Talk:Maneuver warfare

History and implementation

There is some terrible stuff here.

"For the majority of history armies were limited in their speed to that of the marching soldier": "This begun to change with the domestication of the horse ...from approximately 2nd century AD." This is a ridiculous generalisation. The 2nd Century is an arbitrarily chosen date, corresponding with neither the domestication of the horse nor any of the other developments mentioned. DJ Clayworth 17:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree; the whole "History and implementation" section is poor. It implies that all pre-cavalry warfare was attrition warfare, which it certainly wasn't. Before mass firepower, the side with the advantage generally did a frontal assault, and suffered few casualties if sucessful. I'd fix this, but I need to find my (better) sources first. --A D Monroe III 21:15, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry but the section still reads as though manoeuvre warfare wasnt possible using footsoldiers. I believe it is just that as each generation of mobility breaks onto the battlefield so it confers temporary advantage. I hope you'll bear with me if i alter stuff to read that way. I am sure that when troops go to battle in jet packs they will look back on trucks as 'not' real manoeuvre warfare. Facius 00:13, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Still stuff here on Napoleon and Logistics and I have never seen anything said about what this means. Certainly the books I have seen strongly suggest that he moved Armies quickly, but they also suggest he did this by brute force and high expectations not some new 'logistics'. His Armies seem to have lived off the land and walked hard, this is not any kind of logistics I have seen. I propose to remove that reference unless someone says stop. His contribution in this area was enormous but I suggest not for Logistics. Facius 17:12, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

This section fails to mention the Mongol empire in any significant way. Considering that the Khans conquered a larger piece of real estate than any other empire in history, and did so with a fighting force that was more than half light cavalry, one would think that they MIGHT deserve mention. Staypuft9 (talk) 07:06, 3 July 2009 (UTC)#

I would contest the line "For the majority of history, armies were limited in their speed to that of the marching soldier, about equal for everyone involved." - this is patently not true. Taking aside the issues with our historical understanding of manouevre based warfare and doctrine, there are issues with this point. Armies with huge baggage trains, or inefficient marching methods, or unfit men, or poor leaders, or worse equipment, are often far slower. Case in point is Napoleon, who vastly exceeded the speed of his opponents, despite also being limited to marching at the speed of a soldier. Maneuvrist warfare in the 20th century was still perfectly possible even with marching men. Techniques can be developed to speed up marches - just look at the Royal Marines tabbing in the Falklands. The point made afterwards about cavalry is very arbitrary, and needs to be supported by sources describing the impact of cavalry on military thinking and the speed at which armies could conduct affairs. Zak Pearce (talk) 08:25, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I’ve got some issues to add: Take this section:

A key requirement for success in maneuver warfare is up-to-date accurate intelligence on the disposition of key enemy command, support, and combat units. In operations whose intelligence is either inaccurate, unavailable, or unreliable, the successful implementation of strategies based on maneuver warfare can become problematic. When faced with a maneuverable opponent capable of redeploying key forces quickly and discreetly or when tempered, the capacity of maneuver warfare strategies to deliver victory becomes more challenging.

The 2006 Lebanon War example where such shortcomings have been exposed. Despite overwhelming firepower and complete air superiority, Israeli forces were unable to deliver a decisive blow to the command structure of Hezbollah or degrade its effective capacity to operate. Although inflicting heavy damage, Israeli was unable to locate and destroy Hezbollah's diluted force dispositions or neutralize key command centers. Therefore, it did not meet its war aims. The insurgency in Iraq also demonstrates that a military victory over an opponent's conventional forces does not automatically translate into a political victory.

