The concept of maneuver warfare could not have had a more polarizing patron.
Gray told Woods to set about planning a free-play exercise. Until that time, Marine Corps tactical exercises were choreographed
operations. During the briefings, a battalion commander received orders saying, “You will assault and seize Objective Alpha.
Then you will assault and seize Objective Bravo.” This was fine with the lieutenant colonels who were battalion commanders.
Being a battalion commander was part of getting the promotional ticket punched. After a
year or two, if there were no mistakes, a promotion to full colonel was assured. But young officers heard the briefings and
wondered, “What if the enemy is at Objective Alpha in unexpected force and we don’t seize and hold? What then?”
In a free-play exercise—no scenario and no rules—the orchestrated performance was tossed out. There is no better way to select
and test combat leaders than by free play. Free play means winners and losers; it means postexercise critiques by enlisted
men as well as junior officers. No battalion commander enjoys being contradicted by a sergeant, especially if the sergeant
is correct. And if a battalion commander loses a free-play exercise, he might lose his chance at promotion. Careerists hated
free play and, by extension, maneuver warfare. True combat leaders loved it.
During the late summer of 1981, the Marines held their first free-play exercise at Fort Pickett, a little-used Army base near
Blackstone, Virginia. Gray liked the base because it was unfamiliar to all involved; no one would have the advantage of knowing
the terrain. Gray made sure the free-play exercise simulated the unexpected developments of combat as closely as possible.
A battalion commander might be marching along and suddenly find that an element of the 82nd Airborne had parachuted on his
flank. No one told him to expect an attack in force by paratroopers. Now what would he do?
The exercises were immensely popular with most junior officers and just as unpopular with most senior officers.
Boyd seemed to be everywhere during those years. He delivered his briefing hundreds of times, not just to Marines, but to
members of the Army, Navy, and Air Force; to the various command and staff colleges; and at numerous seminars. Boyd was offered
compensation for most of these lectures, but all he ever accepted was travel expenses. References to the OODA Loop were popping
up everywhere from newspaper stories to the advice of business consultants. As had been the case with E-M, many of the references
did not mention Boyd. His work had become generic. And as had been the case with E-M, he laughed and said he did not mind.
The most important thing was that the ideas become known.
But “known” did not mean “accepted.” Back at Quantico, Wyly was beginning to realize that his radical ideas on teaching were
unpopular with the new director of the AWS. Wyly was not invited to meetings he should have attended. Numerous officers snubbed
him. On February 25, 1982—his forty-second birthday—Wyly came to work and was told he had been fired as head of tactics. His
new job was as a member of the amphibious-warfare presentation team, a group that traveled around telling various groups how
the Marine Corps conducted amphibious warfare.
Presenting the ancient and outmoded amphibious warfare briefings was the most painful time of Wyly’s life. He read from the
old AWS manuals all the traditional ideas of linear attacks, of seizing and holding a beachhead, of attrition warfare. He
thought the Marine Corps was marching into the past. He called his office “Spandau” and plotted how to get out.
He was not the only one plotting. Wyly returned from one trip to find his office had been ransacked and his personal mail
opened, the latter a federal offense. Papers were scattered all over the office and Uncle Duncan’s picture was on the floor.
Wyly suspected a burglary and called the military police but was astonished to hear them say there had been no burglary. A
Marine officer fired from his job is considered wounded. He is prey for all predators.
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point held a conference on the military reform movement during the spring of 1982 and invited
representatives from all branches of the services. Wyly attended and was outspoken in proposing reform, but he was clearly
operating on his own, far out in front with no support. He had only his belief in himself for sustenance. Other officers thought
he was out of cover, out of dress, and out of step with the Corps—the single thunk of a boot—and let him know. When he spoke
to Boyd a few months later, the frustration in his voice was clear.
“Mike, I can have you out of Quantico in a month,” Boyd said.
Wyly laughed. “Colonel, I don’t know how much you know about the Marine Corps personnel system, but—”
“I know about the Air Force personnel system,” Boyd interrupted. “I don’t think it’s too much different. Just tell me this:
what do you want to do?”
