Clausewitz and Maneuver Warfare AAR

One and done.

If you’ve been following a while, you know I’ve been teaching a class via distance education for the Marine Corps called Clausewitz and Maneuver Warfare. It was modeled on Ian Brown’s course on John Boyd and the school was interested in one on Sun Tzu before it was decided that it would shut down. This is unfortunate. Too often we put these works on reading lists and maybe present some ideas on power point slides. When these works are decontextualized in this manner and people try to work through them on their own- if they bother to read them at all- it leads to some pretty shallow and twisted ideas about what they actually say. If you’re a masochist read this book for probably the poorest understanding of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu ever printed.

This class was an attempt to provide a helping hand to access both On War and MCDP-1 Warfighting and also to test the waters on my teaching abilities, so here’s a brief AAR on how it went.

Sustain

• The primary goal for this course was to make Clausewitz’s ideas accessible. This was very much achieved, and junior Marines (as junior as E-3) were heavily engaged in discussions about the concepts. It goes to show that the main obstacle to getting junior servicemembers to think about war at a high level is a lack of accessibility to engaging material and texts, not their interest or ability level. It’s a shame that this continuing education program is being shuttered as it is one way to provide that accessibility, but there may be plans to modernize this form of PME as the schools’s infrastructure is built on Marinenet and Moodle, both very outdated methods of digital content delivery. If that is the larger plan, then it’s a good thing.

• Connections and parallels between On War and MCDP-1 were easy to make, and the students seemed to really take to looking at a conceptual idea through both a modern text and one that is quite old. Rather than go through all three texts (Clausewitz’s Guide to Tactics, On War, and MCDP-1 Warfighting) sequentially, there was a short selection from each for each week arranged topically. This seemed to work well for the students.

Improve

• One of my goals for the course was to foster debate between the students. This rarely happened, and I’m not quite sure why. They agreed far more often than they disagreed.

• As a first time teacher, I was unsure when I should jump into student discussions and when I should step back and let them roll with it. This may have been more clear if we were in a classroom setting, but was difficult to gauge in an all-digital asynchronous format. That sense could also come from experience.

• This was a short class; only eight weeks of content. Obviously there’s a lot I couldn’t get into like the dangers of different English translations of On War.

Final Exam Questions

• “One major similarity between the works of Clausewitz and MCDP-1 Warfighting is that they are not intended to tell the tactician how to win, but rather how to think about the dynamics of war so that the tactician (or the strategist) can figure out how to win themselves by applying theory to their specific situations. Did Clausewitz succeed in this? Did the writers of MCDP-1 Warfighting? Why or why not?”

  • No one argued “why not",” which means I may need to rethink this question to foster more critical thinking in the future.

  • One student argued that MCDP-1 needs to be updated to focus more on information given the changes to war since its publication, which was a good critical take on it.

• “The Marine Corps is the only service with a capstone philosophy that is intended to inculcate a specific theory of warfighting among its members and is intended to be read by everyone. Is this an effective method to prepare Marines for combat operations? Has the Marine Corps succeeded in living up to its ideals as depicted in MCDP-1 Warfighting? Why or why not?”

  • This one produced a wide variety of takes, which was good. Some argued the ideal is impossible but nevertheless something that should be strived for, others that the Marine Corps has at times fallen short or gotten away from the philosophy (something I would agree with).

In sum, I still think the U.S. military is remiss in not providing more assistance when it comes to learning strategic theory. It does not seriously try until an officer is a senior O-3 or O-4, and then it is only really introduced except for those selected to advanced schools. But everyone in service is charged with executing strategy from their first day out of entry level training, and even E-3s are interested in learning more.

I don’t know if I’ll be teaching again, and it’s unlikely that if I do I’ll teach this course again as it was designed for the distance education format that the Marine Corps is shutting down next month, but this was a good experience nonetheless.