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I don't understand what all the fuss is about. It's a great book---in fact, for a while, it was my favorite book---but humans have been fighting wars for thousands of years. The Romans ruled the ancient world, and the Mongols Asia, with their mobility.

And yet we're supposed to believe that "hey, strategic and tactical movement is pretty great" is a new idea?

Frankly, most of the time, size and power win the day. Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here.

The reason Card writes about weakness combined with movement and agility and brilliant insight is the same reason we are all fascinated with startups---because they're all counterintuitive (read: loses most of the time) and therefore fun to watch. That's it. Not because it's always a superior fighting style. Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done.

Now, I am an underweight computer programmer, so I don't know what I'm talking about. All I've done is think, and play video games. Which is precisely what Card has done.

And I say this as a fan of Card's work. But turning military fiction into the Art of War is a little much, it seems.

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Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done.

That's a common misconception about WWI, but it's really not true. At the beginning of the war the Germans came very close to out maneuvering the French army and seizing Paris with barely a fight, ending the war instantly. And on the eastern front the Germans very successfully used maneuver warfare to destroy one of the main Russian armies right at the beginning, allowing the Austrians to shift their troops south to compensate for their sudden betrayal by the Italians.

In the trenches themselves the Germans did use fancy maneuvers very successfully (see the other comment about stormtroopers), but contrary to popular opinion the trenches were never the real problem. Both sides were able to break through a trench line when they were willing to devote enough resources throughout the war.

The real problem was that once the line was broken, what do you do next? There was no motorized transport on the offence, soldiers had to travel on foot carrying all their food and supplies and nobody can keep doing that quickly for long. And the advancing soldiers had no way of communicating with command, meaning that they couldn't adapt their attack to changing conditions. By contrast, the defenders trying to contain the breakthrough had railroads and telegraphs to let them move around and communicate. So while both's side can and did create breakthroughs, the only effect was to move the front back a few dozen kilometers.

But of course, those factors aren't obvious to the naked eye like the trenches are, so are often forgotten.

By the time world war II rolled around attacking forces had internal combustion engines and the radio that let them have the same maneuverability and communications as the defenders. But as the Japanese and Germans found, while superior maneuver might let you defeat stronger foes, if you fight someone who is so much bigger that they can absorb defeat after defeat and still come on strong sooner or later they'll up their game, figure out how to fight as well as you do, and crush you.

To be fair the German's lost the war to two separate things, neither of which was due to anything that happened on the battlefield directly.

Hitler's move to bomb cities in Britian cost them London. His decision to change his objectives half way through the Russian campaign cost them Moscow (although you could argue invading Russia at all was dumb, the German army was still poised to overcome this, amazingly.

As for Japan, I think your point stands.

Hitler may have been on the verge of breaking the RAF before switching to bombing cities, but a land invasion is quite another thing entirely, and can't be assumed to have succeeded.

True, but a broken RAF keeps Britain on the defensive.

> And yet we're supposed to believe that "hey, strategic and tactical movement is pretty great" is a new idea?

Well, no -- I don't think that point was really argued anywhere in the article. The tactics of movement are perhaps only recently being formalized, but I think most students of history would agree that all modern military strategy has historical precedent ... assuming that you generalize the tactic broadly enough.

> Frankly, most of the time, size and power win the day.

Hmm. There are two ways I can see to parse this: one is historical -- "most of the time, size and power have won the day" -- and the other is theoretical -- "most of the time, size and power will win the day". I would readily agree with the first, but I'm circumspect about the latter.

I avoid computer games because they're a time sink that I can't afford, but I did get introduced to Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, and I still set aside a little time for it now and again. It is a game that depends very strongly on relative sizes to determine victories. But, my favorite race is militarily also the weakest one. I have the most fun trying to break the game, coming up with less obvious tactics and strategy.

I think there are enough exceptions to the rule of the mightiest throughout history that it's somewhat self-defeating to assume that force size will decide a battle.

> Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here.

Although there are some parallels, business is different from war. We shouldn't use businesses to make points about military strategies.

> The reason Card writes about weakness combined with movement and agility and brilliant insight is the same reason we are all fascinated with startups---because they're all counterintuitive (read: loses most of the time) and therefore fun to watch.

Well, sure. That doesn't mean that it can't also be a good example of a subject.

> Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done.

I would counter-argue that WWI in particular was such a messy, horrible, ugly disaster particularly because of the use of non-fancy maneuvers combined with new technology. Trench and chemical warfare was direct force-on-force conflict, and because planes were relatively new inventions, they were de-emphasized despite being exactly what each side needed to win the war.

