Hand Grenade of the Month for July 2017

John Kuehn Blog Post

Hand Grenade of the Month July 2017

By John T. Kuehn, written circa 23 June 2017

What Comes Next? Phases--Winning the Wars and Losing the Peace (plural)

Stand by, this is a long one.  Could almost be a chapter in a Wick Murray anthology!

The US Army, and larger US military, uses an interesting concept known as “phasing” to describe its military operations.  In this construct there are generally four phases of military operations, phases I through IV.    To this is added a “fifth” phase, often known colloquially as “phase zero.”  More on phase zero later, let us first deal with phases I- IV.

According to US Army doctrinal publication ADRP 3-0, phases are generally defined as:

“… a planning and execution tool used to divide an operation in duration or activity.” [1]

The US Army has chosen in its most recent doctrine NOT to specify any set number of phases, but with a little digging we find in older so-called joint doctrine [2] that the four phase operation is standard with:

Phase I equaling the beginning of combat operations, to include overt military deterrence through mobilization, deployment and establishment of forward operating positions or assembly areas, and may include hasty defensive operations if combat initiated by strategic, operational, or tactical surprise by an enemy.

Phase II usually encompasses what Clausewitz called an active defense, but can include “shaping operations” but generally is not the phase of decisive combat operations. This phase usually ends with “seizing the initiative” or the enemy culminating in some way, as the Japanese did at Guadalcanal for example.

Phase III is the biggie, the one that receives the most effort in Army military decision making process (MDMP) planning.  It encompasses “decisive combat operations,” as well as decisive stability operations in the latest Army doctrine and is the point when offensive operations are the norm with the expectation of leading to a decision or suspension of overt military action.  This phase could last a long time if operations culminate and require a pause and could lead to a sequel requiring a return to phase II type operations.

Phase III is no longer categorized as such in Army doctrine and is now defined more holistically as “offense” that “seizes the initiative” followed by offense that establishes “dominance” of the enemy at a particular level of war.   However, it is implicit in Army doctrine that this phasing construct really applies not to the strategic or tactical levels of war, but rather to the operational level, to a campaign in a bounded theater of war. [3]

Phase IV is the immediate post-war phase and, again, in current doctrine goes by the name “Stability” and is itself now divided into two sections: stability operations that “stabilize” (I know redundant) followed by those that “enable civil authority.”  In joint doctrine it encompasses “conflict termination”—whatever that is.  Also in the older four phase model Phase IV meant the post-war but pre-demobilization environment that once occupied the enemy’s territory and assumed the functions of government if the defeated enemy government could not.   More simply, military occupation until a local civil government, or governments could be established.   So this is current Army, and really joint, doctrine today.

****

Now for the military history piece and the (potential) hand grenade for H-WAR readers.  For a long time, after World War II, the phase IV paradigm was informed by the occupations of defeated Japan and Germany, both based on unconditional surrender terms--or in technically historical terms, the dominant narrative, mostly triumphalist, of those occupations.   However, since the end of the Cold War this paradigm (and associated narratives) has been repeatedly challenged by US and NATO involvement in various locations throughout the globe.

The first problem is that unconditional surrender is an unreal expectation, very few nations do it anymore when they lose, preferring instead to “head to the bush”---or the mountains of Pakistan cities and villages of Iraq—and keep fighting.  The second problem involves those cases where the regime WAS in fact toppled—as in Panama in 1990 (OPERATION JUST CAUSE)—that offered a glimpse of a messy future, but were improperly studied or just ignored by military professionals.

Panama is often regarded as a success, but we now know that “phase IV” was a mess, there was no real plan and the conduct of post-Noriega rule there by the US military as the “lead agency” was ad hoc.   The messiness of this phase IV was overshadowed by larger events later in 1990 – 1991 in Kuwait and Iraq and offers one explanation as to why this messy post-war process was not leveraged and learned from.  And since things in Panama did not seem to have turned out so bad once we started noticing it again we blithely plowed on.   Somalia provided another view, a messy intervention on humanitarian grounds followed by liberal hegemonic “mission creep” followed by an abrupt and confidence shaking withdrawal. If only it had shaken US policy makers and senior military leaders more, eh?  That could have been our future, too.  Notice how the past is a guide to the future? But I digress.

