair posted: One thing I did like to see out of the USMC along with the maneuver warfare doctrine was a renewed interest in studying war in all its aspects in general. You started seeing the Commandant's reading list about that time, if memory serves, and the MCDP 1 series, which was more how to think about war than actual prescriptive doctrine.
Your memory serves very, very well!. (There is obviously hope for me yet, apparently). Although there are one or two public mentions of a Marine Corps reading list in the mid 1980s (sorry, can’t remember exactly when but I remember one suggestion authored by some obscure Marine officer named TX Hammes ), the Commandant’s Reading List was initiated officially under Gray in 1990 in support of the promulgation of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM-1), Warfighting (as it was then known – now MCDP -1, which was rewritten in 1996-7). The Commandant’s reading list was part of a push to get Marine officers, at least, to read more military history (and also to undertand the 'why' of adopting MW), and as part of this through 1990-91 they revamped the curriculum at the C&SC (and indeed, created the MC University) with the emphasis being on infusing military history throughout the courses taught (see, for example, Paul K. van Riper, The relevance of history to the military profession: an American Marine’s view’, in Williamson Murray and Richard Hard Sinnreich, eds., The Past as Prologue, Cambridge University Press, 2006).

selil posted: It was pointed out to me recently that the Marines! though more than willing to move fast and light have taken armor to tiny Pacific islands, Vietnam, and in general like high speed maneuver warfare as much as any cavalry/armor army guy. I just think that they like big guns that go BOOM. Well to be more succinct I always appreciated big guns that made "other things" go BOOM.
I am tempted to say something here in response but one thing I have definitely learned is that the Marine Corps does do more than beaches…….

Cheers

TT