> I would counter-argue that WWI in particular was such a messy, horrible, ugly disaster particularly because of the use of non-fancy maneuvers combined with new technology.

Most of the military histories of that war I've read don't so much blame the tactics, but technological limitations. Radios were still too large and power-hungry to be practical anywhere but at sea, last-mile telephone cables tended to get cut by artillery as soon as battle started, and optical signalling (e.g. flags) were difficult to make out near the front, leaving commanders basically with runners and carrier pigeons as soon as battle started.

When a local engagement can be won and lost in half an hour to an hour, but the communications RTT is 2-3 hours, maneuver warfare gets impractical (as do a lot of other things, like long range artillery against anything other than fortifications).

> When a local engagement can be won and lost in half an hour to an hour, but the communications RTT is 2-3 hours, maneuver warfare gets impractical (as do a lot of other things, like long range artillery against anything other than fortifications).

Which invalidates the entire GP's reasoning about 'size and power always winning the day'. You can't really compare warfare modes before and after portable radios; feedback loops are different.

Absolutely - although note that, at certain historical time periods, the command and control situation was closer to the current one than the WWI situation. The early 20th century was just a period when weapons ranges and (off-battlefield) transportation speeds had gone up immensely, increasing the effective size of a battlefield from practical shouting/runner range, while battlefield communication still hadn't caught up. On the other hand, there are clear examples of maneuver warfare in ancient times, involving tiny (by modern standards) amounts of space and force.

In WWI the Allies DID eventually use mobile warfare (why didn't anybody think of tanks tanks tanks) to decisively finish off the Germans [1][2]. Too besides, as pointed out below, EG is a recommended text in US military academies. Sometimes fun and games are improved by a little research.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Days_Offensive

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Amiens_(1918)#Plan

"The Battle of Amiens was a major turning point in the tempo of the war. The Germans had started the offensive with the Schlieffen Plan before the war devolved into trench warfare, the Race to the Sea slowed movement on the Western Front, and the German Spring Offensive earlier that year had once again given Germany the offensive edge on the Western Front. Armoured support helped the Allies tear a hole through trench lines, weakening once impregnable trench positions. The British Third Army with no armored support had almost no effect on the line while the Fourth with fewer than a thousand tanks broke deep into German territory, for example"

Actually, not only have 'humans been fighting wars for a long time', the entire idea of maneuver warfare predates both Ender's game _and_ it making its way into US army literature.

And this you can surmise not by digging up some obscure work from a library but simply by reading the wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare#Development_of...

The notion that Ender's game, whatever one might think of its merits, was somehow an early and unrecognized insight into maneuver warfare is ludicrous and silly.

I don't think anyone is claiming that, just that it is a good introduction to the principles.

"Despite this aggregation of martial thought, the best book on maneuver warfare is in fact a 30 year old science fiction novel. Although incomplete in addressing all aspects of theory, Ender’s Game is one of the best books on maneuver warfare ever written."

I think the OA is very much and very ludicrously claiming that.

Being a good book - even the best book - is not the same as containing new and/or undiscovered insights.

Since you mention World War I, and new tactics, you might like to read about the original stormtroopers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtrooper).

"Try fancy-schmancy maneuvers in the no-man's land of WW1 and you're done."

This happened. 1940, Germany (maneuver warfare style called "Blitzkrieg") vs. British Expeditionary Force and France using more traditional strategy and tactics, in roughly the same area as the world war 1 battles. BEF was routed, France forced to surrender.

> Frankly, most of the time, size and power win the day. Oracle is still here. Microsoft is still here. Yahoo is still here.

Because in economy the "giants" are well adapted to the current set of rules and the rules change very slowly. Also, the "giants" have more to say when new rules get crafted.

I a "real war", you have no rules. That's why economical wars and other fights for power are not actually "wars". And this is a good thing! You wouldn't want to be part of a "real war". A "real war" doesn't even have the concept of "war crimes", these are facts judged afterwards by the winners (anything "goes", including killing millions in concentration camps and other mostruosities)! Thank god we didn't have any large-scale "real wars" in the last half of century, and pray neither us nor our children ever experience such thing!

Startups are intuitive for most founders because of the scope of our resources. It would usually be counter intuitive for a big business or wealthy individual(s) to create a business as a startup (unless there's a lot of risk involved, perhaps) because they have what would be necessary to go at it full force. Imagine having 1mm in funding the day the MVP starts getting built because you, as a founder, have that liquid cash ready to invest. This isn't a scrappy startup, it's a well funded one.

