Maneuver warfare

You're talking about Blitzkrieg.

At that time, yes, when mobile warfare was new.

Now mobile warfare would be extinct.

We could never repeat Desert Storm right now.

You know, spending a year building up forces in Saudi Arabian ports and then surging into Kuwait, we could never do that today because they'd all be in missile range.

Uh, but I, in, I guess what I-- in doing the, the second book and looking through other stuff, I realized, I sort of knew this at the time when I wrote New Conception of War, but I, it, it became-- the con-the contrast became starker when I'd worked on the second book.

W-but was a lot of really interesting, um, parts of his ideas, uh, kind of wound up on the cutting room floor, if you will, in the process of developing the Marine Corps', you know, maneuver warfare doctrine back at the time that it did.

And I'm not saying that that was wrong, right? Like the, you know, initially Fleet Marine Force Manual 1, Warfighting, now Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting.

You know, it was an effort by its author, uh, you know, Marine captain at the time, John Schmitt, to synthesize and intertwine like three thousand years of, like, the best military thinkers and theorists, right? So there's, there's stuff on the cutting room floor from everybody.

You know, there was no way that that was gonna go sideways at all.

But in-- So the, you know, the relationship between MCDP 1 and then staff planning process is not, not something I, I have a, a huge amount of insight on.

But I-- In terms of did it translate him faithfully, I think th-there, th-there are a few things going on, and I think part of the, both the, the challenge of understanding Boyd n- you know, today as opposed to back when he was, you know, sort of live in his prime, uh, you know, walking through the halls of Quantico on a random Tuesday, um, and, um, sort of the larger culture of the maneuver warfare movement that was going on around him in the Marine Corps at the time.

I think the...

And I think you'll, you'll probably hear in the future that while the Marine Littoral Regiments have not been deployed to the current fight, there are capabilities that have been developed in support of force design that are contributing to the current fight.

You touched on maneuver warfare and the intensity of the modern and future battlefield with robots and pervasive ISR and, uh, really short windows for breakthrough.

So what does maneuver warfare mean in that era? How does it change? You know, we, we don't want to-- I know we all admire the tenacity and adaptation of the Ukrainian military.

We certainly don't wanna end up in a situation where we're fighting like, uh, in the sense that, you know, these fixed lines that move very slowly with, uh, no air superiority and et cetera, et cetera.

So we would wanna fight differently there.

That's a great question.

I mean, for the Marine Corps, I think it's a little bit back to the future.

The, the whole reason why maneuver warfare became the way the Marine Corps fought back in the late '80s and early '90s was because our mission was going to be contributing to the northern flank against the Soviet army.