Wyly did not hesitate. “Meaningful work.”
“Do you want to leave Quantico?”
“Colonel, leaving Quantico would surpass my wildest dreams.”
Boyd laughed. “Okay. But remember, this conversation never took place.”
Wyly sighed as he hung up the telephone. He was indulging a retired officer whom he respected. But what Wyly and so many other
officers never knew about Boyd was that even at the height of the reform movement, when his name was anathema to the Pentagon,
he still had admirers at high levels of government. And of course he still had close friends such as Tom Christie who knew
all the back-channel ways of doing business in the Building.
A few days after Wyly and Boyd talked, an urgent message arrived at Quantico. It said, “Transfer no later than 15 September
1982 to Office of the Secretary of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel M. D. Wyly for duties essential to national security. Carlucci
sends.”
“Carlucci” was Frank Carlucci, the deputy secretary of defense.
Wyly was reeling. He was a mere lieutenant colonel caught in the bureaucratic backwaters of Quantico and suddenly he had been
name requested by the deputy secretary of defense for a job in the Pentagon. It is rare for a
general
to be name requested by the SecDef’s office; for a lieutenant colonel it is virtually unprecedented.
Wyly called Boyd and said, “Colonel, I received orders to get me out of here. A personal message from Carlucci.”
Boyd laughed.
Wyly’s orders were cut within days. For the next two years he worked in Carlucci’s office, in a place referred to only as
the “black hole,” where he was involved in some of the most highly classified matters of the U.S. military. He was the only
Marine in the group. Along the way, Wyly was promoted to full colonel. He probably would not have been promoted had not General
Trainor, his old protector, been chairman of his promotion board.
Six months after becoming a full colonel, Wyly felt comfortable enough with Boyd to call him “John” for the first time.
In 1983 came the first opportunity for the Marines to put maneuver warfare into practice. The Marine Corps barracks in Beirut
was attacked by terrorists and 241 people were killed. As this happened, a battalion of Marines was en route to Beirut to
serve a tour of duty. The battalion was diverted to participate in the invasion of Grenada.
The battalion was led by Lieutenant Colonel Ray Smith, a maneuverist and graduate of the Fort Pickett free-play exercises.
Smith did two things in Grenada that demonstrated the efficacy of maneuver warfare. When intelligence reports told of a large
building flying a curious flag, ranking officers assumed the building housed one of the Grenada revolutionary organizations.
A Navy admiral ordered Smith’s Marines to attack. Historically, a Marine commander receiving such orders would have done so
without a second thought. But a fundamental tenet of maneuver warfare is to give the officer on the scene the authority to
make tactical decisions. A young captain under Smith’s command was not sure the building housed revolutionaries and suggested
sending out a patrol. Smith had confidence in the captain and agreed. He could always call in naval gunfire to level the buildings.
As the patrol approached the building, a civilian came out to welcome them. Dozens of guns were trained on the man. If he
had twitched, if he had reached into a pocket, he probably would have died. He waved and said, “Gentlemen, I am glad to see
you. I am the ambassador of Venezuela.”
Smith’s maturity and prudence that day saved the United States considerable ignominy.
Smith’s overall performance in Grenada was even more illustrative of how a maneuverist works. Elite Army rangers were pinned
down at the airport, largely by Cuban construction workers, and could not move. But Smith’s Marines, a much smaller group,
ripped around Grenada as if they owned the island. They bypassed enemy strongholds, put strength against weakness, and moved
like water flowing downhill. They created such confusion and uncertainty that hundreds of enemy soldiers surrendered to Smith
because, as one of them said, “The Marines are everywhere.”
In his book
About Face,
retired Army colonel David Hackworth quotes an Army general as saying, “We have two companies of Marines running all over
the island and thousands of Army troops doing nothing. What the hell is going on?” It was maneuver warfare. And in a few more
years, the Marines would demonstrate, with far more force and clarity, the efficacy of this new-old concept.