Most people don't have that. Most people HAVE to start small, or burn the midnight oil working on their MVP, trying to get traction. It's not because we necessarily want to, it's because we're hungry to win and we just don't have the firepower that our established competitors have.

It seems like there are a few different frames people have to think about startups. Some think of it like gambling (as you've said), some think startups are x-wings trying to take down the death star (with enough skill and a LOT of luck, a startup will hit it big), some want to reign startups back into being a business (start with an idea that makes money!), and then there are the founders in the trenches fighting on the daily. We're the guys that have been persistently working on our businesses, our projects, our hare-brained business models that just might work. We're grounded by reality - that this is very hard - but we just keep fighting down here. I'm going to stay on these front lines until I lead the guys here who believe in me to a decisive victory.

There's a lot more to it than mobility. For a good overview, which also applies the principles to business, a great book is Certain to Win by Chet Richards, who collaborated with John Boyd on the manuscripts before Boyd died.

The most famous principle Boyd formulated is the OODA loop, which says that if you can observe the situation, figure out what's going on, decide what to do and take action faster than your enemy can, you probably win. A lot of the book is about how you do that faster, in a business situation. Some of it is about making your enemy slower (but that's more difficult to apply in business).

It's true that it didn't all start with Boyd. Some goes back to Sun Tzu, and the Germans applied it to great effect with the Blitzkrieg.

Maneuver warfare is not just for little guys and startups. US military doctrine is based on maneuver warfare.

Do you have a citation for that?

Geesh! Crack a book once in a while! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)

Crack a book? That's a wikipedia link, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking for? Maneuver warfare is 3GW, yesterday's war. How does maneuver warfare fit in with counter insurgency? Do you see a lot of current TRADOC referring to maneuver warfare and the use of swift armored forces to defeat an insurgent force armed with IEDs? You don't think increased use of SOF is a clear indicator that large-scale maneuver warfare is a thing of the past?

Why the tossaway account?

It's only "yesterday's war" as far as COIN is concerned. Against state actors, maneuver is still the order of the day. Even with counterinsurgency, moving infantry with helicopters is a force multiplier.

It's true that asymmetric warfare is the most likely face of warfare in the future, but countries with standing armies still remain a greater threat to the United States.

When, not if, the US gets in a fight with another country, it'll be the typical blitzkrieg again. So no, it's not "yesterday's war".

Its true that maneuver warfare is not completely dead. But don't forget the same things were said about maneuver warfare and the impending conflict with the Soviets during the cold war. And blitzgreig was yesterdays war.

And blitzgreig was yesterdays war.

Only by the narrowest of definitions. The US modus operandi with armoured warfare could be straight out of the German High Command's playbook. I strongly suspect that Guderian, Rommel and Manstein would be completely at home with US non-COIN doctrine.

Also, what's this about the Soviet Union? I'm having trouble parsing that sentence.

There's a bibliography near the end with interesting things to read. That's generally where things to read if you're interested in a topic will appear, and there's no need to be harsh to the guy pointing you toward useful information.

No amount of buzzwords can conceal that you don't understand what "maneuver warfare" is, either; fourth-generation warfare pretty much is maneuver warfare. Your dilution of your point by introducing United States themes and specific tactical situations makes me question why you're putting so much skin in this discussion if you're as lay as your questions indicate. I'm not criticizing you, for what it's worth, just wondering why you're cloaking not knowing something with extra buzzwords -- you should be happy to learn, not apt to show off.

Terrorism and insurgency are forms of maneuver warfare, and the term "maneuver" doesn't imply scale (and certainly not armor, for that matter). Since you're quite obviously American, the Marine Corps' definition of "maneuver warfare" should interest you:

"Maneuver warfare is a warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a variety of rapid, focused, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope."

That's from Warfighting[1]. Seriously, read up, you sound interested but misguided, and I made a throwaway just to spite you. :)

[1]: http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/mcdp1.pdf

"Third Generation warfare, like Second, was a product of World War I. It was developed by the German Army, and is commonly known as Blitzkrieg or maneuver warfare." [1]

"Along with placing greater emphasis on adaptability, the Army has transitioned its focus on training and operations from developing forces for large-scale maneuver warfare to increasing the capability of individuals to operate in smaller, decentralized elements." [2]

The wikipedia link to Warfigthing is broken. I am having trouble finding the manual on DoD's doctrine section.[3][4] Is it still relevant?

