Comments on: Dollars and Sense

By: Johnny Abacus

Johnny Abacus — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:59:27 +0000

Tschafer:

“U.S. military doctrine DOES emphasizer[sic] manuever warfare”

It’s easy to see what Lind is talking about if you focus on the micro level, rather than the macro level. A good example of this is the Strategic Corporal.

The scope of autonomy afforded the corporal is qualitatively different from the way the US military works today, where almost no meaningful decisions are allowed to be made below the brigade level (absolutely nothing below the battalion level).

By: Tschafer

Tschafer — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:00:42 +0000

If Lind thinks that China is going to be a “force for stability” in the 21st Century, he’s living in a dream world. Of course, this is par for the course for Lind – his BS about “Fourth Generation” warfare has always been 50% crap and 50% trite self evident stuff that our military started implementing 35 years ago. U.S. military doctrine DOES emphasizer manuever warfare – what the Hell does Lind think happened in the “End Run” during Desert Storm, or in the run to Baghdad in Iraqi Freedom? Has this guy even read FM 100-5? Lind writes like it’s 1965.

By: William Newman

William Newman — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:07:33 +0000

Leonard wrote “Maneuver warfare is what you do when you cannot simply frontally engage the enemy and destroy him by fire.” I’d say rather that maneuver warfare is what you want to do when your advantage in mobility is bigger than your other advantages. E.g., the US in the Pacific in 1945 had reasonably good capability to engage the enemy and destroy him by fire, but also had superb capability to simply sail around him, and therefore much of the time they didn’t need to mess around with the second-best solution. I know less about candidate extreme examples on land, but perhaps various episodes in the vicinity of Poland — Mongols, Nazis… — would qualify.

Also, even if you don’t have a huge advantage in mobility, you may well have a relative advantage on the tactical defensive. (I’d say this was the case for US vs. Iraq — US attacking Iraqi positions was a severe mismatch, but if the Iraqis had needed to try to dislodge US forces from a strong position, it would have been even more ridiculous. Similarly in Arab-Israeli wars 1967 and 1973.) Then if you are tolerably mobile (as in Iraq or ca. Israel, as opposed to something like WWI), maneuver warfare may let you set up situations where the enemy is stuck with tactical offensive problems (at least if the political clock doesn’t run out before the enemy would be forced to try to dislodge you from your militarily strong but politically untenable position).

By: Johnny Abacus

Johnny Abacus — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:22:56 +0000

Leonard:

Yes, it is true that the US doesn’t need maneuver warfare. The US could successfully invade Cuba with soldiers armed as Hoplites if it wanted to. That would be a silly thing to do, though — it wouldn’t be an efficient use of resources. The same is true of 2nd vs 3rd generation warfare.

Maneuver worked extremely well while we were actually fighting a non-guerrilla war (particularly in Iraq-’92). The subsequent failure of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan is directly linked to the absolutely retarded idea of setting up pet nations.

By: Leonard

Leonard — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:36:03 +0000

Generally sensible recommendations. But I cannot get past this guy’s idea that maneuver warfare is relevant to the US Army. Maneuver warfare is what you do when you cannot simply frontally engage the enemy and destroy him by fire. Well — we can. We don’t need fancy maneuvers to engage any conventional army except maybe some future Chinese army. Certainly in both Iraq and Afghanistan maneuver was unnecessary and in Iraq, where it was attempted probably even counterproductive.