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.mca-marines.org/gazette 85Marine Corps Gazette • September 2020T
h
is article is the ﬁ  rst in a series we call The Maneu-v
erist Papers, discussing maneuver warfare doctrine i
n the Marine Corps. Under the leadership of Com-m
andant Gen Alfred M. Gray, the Marine Corps ﬁ
 rst codiﬁ  ed maneuver warfare as Service doctrine with the 1
989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1
), Warﬁ  ghting, although the signiﬁ  cant intellectual effort t
hat produced the underlying concepts had begun well over a d
ecade earlier. In 1997, Gen Charles C. Krulak oversaw t
he revision of Warﬁ  ghting as MCDP 1, which clariﬁ  ed and e
laborated on select ideas from the original but did not change t
he essence of maneuver warfare in any way. Maneuver war-f
are doctrine has thus served the Marine Corps for over three d
ecades. Much has happened in those years, especially two l
engthy wars that saw signiﬁ  cant changes in the conduct of w
arfare. In contrast, during the same period of time, U.S. A
rmy doctrine has evolved from AirLand Battle  to Full-Di
mensional Operations to Full Spectrum Operations to now U
niﬁ  ed Land Operations over a span of nine capstone ﬁ  eld m
anuals. Now the Marine Corps is set to undertake arguably t
he most dramatic changes to structure and capabilities in o
ver a half century. 
This begs the question: Is it time for the Marine Corps to r
evise its doctrine? Several Gazette articles in recent years have a
rgued so. The aim of The Maneuverist Papers is to energize t
hat conversation. The Maneuverist Papers will continue the d
iscussion begun with “What We Believe About War and W
arfare” in the June Gazette by describing the development o
f and elaborating on key maneuver warfare concepts, provid-i
ng historical context for the development of Warﬁ  ghting and t
he maneuver warfare movement in general, and discussing r
ecent changes to the face of war that may justify a doctrinal re
vision. 
The maneuver warfare movement must be judged as an i
nstitutional success in that maneuver warfare became Marine C
orps doctrine and has remained so for over three decades. M
oreover, the movement brought other lasting changes—most n
otably in the area of professional military education—in f
ull view today. In some areas, such as training, the impact o
f maneuver warfare, with its emphasis on free play, force-o
n-force exercises, arguably has been less enduring. In other a
reas, such as personnel management, the movement seems t
o have had little impact at all. A broader issue is operational a
nd tactical success. From Grenada in 1983 through the Gulf M
aneuver warfare doctrine has served the Marine  Corps for over three decades. (Photo by LCpl Cedar Barnes.)M
arine CorpsM
aneuver WarfareT
he historical contextb
y MarinusM
ANEUVER WARFARE

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ANEUVER WARFAREW
ar to Afghanistan and Iraq, the historical record has been m
ixed. But is this an indictment of maneuver warfare itself? Is i
t a result of the Marine Corps no longer embracing maneuver w
arfare in practice? Or never having truly embraced it in the ﬁ
 rst place, as some have argued? Or is the mixed record the r
esult of some completely external factors, such as the grow-i
ng ineffectiveness of combat as a decisive factor in resolving c
onﬂ  ict in general? That is a topic for another debate.T
he Historical Context 
It is important to understand that the maneuver warfare m
ovement emerged at a particular moment in history. After t
he Vietnam War, the Marine Corps underwent a period of i
nstitutional introspection. The maneuver warfare movement w
as a response to the institutional and operational dysfunc-t
ion of the Vietnam experience that sought, among other t
hings, to put the Marine Corps approach to war on a solid h
istorical and theoretical footing.   
Gray, of course, was the leading exponent of maneuver w
arfare, providing impetus and top cover. Retired Air Force C
ol John Boyd was the movement’s intellectual godfather. C
ivilian Bill Lind was chief provocateur and proselytizer. But t
he core was a grassroots movement comprising a combina-t
ion of Vietnam veterans who had remained on active duty a
fter the war to see things set right and young ofﬁ  cers who s
aw maneuver warfare as empowering. Of the active duty m
aneuverists, Col Michael Wyly was the most prominent. O
ther early thought leaders included then-Capts Stephen M
iller, G.I. Wilson, and William Woods. 
