33strats-ch20-maneuver-into-weakness

MANEUVER THEM INTO WEAKNESS THE RIPENING-FOR-THE-SICKLE STRATEGY 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. 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. 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 sheer force. In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy be 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 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 loss 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 battlelike 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 by converting to maneuver. Your thought 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 fight 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 maneuver is just as decisive as a war of attrition. Think of weakening your enemies as ripening 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 you create is controlled and purposeful, at least for you. 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.) 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 seize 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 giant maps of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy laid out wall to wall on the floor. The desks were piled high with reconnaissance reports. On hundreds of note cards 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. “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 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, already 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 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 northern Italy. He would 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 giant 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 had 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. 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 within minutes–and he was right. Now French divisions were coming 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 9:00 P.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. 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 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 them 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 a 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 of 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 o