Pursuit, Exploitation and the Imperial Garrison
Abstract
The Army has implicitly, and the Marine Corps has explicitly adopted maneuver warfare as their fundamental approach to warfare. Both Services, however, define COIN as a special case in which the normal approach to conflict does not apply. To the extent our focus on COIN for the long war leads us to disregard maneuver warfare thinking this separation between COIN and real warfare is detrimental to our intellectual readiness for major combat operations, giving rise to the heat of the argument between the COINistas' and more traditional thinkers. At the operational level, COIN is, in fact, best understood as a form of maneuver warfare. The paper uses the writings of noted theorist Robert Leonhard to provide the definition of maneuver warfare. The paper sets forth in brief the obvious objections to using maneuver warfare as a foundation for COIN campaign design, then demonstrate how Leonhard's principles of dislocation, pre-emption and disruption do apply at the operational level to a COIN campaign using examples drawn from events in Iraq's Anbar Province from 2003 to 2009. The paper then concludes COIN is best fought using maneuver of the mind for which the basic tenets of maneuver warfare (preemption, dislocation, and disruption) fully apply, arguing the using the same basic approach for understanding armed conflict to COIN as to conventional operations can increase commander and staff proficiency in designing operations across the spectrum of conflict.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 27, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA535582
Entities
People
- Peter G. Szczepanski
Organizations
- Naval War College