Marines and Maneuver
If you ever find yourself at the ballet, try sitting as close to the stage as you can. It’s a jarring experience. The dancers’ graceful leaps are accented by thumps on the floorboards, audible over the orchestra, shattering the illusion of airy weightlessness.
“Ballet-like” is an oft-used cliché for war. The synchronization, rapid movements, and spectacular effects bear plenty of resemblance to dance. Yet to view it from such a remove, away from the carnage of battle, is to overlook the messy and discordant stage where concepts meet reality. When a journalist compares a smoothly-executed operation to a ballet, the simile is more apt than he might realize.
Looking at things from the opposite end, it may seem perverse that of all services in all militaries, it was the US Marine Corps that first formalized maneuver warfare as doctrine. This was the service renowned for being hard-charging and gung-ho, whose most celebrated heroes are Dan Daly and Chesty Puller, and which made its reputation with charges across open fields in the First World War and hard-fought beach landings in the Second.
Yet to see it that way is to focus on the thudding floorboards and miss the ballet. Many of the Marines’ most notorious battles were not attempts to grind through strongpoints for their own sake, but to make room for other components to operate. It was as enablers of maneuver that they most notably practiced maneuver warfare.
Island Hopping
The first and most famous such instance was the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. In a limited sense, this was maneuver insofar as it “attacked the enemy’s gaps and avoided his surfaces.” But 1.) capturing those outposts did not accelerate Japanese defeat by itself, and 2.) sometimes the hardest targets could not be bypassed.
The real purpose in reducing these island redoubts was to give the US Navy and Army Air Corps bases from which operate. Guadalcanal was the first major objective, the gateway to the other islands of the South Pacific. There was minimal resistance during the initial landings, but a large-scale Japanese counterattack resulted in several months of hard fighting along a narrow perimeter.
Once US forces secured the island and its airfield, they were able to project airpower through the rest of the Solomon Islands, supporting their drives into the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, which saw some of the bloodiest combat of the Pacific at Tarawa.
In 1944 the Marines moved on to the Marianas. From there, bombers and naval forces could interdict shipping between Southeast Asia and the Japanese home islands, which carried the oil, rubber, and aluminum necessary to keep the war machine humming—this was maneuver not just at an operational, but at a strategic scale. And the subsequent capture of Iwo Jima made it easier for US bombers to target Japan’s industry directly.
Starved of resources and with its factories reduced to rubble, Japanese production slowed to a trickle. Their troops continued to put up fanatical resistance, but they simply lacked the equipment to mount an effective defense; as difficult as an invasion of the home island threatened to be, there could be no doubt about the ultimate outcome. By enabling the Navy and Army Air Corps’ maneuvers against the soft underbelly of Japanese industry, the Marines’ blood spilled on the beaches of the Central Pacific had already paid for itself many times over.
Inchon
The Inchon landings are not a good example of effective maneuver. The KPA offensive had already been effectively defeated days before along the Pusan Perimeter, to the extent that they could only spare a single understrength division for the defense of Seoul. Nor did the landings destroy the routing divisions: it was the pursuing Eighth Army that virtually annihilated them—if anything, the landings impeded the pursuit by depriving Eighth Army of much-needed artillery and bridging equipment. Nor did X Corps even entrap the fleeing forces, as MacArthur concentrated on a deliberate siege of Seoul instead of rushing to cut off the retreating North Koreans—as a result, nearly all their leadership got away.
Yet it is easy to see how the myth of Inchon took hold. The desperate fighting over the previous two weeks belied the true condition of the KPA, which had practically destroyed itself against American and South Korean defenses. Had the North Koreans been in a better state at the time, and not on the brink of collapse, cutting its supply lines could have averted a collapse of the Pusan Perimeter; at the very least, it would have diverted substantial forces from the south. Over time, the landed X Corps could have closed the noose from the north, destroying the KPA in a giant encirclement battle.
Of particular interest is 1st Marine Division’s role in the operation. It was one of two divisions in X Corps, and although it played a leading role in Seoul and would have been essential for any ensuing encirclement battle, that was not why it was chosen to participate: its major role was the landings themselves. And the fight was expected to be a difficult one. Inchon harbor appeared strongly defended and optimal for the defense. The tides left any attacker only a narrow window to land, and at some of the landing sites Marines had to scale a seawall, feeding them piecemeal into a killing zone. Just 5 years after the end of World War Two, in which 1st Marine Division hit the beaches at Peleliu, Okinawa, and elsewhere, it was one of the most experienced units in amphibious operations in the world. Its value lay in its ability to punch through the prepared defenses at Inchon, in other words, thereby enabling X Corps’ subsequent maneuver.
As it happened, the fight was not nearly as difficult as many feared. Deception operations left the North Koreans confused about American intentions, and they at any rate had few forces to spare. By the time of the landings the beaches were weakly defended, allowing 1st MARDIV to quickly seize a beachhead. Neither in the intensity of the combat nor in the results achieved was Inchon comparable to the hardest-fought battles of WWII; but if only broad conceptual outline, the Marine break-in force played a similar enabling role to those earlier maneuvers.