You made a throwaway account because you did not want to have your name attributed to what you wrote, I experienced no spite

[1] Understanding Fourth Generation War by William S. Lind

[2] Special Operations as a wr fighting function, http://www.soc.mil/swcS/SWmag/archive/SW2401/SW2401SpecialOp...

[3] http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/index.html

[4] http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/search.html?zoom_query=mcdp+war...

Notice how your quote includes the phrase "large-scale" behind it? That's because of what I, you know, wrote in my original comment about maneuver warfare not implying a certain scale or strategy in particular. You're proving my point and disagreeing with me at the same time, which is rather remarkable. Lind's equivalence of third-generation warfare to being called "maneuver warfare" is a definition that I happen to disagree with, as I think maneuvers in general evolve as war itself does. Terrorism itself is another evolution of a maneuver, in my opinion.

Maneuver warfare isn't the specific strategy on a general's table. It's an ethos of war. In particular, maneuver warfare embraces decentralized command, as you're so vociferously citing in your defense; Iraqi Freedom was a war of colonels, not generals, as discussed in a link I shared with you earlier.

I tried to be kind in my reply since you share a passion for military theory, and it's a topic I happen to be extremely versed in (as in, my entire adult life to this day). I hope one day you realize that there are people out there in the world that know more about a topic than you do, don't feel like justifying that authority to you, and that you should appreciate that they took some time out of their day to try to inform you rather than attack them belligerently because they dared to disagree with you.

I see this is fruitless, so, best of luck debating with other laypersons on the Internet.

Both Iraq wars were fought and won with maneuver warfare.

That is two of the last three wars the US has fought, and exclusive to when they've had an opposing force that was actually structured.

The concepts haven't been abandoned just because there are other types of operations being conducted too.

The second war in Iraq was won with maneuver warfare?

Very much so. There's a study of 1MD in Iraqi Freedom specifically here[1].

[1]: http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_WAR_0104,00.ht...

That was the first half of the war. How did the doctrine help with the counter insurgency mess that was left over?

IMO Afghanistan is a lost cause (it is fundamentally unwinnable at any price worth paying for a win; any victory will be at best Pyrrhic. You can pretty readily destroy AQ's ability to operate (completed in early 2002), but you can't turn Afghanistan into anything but a basketcase.)

Iraq, however, was obviously maneuver early on, on the part of the US (who kicked ass; the war in a conventional sense really was won in a few weeks/months -- a reasonable person could have pulled out at that point, and we might have had some stupidity at the Presidential and State Department levels not happened). It then turned into maneuver warfare by the insurgents -- striking the weak link of the US, the large logistics convoys, largely operated by KBR under LOGCAP, needed to supply the logistics-heavy US force. (and arguably the same thing has happened in Afghanistan, aided by the terrain and Pakistan.)

The relative victory post-2007 was primarily due to the old British Empire tactic of dividing your enemies (i.e. buying off both the Shia militias by putting US forces in small posts in their territory to keep them safe from the Sunnis, and by bribing the Sunnis as "Sons of Iraq" to join the US as well) -- with FREs largely destroyed by this time, it meant leaving only AQ, straight-up criminal gangs, and some seriously hardline Shia (Iran-linked) enemies.

Those guys essentially got defeated by the "task force with many names" (6-26, 121, 88, assorted colors, etc.); essentially JSOC. It was pretty much the same as you'd roll up organized crime in the US (i.e. watch The Wire) -- identify high value targets, "human" focal points, and then go kill/capture them. By removing the bulk of non-hardline opposition, the US was left with thousands of enemies, of which only tens or hundreds were key -- and they ended up dying pretty fast.

Small JSOC units operating from the air, from civilian vehicles, etc. were highly mobile, so it was essentially maneuver warfare at the small scale. Essentially all "raid" type SOF missions depend on speed and mobility; there is no way for even a 10x better trained/equipped force to stand and fight against a much larger conventional force for a long period of time, outside of a video game.

Are there any modern militaries which don't consider maneuver warfare to be their primary strategy?

I can see most not being able to execute AirLand or anything involving long-distance strategic mobility, but outside of maybe NK (defending prepared positions with dug-in infantry and artillery), or non-state actors (but even there, it's more like the ultimate evolution of maneuver warfare than anything else), it would seem like the default tactic of most militaries. Certainly US, UK, etc.

No, you're on point, in my opinion. And yes, you're correct, what we're seeing today in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the extreme evolution of maneuver warfare. There's no delicate way to say this, so: it's pretty clear that 'terrorism' is simply extreme maneuver warfare, evolved to its apex (maybe) and designed to break the opposition in nontraditional ways, and what we would consider 'bad guys' simply began perfecting it first.