The other problem is that nations and nation-like (e.g. non-state) entities no longer surrendered “unconditionally” to the US and its allies anymore, which made application of the paradigm ever more difficult, first after the Cold War---the Soviets never did surrender unconditionally to NATO—and then in the Balkans in Bosnia and then in Kosovo/Serbia, but especially in Afghanistan and then, more famously, in Iraq.  Lost in all of this was the fact that the US military, especially the Army, and also especially civilian would-be leaders, failed to understand the real care “phase IV,” now called stability operations, requires.   The enemy often ended up simply turning phase IV, because of poor American planning and “envisioning” into another phase I or phase II called “insurgency.”   The United States had practically institutionalized, along with its NATO allies, a paradigm whereby the peace was lost because how to get from phase III to peace was understudied, and more importantly, under-appreciated.

As for “phase zero,” it is a commonly used phrase but has no counterpart in Army doctrine, although it does exist in older joint doctrine. [4]

So what is it?  It is peace, or rather—and this is somewhat alarming—it is the “interwar” period, where what Americans used to do well is no longer done, grand strategy—instead we are stuck doing a grand strategy we adopted after World War II and continued more intensely after the end of the Cold War known as “liberal hegemony.”  In other words we are on grand strategic autopilot. [5]

Back to phase zero.    It is during this phase that conflict is best avoided, in fact phase zero’s goal is to deter conflict at the strategic level, while at the same time preparing for it--one of the great paradoxes of the human condition in my view.

  Going from phase zero to phase I is something the US does well…but going from phase IV to phase zero?  Well, the US is stuck on IV, isn’t it?  We tried to partially go to phase zero in 2011 with the Iraq withdrawal, but for some reason that did not work.  We seem unable to go full circle to zero.

Just my thoughts, what are yours?

 

[1]  ADRP 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: Headquarter, Department of the Army, November 2016), page 2-8.

[2]   Joint Operational Planning, JP 5-0 ( Washington, DC:   Department of Defense, August 2011), page III-39.

[3] ADRP  3-0, page 3-6, see Figure 3-2.

[4]   JP 5-0, page III-39.

[5] Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), x5-6.

16 Replies

Post Reply

Allow me to reverse the question and ask whether it has been historically possible for any nation to go "full circle to zero" in the absence of the unconditional surrender/utter annihilation of an opponent. I don't think this is a uniquely American problem. You note that the last time the United States really achieved full victory was in World War II. Cora Goldstein contrasted this with the struggle to pacify Afghanistan following the invasion of 2001, and noted the following:

"The Germans and the Japanese were in a state of psychological paralysis and war weariness that made them compliant. The magnitude of defeat had multiple effects:
-it diminished the risk of resistance and armed insurgency.
-it allowed the military governments to achieve and maintain a monopoly of violence, information, and propaganda in the postwar.
-it enabled the occupiers to implement their revolutionary political and ideological agenda." [1] This post-war state was achieved by maximizing the use of violent, and often indiscriminate, force, and generally with an extended occupation of the defeated nation's territory.

So two points then: first, it's not just an American problem. Napoleon was not truly beaten until the allies sent him to the other side of the world and occupied France. The Chinese Communists did not beat the Nationalists until the latter had been driven from the mainland and remaining internal resistance liquidated. Rome couldn't go from phase IV to 0 with Carthage until that city had been pulled down, brick by brick. So, arguably, for anyone to achieve the full circle demands unconditional surrender/complete annihilation. We are not alone in being unable to find a better way of achieving the former absent the latter.

Second point: is it truly unrealistic to think that unconditional surrender is still possible? Perhaps it's more accurate to say that it might be achieved, but would require levels of destruction so high that modern nations are unwilling to face the international condemnation that would inevitably bring. So, the nation (or group) seeking complete victory simply can't care as much about international opinion as it does about its national goal. Russia certainly did not seem to care for world opinion when it came to South Ossetia, the Crimea, or Chechnya. Perhaps that attitude is not an option for the United States. Should we, perhaps, reconsider?

[1] Cora Sol Goldstein, "The Afghanistan Experience: Democratization by Force," Parameters (Autumn 2012): 20.

Ian, Sorry taking so long for a response, I was half-hoping someone else would pick up the gauntlets that your questions pose.

But I am glad you posted them. Using a Gospel approach the last shall be first, okay? Reconsider what it takes to get unconditional surrender (USr)? That is the question right? Surrender of who, or of what? In both Iraq and Afghanistan there really was no surrender. The enemy refused to surrender. As Clausewitz notes: "the animosity and the reciprocal effects of hostile elements, cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy’s will has not been broken.” (CvC, Howard and Paret trans. On War, 90).