Development of a New Doctrine
The remainder of the Korean War was dominated by vicious fighting along a slow-moving front which left little room for maneuver. The war in Vietnam was different still, dominated by fighting at the battalion or regimental level, and did not see any large-scale joint operations to speak of. It was in the wake of Vietnam, against a background of general demoralization within the American military, that the separate services began reorienting toward a possible war with the Soviets in Central Europe.
The US Army was the first to enunciate a new doctrine, called AirLand Battle, in the 1982 edition of FM 100-5 Operations. This outlined an operational concept for fighting waves of Warsaw Pact tanks through the integrated use of airpower and ground forces. The Marine Corps took a more philosophical approach with its 1989 publication of FMFM-1 Warfighting, which laid out a general approach to combat at all levels. It enshrined a concept of maneuver warfare which consisted of avoiding enemy surfaces (strengths) and attacking gaps (weaknesses). These surfaces and gaps were not necessarily physical, but could also be psychological or moral.
Despite this, the Marines’ next two major operations—both in Iraq—were very physical and saw relatively little maneuver. Instead, they reprised their previous roles as enablers, with frontal attacks setting up left hooks by the Army.
Gulf War
The ground phase of Desert Storm began on 24 February 1991, following a five-week air campaign that had heavily attritted Saddam Hussein’s forces. Coalition forces were arrayed along a 600-km front, stretching from the Persian Gulf in the east to the desert along the Saudi-Iraqi border in the west. On the far right was an assortment of Arab forces under Joint Forces Command East, and adjacent to them were the two divisions of I Marine Expeditionary Force. JFC-East and I MEF areas of operations split the approaches to Kuwait City between them, including all the country’s southern oil wells. Covering the western third of the Kuwaiti border was JFC-North, consisting of Saudi and other Arab forces.
The Kuwaiti border was the most heavily-fortified sector, protected by trenches, bunkers, and minefields. The plan was for I MEF and JFC-E and -N to fix and destroy the Iraqi divisions there, drawing in the armor and Republican Guard divisions held in reserve. On the extreme left, US airborne and French light armor would meanwhile shoot through the open desert to interdict reinforcements, while the main attack came from US and UK forces in the center, hooking north then east to envelop the Iraqis in Kuwait.
In the event, the Marines faced light resistance as Iraqi troops surrendered quickly, a result of the heavy bombing over the previous weeks. Fear of coalition air power also kept Iraq armor and Republican Guard from moving forward, and the coalition’s left hook ended up seeing the heaviest combat (while many Republican Guard units got away). But if the ground campaign did not quite go to plan, that was only because the air campaign exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations.
2003 Iraq
Solely in terms of lines on the map, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was remarkably similar to 1991. I MEF drove straight through central Iraq while the Army’s V Corps hooked left through the desert, converging on Baghdad. Although 1st Marine Division enveloped some centers of resistance and bypassed others altogether, its task was to “pick as many fights as possible” and draw away defenders from Baghdad—especially the Republican Guard divisions along the capital’s southern approaches.
As in the previous war, maneuver was not an essential ingredient to victory. Iraqi forces were in even worse shape than in 1991, following their losses from Desert Storm and the ensuing decade of sanctions. Yet to the extent that the straight right/left hook combo facilitated the Coalition victory, it followed a long tradition of Marine frontal assaults setting up another component’s maneuver.
Into the Future
It should not be too great a surprise that the US Marine Corps continues to operate in apparent contradiction to its own doctrine. As an expeditionary force at heart, speed and urgency are more often decisive than elaborate operations. The controversial Force Design 2030 extends this logic even further, explicitly returning to the idea that the Marines support Navy operations rather than the reverse.
Beyond the specifics of American doctrinal debates, there is a dawning reawakening to the fact that maneuver is not a style of warfare in itself, and that it is not always possible to bypass enemy strengths—when he is dug in, well armed, and guarding the only road to the objective, for instance. Ukraine has moreover dissipated many fantasies about winning wars through the skillful employment of information, or directly targeting abstractions such as cohesion or morale.
Notwithstanding that, easier means to victory are always to be sought whenever possible. The militaries of the world are still figuring out the lessons of Ukraine, and the tactics that will enable future operational maneuver are likely awaiting the invention of new technologies. And once those technologies are invented and their accompanying tactics refined, they will still have to be employed in difficult, hard-fought engagements. Requiring, as always, brilliance in the basics.
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Nicely turned out Bruce. One of my favourite lost battles is Spandicker Ley (Germany 4/5 March 1945) where two bns of 53rd Welsh Division fought to create space for other components - sappers to build a bridge so and armour could cross the stream and exploit. Sad thing was the sappers weren't ready to build the bridge, the bridge didn't need building (there was one just a short way upstream) and the inf got overrun because they had no armour.
Tactical attrition to support operational manuever