The Marine Corps was not alone in reforming. Each of the S
ervices, and the broader Defense establishment, responded d
ifferently to the Vietnam experience. Not surprisingly, the A
rmy and Marine Corps, which bore the brunt of the war a
nd experienced its dysfunction most keenly, eventually en-a
cted the most extensive reforms, although the ﬁ  rst reforms a
ctually came out of the Navy, or more precisely the Naval W
ar College, where ADM Stansﬁ  eld Turner reformed the c
urriculum almost immediately upon assuming the presidency i
n 1972. Three curriculum reforms were most signiﬁ  cant for o
ur purposes. The ﬁ  rst was the reintroduction of strategic t
hought, which the Services had mostly abrogated to civilian a
cademics by then and which had largely become focused o
n nuclear strategy. The second was the rediscovery of the g
reat Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose theories a
t that time had been all but forgotten in favor of the more f
ormulaic and geometric approach of the Swiss military theo-r
ist Antoine-Henri Jomini. The rediscovery of Clausewitzian t
heory, made much more accessible by the Michael Howard a
nd Peter Paret translation of On War in 1976, was founda-t
ional to maneuver warfare theory. The third was the revival o
f the study of military history, which had virtually been r
emoved from military education after the Second World W
ar in favor of operations research and procedural training. T
his revival also proved important to the maneuver warfare mo
vement. 
For the Army, reform meant, among other things, return-i
ng to what it considered to be its primary mission: defeating a S
oviet invasion of Europe. A new, post-Vietnam edition of t
he Army’s capstone doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100-5 (
FM 100-5), Operations, introduced the doctrine of Active D
efense in 1976. Active Defense met with immediate and w
idespread criticism within the Army as being too defen-s
ive and mathematical. A coordinated, Army-wide effort to d
evelop a more offensive doctrine ensued. A new FM 100-5i
ntroduced AirLand Battle doctrine in 1982, and a revision f
ollowed in 1986. Neither manual directly mentioned Europe o
r the Soviets, but it was clear that was the problem space. A
irLand Battle was a rigorously reasoned doctrine—arguably m
ore so than any of the Army doctrines that have followed. N
ever executed against its envisioned enemy, AirLand Battle t
urned out to be highly effective against the Iraqi army dur-i
ng Operation DESERT STORM in 1991. Moreover, AirLand B
attle, elevated to the multi-Service level, became the de factoj
oint doctrine. 
Where the Army undertook a coordinated and methodi-c
al effort to develop AirLand Battle, the maneuver warfare m
ovement took on more the character of a back-alley brawl c
onducted on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette—which i
n retrospect is probably appropriate. Col John Greenwood, t
he editor of the Gazette at the time, deserves a lot of credit f
or encouraging and managing the debate. Being able to focus o
n a particular threat in a particular theater allowed the Army t
o write in more speciﬁ  c and concrete terms. As the Nation’s f
orce-in-readiness in the 1980s, the Marine Corps did not e
njoy that luxury, and one consequence is that Warﬁ  ghting is m
ore abstract and theoretical than the Army capstone manu-a
ls have tended to be. It was, as Gray wrote in the foreword, m
ore a “philosophy for action” than a traditional doctrine. M
aneuver warfare as described in Warﬁ  ghting was designed G
en Alfred M. Gray.(Ofﬁ  cial Marine Corps photo.)

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o have very broad utility but required significant judgment i
n application, which has been a source of frustration for s
ome Marine readers looking for more specific guidance. C
onversely, as a result, Warfighting could be written in more e
nduring terms, which goes some way in explaining why the M
arine Corps has not found the need to update its doctrine a
s frequently as the Army has.A 
second aspect of the historical context of maneuver war-f
are is that it is a product of the Cold War era and implicitly r
eflects that paradigm. FMFM 1 ’s default was the classic m
ilitary force-on-force model. It did not explicitly exclude i
rregular warfare, but it had nothing specific to say about it e
ither—one of the criticisms of both editions of Warfighting. T
he 1997 revision acknowledges the possibility of nonstate b
elligerents but offers no additional insights into nonclassical w
arfare. It is a credit to the Corps that countless Marines have e
xtrapolated the classic theory of Warfighting to decades of i
rregular warfare. Arguably, Warfighting reflects a worldview t
hat became dated when the Berlin Wall fell—or, alternatively, p
ossibly one that is just now coming back into relevance.T
he Maneuver vs. Attrition DebateP
erhaps the biggest controversy to arise during the de-v
elopment of maneuver warfare was the maneuver warfare v
s. attrition warfare debate. The early maneuverists chose t
o describe maneuver warfare by comparing it with its op-p
osite, which they called attrition warfare. In retrospect, t
his may have been an operational error that delayed the e
ventual acceptance of maneuver warfare. The simplistic i
