The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud
09.05.2008 at 09:16pm
The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud
by William F. Owen, Small Wars Journal
The Manoeuvre Warfare Fraud (Full PDF Article)
The concept of Manoeuvre Warfare (MW) in its modern form was first advocated in the early 1980s as part of the US military conventional response to perceived Warsaw Pact superiority. It has since become widely accepted as a style of warfare and generic concept of operation. This paper will argue that the community it was intended to serve based its wide acceptance largely on ignorance and a lack of intellectual rigor.
This really, really needed to be shared with a wider audience. Finally! Much thanks to SWJ Editors, to RUSI Journal for releasing it, and of course to Wilf himself. Excellent, excellent work!
Agree with Norfolk.
Well done, Wilf!!!
Just got to this; great job, Wilf.
If I get this right, Mr. Owen argues that the term & idea of Manoeuvre Warfare is totally unnecessary as the diffrence btw MW and attrition does not exist but rather complement each other when real bullets start flying.
So, as MW hinges on the writtings of poor ole Liddel Hart, who undeservingly commands respect amongst military historians and strategists the like of Boyd, Mr. Owen intellectually smears LH as an analytical impotent.
In the end, Mr. Owen identifies the failure of author Richard Simpkin to ‘articulate why differentiating two complementary ‘syles’ was actually necessarily useful’ but himeself does not articulate why lies behind his thesis that MW be stricken from FMs.
Am I missing the whole document? or Do I need to spend another 10min and read this over again?