Look at the American Civil War, unconditional surrender worked, right? Wrong. Phase IV (reconstruction) saw the freed slaves slowly lose their newly won freedoms over the next 50 years and the expansion of the apartheid character of the US in terms of race relations only increased and was applied to other minorities like Asians in the first three decades of the 20th Century. Yes, the Union was restored, but slavery was slowly re-implemented via different economic means and freedom curtailed while the repression of institutionalized racism expanded until after WW II. I tell my students that the American Civil War ended in 1964.

So who surrenders? Insurgencies can simmer for decades and even centuries (as I just pointed out with the "lost cause" insurgency in the US). Saying we will go with a Roman approach and salt the earth seems inconsistent with our values. Those are the means implied to reach USr. Ironically, the more coherent and stable a society the more vulnerable to unconditional surrender it is--e.g. Japan in 1945. It surrendered before it fractured, in fact recent Scholars like Rich Frank argue it surrendered because the Emperor did not want it to fracture. But unless these states are behaving (like N. Korea) in a criminal manner, they are probably not the ones we want to surrender unconditionally, nor completely remake them in our own western, liberal image. So N. Korea might be a candidate for consideration of USr approach.

So there has to be a lot at stake, existentially, for this option to be chosen. The so called war on terror or whatever they call it nowadays is not an existential conflict for America. It is for Syrians, but not for Americans.

As for Afghanistan, calling the place a state is a joke. It is at least 40 different warlord entities with transnational groups running around on top of it. The warlord who controls Kabul gets to speak for "Afghanistan"--but he pretty much controls nothing beyond what he can secure around Kabul, which ain't much. Sounds like China in the 1920s and 30s and 40s. It took Japan and a cult of personality around a home grown communist ideology, labeled extreme by Americans, to get modern China to gel. But it had experience with civilization, so it was more a remembering than a remaking. Still, 40-50 million dead? Not my choice to create a state. But I am not Chinese either.

Okay, maybe I will deal with the other questions later, but my question in return remains, "what is at stake?" Is it worth asking for an unconditional surrender and all that implies in terms of ways and means. My answer, to liberal hegemony beyond the seas, is that of Barry Posen and Andrew Bacevich--no thank you, I will remain on the defense. vr, John

Dr. Kuehn, your point on the American Civil War is well-taken. I just finished Ronald White's "American Ulysses" to refresh myself on postwar politics, and it was truly depressing to accept the reality that, for almost a century, Grant (despite his nickname) was the only president who really made an effort to make the "phase IV" gains stick. I also think that a society's coherence/stability making it more susceptible to unconditional surrender makes sense. Going back to Goldstein's analysis of World War II, having a tightly unified body politic - especially when tied so closely to one party or one individual - makes the psychological and spiritual shock of losing that focal point all the greater, hence making the paralyzed populace more amenable (or vulnerable, however you want to characterize it) to being influenced by the new dominant power.

In that vein, I'm actually not convinced that North Korea falls into the category of coherence/stability that might make unconditional surrender the only viable option. We certainly know very little about what goes on behind the curtain there; but I suspect that separating the people from the leadership might be accomplished short of laying the North waste. Kim takes care of himself and his army; everyone else starves while living in terror. That's not national stability or coherence; that's a tightrope walker who's one wrong move away from a deadly fall. Even being part of the inner circle seems to have little benefit, as Kim seems fond of shrinking that circle at every whim. I don't doubt that a war on the peninsula would be very destructive, but I also don't think it's unrealistic to think we could maybe reach an accommodation with certain leaders in the North in exchange for Kim's body. There's also the theory that a northern invasion could stall of its own accord once Kim's troops come in contact with the material bounty of the south. Again, is it unrealistic to think that we could promise Northern soldiers, "there's more where that came from if you take care of Kim for us?"

I agree that it's really dire stakes that makes unconditional surrender, and its inherent bloodshed and destruction, palatable. "It's us or them" is pretty cut and dried. For the American looking at the Axis, or the Roman looking across the Mediterranean at Carthage, the answer seems clear. Most of our recent conflicts do not seem to rise to that standard; though I think that the somewhat less dire "it's better to fight them over here than in our streets" argument nevertheless has some validity too. A hundred years ago, Wahhabi-type radicals could hate America or the West all they wanted because they were over there and we were over here. Now, they're just a plane ride and some bad airport security away. The extremes a country goes to in order to solve that problem are certainly worth debating. But we can no longer count on our two oceans to defend us.

