Content area
Full text
Mastering maneuver spaces
by The Ellis Group
What is perhaps the longest armored raid in military history occurred in August 2014 in Eastern Ukraine. Under then-Col Mikhail Zubrowski, the Ukrainian 95th Air Assault Brigade, which had been reinforced with armor assets and attachments, launched a surprise attack on Separatist lines, broke through into their rear areas, fought for 450 kilometers, and destroyed or captured numerous Russian tanks and artillery pieces before returning to Ukrainian lines. They operated not as a concentrated brigade but rather split into three company-sized elements on different axes of advance. Col Zubrowski is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and modeled the attack on a similar raid that occurred during the American Civil War.1
The story of Zubrowski's raid demonstrates that certain principles of warfare hold true across military history. Since that time, however, the conflict in Ukraine has solidified. Russiansupported Separatist forces operate advanced capabilities, including electronic warfare (EW) and persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) enabled by advanced commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) unmanned aircraft systems. Ukrainian positions have been reduced to a lengthy series of underground trenches reminiscent of World War I. During that conflict, the ubiquity of indirect fire artillery produced stasis in the lines through sheer imprecise volume of fire. In Ukraine, that same stasis is the result of precision-guided munitions married to persistent ISR that renders volume of fire unnecessary. No Ukrainian offensive has been able to repeat the success of Zubrowski's maneuver.
Maneuver is the core of our maneuver warfare philosophy. It is also the core of our force structure: every MAGTF is built around a maneuver unit. Maneuver, however, is not just limited to a spatial definition, and maneuver units are certainly not the only units required to execute maneuver warfare. Maneuver is described in MCDP 1, Warfighting, as any means of attacking from a position of advantage.2 The original FMFM1-3, Tactics, identifies two general types of maneuver: in space and in time.3 The Marine Corps Operating Concept {MOC) identifies four ways to gain advantage: psychologically, technologically, temporally, and spatially.4 Maneuver warfare means that we favor any indirect or non-linear method to gain an advantage, whatever means by which we maneuver. In the years since the adoption of maneuver...