nterpretation of the argument was: maneuver good, attrition ba
d. In reality, the problem was partly semantic. All warfare i
nvolves attrition—that is, incremental degradation of com-ba
t power because of accumulating losses. And all warfare i
nvolves relational movement, if only to bring weapons into p
osition to cause more attrition. Maneuver and attrition are n
ot a matter of either/or, but that is how proponents came to f
rame the issue. The Marine Corps split into two camps: the m
aneuverists and the attritionists. The maneuverists thought t
hey were simply advancing ideas on a better way to fight, b
ut the attritionists felt (with some justification) that they w
ere being painted as Neanderthals for wanting to kill the e
nemy. How could attrition inflicted on an enemy possibly b
e bad? The attritionists thought the maneuverists were un-n
ecessarily complicating what should be a straightforward p
roposition: find the enemy, destroy the enemy. (Frankly, a
nd unfortunately, part of the attritionists’ motivation also w
as a reaction to the confrontational Lind, who was closely a
ssociated with the maneuver vs. attrition construct. The t
erm “attrition warfare” assumed a pejorative connotation, s
o naturally some Marines adopted it as a badge of honor to s
how their opposition.)T
he issue was not whether it was better to maneuver or to i
nflict attrition because both again are inherent in warfare. I
n retrospect, the issue is what you choose as the mecha-n
ism by which you propose to impose defeat on the enemy. The i
mportant concept of defeat mechanism  was not explicitly r
ecognized at the time. (A later article will address defeat m
echanisms.) The defeat mechanism of attrition warfare was i
nherent in the name: you inflicted defeat by cumulatively e
roding enemy personnel and material strength or psycho-l
ogical resolve until he gave up the fight or eventually was e
liminated. The maneuverists pointed out that this tended to b
e a time-consuming and costly approach. Moreover, it did n
ot work well if there was a marked asymmetry of interests: M
arine readers may be looking for more specific guidance from Warfighting . (Photo by  LCpl Shane Beaubien.)

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ANEUVER WARFAREi
f one belligerent was ﬁ  ghting merely a war of choice while t
he other fought a war of survival (read: Vietnam), the odds we
re signiﬁ  cantly stacked.   
The defeat mechanism of maneuver warfare was much h
arder to put your ﬁ  nger on. It certainly was not inherent i
n the word maneuver, which many understood narrowly t
o mean relational movement, but which the maneuverists i
mbued with deeper meaning that they sometimes struggled t
o explain. (A popular attritionist joke was that maneuver w
arfare sought to win not by defeating the enemy in battle b
ut by “driving in circles and confusing him to death.”) 
For some, the “maneuver” in maneuver warfare suggested t
hat the doctrine was deﬁ  ned by the forms of maneuver it e
mployed, namely envelopments, penetrations, and turning m
ovements—basically anything other than a frontal attack, w
hich by implication was considered stupid. This was a g
ross misunderstanding. Attritionists complained that the m
aneuverists could not lay exclusive claim to select forms of m
aneuver, and they resented the implication that they favored o
nly frontal attacks. Others equated maneuver warfare with m
echanized warfare, likely based on the tendency to associate m
aneuver warfare with the German blitzkrieg of the Second W
orld War. (More about the German inﬂ  uence shortly.) The i
conic image of Gray in utilities with desert goggles on his h
elmet probably reinforced the misconception. 
We now understand that the defeat mechanism of maneuver w
arfare is systemic disruption—eliminating the enemy’s ability t
o operate as a coherent and cohesive whole. According to FM
FM 1: M
aneuver warfare is a warﬁ  ghting philosophy that seeks to shatter t
he enemy’s cohesion through a series of rapid, violent, and unex-p
ected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating s
ituation with which he cannot cope.B
oyd used to talk about “tearing the enemy apart from the ins
ide.”I
n other words, where attrition warfare attacks the components o
f the enemy system to degrade them, maneuver warfare at-t
acks the relationships between those components to break t
he coherent functioning of the system.   
Maneuver warfare is a systemic doctrine, which was a h
ard sell in 1989. The emergence of complexity theory in the 1
990s, with a host of popular books on the subject, greatly e
nhanced the understanding of complex systems. (It also g
reatly enhanced the understanding of both Clausewitz and B
oyd. Alan Beyerchen’s masterful “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, a
nd the Unpredictability of War,” published in International Af
fairs in 1992, argued convincingly that Clausewitz intui-t
ively understood complex nonlinear dynamics but lacked t
he language to describe them. Likewise, the language and c
oncepts of complexity theory helped us to realize that Boyd’s t
hinking had been even farther ahead of its time than we had p
reviously appreciated.) The 1997 revision of Warﬁ  ghting was m
uch more explicitly systemic in its description. It was still a h
ard sell. 