(There's a corollary to the "high stakes" point that makes me uncomfortable, and that is not insignificant numbers of Americans for whom I believe the stakes would never be high enough to get them on board with unconditional surrender these days, and indeed, who believe America might well deserve to lose an "us or them" conflict. But I digress)

I've run out of time to go back to point one, on how the problem of going "full circle to zero" is not uniquely American. Maybe somebody else will, and/or I might try to pick it up later.

On a separate note: if you're looking for future hand grenades, you could toss out whether the Marine Corps actually practices the maneuver warfare doctrine it preaches. I've been looking at that topic as a tangent to a monograph I'm working on, and there is debate within some circles of the Marine Corps right now on it as the commandant has ordered the institution as a whole to "reinvigorate" a maneuver warfare mindset.

Marine forces have always been designed working with Navy as part of the Navy. Perhaps you will provide more commentary concerning this loss as you mention of a maneuver focus to its purposes ?

Can it bee operating in land warfare such as present day experiences has been something lending to a more stationary approach ?

Also you give Grant's Presidency as example of Phase IV experiences. Could this be expanded upon with added comment. Army doctrine of the present, did it match up to what post-Civil War occupation and reintegration of the Southern States into a split up Union was all about ? Post Civil War American history is a particular
subject area of interest.

Thanks for any further thoughts in advance.

Not wanting to reply to my own materials already offered for list view, there is here, given this discussion some further 'extended' remarks both about that material and those Roman Empire history substance which are available for inclusive thought along these subject lines raised.

North Korea sounds like so much wishful thinking short of a real American effort to sit down and discuss with its regime about a future for both in that part of the world. Absent this outcome, far more likely, the US will look down that nuclear missile force of NK's future plans.
Still, this substantive result does not get to the points raised by posting on this subject and other matters included.

Civil War has not been much discussed on this list unless I've missed materials previous. Possibly, if correct, due to interest more in battles, tactics, etc. as a focus of various topics ?
Yet, Rome's Empire and history is replete with examples of Civil Wars, despite it wars against other; most instructive for understanding both the topic and substance which can and does result. So much so, the American Civil War has stood out as a single experience in the Nation's all too brief history as a State..........little more than 200 years.

Would like to suggest further discussions along lines of Civil War, not at all unknown elsewhere and both part of the Korean, WWII experiences[Korea not being the only example] and Europe's history might prove to be a light upon some of these topical subjects mentioned. Another such example, and there are several, would suggest is the French Revolution which ended monarchy rule, paved the way for Napoleon and eventually the French Republics down to modern history. Just one thought on this subject matter. How does phasing and phase IV relate to such types of Wars ?

Re. Wyatt's mention of North Korea, let me drift off-topic and postulate the crazy suggestion that the Hermit Kingdom is a wildly exaggerated problem. There’s no negotiating with them, they hardly live on the same planet as the rest of us. That country is the personal fief of a deranged ruling family, the sole aim of whose young, ruthless and self-indulgent paterfamilias is to 1) perpetuate his personal rule, and 2) perpetuate his sybaritic lifestyle. Perhaps it’s a gamble to make assumptions about him and his regime, but I believe that while it is often in his interest to posture, based on a nonexistent threat from . . . the US? South Korea? Japan? (who knows?), he must realize that actually initiating hostilities would bring down personal ruin on himself – no more sybaritic lifestyle, no more girls, no more porn, no more rich foods, whatever. So, I think all his posturing is for his internal audience, chiefly the long-suffering North Korean people, who must be forced to perceive an existential threat kept at bay only by the wisdom of the supreme leader.

Of course I could have gotten all this wrong.

Wyatt, I will confess some parochialism in the "hand grenade" selection, and as such I should have offered more background detail on why it's a hand grenade at all. I'm a Marine Corps officer, but was still a child when the institutional debate and eventual adoption of maneuver warfare by the Marine Corps occurred in the 1980s. Over the last few years, I have done a great deal of research into that time period and find both the process of institutional reform, as well as the ideas of maneuver warfare themselves, fascinating. The fact that maneuver warfare remains our foundational warfighting philosophy is a testament to the concept's enduring nature.

