MANEUVER THEM INTO WEAKNESS
No matter how strong you are, fighting endless battles with people is exhausting, costly, and unimaginative. Wise strategists generally prefer the art of maneuver: before the battle even begins, they find ways to put their opponents in positions of such weakness that victory is easy and quick. Bait enemies into taking positions that may seem alluring but are actually traps and blind alleys. If their position is strong, get them to abandon it by leading them on a wild-goose chase. Create dilemmas: devise maneuvers that give them a choice of ways to respond--all of them bad. Channel chaos and disorder in their direction. Confused, frustrated, and angry opponents are like ripe fruit on the bough: the slightest breeze will make them fall.
Warfare is like hunting Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait,by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy by many or few. To try simply to overpower the enemy in the open,hand to hand and face to face, even though you might appear to win,is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory....
BYZANTINE EMPEROR MAURIKIOS, A.D. 539-602
MANEUVER WARFARE
Throughout history two distinct styles of warfare can be identified. The most ancient is the war of attrition: the enemy surrenders because you have killed so many of its men. A general fighting a war of attrition will calculate ways to overwhelm the other side with larger numbers, or with the battle formation that will do the most damage, or with superior military technology. In any event, victory depends on wearing down the other side in battle. Even with today's extraordinary technology, attrition warfare is remarkably unsophisticated, playing into humanity's most violent instincts.
Over many centuries, and most notably in ancient China, a second method of waging war developed. The emphasis here was not destroying the other side in battle but weakening and unbalancing it before the battle began. The leader would maneuver to confuse and infuriate and to put the enemy in a bad position--having to fight uphill, or with the sun or wind in its face, or in a cramped space. In this kind of war, an army with mobility could be more effective than one with muscle.
The maneuver warfare philosophy was codified by Sun-tzu in his Art of War, written in China's Warring States period, in the fifth to third century B.C.--over two hundred years of escalating cycles of warfare in which a state's very survival depended on its army and strategists. To Sun-tzu and his contemporaries, it was obvious that the costs of war went far beyond its body counts: it entailed a lost of resources and political goodwill and a lowering of morale among soldiers and citizens. These costs would mount over time until eventually even the greatest warrior nation would succumb to exhaustion. But through adroit maneuvering a state could spare itself such high costs and still emerge victorious. An enemy who had been
maneuvered into a weak position would succumb more easily to psychological pressure; even before the battle had begun, it had imperceptibly started to collapse and would surrender with less of a fight.
Several strategists outside Asia--most notably Napoleon Bonaparte--have made brilliant use of maneuver warfare. But in general, attrition warfare is deeply engrained in the Western way of thinking--from the ancient Greeks to modern America. In an attrition culture, thoughts naturally gravitate toward how to overpower problems, obstacles, those who resist us. In the media, emphasis is placed on big battles, whether in politics or in the arts--static situations in which there are winners and losers. People are drawn to the emotional and dramatic quality in any confrontation, not the many steps that lead to such confrontation. The stories that are told in such cultures are all geared toward such battle-like moments, a moral message preached through the ending (as opposed to the more telling details). On top of it all, this way of fighting is deemed more manly, honorable, honest.
More than anything, maneuver war is a different way of thinking. What matters here is process--the steps toward battle and how to manipulate them to make the confrontation less costly and violent. In the maneuver universe, nothing is static. Battles are in fact dramatic illusions, short moments in the larger flow of events, which is fluid, dynamic, and susceptible to alteration through careful strategy. This way of thinking finds no honor or morality in wasting time, energy, and lives in battles. Instead wars of attrition are seen as lazy, reflecting the primitive human tendency to fight back reactively, without thinking.
In a society full of attrition fighters, you will gain an instant advantage my converting to maneuver. Your thoughts process will become more fluid, more on the side of life, and you will be able to thrive off the rigid, battle-obsessed tendencies of the people around you. By always thinking first about the overall situation and about how to maneuver people into positions of weakness rather than fighting them, you will make your battles less bloody--which, since life is long and conflict is endless, is wise if you want a fruitful and enduring career. And a war of maneuvers is just as decisive as a war of attrition. Think of weakening your enemies as repenting them like grain, ready to be cut down at the right moment.
The following are the four main principles of maneuver warfare:
Craft a plan with branches.
Maneuver warfare depends on planning, and the plan has to be right. Too rigid and you leave yourself no room to adjust to the inevitable chaos and friction of war; too loose and unforeseen events will confuse and overwhelm you. The perfect plan stems from a detailed analysis of the situation, which allows you to decide on the best direction to follow or the perfect position to occupy and suggests several effective options (branches) to take, depending on what the enemy throws at you. A plan with branches lets you outmaneuver your enemy because your responses to changing circumstances are faster and more rational.
Give yourself room to maneuver. You cannot be mobile, you cannot maneuver freely, if you put yourself in cramped spaces or tie yourself down to positions that do not allow you to move. Consider the ability to move and keeping open more options than your enemy has as more important than holding territories or possessions. You want open space, not dead positions. This means not burdening yourself with commitments that will limit your options. It means not taking stances that leave you nowhere to go. The need for space is psychological as well as physical: you must have an unfettered mind to create anything worthwhile.
Give your enemy dilemmas, not problems. Most of your opponents are likely to be clever and resourceful; if your maneuvers simply present them with a problem, they will inevitably solve it. But a dilemma is different: whatever they do, however, they respond--retreat, advance, stay still--they are still in trouble. Make every option bad: if you maneuver quickly to a point, for instance, you can force your enemies either to fight before they are ready or to retreat. Try constantly to put them in positions that seem alluring but are traps.
Create maximum disorder. Your enemy depends on being able to read you, to get some sense of your intentions. The goal of your maneuvers should be to make that impossible, to send the enemy on a wild goose chase for meaningless information, to create ambiguity as to which way you are going to jump. The more you break down people's ability to reason about you, the more disorder you inject into their system. The disorder the enemy suffers is debilitating and destructive.
So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence, the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy's army without fighting at all.
--Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
"Addicts of attrition" as Simpkin calls them, generally cannot think beyond the battle, and they consider that the only way--or at least the preferred way--to defeat an enemy is to destroy the physical components of his army, especially the combat portions (armored fighting vehicles, troops, guns, etc). If the attrition addict appreciates war's intangibles at all (such as morale, initiative, and shock), he sees them only as combat multipliers with which to fight the attrition battle better. If the attrition warrior learns about maneuver, he sees it primarily as a way to get to the fight. In other words, he moves in order to fight. Maneuver theory, on the other hand, attempts to defeat the enemy through means other than simple destruction of his mass. Indeed, the highest and purest application of maneuver theory is to preempt the enemy, that is, to disarm or neutralize him before the fight. If such is not possible, the maneuver warrior seeks to dislocate the enemy forces, i.e., removing the enemy from the decisive point, or vice versa, thus rendering them useless and irrelevant to the fight. If the enemy cannot be preempted or dislocated, then the maneuver warfare practitioner will attempt to disrupt the enemy,i.e., destroy or neutralize his center of gravity, preferably by attacking with friendly strengths through enemy weaknesses.
