Joseph Fouché shares a parable from Robert Leonhard’s The Art of Maneuver:
When I first went to Fort Benning for Infantry Officer Basic Course, I encountered that nasty little insect known for its large nests and painful sting — the fire ant. My wife and I were just recovering from seeing our first cockroach when we noticed a fire ant mound in our front yard. Being an agressive infantryman, I assured my mate that I had learned how to deal with this menace. So, I grabbed a can of gasoline, kicked the top off the mound, and doused the swarm of ants that rushed up out of the ground. I beamed proudly as my wife patted my back with approval. The ants died instantly.
The next day I was dismayed to find another mound in my front yard. This one was about two feet removed from where the remains of the other still stood as a tribute to my military prowess. I defiantly repeated my highly successful tactics of the previous day as my wife looked on doubtfully. Again the ants died.
And again they returned the next day. There ensued a bitter campaign of man against ant. I never lost a battle. A week later, my front yard was pockmarked with brown spots, and I was out of gas. I had done everything a man could do. At one point, to my lasting shame, I even ignited the gasoline-soaked masses, which delighted me to no end but served only to cook the arthropod corpses. My wife frowned on this atrocity, so I desisted. Unable to explain how these devilish ants were able to recover their losses so quickly. I even offered to perform a body count to prove to my wife that I was winning this war.
Finally, in desperation we drove to the PX. In the garden shop I found an insecticide that was guaranteed to rid my yard of fire ants once and for all. The black label directed me to sprinkle some of the granules on the nest. The ants, thinking it was food, would carry it too the queen, who, upon ingesting it, would die. Once the queen dead, the rest of the ants would die or go away.
As I stood there reading the black label on the box, I received one of my most valuable lessons on maneuver warfare, though it did not occur to me then: the center of gravity of a fire-ant nest is the queen. Kill the queen, and the nest goes away for good. If you fail to kill the queen, it doesn’t matter how many ants you get. The masses are irrelevant to the campaign. I took the box home and tried it. Bitterly, I had to admit it worked. It seemed a terribly “unmanly” way to fight, but my wife assured me that she still considered me a great soldier. After all, was not the ruined front yard a memorial to the many battles I had won?