Hungarian Heritage Review, 1991 (20. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1991-09-01 / 9. szám
And the fight is not completely over. Despite the stunning success of the gulf campaign, some champions of what is loosely called "maneuver warfare" still worry that the military's crusty hierarchy is resisting change. "There's a real reluctance to drive around the enemy and have a bloodless victory. It seems contrary to the warrior mentality," says Maj. Dave Grossman, who teaches psychology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Proponents of maneuver warfare argue that their principles will work not only in the open Iraqi in jungles, tundra or even in heavily populated areas like Central Europe. But they fear that Pentagon budget cuts will drive out the trained personnel and impair the training programs that the complexities of maneuver warfare demand. The maneuvering over maneuver warfare in the Army goes back to the mid-70s. Commanders were seeking ways to counter the larger Warsaw Pact conventional forces in Europe, and they also were transfixed by the speed and firepower of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. They designed a doctrine of hitting Soviet thrusts with concentrated force, falling back and hitting again. The "active defense," as it was called, was enshrined in a 1976 Army Field Manual called FM100-5: Operations. "I read it and said, 'This is garbage,'" says retired Air Force Col. John Boyd, an influential proponent of the new way of fighting. " You don't want to hit them head on. You'll cave a lot of heads, you'll lose a lot of bodies." Boyd was an Air Force fighter pilot and instructor who had studied air combat in Korea. He saw that pilots go through cycles of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action - which he called "OODA loops." He discovered that U.S. pilots, even when "out airplaned," still won dogfights by assessing the situation faster and reacting faster - getting "inside" the enemy's OODA loop. Later, studying tactics from those of Genghis Khan's Mongols to the German blitzkriegs, Boyd saw the same thing: Smaller forces often won by using quick- maneuver warfare to confuse and panic the enemy. Bill Lind, an aide to former Sen. Robert Taft on the Armed Services Committee, had been urging similar ideas on the Army for years. But Lind, cocksure and abrasive, a man who had never served in the military, got nowhere. Yet inside the Army, these ideas resonated within a small group of ex-Vietnam commanders who thought the Army's doctrine was defective. One of these Army officers was Col. Huba Wass de Czege, a Hungarian-born, Harvard-educated instructor at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He saw that FM 100- 5's active defense "played out well on a game board," he says, but he believed the tactics would exhaust real soldiers. The Army's internal fight ended in 1982 with a knockout blow by the "maneuverists." Wass de Czege was named to head the team that rewrote FM 100- 5; the new manual introduced the Arm/ s "Air-Land Battle" doctrine, which has as its fundamental tenet that victories are won by seizing the initiative and throwing the enemy off balance with rapid blows from unexpected directions. Wass de Czege credits Boyd and Lind with "stirring the pot," but adds, "We all read the same books." In the Marine Corps, meanwhile, the maneuverists were gaining. Col. Mike Wyly, teaching at the Amphibious Warfare School at Quantico, Va., was searching for a smarter way to fight. When Wyly invited Boyd to lecture, a dozen students stayed late into the night debating maneuver theory. The ideas spread just as the Army's new, 1982 FM 100- 5 was being circulated. When the iconoclastic Gen. Alfred Gray was named Corps commandant, he had his views on maneuver warfare written out in a concise, readable manual by a young Marine captain named John Schmitt. Gray, says Schmitt, had seen the Army's new FM 100-5, and told him, "We need something like that/' In the Army, meanwhile, Wass de Czege had founded the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, where midcareer Army officers were taught maneuver tactics and theory. By the time Operation Desert Storm was launched, hundreds of Army officers had passed through. The school's director, Col. James McDonough, estimates that about 80 of its graduates were involved in planning the gulf war. When Desert Storm unfolded, and an American briefer in Saudi Arabia told reporters the allies had gotten inside Saddam Hussein's "decision-making cycle," friends called John Boyd to congratulate him. Allied —continued next page 16 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW SEPTEMBER 1991