THE ART OF MANEUVER ROBERT R. LEONHARD, 1991
HISTORICAL EXAMPLES
1. On November 10, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte completed the coup d'etat that brought him to power as first consul, giving him near-complete control of the French state. For over ten years, France had been convulsed with revolution and war. Now that Napoleon was leader, his most pressing need was peace, to give the country time to recoup and himself time to consolidate his power--but peace would not come easily.
France had a bitter enemy in Austria, which had put two large armies in the field, ready to move against Napoleon: one to the east of the Rhine and the other in northern Italy under General Michael Melas. The Austrians were clearly planning a major campaign. Waiting was too dangerous; Napoleon had to size the initiative. He had to defeat at least one of these armies if he were to force Austria to negotiate peace on his terms. The one trump card he had was that several months earlier a French army had gained control of Switzerland. There were also French troops in northern Italy, which Napoleon had taken from the Austrians several years earlier.
To plan for the first real campaign under his direction, Napoleon holed himself up in his office for several days. His secretary, Louis de Bourienne, would recall seeing him lying on a giant maps of Germany, Switizerland, and Italy laid out wall to wall on the floor. The desks were piled high with reconnaissance reports. On hundreds of note card organized into boxes, Napoleon had calculated the Austrians' reactions to the feints he was planning. Muttering to himself on the floor, he mulled over every permutation of attack and counterattack.
By the end of March 1800, Napoleon had emerged from his office with a plan for a campaign in northern Italy that went far beyond anything his lieutenants had ever seen before. In the middle of April, a French army under General Jean Moreau would cross the Rhine and push the eastern Austrian army back into Bavaria. Then Napoleon would lead a 50,000 man force, alread in place in Switzerland, into northern Italy through several different passes in the Alps. Moreau would then release one of his divisions to move south and follow eon Napoleon into Italy. Moreau's initial move into Bavaria, and the subsequent scattered dispatch of divisions into Italy, would confuse the Austrians as to Napoleon's intentions. And if the Austrian army at the Rhine was pushed east, it would be too distant to support the Austrian army in northern Italy.
Once across the Alps, Napoleon would concentrate his forces and link up with the divisions under General Andre' Massena already stationed in norther Italy. He would then then move much of his army to the town of Stradella, cutting off communications between Melas in northern Italy and command headquarters in Austria. With Melas's troops now isolated and the mobile French army within reach of them, Napoleon would have many excellent options for dislocating and destroying them. At one point, as he described this plan to Bourienne, Napoleon lay down on the gaint map on his floor and stuck a pin next to the town of Marengo, in the center of the Italian theater of war. "I will fight him here," he said.
A few weeks later, as Napoleon began to position his armies, he received some troubling news: Melas had beaten him to the punch by attacking Massena's army in Northern Italy. Massena was forced back to Genoa, where the Austrians quickly surrounded him. The danger here was great: if Massena surrendered, the Austrians could sweep into southern France. Also, Napoleon had been counting on Massena's army to help him beat Melas. Yet he took the news with surprising calm and simply made some adjustments; he transferred more men to Switzerland and sent word to Massena that he must do whatever he could to hold out for at least eight weeks, keeping Melas busy while Napoleon moved into Italy.
Within a week there was more irritating news. After Moreau had begun the campaign to push the Austrians back from the Rhine, he refused to transfer the division that Napoleon had counted on for Italy, claiming he could not spare it. Instead he sent a smaller, less experienced division. The French army in Switzerland had already begun the dangerous crossings through the Alps. Napoleon has no choice but to take what Moreau gave him.
By May 24, Napoleon had brought his army safely into Italy. Absorbed with the siege at Genoa, Melas ignored reports of French movements to the north. Next Napoleon advanced to Milan, close to Stradella, where he cut Austrian communications as planned. Now, like a cat stealing up on its prey, he could wait for Melas to notice the trap he was in and try to fight his way out of it near Milan.
On June 8, however, once again more bad news reached Napoleon: two weeks before he had hoped, Massena had surrendered. Napoleon now had fewer men to work with, and Melas had won a strong base in Genoa. Since its inception the campaign had been plagued with mistakes and unforeseen events--the Austrians attacking early, Massena retreating into a trap at Genoa, Moreau disobeying orders, and now Massena's surrender. Yet while Napoleon's lieutenants feared the worst, Napoleon himself not only stayed cool, he seemed oddly excited by these sudden twists of fortune. Somehow he could discern opportunities in them that were invisible to everyone else--and with the loss of Genoa, he sensed the greatest opportunity of all. He quickly altered his plan; instead of waiting at Milan for Melas to come to him, he suddenly cast his divisions in a wide net to the west.
Aptitude for maneuver is the supreme skill in a general; it is the most useful and rarest of gifts by which genius is estimated.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821
Watching his prey closely, Napoleon sensed that Melas was mesmerized by the movements of the French divisions--a fatal hesitation. Napoleon moved one division west to Marengo, close to the Austrians at Genoa, almost baiting them to attack. Suddenly, on the morning of June 14, they took the bait, and in surprising force. This time it was Napoleon who had erred; he had not expected the Austrian attack for several days, and his divisions were scattered too widely to support him. The Austrians at Marengo outnumbered him two to one. He dispatched urgent messages in all directions for reinforcements, then settled into battle, hoping to make his small forces hold ground until they came.
The hours went by with no sign of aid. Napoleon's lines grew weaker, and at three in the afternoon the Austrians finally broke through, forcing the French to retreat. This was the ultimate downturn in the campaign, and it was yet again Napoleon's moment to shine. He seemed encouraged by the way the retreat was going, the French scattering and the Austrians pursuing them, without discipline or cohesion. Riding among the men who had retreated the farthest, he rallied them and prepared them to counterattack, promising them that reinforcements would arrive in from all directions. The Austrians, meanwhile, had let their ranks fall into disorder, and, stunned to find themselves facing new forces in this condition, they halted and then gave ground to a quickly organized French counterattack. By 9:00P.M. the French had routed them.
Just as Napoleon had predicted with his pin on the map, he met and defeated the enemy at Marengo. A few months later, a treaty was signed that gave France the peace it so desperately needed, a peace that was to last nearly four years.
Interpretation
Napoleon's victory at Marengo might seem to have depended on a fair amount of luck and intuition. But that is not at all the case. Napoleon believed that a superior strategist could create his own luck--through calculation, careful planning, and staying open to change in a dynamic situation. Instead of letting bad fortune face him down, Napoleon incorporated it into his plans. When he learned that Massena had been forced back to Genoa, he saw that the fight for the city would lock Melas into a static position, giving Napoleon time to move his men into place. When Moreau sent him a smaller division, Napoleon sent it through the Alps by a narrower, more obscure route, throwing more sand in the eyes of the Austrians trying to figure out how many men he had available. When Massena unexpectedly surrendered, Napoleon realized that it would be easier now to bait Melas into attacking his divisions, particularly if he moved closer. At Marengo itself he knew all along that his first reinforcements would arrive sometime after three in the afternoon. The more disorderly the Austrian pursuit of the French, the more devastating the counterattack would be.
