The thoughts and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the U.S. Navy Department or the Naval War College. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Naval Maneuver Warfare Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., U.S. Navy, Retired To approach the sea side of maneuver warfare, one ought first to understand its nature and content in general. Contemporary American military reformers seem to claim that maneuver warfare is everything good: outwitting the enemy, creating and exploiting an information advantage, moving faster and more adroitly, and shooting more precisely and effectively. In the rhetoric, maneuver warfare is "rapid, violent, coordinated attack." But who would espouse the opposite, a "slow, feeble, disorganized attack"? If maneuver warfare is nothing more than fighting intelligently, then its antithesis is "stupid" warfare. Naval Warfare , U.S. Naval Doctrine Publication 1, says, "Maneuver warfare, based on the twin pillars of decisiveness and rapidity, is our preferred style of warfighting." By way of elaboration, NDP 1 specifies four key concepts of modern maneuver warfare: center of gravity, critical vulnerability, focus of effort, and main effort. Yet we might wonder, are not these four attributes common to all successful styles of warfare? Hence, even though the irreproachable conclusion in NDP 1 is that operational maneuver has always been a core strength of great navies, we must look elsewhere for naval maneuver warfare's distinguishing characteristics. Some say maneuver warfare may be recognized by relatively bloodless victories. Applying it causes the enemy to be so demoralized and dominated that he concedes our objective rather than fight. This point of view concludes that the opposite of maneuver warfare is attrition warfare, unimaginative and bloody. But even that advocate of maneuver, John Boyd, has devised a paradigm of superior maneuver, the "OODA loop,*that refutes this; in it, Colonel Boyd measures success by attrition--specifically, a favorable exchange ratio in aircraft kills. DESERT STORM also illustrates the point. Our coalition achieved an unparalleled exchange ratio in casualties, both of men and machines, yet many people who know the details do not believe the ground campaign properly exemplified maneuver warfare. A competitive alternative to maneuver warfare cannot, then, be attrition warfare. One might ask, does maneuver as a style of war apply when the enemy is skillful and inflicts his style on us?1 Was there no defense against the Soviet army, which was known to espouse operational maneuver? Does maneuver warfare apply when the enemy is very determined, as were the Germans and Japanese in World War II, and later, the North Vietnamese? The answers lie in doing two things. First we will gain a better understanding of the scope and limits of maneuver warfare by describing a respectable alternative--an antithesis--so that maneuver warfare is not simply seen as embodying all military virtues. Then, as we shift attention from the properties of maneuver warfare in general to naval maneuver warfare, we will study its viability as a tool of strategy, of maritime operations, and of naval tactics. Power Warfare Introduced and Defined I submit that the true antithesis of maneuver warfare is power warfare . Power warfare achieves success by exhibiting the capacity to destroy the enemy's forces and their support faster than he can destroy ours. That exhibition, of course, usually involves a test in battle, which may be bloody. Power warfare promotes superior firepower over maneuver, but it shares with maneuver warfare the aim of dominating the enemy and his will to fight. It emphasizes advantages in detection and targeting, and in weapon range and accuracy. While it acknowledges that firepower affects the enemy not only in body but in mind and spirit, power warfare emphasizes the capacity to destroy: to impose casualties, eliminate equipage, and break down coherent fighting units into useless rabble. Power warfare emphasizes the permanence of attrition--destroyed men, machines, and battalions cannot fight again later. Power warfare accepts casualties in exchange for permanent, sometimes decisive, results. (As we will see in a moment, navy combat at sea aims at destruction, with the tactics of superior combat power.) We are now able to distinguish the character and limits of maneuver warfare. Maneuver warfare achieves a dominating position or posture by swift actions. The purpose of lethal force in maneuver warfare is more to suppress and demoralize the enemy than to destroy him. Domination by maneuver means to place the enemy in a position where he cannot or ought not to fight back, because his destruction will be inevitable. It means beating the enemy to "the high ground." It means bypassing him so that he withers on the vine, useless and starving. Maneuver warfare emphasizes the sequential advantage of better, stronger postures, especially positional advantage. Maneuver warfare exploits free movement. To anticipate once again naval maneuver warfare, when there is no enemy fleet and maritime domination is inherent, we enjoy the nearest thing to the ideal, which is unimpeded, cost-free movement at sea to within reach of the critical position ashore. Each form of warfare has its own time and place of application. Each can increase our comparative advantage in combat potential and combat power. Sound strategy, operations, and battle tactics will be a blend of both. Table 1 is a side-by-side comparison: The crux is, can and will the enemy concede our objective? Thus far we have not had to distinguish the applicability of maneuver or power warfare at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, or warfare on land and sea. Now let us look at the seaward side, starting where there has been sufficient recent study to give assurance that naval maneuver warfare is robust and effective--literally "operational maneuver from the sea"--at the campaign level. Maneuver and the Levels of Warfare There has been a convergence of agreement at the Naval Doctrine Command, the Naval War College, and in the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations that naval maneuver warfare is an attractive operational concept.2 There should be no quarrel over this. Since the Greeks and Romans, ships have moved large weights and volumes much faster than have ground forces. The German blitzkrieg through France, often regarded as the pinnacle of swift, nearly battle-free operational maneuver, moved just two hundred miles in seven days, or thirty miles per day; the French army never recovered. Robert L. Helmbold's definitive study of army movement rates suggests that against light opposition an average advance of a hundred miles a week is more typical.3 A fleet at sea moves a greater weight of combat potential more than an order of magnitude faster than the blitzkrieg--2,500 miles in seven days. Sea lines of communications are also usually more secure than land routes, which require considerable protection against raids. Right now the sea lines have never been more secure, beyond one or two hundred miles from the enemy coast. A common and accurate truism is that the U. S. Navy is employed for sea control, power projection, and forward presence.4 A more comprehensive truism is that all navies are concerned with the movement and delivery of goods and services, rather than with "the purchase of real estate." Thus, a navy is in the links business, not the nodes business. The sole purpose of a navy is to perform these four functions: on the sea, to move goods and services safely, and prevent enemy movements; from the sea, to deliver goods and services safely, and deny enemy deliveries. "Goods and services" are of two categories: commercial shipping and other such activity, to include fishing and all forms of sea-floor mining and oil rigs; and (as combat potential) the means of land warfare, to include army and Marine combat units, aircraft, missiles, sensors, ammunition, fuel, and other sustainment. The goods and services of interest in any particular war, strategy, or campaign that a navy wishes to move or block at sea are the same ones that it will wish to deliver or deny from the sea, and so one list serves as the unifying bridge between all four functions. The two functions performed "on the sea" are pure Julian Corbett†in modern garb. Corbett wrote: Command of the sea, therefore, means nothing but the control of maritime communications, whether for commercial or military purposes. The object of naval warfare is the control of communications, and not, as in land warfare, the conquest of territory. The difference is fundamental. . . . It is obvious that if the object and end of naval warfare is the control of communications it must carry with it the right to forbid, if we can, the passage of both public and private property upon the sea. . . . The current term "Commerce destruction" is not in fact a logical expression of the strategical idea. To make the position clear we should say "Commerce prevention."5 Antisubmarine warfare has a parallel