My question as to whether the Corps practices maneuver warfare is an outgrowth of my research, and there are circles within the Marine Corps itself that hold passionate and divergent views on the subject. On one side, there are many who think that, from DESERT STORM onward, maneuver warfare has proven itself to be a useful philosophy for guiding combat actions. Former commanders like Gens. Mattis and Kelly have specifically stated that maneuver warfare shaped their approaches to war. On the other side, there are some who believe with some bitterness that the maneuver warfare reforms died the moment FMFM-1 Warfighting was signed; that the Corps never implemented the many other changes that would have been necessary to make it a truly "maneuverist" organization; and that today maneuver warfare is given lip service while Marines are actually taught and trained in the "attritionist" mindset that maneuver warfare sought to eliminate. This is a somewhat simplistic summation of the argument, the details of which could fill volumes. But the passion is there, which is why I suggested it as a hand grenade. That said, it is fairly parochial; I'd say most Marines today do not spend their time wondering whether or not they actually "do" maneuver warfare, as we have been a fairly busy organization of late. Outside of the Corps, I doubt the other Services lose a moment of sleep over the question at all. But I do find it an interesting question, both as a student of history who studied the institutional movement to adopt maneuver warfare extensively, and certainly as a Marine who had not guessed there was any question at all whether we were a maneuverist organization until I did this research and came across the dissenting group.

As to your post-Civil War questions, I'll also confess that that is not an area I have studied much. That was why I found the new Grant biography so intriguing (and depressing). While president, Grant made great efforts to protect the newly-won civil rights of freed slaves as well as keep southern state governments from reverting to a form that would again abridge them. Once he left office, his successors did not make nearly the same effort with the result that, in a very real sense, Dr. Kuehn's point about the Civil War not truly being over until the 1960s is true.

I read White's biography of Grant before this comment thread opened, but as I reply to you now, it's made me think of Dr. Kuehn's original question from a different angle. The last time America won complete unconditional victories in war was over Japan and Germany. And while the social aspects of the Civil War might not have been resolved for decades, on the battlefield Union forces arguably won, and Grant demanded, unconditional victory over the South. In both cases, was America able to make the victories stick because the commanding generals who won them were later elected to the presidency and thus could bring their battlefield perspective to the political side? I refer here to Eisenhower along with Grant. Each came to power after the presidents who were actually in office at the end of the wars proved unsatisfactory in managing the post-war world. And each served two terms, which allowed them the time to craft post-war policies and then oversee their implementation. So maybe we could answer Dr. Kuehn's question with the answer that yes, going from phase IV to phase 0 is possible for America; you just need to elect the general who won the war president for two terms afterward. Thoughts?

Repeated phrase such as "liberal hegemonic “mission creep”" and "liberal hegemony beyond the seas" makes this hand grenade, to my mind, more ideological then historical. It also seems focused on doctrine more than reality. The way this grenade was framed seems to predispose the answers towards a 'can't be done' answer, reinforcing a predetermined critique of American foreign policy since World War II, and perhaps a justification for isolationism, or at least a more passive, less militaristic interventionism.

My own bias is in favor of American interventionism, including military interventionism, and so I believe that 'phase IV', stability, or merely concluding a satisfactory peace IS possible in the context of the irregular wars the United States has most often engaged in since 1945.

The key lies in the idea that wars are political, and that the key to warfare is the will of each side. Not in any sort of macho, 'never surrender' sense, but in the basic idea that peace is achieved when one or both sides determines that the issues at play are no longer worth killing or dying for. That generally takes far longer than most want to believe, the Army chief of Staff's recent speech to the National Press Club on myths of war (reworking a 2015 speech) certainly hits at several problems Americans have had recently when it comes to understanding the difficulties in winning a war. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2017/07/27/milley-future-wars-…

Most specifically, his point that “Armies don’t fight wars, Navies, air forces – they don’t fight wars. Nations fight wars.” hits the key point. I would argue we have had trouble securing the end state we desire because the American people have been unwilling to pay the costs in blood, treasure, and time required to achieve that end state. The emphasis on exit strategies is the prime example of this unwillingness to pay the price required.

WRT to Wyatt's posting about the Marines, it is true that they were initially designed as a naval infantry and security force. The Marines, however, had evolved and received further mandates to serve as a sort of first wave--fast, light, and adaptable--for both amphibious and land operations. There are smarter and more knowledgeable folks on this list than I, but if any on the list want additional reading about the USMC, I can provide resources free in digital and sometimes hard copy formats. The USMC History Division and MCUP press never charges for its books or periodicals. Please feel free to contact me alexandra.kindell@usmcu.edu if you would like any of our titles! This is more PSA than advertising, I promise.

