Canada vs Brits in Latvia

[GR66]

If I am far away, I can still pound the enemy with indirect systems to cause attrition. If I am close, but the enemy is suppressed or neutralized, I still have room to manoeuvre. One is related to time and space, while the other is related to force.

I think the author's point was that we are wrong in NATO to act like maneuver is some type of unique and better form of warfare over the earlier positional or attritional types of war. They are all just warfare. Sometimes you employ maneuver, sometimes you leverage positions and sometimes you attrit the enemy. Do we risk focusing too much on one aspect of warfare at the expense of the others in our focus on being "maneuverist"?

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Except they are not ends of a sliding scale. Manoeuvre is the use of fires and movement to gain a position of advantage, and attrition is simply the destruction of stuff. Attrition stems from manoeuvre, enables it, and is enabled by it. Attrition can also occur through other battlefield activities, such as barrages, wastage, etc.

Two separate concepts that a shitty theorist confused a long time ago.

What the author is really trying to get at is the difference between positional and mobile warfare. As I said in my first post, he makes erroneous assumptions about why the Ukrainians tended to the latter after first trying the former.

Would you say that the battles around Caen were the attritional warfare that enabled manoeuvre warfare in the form of Operation Cobra by fixing and disabling the panzer divisions?

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

My goodness this thread has diverted.

"Attrition warfare" was a strawman created to support the existence of "manoeuvre warfare." This then gets even more confusing because we use the term manoeuvre for several things. The attrition warfare strawman uses WW1 battles where western front opponents engaged in battles that wore down the enemy at a differential rate that supposedly benefited the side employing it. This leaves aside that many of these "attritional" fights were really just failed breakthroughs that left Generals looking for some crumbs of success in the wreckage. In fairness, though, the German operational design for Verdun could be considered "attritional" since it sought to wear down French reserves at a rate beyond that which France could sustain while also causing the British to launch their own, exhausting, offensive to relieve some of the pressure. So there is a little bit of truth in "attrition warfare", but it gets distorted to try and sell some other concept.

Destroying the enemy is not "attrition warfare." Fixing the enemy is a tactical task or effect, not a form of warfare. Looking at Normandy, it is comforting for Anglo-Canadian commentators to characterize post-facto those offensives between Jun and Aug 1944 as fixing attacks that enabled the Cobra. The intent of those operations, though, was to achieve breakthroughts. That they failed is true. That they also succeeded in fixing significant German forces is also true. They also failed to prevent the Germans attempting the counter-attack at Mortain, but let's park that.

If the design of a campaign is to wear down the enemy to make them sue for peace then I suppose it could be characterized as attritional, but the "manoeuvrist approach" also seeks to break the opponent's will. So I don't know how helpful it is as a distinction.

If I include the tactical task of destroying the enemy reserve in my plan that does not make it attritional, even if I plan to lose elements of my own force to achieve it.

 

[Kirkhill]

I really like the Humpty Dumpty quote

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Does it get any clearer when words like attrition and manoeuvre are translated into French, German and Polish?

And what is the French word for manoeuvre anyway?

 

[GR66]

And what is the French word for manoeuvre anyway?

battre en retraite?

 

[Brad Sallows]

"Manoeuvre warfare" was an unfortunate choice of words. But just as there is "velocity of money", there is "velocity of massing and co-ordinating effects and events".