saying (of obscure pedigree), that the purpose of ASW operations is not to sink submarines but to safeguard shipping. If one looks closely at the core navy functions of securing or preventing communications and commerce, it is evident that they are conducted through power warfare . We safeguard shipping by sinking submarines, and the usual measure of success has been the exchange ratio of merchant ships lost per submarine sunk, because the measure of effectiveness is an indication of the long-term winner. The powerful fighting fleet will sink the enemy if it must, but its aim is to dominate the sea lines of communications by remaining unchallenged. The closest one sees to a campaign of maneuver at sea is a guerre de course , or guerrilla war at sea, conducted by an inferior navy. Naval maneuver warfare is associated with delivering goods and services safely. It is a littoral warfare concept that receives prominence in Naval Doctrine Publication 1 (mentioned above) because the emphasis today is on delivery of goods and services in the form of Marines, strikes, and sustainment of the ground campaign. Observe, however, that this function has always been important. All naval battles have been fought close to a coast. That is because naval operations are related to some higher purpose on the land. To affirm that littoral warfare has been a concept inherent--indeed predominant--in past operations at sea, the reader may peruse sources such as Sanderson, Pemsel, or Hughes and Costello.6 In the sweep of history from ancient times to the present, it is impossible to find a battle that was not tied to events somewhere ashore, and difficult to find many battles that are remote from the campaign's seat of purpose on the land. To grasp the importance of the denial of enemy delivery of goods and services from the sea, one must look at the role through enemy eyes: that is, the mirror-image purpose of a coastal state is to prevent us from operating from the sea. Some coastal navies, supplemented by sensors, weapons, and command-and-control systems on land but pointed to seaward, are very proficient in adapting to their own geography, weather conditions, coastal shipping and air traffic, and generally, the clutter of their littoral environment. In the sense that they will use tactical mobility, surprise, and a "rapid, violent, coordinated attack," they will exercise the attributes of successful maneuver; but a coastal navy's purpose will be destruction sufficient to forestall our effective employment of operational maneuver onto the land. Proficient coastal navies expect to sacrifice their ships and aircraft in large numbers to blunt our attack in a littoral war. Such is power warfare of the enemy's choosing.7 From this quick review of a navy's functions, it is evident that maneuver warfare from the sea is naval--or it is "military" (all services)--but it is not navy maneuver warfare. There is no such thing as navy maneuver warfare at sea. Before we appraise maneuver warfare as a strategic, logistic or tactical concept, let us turn briefly to our own history, in order to show that the post-World War II, post-Soviet maritime environment is the norm for a dominant navy, and to see in stark terms the misfortunes a dominant sea power inflicts by safely delivering its goods and services upon a fleetless state. Maneuver Warfare in History Frank Uhlig's fine book How Navies Fight shows the real contributions of a superior navy. As I observe in the foreword to that work, it focuses not on naval strategy, technology, or the tactics of great sea battles, but on the many-faceted employment of naval forces in an extended naval campaign. It is an illuminating approach, because repeatedly the campaign is 10 percent about battles for mastery of the sea and 90 percent about unglamorous protection or denial of shipping, or bitterly contested operations along an enemy coast. The 90 percent role, so often overlooked, demanded small ships in great numbers--ships that again and again turn out to be in embarrassingly short supply.8 Naval Campaigns in American History. The United States has been victim as often as beneficiary of operational maneuver from the sea. In the American Revolution and in the War of 1812, the Royal Navy used its mobility again and again to plant army units where they would be effective. That the British failed to achieve all they sought is educible to lapses of strategic employment. The climactic British bungle that allowed General Cornwallis to be ensnared by Washington at Yorktown is an exception that proves the efficacy of sea dominion, if ever there was one. The glory of John Paul Jones in the Revolutionary War and of the one-on-one victories of USS Constitution in the War of 1812 were mere embarrassments to the Royal Navy; they constrained its free employment in "maneuver warfare" not a whit. Only the rigors of a naval blockade--what could be regarded as stationary, power warfare--diminished, by tying down its blockading units, the free movement and insertion of British forces on the ground where and as desired. Blockade is the trench warfare of naval operations, cruel enough on the storm-tossed seas even without daily bloodshed. The U.S. Civil War, eighty years later, is instructive from both the North's and South's point of view. Enjoying unchallenged maritime supremacy, the Union navy was free to exercise maneuver warfare by landing ground forces at will. The critical coastal points were easy to recognize: New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Savannah, Port Royal Sound, Charleston, Wilmington, and above all, the Chesapeake Bay. These places were not of equal significance, and the South was aware of the worth of each. Their seizures entailed bloodshed in proportion to their significance. Nevertheless, freedom of maneuver at sea worked its magic, by tying down Rebel forces along the long Confederate coastline when the local citizenries induced the Richmond government to override military necessity and assign troops to static defense when these forces were badly needed to the north. More dramatic were the campaigns on the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers. The operations of army forces under U.S. Grant with naval units under Andrew H. Foote in Kentucky and Tennessee illustrate the threefold advantage of riverine mobility: swift descent, relatively secure longitudinal lines of communications, and severance of enemy lateral communications. The campaign for the Mississippi and its tributary, the Red River, was fiercely contested. The South fully appreciated that trans-Mississippi communications were crucial and conceded no cheap, swift maneuver victories, successfully fighting off the Union's river gunboats on the "Father of Waters" until July of 1863. Not to be forgotten amidst the splashy amphibious landings and river operations was the fundamental Union naval strategy, what General Winfield Scott called the "Anaconda Plan," intended to stifle the South's trade. An enormous fleet was built and put to sea to blockade the Confederacy, a fleet so extensive in fact that one might challenge its cost-effectiveness, though not its wisdom. The blockade was tedious, slow, and expensive, but it was valuable in disarming the South. It was anything but "maneuver warfare." Blockade illustrates that vital naval operations are not all movement and immediate achievement. Denial of the seaward side of the littorals has resurfaced as a slow-acting and resource-consuming function of navies, prominently against Iraq and in the Adriatic. Its peacetime manifestation as "interdiction" appears intermittently against Haitian refugees and continuously against drug runners. For the U.S. Navy, maneuver as core doctrine must be tempered by the pragmatism of stationary operations in littoral waters off an enemy coast. Blockade and interdiction are manifestations of power warfare, pure and simple. World War II, of course, offers the most comprehensive laboratory for the study of naval maneuver warfare in recorded history, exceeding in its lessons even the features of the Punic, Anglo-Dutch, and Anglo-French wars illuminated by A.T. Mahan in his The Influence of Sea Power upon History. World War II was also the last time the U.S. Navy's freedom of maneuver was challenged and the last time it fought a battle at sea. In particular, the Solomons campaign of 1942-43 exhibits the crucible of littoral warfare at its most intense. Rich rewards come from the study of such a book as the recent and accurate Guadalcanal , by Richard B. Frank.9 Understanding the teamwork of land, sea, and air forces and the central role of scouting ("information acquisition") in the Solomons helps one anticipate the even greater interaction that will confront naval forces conducting operations on both sides of a coastline in the missile warfare of the twenty-first century. But our purpose here must be to make two points only. The first contrasts General Douglas MacArthur's drive up the northern New Guinea coast with Admiral Chester Nimitz's advance across the Central Pacific, while viewing the two together as a coherent