Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
My objective is the destruction of the enemy. I'm a Clauswitian!

You'd always be looking to gain a positional and temporal advantage. I take that as read. Yes, I may want to infiltrate for the purposes of raiding, but again, I want to know where the enemy is, not where he is not.

I'm not trying to be a semantic pedant. The first core function is FIND, meaning find the enemy.
Unless we are talking about the mercenary armies that characterized warfare in Italy during the Renaissance, I concur with Wilf. Even then, the concept was to put one's army in a position such that the opponent would choose to surrender rather than fight and be destroyed--that to me is the essence of maneuver.

BTW, F2T2EA seems to have replaced OODA as the buzzword of choice in certain circles (Find, Fix, Target, Track, Engage, Assess). Recon pull can support this model easily. The main difference is, again as Wilf pointed out, that what your reconnaissance efforts uncover is used to pull your forces to engage, not to avoid, the enemy.

Others have commented on the problem of the trap--pushing forces into a gap could easily turn into a modern day Cannae. I worked for a guy who planned to conduct a number of Bde-sized L-shaped ambushes during WWIII in Germany. His idea was to allow the bad guys' recon assets to find a "boundary" to exploit (their doctrine). He had massed forces in vertical arrays on the real boundary with a small blocking forces (sort of like Hannibal at Lake Trasimene)--he tested out his theory during a REFORGER and was wildly successful--got a star as a result.

The picture of the scouts strung along across the entire force's front, probing for holes in the enemy defense reminds me too much of linear static warfare like WWI and the later phases of WWII in Europe--certainly seems likely to devolve very quickly into attrition warfare. And, as danced around in earlier posts, still no discussion of how to protect a force's support echelons once the battlefield becomes non-linear as combat power "pours" through a hole (that isn't a trap). 507th Maint Co at Nasiryah, anyone?