Slapout, I've pretty much got the entire pantheon of this stuff on the shelf - I was a "maneuver warfare" junky prior to seriously considering the idea (I also was a pop-centric COIN junky too - fool me once, fool me twice!). Maneuver warfare clouds any useful concepts with so much junk that it should be flushed.
1. The "Generations of Warfare" argument is completely silly - anyone who argues that "4GW" is an evolution of "3GW Maneuver Warfare" which are both superior evolutions of "2GW Attritive War" is a fool. Maneuver Warfare builds on this poor history by taking any examples of "good tactics" for its own as examples of "maneuver warfare" while denigrating examples of "bad tactics" as "attrition warfare". Pretty easy to say my theory is good if I illogically assign all good, unrelated examples of history to my column!
2. The whole concept uses "maneuver warfare" and "attrition warfare" to create a false dichotomy where none exists. This takes away from the fact that firepower and maneuver both have roles to play on the battlefield and that attrition has battlefield value. Yes - the manual states that a "maneuver warfare force" still uses firepower, but the body of literature that Lind and Co. built around Maneuver Warfare (and yes, I've read almost all of it) clearly approaches things with this false dichtomy in mind. "Shattering will and cohesion" is done by killing people and wrecking stuff with firepower.
3. The OODA loop, which MW elevated from Boyd, is not a good model. Humans are not iterative. They are constantly observing and acting. So "getting in a loop" really makes no sense (a tip of the hat to LCol Storr on this one).
4. "Surfaces and Gaps" is silly. What consititutes a gap? If all I have to do to turn myself into a "surface" do is swing my MG 90 degrees, then is the concept of any use? "Recon Pull" suffers from the same problems.
Shall I go on?
Clearly, any benefits that maneuver warfare brings could be gained by abandoning the farce and simply looking at the basics.
Bookmarks