whole. MacArthur's success with minimum casualties is sometimes cited as maneuver warfare at its best. If that is so, then the concurrent and casualty-laden island assaults in the Central Pacific drive from November 1943 to October 1944 must be assessed a mistake. Seeing why the Central Pacific part of the campaign was in fact not an error helps us to understand the nature of naval maneuver warfare. MacArthur's operations in the Southwest Pacific had a three-thousand-mile head start over Nimitz's forces, which swept west from Pearl Harbor--yet it was the Central Pacific drive that frightened Japan. MacArthur enjoyed fewer casualties because his southern route was viewed by the enemy as a sideshow. When Admirals Raymond Spruance and Richmond K. Turner assaulted Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, on the other hand, they entered the Japanese vital center. The forces they faced afloat, ashore, and in the air were ordered to stand or die. The Japanese died, but not before having defended with almost unprecedented ferocity. Maneuver warfare is not bloodless warfare: it is swift movement to successive positions the loss of which will hurt the enemy badly. Mediocre campaigners will not recognize the vital nature of their own such positions and will leave the door open for a swift, information-dense and casualty-light campaign against them. More to the point, an enemy without a substantial navy is powerless to prevent swift movement at sea. On the littoral, which by definition is within reach of naval forces, such an advantage may be decisive, and entail few casualties.10 When, however, the enemy is skillful, he will know the center of gravity and be prepared, as were the Japanese in the Marianas and again at Okinawa. That there is a bloody battle does not mean that maneuver from the sea has not occurred. One may conclude that when the enemy is hollow, our casualties are indicators of our own failure to maneuver; but when the enemy is magnificent, casualties at the decisive points are indicators of sound strategic thought on both sides . Maneuver warfare's swift movement overtakes the enemy's ability to react: to retreat, reinforce or realign his forces. Jan Breemer calls the effect on the enemy "permanent surprise." The great movements of the U.S. Fifth Fleet from January to June of 1944 constrained the reactions of the Japanese, notably by neutralizing and bypassing the Imperial Japanese Navy bastion at Truk and leapfrogging a thousand miles, all the way from Eniwetok to Saipan. The Japanese fought with intense devotion ashore and their fleet came out, but the Japanese forces were off balance, ill trained, and badly synchronized, especially in the air. In the battle of the Philippine Sea the greenness of the Japanese air forces wrecked an imaginative battle plan; the aviators were not sufficiently trained to execute it. The debacle sealed the fate of sixty-five thousand Japanese troops on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. But they gave their lives dearly and inflicted twenty-six thousand U. S. Marine and Army casualties. The Japanese also lost four of nine carriers, over three hundred carrier aircraft, and many more aircraft on the airfields of the Marianas. The United States lost 129 aircraft.11 Can such a bloodbath be maneuver warfare? That is the wrong issue. Investing the Marianas was very advantageous; both sides knew the islands' value. The Americans conducted "operational maneuver from the sea" brilliantly, followed by power warfare ashore as a Japanese choice . After the loss of the Marianas, the leaders in Tokyo knew the war was lost. They continued out of pride and in resistance to President Roosevelt's proclaimed objective of unconditional surrender. After Tarawa (November 1943) and Kwajalein (January 1944), the Joint Chiefs were impressed with the effectiveness of the newly proven skill in amphibious assault and with its matchless velocity. The Central Pacific offered the potential of great leaps, using the fast carriers to cover and jeep carriers to support landings hundreds of miles beyond the reach of land-based aircraft. MacArthur also grasped the advantage of leapfrogging and did so with great skill, but his was not the theater that captured the close attention of the Japanese. Although some theorists have argued against the American dual drives, it would have been folly to shut down MacArthur's movement up from the south, apart from the impossibility of challenging his dominating will. MacArthur's simultaneous movements to the southwest of the Fifth Fleet drove the Japanese staff mad with uncertainty. The U. S. Pacific strategy in 1944 was maneuver warfare on a grand scale, brilliant not so much in its design but in its swift execution. The historian E. P. Hoyt describes Japanese confusion: The Americans in the spring of 1944 were moving so rapidly that the Imperial General Staff had difficulty keeping up with them. [In New Guinea MacArthur's forces] struck Aitape, and then Humboldt Bay, and then Tanahmerah Bay. A few weeks later they attacked the Wakde-Sarmi area, 120 miles west of Hollandia. Then they attacked Biak. . . . The Japanese had 10,000 troops on that island, but as soon as the Americans and their allies seemed to be successful in the first invasion Imperial Army Headquarters in Tokyo announced that it intended to abandon the troops [who were to] fight to the last man. . . . This was the largest force yet abandoned to certain destruction. As the navy planners in Tokyo considered the situation in the south, they decided that the opportunity for the fateful "decisive battle" was offered them in New Guinea [for] it was reasonable to believe that the American naval force could be drawn into major action [there]. . . . The invasion of Biak on May 27 triggered the Japanese plan. The navy would fight at Biak. The army quickly reconsidered its abandonment of the Biak garrison and began assembling reinforcements. The navy ordered nearly a hundred planes from Philippine and Mariana bases down to Sorong, on the northwest coast of New Guinea [and] a few days later another seventy-five fighters and bombers were sent from the Carolines [while the fleet reoriented to the south]. Then, on June 1, Lt. Takehiko Chihaya made a report on an aerial reconnaissance flight. . . . The Americans had built up Majuro in the Marshalls with an enormous number of ships of all sorts. It seemed obvious that a new invasion was just days away. . . . The Imperial General Staff reeled with the shock. Where was the major action? It could be coming from Biak. It could be Palau. It could be Saipan. With so many U. S. ships in the New Guinea area and so many in the Marshalls, which was the major force? . . .The truth was no one knew, and no one had a feel for the American strategy.12 In one year American forces, mostly naval, swept from Pearl Harbor five thousand miles almost due west into the Philippines, along the way establishing air bases in the Marianas for B-29 attacks against the Japanese home islands. Here was maneuver warfare at its most telling: fast, furious, irresistible, and decisive. Another operation epitomizing totally successful "naval" (or joint) maneuver warfare took place during the Korean War--MacArthur's bold landing at Inchon in 1950. Inchon characterizes the very nature of maneuver warfare: high risk, high reward. A watchword of maneuver warfare is "audacity," a quality that, if success is to result, must be accompanied by a high level of experience and wisdom. Indeed, it usually is forgotten that the Joint Chiefs of Staff traveled to Tokyo in an attempt to convince General MacArthur that his plan was unwise, even foolhardy; MacArthur accepted these points but insisted that the obvious drawbacks would be equally plain to his enemy--and that for this very reason his plan would succeed. The Inchon operation is esteemed today not only for its dramatic outcome but also because in it MacArthur exhibited an astute mixture of daring and capacity to weigh the risks against rewards. Intensity Levels of Naval Maneuver in Littoral Operations. My second purpose in looking at World War II is to establish several "intensity levels" of littoral operations, the interpretation of which will prove useful. In Table 2, the "numbers involved" column refers to U. S. Marine and Army forces employed in the first day's assault. They should be viewed as a commitment of combat potential that the operational commander regarded as adequate. The Marine Corps and even the Navy tend to disregard the European theater when looking for lessons in maneuver warfare. Yet the mobility afforded the Allied forces through preponderance at sea was quite confounding to the Axis in Europe, because naval supremacy came earlier there and was more marked than in the Pacific theater. - At level 1, we find the raid on Dieppe, which, like the Makin Island raid, was of questionable value, if for different reasons. - At level 2, we find no examples to offer; there was too much land, and there were too few isolated spots to offer prospects of airfield enclaves in the European theater. Malta