Wow! This compiled subject postings certainly did what was actually wishing would happen.........replies and further commentaries. Thanks ever so much. Should clarify for these subject discussions that am aware of the original purpose of MarCorps and really appreciate the offer of publications.
Just so you have a little more background for where this discussion is coming, over decades of time since WW II have had some awareness of Marines. One of my own first experiences was riding a Greyhound Bus from San Diego to LA about late 40s, postwar and my seat was next to a Marine from Pendleton in his DressBlues. For a kid, that was quite an experience.
In any event, during Vietnam years, while working at Main Navy as civilian staff, one of my project assignments was working on a 2000 personnel contract eval team for the LHA, MarCorps amphibious ship planned for 1970s and beyond so am somewhat aware of what Marines do. The Marine Colonel under whom my own efforts were provided was recently returned from Vietnam where he served on Gen. Lewis Walt's staff as his Finance guy there. The Colonel, among other things, truly a tremendous human being, was up for promotion to Brig. General; sadly, passed over by the Corps, he retired at took a teaching position in Mathematics in North Carolina at University there. Just a few personal moments. The LHA became the 1970s MarCorps ship of history. It was a new construction departure in shipbuilding also.
My comments were directed at how list members came to see Marines as stationary mission personnel in recent history; it wasn't their past.

In answer to Ian and Paul and Ralph, quite agree with both Ian and Pal's commentaries. However, MarCorps has always been a maneuver force for the Navy and would submit the LHA ships of the 70s are testament to that truth, planned as they were with onboard airconditioning for operation in tropical and subtropical areas of the world, among other things. There was never in any such question as fixed force locations in 70s and opposed to helo troops from the decks of LHA's. Hope this shed more light on the subject and look forward to any further detail or substance.
Ralph's comments about North Korea deserve some separate discussion am thinking. Perhaps will get back to that shortly ?
Couple of caveats, no one is going to trade the CONUS or land area of the US for North Korea but that still leaves some considerable space and area for discussion.
The comments on IKE as Prexy, etc. and Grant would think need further and yes, the 20th Century did usher into history a new issue of war, that of nations of people at war, rather than
merely some segment or ruler's wars separate from the mass of people. Communism's claim to bring 'people's war' to the struggle between opposing ideologies is exactly that point and recognition of Nations going to war in mass. Of course, even Napoleon claimed to know that as a truth of history.
Semper Fie!

All: Great dialog going here, especially Ian's discussion of the dichotomy of maneuver warfare versus attrition.

In my advice to CNO recently (really, and I do not think I am speaking out of turn, if so apologies to John Richardson), I recommended that whatever we build in terms of a naval fleet we build to fight a protracted conflict, not for some battle of the "first salvo." If one gets a maneuverist "victory" so much the better--but long conflicts, especially those that involve a maritime component, are more likely. How long did the first Punic war last? The Peloponnesian War? The Seven Years War (really, Fred Anderson argues it lasted almost 10 years from start to finish). So great discussion Ian, especially your honesty about how important the actual debate is to the bigger scheme of things and other services.

Ralph, you are mentioned in dispatches as well. I tend to agree with most of what you say about N. Korea, still Kim does give Admiral Harris in Hawaii some sleepless nights and I hope to have an editorial of my own in another venue on the topic soon. I will give the hand grenade audience a vector if it pans out, if not, I will probably turn it into a hand grenade.

thanks to all who keep this forum lively and interesting. Very Respectfully, John

ps. You can also follow my irreverent adventures now in a much more constrained, medium...by which I mean, of course,
Twitter. https://twitter.com/jkuehn50

So I am going to run the risk of quibbling here, along with somewhat tooting my own horn/shamelessly promoting the upcoming release of my monograph on the subject. And it's not so much a quibble as a clarification: in discussing maneuver warfare, I do not believe that - when properly understood - it's a bunch of fancy footwork to land a quick and immediately lethal blow that requires no follow-through. John Boyd, whose work laid the foundation for the Marine Corps' maneuver warfare, said as much (forgive the lengthy quote). His "game" was to:

  • Create tangles of threatening and/or non-threatening events/efforts as well as repeatedly generate mismatches between those events/efforts adversary observes or imagines ... and those he must react to ...

    As basis to
     
  • Penetrate adversary organism to sever his moral bonds, disorient his mental images, disrupt his operations, and overload his system, as well as subvert or seize those moral-mental-physical bastions, connections, or activities that he depends upon

    thereby
     
  • Pull adversary apart, produce paralysis, and collapse his will to resist.