These paragraphs are crap. They don’t understand that maneuver warfare as expressed by Boyd in Patterns of Conflict involves relative situations. That alleged key component is an impossibility in any conflict. What is important is to have such to an extent so as to have a better appreciation and mental model of reality relative to your adversary’s. You might not be up to date but you’re more recent, you might not be accurate, but you’re more accurate. You’ll never truly be up to date nor completely accurate. Further, these weaknesses apply not just to maneuverists. They’re just as limiting to attritionists especially if those attritionist happen to be facing maneuverist adversaries. These aren’t maneuver strategies, they’re maneuver operations. The paragraph starts with an OLW frame, keep it consistent. As for the examples, these aren’t examples of maneuver warfare itself being flawed, they’re examples when the adversary outmaneuvered the “home team.” Having said this, it may be worth mentioning an asymmetry in required endstates. In both cases, the respective adversaries only needed to outlive the will to fight of their opponents. They only needed to survive as “forces in being.” Very Washington and Ho Chi Minh. Very much in line with Rupert Smith in They Utility of Force. And it is still maneuver as they, Hezbollah and insurgents, understood their positions and their adversary’s positions in the environment while getting inside decision loops. Meanwhile, the writing to having overwhelming firepower and complete air superiority, aka air supremacy, shows whoever wrote this was defaulting toward an attrition mindset while not appreciating maneuver. It also begs the point that attritionists were just as lost. As discussed in Discourse on Winning and Losing, pay attention to Boyd’s guerrilla counter guerrilla as well as his focus to the importance of morals in conflict. These are a part of maneuver warfare yet they seem to be forgotten here. Fffflats (talk) 03:47, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Concepts

I have eliminated the phrase "methodical battle", as it seems to me that it causes to much confusion. Attrition warfare is the more commonly used term (at least in the Marine Corps), and maneuver warfare can be just as "methodical". I think that this section can still use some more expansion and clarification.--Mbaur181 01:58, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

But Attrition warfare is not the opposite of maneuver warfare. Before the mid 19th Century, most armies used neither attrition warfare nor maneuver warfare. There isn't an established name for the opposite of maneuver warfare, but "methodical" is as good as I've heard. Unless someone has a better idea in the next few days, I'm going to put it back. --A D Monroe III 22:44, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I removed the word "methodical" because its use to describe attrition warfare implies that there is no methodology, no procedural basis for maneuver warfare. As for attrition warfare not being the opposite of manuever warfare, I would have to wholeheartedly disagree. Maneuver warfare seeks to defeat the enemy systemically, whereas attrition seeks to defeat him by eliminating or "attriting" his forces, physically destroying his tools to fight. However, just because they are opposite does not mean that they exclude each other. Most of this is taken from MCDP-1: Warfighting.--Mbaur181 03:40, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Methodical Battle is not the opposite of manoeuvre warfare. It's manoeuvre warfare carried out more slowly and carefully to ensure optimal local force ratios and avoid ambushes. So it sacrifices speed and surprise for a more favourable attrition ratio and denying surprise to the enemy but it emphasises the Schwerpunkt, the breakthrough and the quick occupation and holding by consolidation of key locations cutting of the enemy supply lines, followed by the Kesselschlacht.--MWAK 07:00, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Is positional warfare a better term to pose against maneuver warfare? Iconoclastodon (talk) 19:09, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Hizbollah maneuver warfare ?

I think that Guerilla warfare (perhaps shoot and scoot in this case) is not maneuvre warefare any more than the original guerilla warfare in the peninsula war. Can i remove that sentence ? Facius 12:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Read General Sir Rupert Smith The Utility of Force. Guerrilla warfare and proper counter guerrilla warfare fall into what Smith calls “warfare amongst the people” as opposed to “industrial warfare.” Boyd addressed guerrilla warfare in his Discourse on Winning and Losing. Guerrilla and counter guerrilla warfare still seek to interrupt decision cycles and very much involve surprise, deception, dispersion and concentration, and are in keeping with maneuver warfare. Note: you can have maneuver in information warfare too. Fffflats (talk) 03:17, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Copy + Paste Policy...