would serve if it had been seized, not simply held. - At level 3 are the several North Africa and Sicily landings, U. S. Army operations all, lightly opposed assaults because "operational maneuver from the sea"--OMFTS, in the modern jargon--made it impossible for the enemy to hurl them off the beach. - At level 4 we might put the difficult Anzio operation and the whole panoply of German and Soviet operations in the Baltic in support of the ground campaign. - The landings in Normandy to spearhead the campaign in France and Germany were so grand and massive as to constitute a unique event, but even they depended substantially on a deception that froze in place key elements of the German army. Maritime mobility made the deception possible. More recent examples can also be categorized: at level 1, the Iranian rescue mission; at level 2, the Grenada and Panama interventions; and at level 4, the Falklands War (as involving a sizable fraction of the available combat potential committed by the two opponents). A number of conclusions can be drawn from history. First, naval maneuver warfare is associated with a campaign and applies at the operational level of war. Second, the absence of bloodshed is not the defining characteristic of maneuver warfare. The defining characteristic is the freedom to apply combat power where it counts; the more critical the point, the more certain that the enemy will recognize it and shed blood to keep it. Also, the focus is not always on Navy-Marine forces. When the scale is sufficient--a "major regional conflict," for instance--the Army and Air Force are equal or superior partners. But the entire operation rests on freedom of maneuver at sea, as it did in the Korea, Vietnam, and Gulf conflicts. Whether one calls them sustained operations from the sea or just littoral warfare, the defining characteristic is a secure sea-land interface. Fourth, combat at the sea-land interface has changed sufficiently (in the span and focus of sensors and the reach and accuracy of weapons) to affect the nature of naval tactics, especially the interaction of land, sea, and air forces. Finally, one contribution of naval maneuver is to confront the enemy with the question, "Where will they strike us next?" The two-pronged offensive in the Pacific, often criticized, exploited the U.S. advantage in naval forces to fix untold Japanese forces where they could do little harm. A Strategy of Maneuver and the Land War There is no naval strategic warfare. A maritime strategy, the obvious choice of the United States, is carried out in joint operations. A maritime campaign by a maritime nation aims at sea control as the means but not the end, because strategy prescribes wartime goals and missions governed by purposes on the land. A maneuver strategy in land warfare has a reputable pedigree, with B.H. Liddell Hart its best-known apostle, Frederick the Great an early exemplar, and Sun Tzu a proponent of maneuver strategy at its most subtle. As many writers have said, the fruits of strategic maneuver on land are amply illustrated by certain operations that have embodied its ideals: Napoleon's campaign in Italy, 1797; General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862; the German blitzkrieg's quick and total defeat of France, 1940; the Japanese campaigns in the Malay States and East Indies that ended British and Dutch presence east of Singapore, 1941-1942; and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War--bloody, but short and decisive. Each operation is characterized by all the virtues of operational maneuver warfare writ large: in each, an outnumbered force defeated several enemy forces in succession by swift movement, surprise, envelopment, and demoralization. We have already seen the limits of maneuver in a naval campaign. The limits in land strategy are similar. When, on the ground, the defense is the stronger tactically, which in history has been true more often than not, maneuver must be toward a superior position that cannot be ignored by the enemy, who to extricate himself must attack and be punished. When Napoleon was confronted with the prepared positions of Wellington (the "Iron Duke"), first on the Peninsula and later at Waterloo, his operational brilliance could not overcome the advantages of a skillful, determined defense. A maneuver strategy entails maneuvering room. World War I saw successful maneuver warfare on the Eastern Front and its attempt, in 1914, on the Western Front. In the West the attempt failed, and as the flanks were extended the armies ran out of space to envelop. The next year the French found that frontal assault was disastrous; on the Western Front a strategy of maneuver was dead until 1918. The trenches proved to be impenetrable until new infiltration tactics were developed by the German army, and tank technology by the British army. Perhaps the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War is the most instructive of all. In the west, as a brigadier, Grant won two brilliant campaigns of maneuver, between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in February 1862 and east of Vicksburg in May of 1863--both examples of riverine "amphibious" warfare. With the fall of Vicksburg on 4 July, one could say that the Confederacy had lost the western theater. Then Grant went east to command all the Union armies; with President Lincoln and General William T. Sherman, now the primary Union commander in the west, he mapped out the Union strategy for 1864 to crush the rebels, who were beaten but refused to admit it. In Tennessee and Georgia, Sherman would conduct a war of maneuver, although the South remembers it as a campaign of burning and destruction. In the east, Grant would pin down the South's premier tactician, Robert E. Lee. No one could outmaneuver Lee, so Grant would not try. Grant's task was, by threatening Richmond, to make sure Lee's Army of Northern Virginia did not outmaneuver the Army of the Potomac, with which Grant now located his headquarters. It would not be pretty, because two of the finest armies in the world now faced each other, and they were well matched: Grant with the advantages of numbers and secure sea lines in Chesapeake Bay, Lee with the advantages of the defense and railroads on interior lines, to be exploited if either Sherman or Grant faltered. But here we are more interested in strategic maneuver at sea. Searching for evidence that it was a central ingredient of the decision on land, one finds the best expositions not in the lustrous Liddell Hart, the profound Karl von Clausewitz, the mechanistic Baron Jomini, or even the well-balanced J.F.C. Fuller. To understand the influence of sea power's mobility one should turn to Sir Julian Corbett, Rear Adm. J.C. Wylie, and a fine new book by Professor John Arquilla entitled Dubious Battles .14 Special note is due to Raoul Castex, the influential French admiral who between the world wars had to conceive a naval strategy by which a land power might deal with British naval superiority. His solution, such as it is, may be seen in an abridgment of his Theories Strategiques. 15 Castex wished to resolve the debate in France between advocates of Mahanian sea power, who championed a battle fleet to challenge the British navy, and the so-called jeune ecole, who espoused a guerrilla campaign with a fleet of sea raiders.16 Castex's solution is victory at sea by strategic maneuver. Here is a sample (in which I have retained French spelling to remind us of Castex's special meaning of maneouvre ): Military writers have characterized maneouvre in various ways. Some describe it as achieving numerical advantage, some as bringing strength against weakness. Another version makes it an operation in strength against the decisive point, while still another view is that maneouvre is organizing one's effort. I suggest the following formula: to maneouvre is to move intelligently in order to create a favorable situation. . . . Thus presented, maneouvre becomes the pinnacle of the art. It is the Divine part of the profession, that which calls upon all the treasures of spirit, intelligence, imagination, will, and knowledge.17 Thus described, maneuver warfare exceeds the fondest ambitions of everyone else who ever championed it. But Castex was not pure poet and visionary. He offered particulars to flesh out strategic maneouvre . We find that "maneouvre is an essentially intellectual factor that transforms a physical situation." Should the Navy and Marine Corps adopt "maneouvre" as the theme that unifies doctrine at all levels, strategic, operational, and tactical? I think not. As a French admiral visiting the U.S. Naval Doctrine Command recently observed, "Castex had to solve the problem of an inferior navy. Maneuver warfare is risky warfare. You [the admiral's American listeners] should use your superiority." As for naval tactics, striving for superior maneouvre is a sound way to study combat at sea, but, as we will see, it is an artificially complicating tactical thought. Contemporary Operational Maneuver from the Sea In modern naval tactics, maneuver by a formation of fighting ships and