    How
     
  • Get inside adversary observation-orientation-decision-action loops (at all levels) by being more subtle, more indistinct, more irregular, and quicker - yet appear to be otherwise. [1]

Nowhere did Boyd say that maneuver warfare was about "one and done," or overwhelmingly winning the first battle so that the enemy immediately gave up. The point was to use deception, tempo, mismatches of your strengths against his weaknesses, and above all not operating in recognizable patterns, to degrade the enemy's ability to function as a coherent whole while undermining him mentally and morally; and all of this was grounded in the complex processes of orientation, which was best understood as the deepest of deep dives into understanding all aspects of yourself, and all aspects of your enemy. Boyd never talked about specific timeframes for accomplishing this; the only timeframe that mattered was acting more quickly this way relative to the enemy. Indeed, he several times made points about guerrilla warfare by pointing out that guerrillas tend to operate on much long timescales than the counterinsurgent. The guerrilla wants to stretch out the length of the conflict, because - based on a good orientation on his enemy - he knows that the longer he can survive, the more he undermines the legitimacy of the government trying to defeat him. So the guerrilla does not have to operate quickly, so long as he can make the counterinsurgent operate even slower than him. He made this very point about Vietnam: "the guerrillas, in a sense, were in effect operating at a faster tempo than we were ... they were operating very slow, but Christ, we were blundering all over and couldn't even operate at their pace. We were doing things all disoriented." [2]

All this is to say I hope you don't think that I think maneuver warfare is a magical elixer for winning a war in one battle with some clever movement and Jedi mind tricks. Maneuver warfare is a repertoire of actions and deceptions, some of which aren't even military, aimed at severing those bonds that hold the adversary together; and the length of absolute time or number of battles involved has nothing to do with it.

Now to my shameless plug: this interpretation of Boyd is not well-understood. Not now, nor even at the time Boyd's friends were spreading the gospel of maneuver warfare across the Marine Corps in the late 1970s and 1980s. How did this come to pass? I will have a book coming out on the subject, hopefully before the year is over, thanks to the good graces of the Marine Corps History Division. The maneuver warfare that has both vocal proponents and critics is often not the type of conflict Boyd was talking about.

[1] John R. Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” in A Discourse on Winning and Losing (unpublished manuscript, 1987), 175.

[2] John R. Boyd, “Discourse on Winning and Losing,” transcript of lecture to USMC Command and Staff College, 25 April, 1989, tape 1, side 1 (8 audio cassettes/8 compact discs), Archives and Special Collections Branch, Library of the Marine Corps, Quantico, VA, 12.

See reply re: 1970s and end 20th Century decades plans and design for MarCorps, Navy LHA ships, new design for maneuver warfare, already on list. Further details can be brought to discussion based upon replies from list members.

Attrition practice sounds more like a battlefield tactic than a planned use of force approach. More commentary on this subject of Ian's ?

So this could easily turn into a deep rabbit hole, but Dr. Kuehn's on vacation, so I guess let's see how far down we can go before he makes us stop!

"Attrition" is badly understood; for that matter, so is maneuver. The "maneuverists" of the 1970s and 80s are as much to blame for this as anyone, because they set up the "attritionist" as the foil to themselves and in many respects, the attritionist is a straw man. If you weren't completely on board with talking about timing, tempo, mobility, surprise, et cetera, then you obviously wanted to line your men up shoulder to shoulder and walk slowly into machine gun fire (I exaggerate. A bit). Really what the non-maneuverists griped about was that maneuver warfare (hereafter abbreviated as MW) proponents talked a lot about tempo, surprise, and the like, to the point where non-maneuverists came to believe that the maneuverists thought they could win battles or whole wars without killing people or breaking things. To their credit, some of the maneuverists acknowledged this and devoted some effort to correcting this perception. MW, said the proponents, did not meant no killing or no destroying; it was to what, how, and to what end you applied firepower that mattered.

For some clarity, let's go back to Boyd, who himself never set up the binary "attrition vs. maneuver" choice. Rather, he had more a sliding scale, from attrition to maneuver to moral conflict, and firepower was not absent in any of them, but was directed toward different ends. Boyd did not claim that attrition warfare was the indifferent flinging of men directly into concentrated fire with dumb tactics, as maneuverists had the bad habit of implying. Rather, attrition warfare had a very physical focus, as he laid out in his observations on it in "Patterns of Conflict:"

  • Firepower, as a destructive force, is king.
  • Protection (trenches, armor, dispersion, etc.) is used to weaken or dilute effects of enemy firepower.
  • Mobility is used to bring firepower to bear or to evade enemy fire.
  • Measures of success are (now) "body count" and targets destroyed.