Napoleon's power to adjust and maneuver on the run was based in his novel way of planning. First, he spent days studying maps and using them to make a detailed analysis. This was what told him, for example, that putting his army at Stradella would pose a dilemma for the Austrians and give him many choices of ways to destroy them. Then he calculated contingencies: if the enemy did x, how would he respond? If part y of his plan misfired, how would he recover? The plan was so fluid, and gave him so many options, that he could adapt it infinitely to whatever situation developed. He had anticipated so many possible problems that he could come up with a rapid answer to any of them. His plan was a mix of detail and fluidity, and even when he made mistake, as he did in the early part of the encounter at Marengo, his quick adjustments kept the Austrians from taking advantage of it--before they'd figured out what to do, he was already somewhere else. His devastating freedom of maneuver cannot be separated from his methodical planning.
Understand: in life as in war, nothing ever happens just as you expect it to. People's responses are odd or surprising, your staff commits outrageous acts of stupidity, on and on. If you meet the dynamic situations of life with plans that are rigid, if you think only holding static positions, if you rely on technology to control any friction that comes your way; you are doomed: events will change faster than you can adjust to them, and chaos will enter your system.
In an increasingly complex world, Napoleon's way of planning and maneuvering is the only rational solution. You absorb as much information and as many details as possible; you analyze situations in depth, trying to imagine the enemy's responses and the accidents that might happen. You do not get lost in this maze of analysis but rather use it to formulate a free-flowing plan with branches, one that puts you in positions with the possibility of maneuver. You keep things loose and adjustable. Any chaos that comes your way is channeled toward the enemy. In practicing this policy, you will come to understand Napoleon's dictum that luck is something you create.
2. As the Republicans prepared their convention to pick a presidential candidate in 1936, they had reason to hope. The sitting president, the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, was certainly popular, but American was still in the Depression, unemployment was high, the budget deficit was growing, and many of Roosevelt's New Deal programs were mired in inefficiency. Most promising of all, many Americans had become disenchanted with Roosevelt as a person--in fact, they had even come to hate him, thinking him dictatorial, untrustworthy, a socialist at heart, perhaps even un-American.
Interpretation
Everything is political in the world today, and politics is all about positioning. In any political battle, the best way to stake out a position is to draw a sharp contrast with the other side. If you have to resort to speeches to make this contrast, you are on shaky ground: people distrust words. Insisting that you are strong or well qualified rings as self-promotion. Instead make the opposing side talk and take the first move. Once they have committed to a position and fixed it in other people's minds, they are ripe for the sickle. Now you can create a contrast by quoting their words back at them, showing how different you are--in tone, in attitude, in action. Make the contrast deep. If they commit to some radical position, do not respond by being moderate (moderation is generally weak); attack them for promoting instability, for being power-hungry revolutionaries. If they respond by toning down their appeal, nail them for being inconsistent. If they stay the course, their message will wear thin. If they become more strident in self-defense, you make your point about their instability.
Use this strategy in the battles of daily life, letting people commit themselves to a position you can turn into a dead end. Never say you are strong, show you are, by making a contrast between yourself and your inconsistent or moderate opponents.
3. The Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany. Their main enemies in the Middle Eastern theater were the British, who were based in Egypt, but by 1917 they had arrived at a comfortable stalemate: the Turks controlled a strategic eight-hundred-mile stretch of railway that ran from Syria in the north to the Hejaz(the southwestern part of Arabia) in the south. Due west of the central part of this railway line was the town of Aqaba, on the Red Sea, a key Turkish position from which they could quickly move armies north and south to protect the railway.
The Turks had already beaten back the British at Gallipoli (see chapter 5), a huge boost to their morale. Their commanders in the Middle East felt secure. The English had tried to stir up a revolt against the Turks among the Arabs of the Hejaz, hoping the revolt would spread north; the Arabs had managed a few raids here and there but had fought more among themselves than against the Turks. The British clearly coveted Aqaba and plotted to take it from the sea with their powerful navy, but behind Aqaba was a mountain wall marked by deep gorges. The Turks had converted the mountain into a fortress. The British knew that even if their navy took Aqaba, they would be unable to advance inland, rendering the city's capture useless. Both the British and the Turks saw the situation the same way, and the stalemate endured.
In June 1917 the Turkish commanders of the forts guarding Aqaba received reports of strange enemy movements in the Syrian deserts to the northeast. It seemed that a twenty-nine-year-old British liaison officer to the Arabs named T. E. Lawrence had trekked across hundreds of miles of desolate terrain to recruit an army among the Howeitat, a Syrian tribe renowned for fighting on camels. The Turks dispatched scouts to find out more. They already knew a little about Lawrence: unusually for British officers of the time, he spoke Arabic, mixed with the local people, and even dressed in their style. He had also befriended Sherif Feisal, a leader of the Arab revolt. Could he be raising an army to attack Aqaba? To the extent that this was possible, he was worth watching carefully. Then word came that Lawrence had imprudently told an Arab chief, secretly in Turkish pay, that he was heading for Damascus to spread the Arab revolt. This was the Turks' great fear, for a revolt in the more populated areas of the north would be unmanageable.
The army Lawrence had recruited could not have numbered more than 500, but the Howeitat were great fighters on camel, fierce and mobile. The Turks alerted their colleagues in Damascus and dispatched troops to hunt Lawrence down, a difficult task given the mobility of the Arabs and the vastness of the desert.
In the next few weeks, the Englishman's movements were baffling, to say the least: his troops moved not north toward Damascus but south toward the railway town of Ma'an, site of a storage depot used to supply Aqaba, forty miles away. No sooner had Lawrence appeared in the area of Ma'an, however, than he disappeared, reemerging over a hundred miles north to lead a series of raids on the railway line between Amman and Damascus. Now the Turks were doubly alarmed and sent 400 cavalry from Amman to find him.
For a few days, there was no sign of Lawrence. In the meantime an uprising several miles to the south of Ma'an surprised the Turks. An Arab tribe called the Dhumaniyeh had seized control of the town of Abuel Lissal, directly along the route from Ma'an to Aqaba. A Turkish battalion dispatched to take the town back found the blockhouse guarding it destroyed and the Arabs gone. Then, suddenly, something unexpected and quite disturbing occurred: out of nowhere Lawrence's Howeitat army emerged on the hill above Abu el Lissal.
Distracted by the local uprising, the Turks had lost track of Lawrence. Now, linking up with the Dhumaniyeh, he had trapped a Turkish army at Abu el Lissal. The Arabs rode along the hill with enormous speed and dexterity, goading the Turks into wasting ammunition by firing on them. Meanwhile the midday heat took its toll on the Turkish riflemen, and, having waited until the Turks were sufficiently tired, the Arabs, Lawrence among them, charged down the hill. The Turks closed their ranks, but the swift-moving camel cavalry took them from the flank and rear. It was a massacre: 300 Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest taken prisoner.
Now the Turkish commanders at Aqaba finally saw Lawrence's game: he had cut them off from the railway line on which they depended for supplies. Also, seeing the Howeitat's success, other Arab tribes around Aqaba joined up with Lawrence, creating a powerful army that began to wend its way through the narrow gorges toward Aqaba. The Turks had never imagined an army coming from this direction; their fortifications faced the other way, toward the sea and the British. The Arabs had a reputation for ruthlessness with enemies who resisted, and the commanders of the forts in back of Aqaba began to surrender. The Turks sent out their 300-man garrison from Aqaba to put a stop to this advance, but they were quickly surrounded by the swelling number of Arabs.