aircraft is subordinated to the maneuvers (or movements) of the missiles or torpedoes they fire.18 What is more, battles are won by out-scouting the enemy and concealing not only one's formations but one's intentions. The critical activities (the processes of naval combat) are shooting, scouting, command and control, and confounding the attempts by the enemy to carry out these three activities.19 Until after World War I, maneuvers (movements) by warships were synonymous with tactics. Now maneuver-by-ship in battle is not a critical tactical activity at all, because a commander cannot correct an error of formation when the missiles come raining down. Thus it does no harm and probably some good to understand the intent of Castex's maneouvre strategy and to think of tactical maneouvre as being all of the critical actions taken in battle, blended "intelligently to create a favorable situation." But I would not call that "tactical maneuver warfare." A fighting fleet's critical actions create combat power, the aim of which is to destroy the enemy. Naval Tactics Are Power Warfare. Unlike at the campaign level, where history validates the worth of naval maneuver, there is conclusive evidence that naval tactics are invariably attrition-oriented. Naval battles are won by sinking the enemy or putting him out of action before he can do the same to oneself. Until recently a fleet has been able to choose whether to fight, and when. This is a campaign decision in the realm of operational art, not tactics. Once the decision is made by two parties to fight, the result will be settled by attrition. "Maximum ordnance on target," "Attack effectively first," and "Kill or be killed" are only slogans, but they are slogans suited to naval tactics. These propositions are settled and certain. Victory in land battle may sometimes come from seizing and holding a dominating position, aided by suppression, breakthrough, or demoralization; but these are tactical means of ground, not naval, combat. Simply put, naval tactics are power warfare aimed at destruction. Parenthetically, it is no longer certain that a fleet can find safe haven in port. The shift began in World War II. The Royal Navy's shocking air attack on the Italian navy at Taranto in November 1940 was the first indication; it forced the Italians to move the fleet to La Spezia, away from the Mediterranean's strategic center. Then came the attack on the unalerted U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, the 1944 attack on the semi-alerted Japanese fleet at Truk, and U.S. fleet air attacks, almost at will, on the fully alerted Japanese home ports in 1945. Today, standoff missiles amplify the hazard of attempting to maintain a "fleet in being." Yet in-port vulnerability is not a foregone conclusion, and European coastal navies are practiced at deception, dispersal, and concealment. Coastal warfare blurs the distinction between operational and tactical decision making, and the in-port vulnerability of a fleet accents the trend toward power warfare and away from maneuver warfare. But of primary contemporary interest is littoral warfare, fought on both sides of the coastline. Missiles launched from sea to shore and shore to sea will create a tactical environment of unparalleled tactical complexity insofar as land-sea-air interaction is concerned. Again, however, the change wrought by all sorts of missiles is in the direction of power tactics, and away from maneuver operations, as a style of warfare that offers hope of victory. Because speed of attack has been transferred from ships and aircraft to the weapons they fire, speed is now a tactical tool of escape and evasion, not closure and attack. The first step to neutralize the seaward threat on the littoral will be to clear away the clutter: enemy coastal traffic, fishing fleets, coastal missile sites, and so forth. When opposed by air, land, sea, and undersea elements, the task is a hard one. Whether the clearance is carried out by ships or aircraft, maneuver is involved, but none of these preliminary operations exhibits the characteristics of maneuver warfare. Victory in battle will be achieved by out-scouting the enemy, or in the language of today, "dominant battlespace awareness." This has been true at sea since World War II, when aircraft became the prominent means of striking. The point can be made mathematically, but qualitatively the reason is easy to explain. Aircraft--or missile--attacks come in compact pulses of striking power; if a pulse is large and accurate enough to destroy the preponderance of the enemy's combat potential, then a smaller, nominally inferior force can win decisively by better scouting. If both sides are caught in an exchange of salvoes, then the possibility exists of mutual annihilation. This is nothing new. As an American admiral said in the early 1930s, "Opposing carriers within a strategical area are like blindfolded men armed with daggers in a ring. There is apt to be sudden destruction to one or both."20 The U. S. Navy of today depends on defensive firepower for survival against an enemy who gets off the first salvo, but its modern defenses have never been tested in a battle. If it gets caught in an exchange of missiles we are liable to see big ships put out of action in the act of destroying the enemy's little ones--and the likelihood of an exchange grows in the enemy's own coastal waters, which is where the U.S. Navy must operate. The modern metaphor might be of two men, one big and strong, the other small and weak, both armed with pistols, stalking each other in a maze of shrubbery designed by the weak man. Can even modern sensors see through the "shrubs"? Whoever wins, it will have been a result of power warfare actualized by superior scouting. The notion of Castex's maneouvre , as any intelligent action, is serviceable in the study of naval tactics, but it is too arcane to advocate as tactical doctrine. Tactical doctrine should be as simple as possible, utterly free of jargon, and without ambiguity (except when guidance of the "If this, then do that" variety is necessary). Maneouvre terminology achieves none of those things. DESERT STORM and Maneuver Warfare. DESERT STORM itself only partially fits the characterization of maneuver warfare, and in ways that few if any writers have thus far described.21 The war exhibited these characteristics of littoral maneuver warfare: combat potential delivered, without loss, from the sea; maneuver on the seaward flank to pin down enemy units; maneuver on the landward flank to envelop the enemy; swift shock-attack up the middle, accompanied by intense covering fire to suppress enemy fire and discourage resistance; a clear campaign objective and intended end-point; and overwhelming momentum (firepower on the move), sustained from start to finish. Still, some of the war's features are also manifestations of power warfare. Was this not simply smart warfare, blending power and maneuver? The dichotomy between power and maneuver warfare is only a mental construct to aid in conceptualizing the positive effects of maneuver in a campaign. Sound practice combines the advantages of power and maneuver; or in old-fashioned terms, fire and movement. The art and genius of command is in setting the proportions. But there was in DESERT STORM one unambiguous example of maneuver warfare, and it came in the air campaign before the ground attack. General Schwarzkopf had said that his goal for that campaign was 50 percent destruction of vehicles in Kuwait.22 In fact, only perhaps 40 percent of the vehicles at the Saudi border were destroyed, and fewer to the north, but nonetheless the campaign was hugely successful--because, strange to say, the bombing effects typified maneuver warfare , in that: - The enemy was not only killed in large numbers but pinned down, unable to move or leave cover. His movement was suppressed. - At the Saudi border the enemy spirit was crushed before the start of the ground campaign; he was overwhelmed, demoralized, and dominated; he surrendered in droves as soon as he could. - The enemy was unable to see the buildup on his right flank, nor could he have done anything even had he suspected. ("Gotcha !" exclaimed General Schwarzkopf the day the air campaign started.) - Most important of all, 40 percent attrition of materiel was evidently accompanied by about a 90 percent reduction of Iraqi combat potential along the Saudi border. The Marines achieved instantaneous domination of the defenders when they attacked. Tank operations are usually described as "maneuver warfare." As a speculative aside, we may have seen in the Persian Gulf War of 1991 the transformation of combat between armored forces into the Navy's tactical paradigm. Tanks are now big, expensive machines, as warships are. They are stalked by aircraft and, absent a screen, are subject to ambush. The tank battles of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War were fast, intense, and decisive, and the mutual attrition rate was awesome, whereas in DESERT STORM tank destruction was just about as swift, but the results were starkly one-sided. To what do