See William Owen, "The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud," in Small Wars Journal. Also published in August 2008, Vol 153, Vol 4. Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Journal.

As a very minor contributor to a couple of the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication “White Books” outlining Maneuver Warfare and having once been a professor teaching Maneuver Warfare for American Military University, my attention was caught by William F. Owen’s piece, “The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud," if nothing else than for its catchy title. One might expect it to get a fair amount of visibility due to its controversial thesis. Owen is rightly frustrated with the maneuver warfare concept, especially since he appears to rely on the U.S. Marine Corps publications FMFM-1 and its successor, MCDP-1 Warfighting as the best contemporary articulation. But to characterize the concept as a fraud? A perversion of the truth perpetrated on the U.S. military in order to deceive it? There are indeed difficulties with the maneuver warfare concept, but to label it a fraud seems a bit much. Owen argues that the “the community it was intended to serve” embraced maneuver warfare uncritically. So who is to blame—the advocates who maliciously perpetrated the concept or the U.S. Marine Corps that accepted it so naively and so readily? ...

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In the Winter 2007 issue of the hobby wargaming journal Fire & Movement, the editor, Jon Compton, relates his experiences in playing counterinsurgency games at the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) conference in Monterrey, California. His last comments are worth circulating in this group and expanding upon:

All in all, it was an enlightening experience, and it was fascinating to get a glimpse of what professional wargame developers are doing in the military. Although board games are highly respected in this group, they are not taken seriously as modeling tools. To some extent I found that disappointing in that there is, in my opinion, too much dependence upon computer based agent interaction and stochastic processes, and too little upon the actual human interaction, which is where board games excel. The other problem I see is the black box issue related to computer-based simulations. This issue became very apparent as I quizzed the developers of the wargame we participated in and discovered that many of the governing assumptions were not based upon any sort of empirical or theoretical structure, but were simply invented out of whole cloth. This is information you would not know by playing the game, whereas with board games the system is open to examination and critical evaluation.

The Center For Naval Analyses (CNA) - certainly no stranger to MORS or to those well-read in counterinsurgency studies - published a very interesting monograph in September 2006 on the possibilities of wargaming such situations in board wargame formats, most notably using Card Driven Game (CDG) method pioneered by Mark Herman (currently at Booz, Allen and Hamilton) in his commercial hobby wargames. Entitled Wargaming Fourth Generation Warfare, authors Peter P. Perla, Albert A. Nofi, and Michael C. Markowitz would seem to solve some of Compton's complaints - if only commercial game designers could be taken seriously...

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On 22 March 2007, Inside the Pentagon published an article by Rati Bishnoi entitled "Army Officials Call DoD Models Insufficient for Modeling Unrestricted Warfare." The tone of the piece laments the lack of M&S tools to reflect what the Chinese have long called "unrestricted warfare," a meaning quite different than what many others might think it is--particularly if you are thinking of the Clausewitzian "absolute war" construct. No, here it means "anything can be made into a weapon" and is an approach favored by those who must rely on strategic (as well as tactical and operational) asymmetrical means to win over a militarily superior adversary. Of course, many have seen "unrestricted warfare" in this sense to be a key method in "small wars" and/or so-called "asymmetrical warfare."...

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