Finally, complicating the issue was the often-misunderstood a
nnihilation-attrition strategic construct. The German his-t
orian Hans Delbruck (1848–1929) posited two basic types o
f strategy: Ermattungsstrategie and Niederwerfungsstrategie, w
hich were mistakenly translated in English as strategy of a
ttrition and strategy of annihilation. The English terms a
re problematic because they are practically synonymous. In f
act, most American readers were probably introduced to the t
erms in Russell Weigley’s 1973 classic The American Way o
f War, in which, the author later acknowledged, he had got t
he terms confused. The former strategy is probably better ter
med strategy of exhaustion, which Delbruck argued was a v
iable option for a weaker belligerent that lacked the ability t
o defeat the enemy outright and instead sought a limited o
bjective—to raise the enemy’s costs so high that he was w
illing to settle on your terms rather than continue to ﬁ  ght. M
aneuver warfare attacks relationships between components to break down the coherent functioning of the system.(Photo by Cpl Tanner Seims.)

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.mca-marines.org/gazette89 Marine Corps Gazette • September 2020T
he latter is better termed a strategy of incapacitation. (The G
erman literally means “taking-down strategy,” as in a take d
own in wrestling. It does not require reducing the enemy “to n
othing,” the literal meaning of “annihilation” from Latin.) T
he latter strategy involved the outright defeat of the enemy’s a
bility to resist, which Delbruck argued involved the adoption o
f an unlimited military objective and was available only to t
he stronger belligerent.  T
he German InfluenceA
nother controversy during the maneuver warfare move-m
ent was the German influence. The maneuverists, some m
ore than others, were fond of using German historical e
xamples and terminology. They made two arguments. The fi
rst was that the German army had in fact achieved tactical a
nd operational excellence using maneuver warfare and was o
ne of the few modern armies to do so. The second was that t
he German army was the only modern army to codify its m
aneuver doctrine. As a result, any primary source documents t
ended to be German. For the maneuverists, both arguments m
ade the Germans worth studying. The maneuver warfare c
anon thus was filled with titles like Mellenthin’s Panzer B
attles, Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Manstein’s Lost Victories, R
ommel’s Attacks, and Schell’s Battle Leadership.S
chwerpunkt (main effort or center of gravity), Auftrag-st
aktik (mission tactics), Flaechen und Luekentaktik (tactics o
f surfaces and gaps), aufrollen (rolling up enemy forces from t
he flank after a penetration), and Fingerspitzengefuhl (liter-a
lly “finger tips feeling,” meaning intuitive flair or instinct) f
ound their way into the discussion, often getting mangled i
n pronunciation in the process.  F
ueling the debate was the 1982 publication of Martin van C
reveld’s Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 19
39-1945 (although it was available several years earlier as a D
OD-funded study). Van Creveld did an extensive statistical a
nalysis of 87 engagements between U.S. Army and German f
orces in the Second World War and concluded that German g
round forces were tactically and operationally superior to U
.S. forces. The oversimplified lesson that some took from F
ighting Power was that German troops were 1.5 to 2.0 times b
etter than their American counterparts, which did not sit w
ell with many American readers and may have helped to p
ush some into the attritionist camp. Last, but not least, the c
ontroversial Lind was an unabashed Germanophile (Prus-s
ophile is probably more accurate), and this alone produced a
ntibodies.I
n the end, Warfighting intentionally avoided the use of G
erman terminology. Thirty years of subsequent experience h
as reduced the need to rely on German examples, and the c
ontroversy has largely blown over.W
hy the Maneuver Warfare Movement SucceededT
here are several reasons for maneuver warfare’s insti-t
utional success, and those may provide lessons for today’s s
ituation.•
T he maneuver warfare movement came from a point of real i
nstitutional pain. The origin and motivation of the maneuver w
arfare movement, as mentioned, was the pain caused by t
he dysfunctional experience of the Vietnam War. It was t
his motivation that sustained the movement. Maneuver w
arfare was not merely an intellectual exercise, although H
einz Guderian. (Photo taken in Poland, Photog-r
apher unknown.)F
ield Marshal Erwin Rommel. (Bundesar-c
hiv_Bild_146-1973-012-43,_Erwin_Romme.)F
ield Marshal Erich von Manstein. (Bunde-s
archiv_Bild_183-H01757,_Erich_von_Manstein.)A
nother controversy during the ma-n
euver warfare movement was the Ger
man influence.