After Wyly’s Pentagon tour he asked to be transferred to the University of Kansas as head of Naval ROTC. It was not an assignment
that helped his career, but his mother lived in Kansas City and was very sick, and this was something he had to do. Boyd came
out often to lecture. So did James Webb, Wyly’s former platoon leader in Vietnam who now was an assistant secretary of defense.
General Al Gray also was a guest lecturer. It was quite an ROTC program. (Before being appointed to high office, Webb wrote
Fields of Fire,
a bestselling novel about a company of Marines fighting in Vietnam. “Dying Delta,” they were called. One of the most important
characters in the book is a heroic company commander who turned his hard-luck company into hard-charging Marines. That character,
of course, is based on Mike Wyly’s combat experience.)
In 1983 General P. X. Kelly became the commandant of the Marine Corps and spoke derisively of maneuverists and—in a reference
to Bill Lind’s study groups—“people who meet in basements.” To survive, maneuver warfare needed support from the top level
of the Marine Corps. Suddenly, that support was gone.
Except for the Marine Corps
Gazette
.
The
Gazette
is a monthly journal, much like the Navy Institute’s
Proceedings,
the Air Force’s
Aerospace Power Journal,
and the Army’s
Parameters
. The
Gazette
is a curious little magazine. As early as 1941 it published a translation of Mao on guerrilla warfare. It also published
articles on Sun Tzu, and in the period between 1955–1962 it ran twenty-five articles by the military theorist Liddell Hart.
Nevertheless, until about 1980 the privately funded
Gazette
was a flaccid house organ, something of a cheerleading magazine largely without distinction even within the Marine Corps.
Then retired Marine Corps colonel John Greenwood became editor. Greenwood is a modest and self-effacing man, a gentleman in
the old sense of the word. Anyone who met him while he was in civilian clothes would never guess that he was a former regimental
commander, a man with impeccable Marine Corps credentials. He has additional gravitas among Marines because his four sons
serve as Marine Corps officers. Greenwood, perhaps more so than any other person—including the commandant—was Mr. Marine Corps.
No one could question his devotion. No one could doubt that every publishing decision he made was based on what he thought
best for the Marine Corps. And he wanted to publish articles that kept Marines awake at night.
So Greenwood did what great magazine editors have done throughout history; he kept alive a controversial idea. Greenwood opened
the
Gazette
to the maneuverists. And all during the 1980s, article after article on maneuver warfare appeared, along with spirited rebuttal
from senior Marine officers. The magazine became the vehicle that continued stirring intellectual ferment throughout the Marine
Corps.
Wyly wrote many of the seminal articles of those years, one of the most important being “Thinking Beyond the Beachhead,” a
piece born of Boyd’s comment,
That beachhead is looming bigger and bigger.… Fight the enemy, not the terrain.
In the article, Wyly said that in an amphibious operation, getting on a beach was not the real challenge; getting
off
the beach and moving into enemy territory was the challenge.
With each article Wyly became more out of cover, more out of dress, more out of step with other Marines.
Just as it is difficult to separate some of Boyd’s ideas from those of the Acolytes, it is difficult on occasion to separate
the ideas of Boyd and Wyly. Even Wyly was confused at times. Boyd called to congratulate him after various pieces in the
Gazette
were published and Wyly thanked him for providing an idea or a thought contained in the piece. Boyd laughed and said, “It
was your thinking and your ideas that brought that out, Mike.”
James Webb was named secretary of the Navy in 1987, and one of his jobs was to appoint a new commandant of the Marine Corps.
Wyly and G. I. Wilson arranged for Webb to meet Al Gray, the three-star who brought maneuver warfare to the 2nd Marine Division
at Lejeune. “He’s dynamite. We think he is a warrior,” they told Webb. Soon after, Gray, much to his surprise, was given a
fourth star and appointed commandant of the Marine Corps.
In 1987 Wyly received orders for Okinawa. He had two daughters, and as military men have done for ages, he left his wife and
children at home when he went overseas. He had wanted to command a regiment, but he was a pragmatist and knew that men who
lead guerrilla movements rarely lead regiments. His new job was as assistant chief of staff, in charge of operations and training
in the western Pacific.