we attribute the coalition's success? One commentator has pointed out that detection range was as important as weapon range, another phenomenon of naval tactics. The poor tank tactics of the Iraqis, such as their failure to establish screens for early warning, accented the coalition's technological advantage. A more competent enemy would have striven for concealment even in the desert, to reduce the usefulness of greater weapon range and accuracy; the results would likely have been dramatically less to the coalition's advantage.23 If that is so, then air-armor warfare will look much like air-naval warfare, and superior scouting will be the key to attacking effectively first. Some commentators attribute the decisiveness of the DESERT STORM tank battles to the coalition's swift advance. The U.S. doctrinal principle of synchronization has been accused of slowing advances and muting the advantages of operational maneuver. But synchronization of tank fire finds a tactical parallel in a formation of destroyers that fire their torpedoes in one nearly simultaneous salvo at a column of battleships and cruisers. Another analog would have been a synchronized regiment of Soviet Backfire bombers launching their antiship missiles all together as a pulse, in the tactic the U.S. Navy feared most. Well-aimed fire from an entire tank formation is almost pulse-like in intensity, and it is capable of an attrition rate that looks much like the modern pulsed-power tactics of navies. Logistics and the Operational Level of War. By differentiating the viewpoints toward warfare taken by the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army, Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie helps us to understand a ground force's greater emphasis on operational art: Where the sailor and the airman are almost forced, by the nature of the sea and the air, to think in terms of a total world or, at the least, to look outside the physical limits of their immediate concerns, the soldier is almost literally hemmed in by his terrain. From this fact of terrain as a limiting element has come the concept of "theater" in the soldier's strategy, a terrain division somehow arbitrary to the sailor or the airman but sound and logical if we move into the soldier's headquarters.24 Here is what Admiral Wylie is getting at, expressed quantitatively. As we saw, lightly opposed ground forces can expect to move about a hundred miles in a week. In a week, naval forces and merchant ships will move 2,500 miles at a modest fifteen knots.25 Aviators now practice intercontinental air strikes at much higher speeds. In the U.S. military, the Army and Marine Corps have found it necessary to distinguish actions at the operational level, i.e., as those that support strategy within a theater of war; the Navy (as well as, I believe, the Air Force) has no such need. With no loss of clarity and perhaps some gain, all but one of the previously discussed historical examples of "operational" maneuver could be (and generally have been) called strategic maneuver: the British navy's freedom to sustain ground forces at will along the coast of the North American colonies, the Union navy's unrestricted capacity to attack Confederate ports, and the American forces' swift, two-pronged drive toward Japan. The exception helps to reinforce the distinctiveness of ground warfare: it is the Union army-navy joint operations on the western rivers in the American Civil War. Furthermore, because the functions of a navy are to move and deliver goods and services on and from the world's oceans, about 90 percent of the conduct of a maritime campaign is determined by logistics--the movement at sea or the sustainment on land of combat potential. That is why the U.S. Navy has been so slow to adopt "operational art," considering it an artifice appropriate to ground force doctrine. The maritime strategist must figure out what ends are sought and to that purpose where, and in what order, to deploy and operate. These are matters of desirability . The tactician then estimates what forces are required to fight there to achieve those ends in the face of the enemy; that is a question of acceptability . The wise strategist and tactician then consult their logistician, who tells them whether the forces the tactician needs can be delivered where the strategist wants them to go--that is feasibility . Whether the campaign succeeds or fails usually depends most on feasibility, which is determined by the art and science of logistics. Consider the Guadalcanal campaign. There were plenty of soldiers and Marines in the Pacific, but one Marine division was all that could be delivered and sustained in the distant Solomon Islands in the summer of 1942. The strategists had a good idea, which was to block the Japanese by seizing a nearly completed airstrip on Guadalcanal and using it to dominate the waters of the lower Solomons. The tacticians, however, underestimated the land, sea, and air forces needed in the face of Japanese prowess and resistance. The logisticians, who were still learning, nearly miscalculated what could be safely delivered, and they did a messy, unprofessional job of execution. The result was a six-month-long "near run thing." The three prongs of the naval trident have long been called strategy, tactics, and logistics; all one has to do to bring the classical paradigm up to date is change the order to strategy, logistics, and tactics. Maritime operational art is almost, but not quite, synonymous with operational logistics. Because of the need to work closely in support of land forces, Navy terminology should doubtless also now embrace "operational art," especially for joint littoral warfare. Beyond that, who would wish to say that naval maneuver warfare is only a question of logistics? But as Admiral Wylie observed, maritime operational flexibility is ocean-wide, and truly strategic, maneuver. Military planners, especially the U.S. unified commanders in chief, will grasp the tremendous advantage of contemporaneous operational maneuver at sea most firmly when they compute the utility of logistics support unopposed almost up to the enemy coast. The practical consequence of looking through the logistics lens is a clear perception of how the feasibility of "operational maneuver from the sea" is affirmed by specific logistical considerations: i.e., the time-distance-weight (or volume) computations that determine how much combat potential, expressed in fighting units, can be delivered to what depth inland from what distance at sea. When this logistic capability is compared with operational objectives, then it will become evident whether "OMFTS" and the associated "ship-to-objective maneuver" tactics are circumscribed at what I called above intensity level 1 (a Makin Island or Dieppe raid, or the attempted "Desert One" rescue) or at intensity level 2 (Grenada or Panama). The quantity of fire support--organic to the troops ashore, or remote afloat--and all other tactical support can be examined in this light. We know from the strategist what we want to do; we know from the tactician the forces it will take to generate sufficient combat power to do it. The logistical question, which is the solid, computable core of operational art, marries the two together to determine whether the tactician's force requirement can be brought to bear quickly and surely in order to fulfill the strategist's goal. It is not actually possible for the tactician to specify what forces will be needed to execute a regional conflict (major or limited), a low-intensity conflict, or operations other than war, because in any operation, combat is full of uncertainty. But the fighting is the responsibility of the tactical commander, not the task of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the unified commanders. Their task is relatively straightforward: to estimate the feasibility of moving blocks of combat potential quickly and safely to the scene of action and sustaining them.26 It is also the operational commander's responsibility to anticipate the integration problems of multiservice operations. Actually accomplishing the service-integrated activities of movement, emplacement, and sustainment is high art, as DESERT SHIELD reminded us. Operational maneuver depends on astute calculations and energetic labor, all in the face of an enemy who may regard sustainment as our Achilles' heel. OMFTS is a Navy-Marine Corps concept, but one that is broadly applicable. It ought to be the unifying vision for all joint littoral operations, up to the intensity level of a "major regional conflict." Such a conflict would not be, however, purely naval; it would be a joint operation at intensity level 3 or 4, with the Army and Air Force primarily doing the fighting and the Navy in a sustainment and support role. Hence, "operational maneuver from the sea" entails interfaces among the services, and there is enough confusion between U.S. service capabilities as it is. On one hand, the Navy and Marine Corps should pioneer the organization, training, and equipment of naval maneuver warfare operations and tactics for