Geesh! Crack a book once in a while! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
Why the tossaway account?
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".
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.
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. :)
"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...
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.
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.
[1]: http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_WAR_0104,00.ht...
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.
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.
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.
Also IIRC the Vietnam war is not considered to have been one of America's finest military successes, either.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.