On July 6 the Turks finally surrendered, and their commanders watched in shock as Lawrence's ragtag army rushed to the sea to take what had been thought to be an impregnable position. With this one blow, Lawrence had completely altered the balance of power in the Middle East.
Interpretation
The fight between Britain and Turkey during World War I superbly demonstrates the difference between a war of attrition and a war of maneuver. Before Lawrence's brilliant move, the British, fighting by the rules of attrition warfare, had been directing the Arabs to capture key points along the railway line. This strategy had played into Turkish hands: the Turks had too few men to patrol the entire line, but once they saw the Arabs attacking at any one place, they could quickly move the men they had and use their superior firepower to either defend it or take it back. Lawrence--a man with no military background, but blessed with common sense--saw the stupidity in this right away. Around the railway line were thousands of square miles of desert unoccupied by the Turks. The Arabs had been masters at a mobile form of warfare on camelback since the days of the prophet Mohamed; vast space at their disposal gave them infinite possibilities for maneuvers that would create threats everywhere, forcing the Turks to bunker themselves in their forts. Frozen in place, the Turks would wither from lack of supplies and would be unable to defend the surrounding region. The key to the overall war was to spread the revolt north, toward Damascus, allowing the Arabs to threaten the entire railway line. But to spread the revolt north, they needed a base in the center. That base was Aqaba.
The British were as hidebound as the Turks and simply could not picture a campaign of a group of Arabs led by a liaison officer. Lawrence would have to do it on his own. Tracing a series of great loops in the bast spaces of the desert, he left the Turks bewildered as to his purpose. Knowing that the Turks feared an attack on Damascus, he deliberately spread the lie that he was aiming for it, making the Turks send troops on a wild-goose chase to the north. Then, exploiting their inability to imagine an Arab attack on Aqaba from the landward side (a failing they shared with his British countrymen), he caught them off guard. Lawrence's subsequent capture of Aqaba was a masterpiece of economy: only two men died, on his side. (Compare this to the unsuccessful British attempt to take Gaza from the Turks that same year in head-on battle, in which over three thousand British soldiers were killed.) The capture of Aqaba was the turning point in Britain's eventual defeat of the Turks in the Middle East.
The greatest power you can have in any conflict is the ability to confuse your opponent about your intentions. Confused opponents do not know how or where to defend themselves; hit them with a surprise attack and they are pushed off balance and fall. To accomplish this you must maneuver with just one purpose: to keep them guessing. You get them to chase you in circles; you say the opposite of what you mean to do; you threaten one area while shooting for another. You create maximum disorder. But to pull this off, you need room to maneuver. If you crowd yourself with alliances that force your hand, if you take positions that box you into corners, if you commit yourself to defending one fixed position, you lose the power of maneuver. You become predictable. You are like the British and the Turks, moving in straight lines in defined areas, ignoring the vast desert around you. People who fight this way deserve the bloody battles they face.
4. One day in Japan of the 1540s, in a ferryboat crowded with farmers, merchants, and craftsmen, a young samurai regaled all who would listen with tales of his great victories as a swordsman, wielding his three-foot-long sword as he spoke to demonstrate his prowess. The other passengers were a little afraid of this athletic young man, so they feigned interest in his stories to avoid trouble. But one older man sat to the side, ignoring the young boaster. The older man was obviously a samurai himself--he carried two swords--but no one knew that this was in fact Tsukahara Bokuden, perhaps the greatest swordsman of his time. He was in his fifties by then and liked to travel alone and incognito.
Bokuden sat with his eyes closed, seemingly deep in meditation. His stillness and silence began to annoy the young samurai, who finally called out, "'Don't you like this kind of talk? "I most certainly do," answered Boku den. "My way, however, is not to wield my sword in such inconsequential circumstances as these." "A way of using a sword that doe sn't use a sword," said the young samurai. "Don't talk gibberish. What is your school of fighting called?" "It is called Mutekatsu-ryu [style that wins without sword or fighting], " replied Bokuden. "What? Mutekatsu-ryu? Don't be ridiculous. How can you defeat an opponent without fighting?"
By now the young samurai was angry and irritated, and he demanded that Bokuden demonstrate his style, challenging him to a fight then and there. Bokuden refused to duel in the crowded boat but said he would show the samurai Mutekatsu-ryu at the nearest shore, and he asked the ferryman to guide the boat to a tiny nearby island. They young man began to swing his sword to loosen up. Bokuden continued to sit with his eyes closed. As they approached the island, the impatient challenger shouted, "Come! You are as good as dead. I will show you how sharp my sword is!" He then leaped onto the shore.
Bokuden took his time, futher infuriating the young samurai, who began to hurl insults. Bokuden finally handed the ferryman his swords, saying, "My style is Mutekatsu-ryu. I have no need for a sword"--and with those words he took the ferryman's long oar and pushed it hard against the shore, sending the boat quickly out into the water and away from the island. The 'samurai screamed, demanding the boat's return. Bokuden shouted back to him, "This is what is called victory without fighting. I dare you to jump into the water and swim here!"
Now the passengers on the boat could look back at the young samurai receding into the distance, stranded on the island, jumping up and down, flailing his arms as his cries became fainter and fainter. They began to laugh: Bokuden had clearly demonstrated Mutekatsu-ryu.
Interpretation
The minute Bokuden heard the arrogant young samurai's voice, he knew there would be trouble. A duel on a crowded boat would be a disaster, and a totally unnecessary one; he had to get the young man off the boat without a fight, and to make the defeat humiliating. He would do this through maneuver. First, he remained still and quiet, drawing the man's attention away from the innocent passengers and drawing him toward Bokuden like a magnet. Then he confused the man with a rather irrational name for a school of fighting, overheating the samurai's rather simple mind with a perplexing concept. The flustered samurai tried to cover up with bluster. He was now so angry and mentally off balance that he leaped to the shore alone, failing to consider the rather obvious meaning of Mutekatsu-ryu even once he got there. Bokuden was a samurai who always depended on setting up hisw opponents first and winning the victory easily, by maneuver rather than brute force. This was the ultimate demonstration of his art.
The goal of maneuver is to give you easy victories, which you do by luring opponents into leaving their fortified positions of strength for unfamiliar terrain where they must fight off balance. Since your opponents' strength is inseparable from their ability to think straight, you run the risk of revealing your game; you must be subtle, drawing opponents toward you with enigmatic behavior, slowly getting under their skin with provocative comments and actions, then suddenly stepping back. When you feel that their emotions are engaged, that their frustration and anger are mounting, you can speed up the tempo of your maneuvers. Properly set up, your opponents will leap onto the island and strand themselves, giving you the easy victory.
Image:
The Sickle.
The simplest of instruments. To cut the tail grass or unripened fields of wheat with it is exhausting labor. But let the stalks turn golden brown, hard and dry, and in that brief time even the dullest sickle will mow the wheat with ease.