Firepower was used to inflict "frightful and debilitating attrition" in order to "break enemy's will to resist" and "seize and hold terrain objectives," with the ultimate goal of compelling the "enemy to surrender and sue for peace." [1] So attritional war (I've also heard it called "deliberate" or "methodical" warfare) focuses firepower on causing physical damage for its own end, with maneuver used to either improve the efficiency of one's firepower or reduce that of the enemy against you, and with the end state of causing so much physical destruction that the enemy quits.

MW uses firepower; let's be clear about that. Its goal, however, is not the aggregate stacking up of bodies, but directing that firepower against people or things the destruction of which causes "disorientation ... disruption ... overload," in order to "generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity." [2] In other words, attrition warfare wants to destroy those centers of gravity (assumed to be physical targets in themselves) as much as possible. MW wants to destroy those things that allow the centers of gravity (which may or may not be physical, which is determined by a good orientation on the enemy) to work in harmony, reducing the whole to less than the sum of its parts. By destroying those connections, you are inflicting a certain level of physical damage but with the aim of affecting the enemy's mental and moral strength. Kill an enemy, and he's dead but you may have strengthened the resolve of his comrade or family to keep fighting and get vengeance. But destroy other things, and you can introduce those human factors which can overwhelm courage and vengeance: make him feel alone, make him hungry, cold, in the dark, without the material means to defend himself. He will be more amenable to giving up and thus removing the fear and uncertainty that cripples him.

I could go on but this rabbit hole is probably deep enough for now. The point is, the choice is not between attrition and maneuver as battlefield tactics. War will always involve force and violence. It is to what targets, and to what ends, that force and violence is applied that distinguishes MW. We have seen time and again throughout history that the methodical approach of working through lists of physical targets in the hopes that destroying enough of them makes the enemy cry "uncle!" DOES NOT WORK. Armies and nations can endure ungodly amounts of physical destruction. Physical destruction is a certainty in warfare. MW seeks to generate uncertainty, using "ambiguity, deception, novelty, fast transient maneuvers" to "uncover, create, and exploit many vulnerabilities and weaknesses, hence many opportunities," to overthrow the human mind. [3] Firepower is used to contribute to that uncertainty.

[1] Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” 112-113.

[2] Ibid., 117.

[3] Ibid.

On the question of attrition vs. maneuver, I think it is useful to consider the example of Vietnam. In the Vietnam War the Communists faced two major enemies, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and the United States, with the United States by far the stronger.

The Communists won the war in 1975 in a campaign of maneuver, but for this to be possible, they had first to get the Americans out of Vietnam. That they accomplished through attrition. They inflicted heavy enough casualties on the American forces that the United States decided the war was not worth what it was costing, and pulled American forces out of Vietnam.

So the Communist victory was based on both maneuver and attrition, but I have to say I think attrition was the more important factor.

For right now, will again refer to posting about 1970s plans, new design for Navy-Marcorps LHA ships. There is considerably more which details may have to provide on this subject discussion of attrition v. maneuver. Would get into further little bit later than today but not right this moment. Suffice to point out, there are other materials which will bring forward on this discussed. The LHA's a new type of Navy-Marine ship, replacing some of older types into one were specific to allow maneuver as a Marine function and viewed as life from 70s until at least end of 20th Century, some 30-40 years before a need to replace them. Do believe some are still in active service witness the accident and Marines loss just this week off Australia coast.
The original plan, as remembered was bid out to private shipbuilders, for 19 ships ? Someone can confirm this most likely. However, as we did the evaluation of contractors proposed bids and plans, it became clear cost escalation was too great to build out that number and the eventual program was cut back to only 9 ships, LHA 1 thru 9.
Will have more to add on this a maneuver argument, but they would give Marines ability to intervene anywhere directed in world though mostly in 3rd world countries estimated as the likely source of needs. Think of the old cavalry forts of the West. These were fixed fortifications in places to control territory[not that we did in 1970 think this way]. LHA's were basically floating forts, moveable on the Oceans to trouble spots from which their forces could move into action when and where needed.
Again, attrition besides battlefield tactic could be a strategic object for a war. They were not that.