The theory of the 'good guys' (the scare quotes aren't hedging, they're just being careful to avoid ideological framing of the discussion), Lind in particular, is rapidly adjusting to the new threat model. That was the thrust of my point to the other commenter here. There's an interesting parallel in that countering terrorism and counterinsurgency are largely reactionary by their very nature, and the 'good guys' have been left reacting to the new model of warfare in itself in, say, the last decade. People do disagree with Lind on fourth-generation warfare, for what it's worth.

We're "catching up," not "innovating" on the battlefield today. That's the big lesson here.

IIRC there have been wars where we used "tactical maneuver" but still thought of strategic attrition as the goal -- Vietnam is probably the best example, where the "body count" was the end goal, and "take this hill" was primarily for the purpose of incidentally killing (at a very favorable exchange ratio) the enemy. Karl Marlantes has a pretty good criticism of this in "What it is like to go to war" -- the escalating levels of lying over statistics, as well as the ultimate futility and irrelevance of the body count statistic. Unclear to me if this was due to a lack of possible focal points to attack, or because those focal points were somehow out of bounds (Chinese supply lines, etc.).

Also IIRC the Vietnam war is not considered to have been one of America's finest military successes, either.

Indeed, one of its finest defeats. Vietnam was extremely complicated, both on the battlefield and off, and it's not my area of expertise; that being said, a lot of modern maneuvers planted their seeds in that soil.

Americans grew tired of Iraq when insurgents kept picking off a soldier every other day and there was little to show for their loss. Similar themes presented in the latter years of Vietnam, combined with a complicated political picture stateside. That's the success of an insurgency: attrition not of materiel, but the minds, resolve, and fortitude of a belligerent. That was certainly evident in Vietnam, as well, and it's a great parallel.

I've always been curious if the "problem" from the popular-support perspective was the casualties (which, while high, were not THAT high for the total force -- in Iraq, most were due to IEDs/rockets and spread over a large number; in Afghanistan they're a bit more concentrated on actual combat troops), or the lack of progress, or some combination.

There really was ~zero progress (net; there were some wins and some losses) from late-2003 to early-2007 in Iraq, overall, and from ~2003 to ~2009 in Afghanistan (the 2009 end date is questionable; I'm reluctant to say Afghanistan overall is better right now than it was right after the CIA/ODA 555 operations in late 2001, as described in First In by Gary Schroen).

I was in Iraq watching this and was a lot more critical of the way the US was fighting from 2003-2006 than of the actual casualty numbers.

It's certainly more rational to be more willing to take a few hundred casualties if it brings a quick victory than to endure long slow bleeding of thousands, but I don't know if popular opinion is rational. I think casualties-per-second are much higher in offensive operations than in purely static defense, though.

Matterhorn was a great book. I'll have to check out the other.

> We're "catching up," not "innovating" on the battlefield today. That's the big lesson here.

I've lately come to the conclusion that modern warfare came into being because of Napoleon's genius and his wars of the early 1800s. He was way ahead of his time, and you could sense this by how "surprised" at his tactics were the guys confronting him from the other side (the Prussians, Austrians etc). For what it's worth, I think that WW1 which took place 100 years later was still an "old world" war.

What I'm trying to come at is that even Napoleon had to face a huge "insurgency" war in Spain (those insurgents will by today's standards be called "terrorists"). Even Napoleon couldn't "win" that war, I doubt it that in today's US military there are smarter heads when it comes to war.

The second war in Iraq was won?

> Both Iraq wars were fought and won with maneuver warfare.

They were won from a tactical perspective, but I'd say that strategically the second one was lost (while the first one was not such a clear-cut victory either, with Saddam still clinging to his post). Yes, I know that the US had their "mission accomplished", but true war is never that, is only "the continuation of politics by other means". True war has nothing to do with video games (with the probable exception of "Eve Online")

Irrelevant to my observation really.

The point is that the actual warfare component of the war was fought and won with the doctrine the GP suggests was yesterday's tactics.

The occupation of Iraq - notably barely a war never mind a use of maneuver - is where the US is failing.

Late in the war to solve the trench impasse the German's developed infiltration tactics which were winning the war (loss was due to blockades starving people). These tactics led to blitzkrieg which led to modern maneuver warfare.

you obviously don't know much about tactics the Sturmtruppen in ww1 did use more complex tactical maneuvers and where successful.

And the french system (impulse) developed out of the 7 years war and used by Napoleon used manover with combined arms to defeat the static linear armys he was facing

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