Authority: Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter....Nearly all the battle which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art.......have been battles of maneuver in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In such battles the losses of the victors have been small. --Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
REVERSAL
There is neither point nor honor in seeking direct battle for its own sake. That kind of fighting, however, may have value as part of a maneuver or strategy. A sudden envelopment or powerful frontal blow when the enemy is least expecting it can be crushing.
Warfare is like hunting Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait,by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy by many or few. To try simply to overpower the enemy in the open,hand to hand and face to face, even though you might appear to win,is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm. Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory....
BYZANTINE EMPEROR MAURIKIOS, A.D. 539-602
MANEUVER WARFARE
Throughout history two distinct styles of warfare can be identified. The most ancient is the war of attrition: the enemy surrenders because you have killed so many of its men. A general fighting a war of attrition will calculate ways to overwhelm the other side with larger numbers, or with the battle formation that will do the most damage, or with superior military technology. In any event, victory depends on wearing down the other side in battle. Even with today's extraordinary technology, attrition warfare is remarkably unsophisticated, playing into humanity's most violent instincts.
Over many centuries, and most notably in ancient China, a second method of waging war developed. The emphasis here was not destroying the other side in battle but weakening and unbalancing it before the battle began. The leader would maneuver to confuse and infuriate and to put the enemy in a bad position--having to fight uphill, or with the sun or wind in its face, or in a cramped space. In this kind of war, an army with mobility could be more effective than one with muscle.
The maneuver warfare philosophy was codified by Sun-tzu in his Art of War, written in China's Warring States period, in the fifth to third century B.C.--over two hundred years of escalating cycles of warfare in which a state's very survival depended on its army and strategists. To Sun-tzu and his contemporaries, it was obvious that the costs of war went far beyond its body counts: it entailed a lost of resources and political goodwill and a lowering of morale among soldiers and citizens. These costs would mount over time until eventually even the greatest warrior nation would succumb to exhaustion. But through adroit maneuvering a state could spare itself such high costs and still emerge victorious. An enemy who had been
maneuvered into a weak position would succumb more easily to psychological pressure; even before the battle had begun, it had imperceptibly started to collapse and would surrender with less of a fight.
Several strategists outside Asia--most notably Napoleon Bonaparte--have made brilliant use of maneuver warfare. But in general, attrition warfare is deeply engrained in the Western way of thinking--from the ancient Greeks to modern America. In an attrition culture, thoughts naturally gravitate toward how to overpower problems, obstacles, those who resist us. In the media, emphasis is placed on big battles, whether in politics or in the arts--static situations in which there are winners and losers. People are drawn to the emotional and dramatic quality in any confrontation, not the many steps that lead to such confrontation. The stories that are told in such cultures are all geared toward such battle-like moments, a moral message preached through the ending (as opposed to the more telling details). On top of it all, this way of fighting is deemed more manly, honorable, honest.
More than anything, maneuver war is a different way of thinking. What matters here is process--the steps toward battle and how to manipulate them to make the confrontation less costly and violent. In the maneuver universe, nothing is static. Battles are in fact dramatic illusions, short moments in the larger flow of events, which is fluid, dynamic, and susceptible to alteration through careful strategy. This way of thinking finds no honor or morality in wasting time, energy, and lives in battles. Instead wars of attrition are seen as lazy, reflecting the primitive human tendency to fight back reactively, without thinking.
In a society full of attrition fighters, you will gain an instant advantage my converting to maneuver. Your thoughts process will become more fluid, more on the side of life, and you will be able to thrive off the rigid, battle-obsessed tendencies of the people around you. By always thinking first about the overall situation and about how to maneuver people into positions of weakness rather than fighting them, you will make your battles less bloody--which, since life is long and conflict is endless, is wise if you want a fruitful and enduring career. And a war of maneuvers is just as decisive as a war of attrition. Think of weakening your enemies as repenting them like grain, ready to be cut down at the right moment.
The following are the four main principles of maneuver warfare:
Craft a plan with branches.
Maneuver warfare depends on planning, and the plan has to be right. Too rigid and you leave yourself no room to adjust to the inevitable chaos and friction of war; too loose and unforeseen events will confuse and overwhelm you. The perfect plan stems from a detailed analysis of the situation, which allows you to decide on the best direction to follow or the perfect position to occupy and suggests several effective options (branches) to take, depending on what the enemy throws at you. A plan with branches lets you outmaneuver your enemy because your responses to changing circumstances are faster and more rational.
Give yourself room to maneuver. You cannot be mobile, you cannot maneuver freely, if you put yourself in cramped spaces or tie yourself down to positions that do not allow you to move. Consider the ability to move and keeping open more options than your enemy has as more important than holding territories or possessions. You want open space, not dead positions. This means not burdening yourself with commitments that will limit your options. It means not taking stances that leave you nowhere to go. The need for space is psychological as well as physical: you must have an unfettered mind to create anything worthwhile.
Give your enemy dilemmas, not problems. Most of your opponents are likely to be clever and resourceful; if your maneuvers simply present them with a problem, they will inevitably solve it. But a dilemma is different: whatever they do, however, they respond--retreat, advance, stay still--they are still in trouble. Make every option bad: if you maneuver quickly to a point, for instance, you can force your enemies either to fight before they are ready or to retreat. Try constantly to put them in positions that seem alluring but are traps.
Create maximum disorder. Your enemy depends on being able to read you, to get some sense of your intentions. The goal of your maneuvers should be to make that impossible, to send the enemy on a wild goose chase for meaningless information, to create ambiguity as to which way you are going to jump. The more you break down people's ability to reason about you, the more disorder you inject into their system. The disorder the enemy suffers is debilitating and destructive.
So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence, the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy's army without fighting at all.
--Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
"Addicts of attrition" as Simpkin calls them, generally cannot think beyond the battle, and they consider that the only way--or at least the preferred way--to defeat an enemy is to destroy the physical components of his army, especially the combat portions (armored fighting vehicles, troops, guns, etc). If the attrition addict appreciates war's intangibles at all (such as morale, initiative, and shock), he sees them only as combat multipliers with which to fight the attrition battle better. If the attrition warrior learns about maneuver, he sees it primarily as a way to get to the fight. In other words, he moves in order to fight. Maneuver theory, on the other hand, attempts to defeat the enemy through means other than simple destruction of his mass. Indeed, the highest and purest application of maneuver theory is to preempt the enemy, that is, to disarm or neutralize him before the fight. If such is not possible, the maneuver warrior seeks to dislocate the enemy forces, i.e., removing the enemy from the decisive point, or vice versa, thus rendering them useless and irrelevant to the fight. If the enemy cannot be preempted or dislocated, then the maneuver warfare practitioner will attempt to disrupt the enemy,i.e., destroy or neutralize his center of gravity, preferably by attacking with friendly strengths through enemy weaknesses.
THE ART OF MANEUVER ROBERT R. LEONHARD, 1991
HISTORICAL EXAMPLES
1. On November 10, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte completed the coup d'etat that brought him to power as first consul, giving him near-complete control of the French state. For over ten years, France had been convulsed with revolution and war. Now that Napoleon was leader, his most pressing need was peace, to give the country time to recoup and himself time to consolidate his power--but peace would not come easily.