intensity levels 1 and 2; on the other hand, there is cause to doubt that an all-naval operation would be countenanced even at those intensities. It is certain that when an operation of intensity 3 or 4 is undertaken, the U.S. Army and Air Force will do the bulk of the fighting and require the bulk of the logistic support. Consequently, if OMFTS and ship-to-objective maneuver are to be robust, all joint roles ought to be worked out from the beginning. The Department of the Navy has a strong strategy under which to organize, train, and equip its operating forces, a strong vision for the future, and basic doctrine that includes maneuver warfare at the operational level.27 Naval forces are still grappling with the tactical details of fighting together at intensity levels 1 and 2. Now is therefore also the best time to address the tasks and tactical doctrine of operational maneuver from the sea at higher intensity levels. Ship-to-Objective Maneuver and Littoral Tactics. One wins a campaign by winning battles.28 It is not the purpose of this article to review the Marine Corps processes of tactical development that are now underway. Operational maneuver from the sea is a solid concept; it charts the way for the Navy-Marine Corps team in the littoral warfare environment. Its implementing, tactical companion-piece--ship-to-objective maneuver--will no doubt fulfill its intention to "direct the development of [Marine] equipment, doctrine, training, and support for the future while employing existing and emerging mobility assets."29 Ship-to-objective maneuver tactics will imaginatively use new command systems to combine and control fires, aviation, and maneuverable ground forces into a tactical organism that operates cohesively on a non-contiguous battlefield. The new Marine tactical concept imposes one burden on the Navy that is fundamental enough for immediate attention. Ship-to-objective maneuver will exploit modern air, land, and sea mobility to permit the tactics of maneuver warfare ashore. It envisions light, fast-moving, deep-striking bundles of combat potential keeping the enemy off balance, while operating at or near the center of gravity of the operation or campaign. To allow such nimble maneuver ashore, it envisions two forms of tactical assistance from the Navy: fire support, and an afloat sustainment base. It also requires the means to move well beyond the coast into the littoral and, on the landward side, quickly here and there to avoid easy targeting by an enemy. The Marine Corps anticipates that some enemies will have modern precision sensors and weapons, and that movement will be one of the best ways to confound them. The tactics of ship-to-objective maneuver intended for the Navy-Marine Corps team will apply at the lower levels of intensity. A doctrinal issue of first importance arises here: the scale of opposition against which they are to be used. An accurate appraisal of one's effective combat power advantage depends on the enemy's mass-mobility relationship as well as one's own. In other words, can we retain local preponderance by moving faster than the enemy can aggregate his forces against our mobile but small maneuvering units? Let us suppose such local superiority can be maintained. It should be recognized, then, that the consequence of Marine mobility is Navy immobility . To allow the forces on the ground to be agile, Navy forces in support are likely to lose agility, to be tied rather tightly to a single location, at the cost of operational maneuver upon the sea. Theater ballistic missile defense from the sea, for instance, is a demanding commitment that amounts to a stationary operation, and one of pure power warfare. There are therefore two issues the Department of the Navy must clarify. One, to be worked out by its two services jointly, is the time-distance-weight-volume problem: how deep and with how big a force will the Marines operate? The second is the Navy's problem to solve alone, but it has serious Marine implications: if the logistical solution requires the Navy to operate close to the shore, then just when the Marine Corps is living by maneuver, the Navy may be dying for lack of it.30 The Marine Corps envisions swift movement, sometimes airborne, in small, nimble packages. The U.S. Navy's ships are operationally mobile but not tactically nimble; its warships today are very big packages, including the best amphibious ships. One would expect that the enemy's precision sensors and weapons, which Marine maneuverability evades on land, will be directed instead at our big, slow ships, constrained as they are within a fairly small area. Doctrinal Implications Naval maneuver warfare--objective-oriented deployment and sustainment of combat potential on both sides of a coastline--is the historically validated practice of maritime powers. Its efficacy rests on swift movement of large quantities of goods and services by sea, relative to their movement by land. To seaward, operational maneuver on the sea is a very powerful option today for the U. S. Navy, which already has effective control of all but coastal waters and so enjoys great freedom of movement. All U. S. forces profit from maritime supremacy in littoral operations of every level of intensity, including conflicts in which the bulk of fighting is by Army and Air Force components. To seaward of the littoral, U. S. naval supremacy permits the almost risk-free employment of maneuver warfare. It is important to add that naval supremacy also enables low-risk stationary warfare: blockade, interdiction, inspection, and (prospectively) tactical ballistic missile defense from the sea. Closer to the shore, however, planners must distinguish operational mobility of ships, which is their strength, from tactical immobility when employing weapons of war, which is their weakness. American warships and merchantmen are big, slow, and targetable; what speed they possess is primarily good for complicating the enemy's prestrike targeting. Ship-to-objective maneuver will tie warships to a specific vicinity for fire support and logistic sustainment of troops on the ground. Tactical maneuverability of forces on the ground comes at the expense of the operational freedom of the supporting warships. The implication is a nearly stationary, supporting enclave maintained off the enemy coast for the duration of the operation--and the tactics for this do not now exist. The principal conclusion we should draw is that "operational maneuver from the sea"--at present, naval maneuver warfare's principal doctrinal expression--is an available, powerful, and desirable manifestation of that approach to warfare (others being aircraft and missile strikes). OMFTS applies at the operational level, irrespective of the actuating tactics. It concerns the delivery and sustainment of combat potential, the forces that will exert combat power. Successful planning and execution rests on realistic calculations, specifically of time, distance, weight, and volume. Although the Navy and Marine Corps are and ought to be its primary developers, exponents, and practitioners, large-scale operations will involve the Army and Air Force, to say nothing of coalition partners. In addition, recent experience suggests that all services may participate even in smaller operations. Naval doctrine should, accordingly, anticipate frequent participation of all the armed services by prescribing the necessary interfaces as the Navy and Marine Corps organize, train, and equip their own forces. Notes 1. Naval Doctrine Publication (or NDP) 1 identifies the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II as "attrition warfare," in order to contrast it with maneuver warfare. The nature of the U-boat campaign against shipping was the German choice, not that of the Allies; it engendered an enormous response, in the ratio of about a hundred to one in personnel. The Allies could scarcely decline the task then, nor can we now say the German campaign was a mistake. Of course, the degree of success that it achieved depended on the iron wills of the U-boat crews. 2. Discussions in print rarely distinguish maneuver warfare's applicability at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels--probably because as recently as 1992 the U.S. Navy did not formally acknowledge the operational level. NDP 1 is apparently the first naval document to introduce it formally. 3. Furthermore, the Helmbold study concludes that advance rates on land have not changed much over the last four hundred years. Hence it should come as no surprise that advance rates for lightly engaged forces are only slightly higher (by a factor of 1.5 or two) for motorized forces than for those on foot. See R.L. Helmbold, Rates of Advance in Historical Land Combat Operations , Research Paper CAA-RP-90-1 (Bethesda, Md.: U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, June 1990). 4. The employments listed in NDP 1 (pp. 15-30) are adjusted for the current strategic environment and to give appropriate weighting for the Marine Corps. 5. Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911; reprint, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988), pp. 94-5. 