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ANEUVER WARFAREc
learly it contained an intellectual element. In contrast, many c
apability development initiatives today seem like purely i
ntellectual exercises not motivated by any institutional p
ain. They appear to be change for change’s sake.• 
The discourse was extensive, open, and transparent—and f
requently messy. This was critical. The argument took place i
n the open over more than a decade. It got ugly at times, b
ut this forced the maneuverists to strengthen their case a
nd in the end helped garner widespread support for the d
octrine. Maneuver warfare was not developed in secret by s
ome high-level “working group” and then imposed on the r
est of the institution. In today’s parlance, we might say it w
as crowd sourced. The open discourse went a long way t
oward socializing, strengthening, and eventually vetting m
aneuver doctrine.• 
The movement operated as a classic insurgency. While the d
iscourse took place in the open, the maneuver warfare m
ovement itself operated like a classic insurgency, employ-i
ng an inkblot strategy to gradually expand its inﬂ  uence o
ver time, increasing its proﬁ  le as it grew stronger. The m
aneuverists thought of themselves as insurgents, work-i
ng to subvert the existing order. Maneuverist cells popped u
p spontaneously around the Marine Corps. With Gray’s s
uccession to the Commandancy, the insurgency became t
he regime.  • 
The movement enjoyed a combination of strong visionary l
eadership and bottom-up, grass-roots commitment. Gray pro-v
ided a compelling and unifying vision as well as critical t
op-cover for the insurgents. Meanwhile, Lind drew most o
f the attritionists’ ﬁ  re, providing additional cover for the r
est of the movement. But the ultimate driving force was t
he growing number of Marines who supported the new c
oncepts. Maneuver warfare would not have succeeded to t
he extent it did without both the top-down and bottom-u
p dynamics. • 
Maneuver warfare had strong historical and theoretical f
oundations. A key attribute of the maneuver warfare move-m
ent was the strength of its intellectual foundation. The m
aneuverists did their homework. People might have be-m
oaned the number of German historical examples, but t
here was no shortage of examples. Meanwhile, maneuver d
octrine rested on a solid philosophical foundation of Sun-z
ian, Clausewitzian, and Boydian theories. (One of the early c
riticisms of Warﬁ  ghting was that there was “nothing new” i
n it. LtGen P.K. Van Riper used to respond that that was t
rue: there was nothing in Warﬁ  ghting that wasn’t in Sun T
zu, Clausewitz, or Boyd. The trick of W a r ﬁ g h t i n g was that i
t managed to synthesize those three disparate theories into a c
oherent whole.) In contrast, too many contemporary w
arﬁ  ghting concepts appear to be no more than PowerPoint d
eep. Moreover, many seem to be anti-historical, implying o
r openly asserting that some technological or other innova-t
ion has so “changed the fundamental nature of war” that t
here is nothing to be learned from the past.  • 
The process involved signiﬁ  cant experimentation. Long be-f
ore there was a Marine Corps Warﬁ  ghting Lab, Second M
arine Division became a maneuver warfare laboratory w
hen Gray took command in 1981 and declared at an all-o
fﬁ  cers call at the base theater that maneuver warfare was t
he division’s ofﬁ  cial doctrine. The pinnacle of experimen-t
ation was the annual Combined Arms Operation at Fort P
ickett, VA, a completely free play, force-on-force exercise p
itting some combination of battalions against each other. A
t ENDEX each day, all ofﬁ  cers and staff NCOs would d
rive back to the base theater at mainside for an exten-s
ive hotwash moderated personally by Gray, with Lind in a
ttendance like a Prussian Nestor. The Combined Arms O
peration and similar exercises went a long way toward c
reating additional maneuverists.C
onclusion 
To understand where you are and where you are going, i
t is important to know where you have been. The future e
volves from the past. This short history of the development o
f maneuver warfare in the Marine Corps may illuminate s
ome worthwhile questions for the Marine Corps today as i
t faces yet another transition after long period of war: Is t
here institutional pain today sufﬁ  cient to drive doctrinal a
nd other reform? Is that pain even a necessary ingredient n
ow as it was then? (Arguably, the effort that led to the ini-t
ial development of amphibious doctrine in the 1930s was n
ot based on institutional pain but simply on a clear-eyed a
ssessment of the future security environment.) Must any s
uccessful reform involve a bottom-up grass roots movement, a
nd must it too take the form of an institutional insurgency? W
ill there need to emerge another Gray, Boyd, Wyly, or Lind? S
hould or how should maneuver warfare adapt to recent and e
merging changes in warfare? Or, more fundamentally, has w
arfare changed sufﬁ  ciently that the Marine Corps should r
econsider its basic doctrine? Most Marines would instinc-t
ively and emphatically say, “No!”—but does that mean the q
uestion should not be asked?  T
o understand where you are and w
here you are going, it is important to k
now where you have been. The future e
volves from the past.