France had a bitter enemy in Austria, which had put two large armies in the field, ready to move against Napoleon: one to the east of the Rhine and the other in northern Italy under General Michael Melas. The Austrians were clearly planning a major campaign. Waiting was too dangerous; Napoleon had to size the initiative. He had to defeat at least one of these armies if he were to force Austria to negotiate peace on his terms. The one trump card he had was that several months earlier a French army had gained control of Switzerland. There were also French troops in northern Italy, which Napoleon had taken from the Austrians several years earlier.
To plan for the first real campaign under his direction, Napoleon holed himself up in his office for several days. His secretary, Louis de Bourienne, would recall seeing him lying on a giant maps of Germany, Switizerland, and Italy laid out wall to wall on the floor. The desks were piled high with reconnaissance reports. On hundreds of note card organized into boxes, Napoleon had calculated the Austrians' reactions to the feints he was planning. Muttering to himself on the floor, he mulled over every permutation of attack and counterattack.
By the end of March 1800, Napoleon had emerged from his office with a plan for a campaign in northern Italy that went far beyond anything his lieutenants had ever seen before. In the middle of April, a French army under General Jean Moreau would cross the Rhine and push the eastern Austrian army back into Bavaria. Then Napoleon would lead a 50,000 man force, alread in place in Switzerland, into northern Italy through several different passes in the Alps. Moreau would then release one of his divisions to move south and follow eon Napoleon into Italy. Moreau's initial move into Bavaria, and the subsequent scattered dispatch of divisions into Italy, would confuse the Austrians as to Napoleon's intentions. And if the Austrian army at the Rhine was pushed east, it would be too distant to support the Austrian army in northern Italy.
Once across the Alps, Napoleon would concentrate his forces and link up with the divisions under General Andre' Massena already stationed in norther Italy. He would then then move much of his army to the town of Stradella, cutting off communications between Melas in northern Italy and command headquarters in Austria. With Melas's troops now isolated and the mobile French army within reach of them, Napoleon would have many excellent options for dislocating and destroying them. At one point, as he described this plan to Bourienne, Napoleon lay down on the gaint map on his floor and stuck a pin next to the town of Marengo, in the center of the Italian theater of war. "I will fight him here," he said.
A few weeks later, as Napoleon began to position his armies, he received some troubling news: Melas had beaten him to the punch by attacking Massena's army in Northern Italy. Massena was forced back to Genoa, where the Austrians quickly surrounded him. The danger here was great: if Massena surrendered, the Austrians could sweep into southern France. Also, Napoleon had been counting on Massena's army to help him beat Melas. Yet he took the news with surprising calm and simply made some adjustments; he transferred more men to Switzerland and sent word to Massena that he must do whatever he could to hold out for at least eight weeks, keeping Melas busy while Napoleon moved into Italy.
Within a week there was more irritating news. After Moreau had begun the campaign to push the Austrians back from the Rhine, he refused to transfer the division that Napoleon had counted on for Italy, claiming he could not spare it. Instead he sent a smaller, less experienced division. The French army in Switzerland had already begun the dangerous crossings through the Alps. Napoleon has no choice but to take what Moreau gave him.
By May 24, Napoleon had brought his army safely into Italy. Absorbed with the siege at Genoa, Melas ignored reports of French movements to the north. Next Napoleon advanced to Milan, close to Stradella, where he cut Austrian communications as planned. Now, like a cat stealing up on its prey, he could wait for Melas to notice the trap he was in and try to fight his way out of it near Milan.
On June 8, however, once again more bad news reached Napoleon: two weeks before he had hoped, Massena had surrendered. Napoleon now had fewer men to work with, and Melas had won a strong base in Genoa. Since its inception the campaign had been plagued with mistakes and unforeseen events--the Austrians attacking early, Massena retreating into a trap at Genoa, Moreau disobeying orders, and now Massena's surrender. Yet while Napoleon's lieutenants feared the worst, Napoleon himself not only stayed cool, he seemed oddly excited by these sudden twists of fortune. Somehow he could discern opportunities in them that were invisible to everyone else--and with the loss of Genoa, he sensed the greatest opportunity of all. He quickly altered his plan; instead of waiting at Milan for Melas to come to him, he suddenly cast his divisions in a wide net to the west.
Aptitude for maneuver is the supreme skill in a general; it is the most useful and rarest of gifts by which genius is estimated.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821
Watching his prey closely, Napoleon sensed that Melas was mesmerized by the movements of the French divisions--a fatal hesitation. Napoleon moved one division west to Marengo, close to the Austrians at Genoa, almost baiting them to attack. Suddenly, on the morning of June 14, they took the bait, and in surprising force. This time it was Napoleon who had erred; he had not expected the Austrian attack for several days, and his divisions were scattered too widely to support him. The Austrians at Marengo outnumbered him two to one. He dispatched urgent messages in all directions for reinforcements, then settled into battle, hoping to make his small forces hold ground until they came.
The hours went by with no sign of aid. Napoleon's lines grew weaker, and at three in the afternoon the Austrians finally broke through, forcing the French to retreat. This was the ultimate downturn in the campaign, and it was yet again Napoleon's moment to shine. He seemed encouraged by the way the retreat was going, the French scattering and the Austrians pursuing them, without discipline or cohesion. Riding among the men who had retreated the farthest, he rallied them and prepared them to counterattack, promising them that reinforcements would arrive in from all directions. The Austrians, meanwhile, had let their ranks fall into disorder, and, stunned to find themselves facing new forces in this condition, they halted and then gave ground to a quickly organized French counterattack. By 9:00P.M. the French had routed them.
Just as Napoleon had predicted with his pin on the map, he met and defeated the enemy at Marengo. A few months later, a treaty was signed that gave France the peace it so desperately needed, a peace that was to last nearly four years.
Interpretation
Napoleon's victory at Marengo might seem to have depended on a fair amount of luck and intuition. But that is not at all the case. Napoleon believed that a superior strategist could create his own luck--through calculation, careful planning, and staying open to change in a dynamic situation. Instead of letting bad fortune face him down, Napoleon incorporated it into his plans. When he learned that Massena had been forced back to Genoa, he saw that the fight for the city would lock Melas into a static position, giving Napoleon time to move his men into place. When Moreau sent him a smaller division, Napoleon sent it through the Alps by a narrower, more obscure route, throwing more sand in the eyes of the Austrians trying to figure out how many men he had available. When Massena unexpectedly surrendered, Napoleon realized that it would be easier now to bait Melas into attacking his divisions, particularly if he moved closer. At Marengo itself he knew all along that his first reinforcements would arrive sometime after three in the afternoon. The more disorderly the Austrian pursuit of the French, the more devastating the counterattack would be.
Napoleon's power to adjust and maneuver on the run was based in his novel way of planning. First, he spent days studying maps and using them to make a detailed analysis. This was what told him, for example, that putting his army at Stradella would pose a dilemma for the Austrians and give him many choices of ways to destroy them. Then he calculated contingencies: if the enemy did x, how would he respond? If part y of his plan misfired, how would he recover? The plan was so fluid, and gave him so many options, that he could adapt it infinitely to whatever situation developed. He had anticipated so many possible problems that he could come up with a rapid answer to any of them. His plan was a mix of detail and fluidity, and even when he made mistake, as he did in the early part of the encounter at Marengo, his quick adjustments kept the Austrians from taking advantage of it--before they'd figured out what to do, he was already somewhere else. His devastating freedom of maneuver cannot be separated from his methodical planning.