6. Michael W.B. Sanderson, Sea Battles: A Reference Guide (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975), makes the point about the proximity of land. H. Pemsel, A History of War at Sea: An Atlas and Chronology of Conflict at Sea from Earliest Times to the Present (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1977), contains maps by period illustrating the same phenomenon. Terry Hughes and John Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic (New York: Dial Press, 1977), offers maps showing that most U-boat attacks occurred in the Western approaches to the British isles or off the coast of North America. 7. Sinking or crippling even one assault ship (LHA or LHD) would probably stop an amphibious operation or cause a long delay. 8. Frank Uhlig, Jr., How Navies Fight: The U.S. Navy and Its Allies (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1994), foreword. The book's concluding and summarizing chapter was adapted as "How Navies Fight, and Why," Naval War College Review , Winter 1995. Frank Uhlig develops the point further in "The Constants of Naval Warfare," Naval War College Review , Spring 1997. 9. Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). Frank adds new information, notably about the scouting effectiveness of the two sides, but omits scarcely any of what was known before. He is more charitable than most military historians toward Frank Jack Fletcher, an opinion with which I agree. 10. In DESERT SHIELD and STORM, safe delivery of the means of war for the air and ground operations were the U.S. Navy's principal maneuver contribution, not its land attack-missile or air strikes, or its amphibious demonstration. The amphibious assault would have been costly on the narrow front of the Kuwait coastline. Nevertheless, the demonstration and threat of an assault arguably exploited naval mobility nearly as well as a landing would have, with respect to pinning down Iraqi forces. 11. Only thirty were lost in the famous "Marianas Turkey Shoot," when U.S. fighter aircraft defending carriers massacred attacking Japanese pilots. A hundred were lost when Admiral Marc Mitscher persuaded Raymond Spruance to let his pilots chase the retreating Japanese to extreme range (three hundred miles, where two hundred was usual). It was a calculated risk: many planes ran out of fuel. 12. Edwin P. Hoyt, To The Marianas: War in the Central Pacific 1944 (New York: Avon Books, 1980), pp. 102-3. More recent and thorough research by John Prados for his Combined Fleet Decoded (New York: Random House, 1995) gives the Japanese more credit than does Hoyt, but it confirms that the pace of the American advance surprised and dismayed the Japanese leaders and confounded all their attempts to seize the initiative, including the "A Operation" plan to oppose the Marianas landings. 13. Vice Admiral Turner's V Amphibious Force of 530 warships and auxiliaries brought 127,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers to the Marianas, of which 77,000 were earmarked for Saipan. The Marine assault landed eight thousand in the first hour, twenty thousand in the first day. 14. John Arquilla, Dubious Battles: Aggression, Defeat, and the International System (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1992). Admiral Wylie's best-known work is Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967; reprint, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989). Among the prolific Sir Julian Corbett's works, the first to read is Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911; reprint, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988). 15. Raoul Castex, Strategic Theories , trans. and abridged by E.C. Kiesling (1929-1935: reprint, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1994). 16. The watchword of Theophile Aube, founder of the French Navy's jeune ecole , was, "Shamelessly attack the weak; shamelessly flee the strong." It could serve as the epigram for maneuver warfare of the cheap-and-bloodless-victory variety. 17. Castex, pp. 102-4. See also James J. Tritten and Vice Adm. Luigi Donolo, A Doctrine Reader: The Navies of United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain , Newport Paper No. Nine (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1995). 18. For a clear theoretical discussion of the issues of maneuverability and survivability in the littoral, see Yedidia Ya'ari (Rear Adm., Israel Navy), "The Littoral Arena: A Word of Caution," Naval War College Review , Spring 1995, esp. pp. 8-13. 19. See Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1986), esp. chap. 6. 20. Quoted by Dr. Thomas C. Hone in a letter to the author, cited in Fleet Tactics , p. 88. 21. I am aware of the controversy over the appropriateness of Army doctrine for the war. I leave it to the sages of land warfare to argue whether the deep, flanking attack on the left was operational maneuver warfare or merely operational maneuver in war. 22. Grant Sharp (Rear Adm., USN), statement at the Military Operations Research Society Minisymposium "Analysis Lessons Learned during Desert Shield/Desert Storm," 9-11 December 1991, Center for Naval Analyses, Washington, D.C. 23. Stephen Biddle, Explaining the Coalition Loss Rate in the Gulf War (Washington: Institute for Defense Analysis, 14 February 1996). 24. Wylie. 25. When I assisted the Army Concept Analysis Agency in adding a maritime aspect to one of its war-gaming systems, the land dimensions of the theater of operations were about a hundred by 150 miles, in which was constructed a grid of hexagons a few miles across. To play the seaward side of the game would have required a map at least ten times bigger. 26. I do not intend to say that the operational commander makes no appraisal of the anticipated fighting. I illustrate strategic appraisal with the strategic gaming done at the Naval War College before World War II. A careful calculation of the fighting values of the opponent's ships and aircraft was made, like firepower indices. When forces met at sea the "outcome" was derived from the sums of the fighting values. If the forces were equal in value, both were removed for the game's duration; if one side had a three-to-two advantage, the other side was removed permanently, but the winner was out of play for several "months"; if the advantage was two to one, the weaker side was removed and the stronger sailed majestically on. Note that a firepower index is nothing more or less than a statement of combat potential. Today I would want to include a measure of scouting capacity, because today, unlike the day of battleships, an inferior force that strikes first can decisively defeat a force having greater firepower. 27. For operating forces, see the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Operations, and Commandant of the Marine Corps white paper "Forward . . . from the Sea." The guidance may seem imperfect to some, but it is a solid basis for a maritime strategy. As to future vision, the Chief of Naval Operations' "Vision 2020: A Navy for the 21st Century" is concerned with the future, but it charts a course both plain enough to inform program management and flexible enough to allow mid-course corrections. Finally, Naval Warfare (Naval Doctrine Publication 1) and Naval Operations (NDP 3) supply doctrine for naval campaign planning. 28. See Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., "The Strategy-Tactics Relationship," in Colin S. Gray and Roger W. Barnett, eds., Seapower and Strategy (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989). 29. Coordinating draft for Ship-to-Objective Maneuver , Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication (FMFRP) 14-24 (Quantico, Va.: Marine Corps Combat Development Center, 6 April 1995). 30. FMFRP 14-24 envisions support by ships at from twenty-five to fifty miles off a coast, perhaps even less (see page 17). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * "Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act." † Sir Julian Stafford Corbett (185401922) was a distinguished British naval historian and instructor at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. He first made his name as the author of several important studies on the period between 1588 and 1805, later becoming the official historian of the Royal Navy in World War I and the author of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. ___________________ Captain Hughes is Senior Lecturer at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in the Department of Operations Research. He is the author of Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1986) and Military Modeling, 2nd ed. (Alexandria, Va.: Military Operations Research Society, 1989); the article "Naval Tactics" in the Encyclopedia Britannica; two U.S. Naval Institute Prize Essays; and four articles in this journal (most recently in the Summer 1995 issue). On active duty he commanded the USS Hummingbird (MSC 192) and USS Morton (DD 948), was executive assistant to the Under Secretary of the Navy, and served in the Korea and Vietnam conflicts.