I noticed that the entries for Maneuver Warfare are the same on Wikipedia and Answers.com. I'm not entirely sure what Wikipedia's policy on copying and pasting information from other websites is (or maybe it was the other way around?), but I feel it should be addressed somehow or another. --OFX 18:48, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Answers.com is a mirror of Wikipedia - they often take stuff from us (under GFDL). So I wouldn't worry to much about this here.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 21:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Context of article too broad

The problem with article is, I think, that the context is too broad. Maneuver warfare could be seen as an evolution in Western military thought by Hart, Boyd and others. In the view of maneuver warfare theorists, von Clausewitz "On War" focuses on destruction of the enemy's armies and maneuver warfare instead focuses on "rapid movement to keep an enemy off-balance" etc etc. Military theorist, see, in hindsight, that these ideas are not new and they use examples from historic battles to make their point. So the article should not say, for example, that the Battle of Walaja was an example of maneuver warfare but instead should say that maneuver warfare theorist point to the Battle of Walaja as an example to support their theory. In other words Maneuver warfare is a modern theory, that seeks to explain warfare today, that is supported by many examples in history. Maneuver warfare is a framework that uses Sun Tzu, Ghengis Khan, Patton, Guderian etc in a modern western context. So in my view, the "Modern adaptations" section is misnamed because Maneuver Warfare is the modern adaption. "Early History" is misnamed as well Early history should be Hart or the like, if you see my point KAM 15:15, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I think I shall go ahead and edit from the viewpoint that the above is correct. Perhaps it is maneuver warfare vs "Maneuver Warfare"? KAM 15:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

references

If someone could fix the references it would be appreciated. I have not been able to figure out how to do it. I find them very frustrating. KAM 17:03, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Concept

I find the concept of 'manoeuvre warfare' rather puzzling and I don't agree that there is a spectrum of methods with attrition at on end and manoeuvre at the other, particularly when 'attrition' methods cease to be attrition when their intent is to enable manoeuvre; behaviour is behaviour. I rather favour a sociological definition where 'manoeuvre warfare' is passed off as the theory that animates the military force's operations so that in peace, the reality of the situation (that the force will be used for indiscriminate slaughter) is obscured. It also offers a false alibi for the delegation of responsibility forward without an equal delegation of power, similar to the reduction of management to a caretaker function in the civilian economy. Keith-264 (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Article tagged for multiple issues

I've tagged this article for a number of reasons:

• Not enough in-line citations;
• Not enough total references;
• Tone is a little too essay than encyclopaedic.

The first two should be pretty self-explanatory, but the third is there because, between the first two and the language used, the article comes off more as an essay than an article. I intend to work on it with some of the other military articles that I am currently working on, but any other work on it would be greatly appreciated.

As an aside, there is also a redirect set up from Bewegungskrieg to this article as a straight translation of the German word, but there is no mention in this article of the term as the historical alternative to Blitzkrieg (as described in the Blitzkrieg article). The German wiki only has a stub that describes the term generally, so the Blitzkrieg article may be a better source for Inter-war period and World War II contributions to manoeuvre warfare theory. – Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 00:15, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Early Examples

"For the majority of history armies were limited in their speed to that of the marching soldier"

"In prehistoric times this began to change with the domestication of the horse"

I'm dreadfully curious to know exactly how a prehistoric revolution proceeded historic warfare. If I'm not mistaken, the DMC-12 wasn't released until 1981. As far as highschool essays go, this page is most interesting.

--174.238.192.186 (talk) 10:59, 2 June 2015 (UTC)Mister Ratburn

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peeking in here while working on the B. H. Liddell Hart article, and

The main battle tank concept is post war. Even in the Korean War and for some time after you have light, medium and heavy tanks. I think the point really is that WW 2 tanks were much faster and more powerful than the tanks in WW 1. I'll replace..

Clausewitz was barely known until after the Franco Prussian wars. Moltke the elder was the person who popularized Clausewitz in Germany (see this Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSF_UtEWnCg ). And Clausewitz was hardly a maneuver warfare type. Typical frankly for folks like B.H. Liddell Hart and John Boyd to blame Clausewitz, rightly or wrongly, for the slaughter of WW 1. Dwmyers (talk) 00:52, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Maneuver defense

This is also a thing, but not in the article as yet. Springnuts (talk) 09:53, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Springnuts if you have sources I'm glad to pour through them and add relevant stuff. I'm quite bad at finding military sources lol. — Ixtal ^{( T / C )} ⁂ Join WP:FINANCE! 10:15, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks - v kind. I saw it here [[1]]. Springnuts (talk) 18:02, 30 April 2022 (UTC)