Understand: in life as in war, nothing ever happens just as you expect it to. People's responses are odd or surprising, your staff commits outrageous acts of stupidity, on and on. If you meet the dynamic situations of life with plans that are rigid, if you think only holding static positions, if you rely on technology to control any friction that comes your way; you are doomed: events will change faster than you can adjust to them, and chaos will enter your system.
In an increasingly complex world, Napoleon's way of planning and maneuvering is the only rational solution. You absorb as much information and as many details as possible; you analyze situations in depth, trying to imagine the enemy's responses and the accidents that might happen. You do not get lost in this maze of analysis but rather use it to formulate a free-flowing plan with branches, one that puts you in positions with the possibility of maneuver. You keep things loose and adjustable. Any chaos that comes your way is channeled toward the enemy. In practicing this policy, you will come to understand Napoleon's dictum that luck is something you create.
2. As the Republicans prepared their convention to pick a presidential candidate in 1936, they had reason to hope. The sitting president, the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, was certainly popular, but American was still in the Depression, unemployment was high, the budget deficit was growing, and many of Roosevelt's New Deal programs were mired in inefficiency. Most promising of all, many Americans had become disenchanted with Roosevelt as a person--in fact, they had even come to hate him, thinking him dictatorial, untrustworthy, a socialist at heart, perhaps even un-American.
Interpretation
Everything is political in the world today, and politics is all about positioning. In any political battle, the best way to stake out a position is to draw a sharp contrast with the other side. If you have to resort to speeches to make this contrast, you are on shaky ground: people distrust words. Insisting that you are strong or well qualified rings as self-promotion. Instead make the opposing side talk and take the first move. Once they have committed to a position and fixed it in other people's minds, they are ripe for the sickle. Now you can create a contrast by quoting their words back at them, showing how different you are--in tone, in attitude, in action. Make the contrast deep. If they commit to some radical position, do not respond by being moderate (moderation is generally weak); attack them for promoting instability, for being power-hungry revolutionaries. If they respond by toning down their appeal, nail them for being inconsistent. If they stay the course, their message will wear thin. If they become more strident in self-defense, you make your point about their instability.
Use this strategy in the battles of daily life, letting people commit themselves to a position you can turn into a dead end. Never say you are strong, show you are, by making a contrast between yourself and your inconsistent or moderate opponents.
3. The Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany. Their main enemies in the Middle Eastern theater were the British, who were based in Egypt, but by 1917 they had arrived at a comfortable stalemate: the Turks controlled a strategic eight-hundred-mile stretch of railway that ran from Syria in the north to the Hejaz(the southwestern part of Arabia) in the south. Due west of the central part of this railway line was the town of Aqaba, on the Red Sea, a key Turkish position from which they could quickly move armies north and south to protect the railway.
The Turks had already beaten back the British at Gallipoli (see chapter 5), a huge boost to their morale. Their commanders in the Middle East felt secure. The English had tried to stir up a revolt against the Turks among the Arabs of the Hejaz, hoping the revolt would spread north; the Arabs had managed a few raids here and there but had fought more among themselves than against the Turks. The British clearly coveted Aqaba and plotted to take it from the sea with their powerful navy, but behind Aqaba was a mountain wall marked by deep gorges. The Turks had converted the mountain into a fortress. The British knew that even if their navy took Aqaba, they would be unable to advance inland, rendering the city's capture useless. Both the British and the Turks saw the situation the same way, and the stalemate endured.
In June 1917 the Turkish commanders of the forts guarding Aqaba received reports of strange enemy movements in the Syrian deserts to the northeast. It seemed that a twenty-nine-year-old British liaison officer to the Arabs named T. E. Lawrence had trekked across hundreds of miles of desolate terrain to recruit an army among the Howeitat, a Syrian tribe renowned for fighting on camels. The Turks dispatched scouts to find out more. They already knew a little about Lawrence: unusually for British officers of the time, he spoke Arabic, mixed with the local people, and even dressed in their style. He had also befriended Sherif Feisal, a leader of the Arab revolt. Could he be raising an army to attack Aqaba? To the extent that this was possible, he was worth watching carefully. Then word came that Lawrence had imprudently told an Arab chief, secretly in Turkish pay, that he was heading for Damascus to spread the Arab revolt. This was the Turks' great fear, for a revolt in the more populated areas of the north would be unmanageable.
The army Lawrence had recruited could not have numbered more than 500, but the Howeitat were great fighters on camel, fierce and mobile. The Turks alerted their colleagues in Damascus and dispatched troops to hunt Lawrence down, a difficult task given the mobility of the Arabs and the vastness of the desert.
In the next few weeks, the Englishman's movements were baffling, to say the least: his troops moved not north toward Damascus but south toward the railway town of Ma'an, site of a storage depot used to supply Aqaba, forty miles away. No sooner had Lawrence appeared in the area of Ma'an, however, than he disappeared, reemerging over a hundred miles north to lead a series of raids on the railway line between Amman and Damascus. Now the Turks were doubly alarmed and sent 400 cavalry from Amman to find him.
For a few days, there was no sign of Lawrence. In the meantime an uprising several miles to the south of Ma'an surprised the Turks. An Arab tribe called the Dhumaniyeh had seized control of the town of Abuel Lissal, directly along the route from Ma'an to Aqaba. A Turkish battalion dispatched to take the town back found the blockhouse guarding it destroyed and the Arabs gone. Then, suddenly, something unexpected and quite disturbing occurred: out of nowhere Lawrence's Howeitat army emerged on the hill above Abu el Lissal.
Distracted by the local uprising, the Turks had lost track of Lawrence. Now, linking up with the Dhumaniyeh, he had trapped a Turkish army at Abu el Lissal. The Arabs rode along the hill with enormous speed and dexterity, goading the Turks into wasting ammunition by firing on them. Meanwhile the midday heat took its toll on the Turkish riflemen, and, having waited until the Turks were sufficiently tired, the Arabs, Lawrence among them, charged down the hill. The Turks closed their ranks, but the swift-moving camel cavalry took them from the flank and rear. It was a massacre: 300 Turkish soldiers were killed and the rest taken prisoner.
Now the Turkish commanders at Aqaba finally saw Lawrence's game: he had cut them off from the railway line on which they depended for supplies. Also, seeing the Howeitat's success, other Arab tribes around Aqaba joined up with Lawrence, creating a powerful army that began to wend its way through the narrow gorges toward Aqaba. The Turks had never imagined an army coming from this direction; their fortifications faced the other way, toward the sea and the British. The Arabs had a reputation for ruthlessness with enemies who resisted, and the commanders of the forts in back of Aqaba began to surrender. The Turks sent out their 300-man garrison from Aqaba to put a stop to this advance, but they were quickly surrounded by the swelling number of Arabs.
On July 6 the Turks finally surrendered, and their commanders watched in shock as Lawrence's ragtag army rushed to the sea to take what had been thought to be an impregnable position. With this one blow, Lawrence had completely altered the balance of power in the Middle East.
Interpretation
The fight between Britain and Turkey during World War I superbly demonstrates the difference between a war of attrition and a war of maneuver. Before Lawrence's brilliant move, the British, fighting by the rules of attrition warfare, had been directing the Arabs to capture key points along the railway line. This strategy had played into Turkish hands: the Turks had too few men to patrol the entire line, but once they saw the Arabs attacking at any one place, they could quickly move the men they had and use their superior firepower to either defend it or take it back. Lawrence--a man with no military background, but blessed with common sense--saw the stupidity in this right away. Around the railway line were thousands of square miles of desert unoccupied by the Turks. The Arabs had been masters at a mobile form of warfare on camelback since the days of the prophet Mohamed; vast space at their disposal gave them infinite possibilities for maneuvers that would create threats everywhere, forcing the Turks to bunker themselves in their forts. Frozen in place, the Turks would wither from lack of supplies and would be unable to defend the surrounding region. The key to the overall war was to spread the revolt north, toward Damascus, allowing the Arabs to threaten the entire railway line. But to spread the revolt north, they needed a base in the center. That base was Aqaba.
The British were as hidebound as the Turks and simply could not picture a campaign of a group of Arabs led by a liaison officer. Lawrence would have to do it on his own. Tracing a series of great loops in the bast spaces of the desert, he left the Turks bewildered as to his purpose. Knowing that the Turks feared an attack on Damascus, he deliberately spread the lie that he was aiming for it, making the Turks send troops on a wild-goose chase to the north. Then, exploiting their inability to imagine an Arab attack on Aqaba from the landward side (a failing they shared with his British countrymen), he caught them off guard. Lawrence's subsequent capture of Aqaba was a masterpiece of economy: only two men died, on his side. (Compare this to the unsuccessful British attempt to take Gaza from the Turks that same year in head-on battle, in which over three thousand British soldiers were killed.) The capture of Aqaba was the turning point in Britain's eventual defeat of the Turks in the Middle East.
The greatest power you can have in any conflict is the ability to confuse your opponent about your intentions. Confused opponents do not know how or where to defend themselves; hit them with a surprise attack and they are pushed off balance and fall. To accomplish this you must maneuver with just one purpose: to keep them guessing. You get them to chase you in circles; you say the opposite of what you mean to do; you threaten one area while shooting for another. You create maximum disorder. But to pull this off, you need room to maneuver. If you crowd yourself with alliances that force your hand, if you take positions that box you into corners, if you commit yourself to defending one fixed position, you lose the power of maneuver. You become predictable. You are like the British and the Turks, moving in straight lines in defined areas, ignoring the vast desert around you. People who fight this way deserve the bloody battles they face.
4. One day in Japan of the 1540s, in a ferryboat crowded with farmers, merchants, and craftsmen, a young samurai regaled all who would listen with tales of his great victories as a swordsman, wielding his three-foot-long sword as he spoke to demonstrate his prowess. The other passengers were a little afraid of this athletic young man, so they feigned interest in his stories to avoid trouble. But one older man sat to the side, ignoring the young boaster. The older man was obviously a samurai himself--he carried two swords--but no one knew that this was in fact Tsukahara Bokuden, perhaps the greatest swordsman of his time. He was in his fifties by then and liked to travel alone and incognito.
Bokuden sat with his eyes closed, seemingly deep in meditation. His stillness and silence began to annoy the young samurai, who finally called out, "'Don't you like this kind of talk? "I most certainly do," answered Boku den. "My way, however, is not to wield my sword in such inconsequential circumstances as these." "A way of using a sword that doe sn't use a sword," said the young samurai. "Don't talk gibberish. What is your school of fighting called?" "It is called Mutekatsu-ryu [style that wins without sword or fighting], " replied Bokuden. "What? Mutekatsu-ryu? Don't be ridiculous. How can you defeat an opponent without fighting?"
By now the young samurai was angry and irritated, and he demanded that Bokuden demonstrate his style, challenging him to a fight then and there. Bokuden refused to duel in the crowded boat but said he would show the samurai Mutekatsu-ryu at the nearest shore, and he asked the ferryman to guide the boat to a tiny nearby island. They young man began to swing his sword to loosen up. Bokuden continued to sit with his eyes closed. As they approached the island, the impatient challenger shouted, "Come! You are as good as dead. I will show you how sharp my sword is!" He then leaped onto the shore.
Bokuden took his time, futher infuriating the young samurai, who began to hurl insults. Bokuden finally handed the ferryman his swords, saying, "My style is Mutekatsu-ryu. I have no need for a sword"--and with those words he took the ferryman's long oar and pushed it hard against the shore, sending the boat quickly out into the water and away from the island. The 'samurai screamed, demanding the boat's return. Bokuden shouted back to him, "This is what is called victory without fighting. I dare you to jump into the water and swim here!"
Now the passengers on the boat could look back at the young samurai receding into the distance, stranded on the island, jumping up and down, flailing his arms as his cries became fainter and fainter. They began to laugh: Bokuden had clearly demonstrated Mutekatsu-ryu.
Interpretation
The minute Bokuden heard the arrogant young samurai's voice, he knew there would be trouble. A duel on a crowded boat would be a disaster, and a totally unnecessary one; he had to get the young man off the boat without a fight, and to make the defeat humiliating. He would do this through maneuver. First, he remained still and quiet, drawing the man's attention away from the innocent passengers and drawing him toward Bokuden like a magnet. Then he confused the man with a rather irrational name for a school of fighting, overheating the samurai's rather simple mind with a perplexing concept. The flustered samurai tried to cover up with bluster. He was now so angry and mentally off balance that he leaped to the shore alone, failing to consider the rather obvious meaning of Mutekatsu-ryu even once he got there. Bokuden was a samurai who always depended on setting up hisw opponents first and winning the victory easily, by maneuver rather than brute force. This was the ultimate demonstration of his art.
The goal of maneuver is to give you easy victories, which you do by luring opponents into leaving their fortified positions of strength for unfamiliar terrain where they must fight off balance. Since your opponents' strength is inseparable from their ability to think straight, you run the risk of revealing your game; you must be subtle, drawing opponents toward you with enigmatic behavior, slowly getting under their skin with provocative comments and actions, then suddenly stepping back. When you feel that their emotions are engaged, that their frustration and anger are mounting, you can speed up the tempo of your maneuvers. Properly set up, your opponents will leap onto the island and strand themselves, giving you the easy victory.
Image:
The Sickle.
The simplest of instruments. To cut the tail grass or unripened fields of wheat with it is exhausting labor. But let the stalks turn golden brown, hard and dry, and in that brief time even the dullest sickle will mow the wheat with ease.
Authority: Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter....Nearly all the battle which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art.......have been battles of maneuver in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In such battles the losses of the victors have been small. --Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
REVERSAL
There is neither point nor honor in seeking direct battle for its own sake. That kind of fighting, however, may have value as part of a maneuver or strategy. A sudden envelopment or powerful frontal blow when the enemy is least expecting it can be crushing.
The only danger in maneuver is that you give yourself so many options that you yourself get confused. Keep it simple--limit yourself to the option you can control.
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