Manoeuvre Warfare: A Self-Inflicted Lack Of Common Understanding

There is a lack of common understanding of the NATO doctrinal concepts of manoeuvre warfare and the manoeuvrist approach among practitioners and students. One reason is that after 30 years of stability and counterterrorism operations, NATO is now facing a perceived return to peer-to-peer conflict without fully considering the changes in context. Another is the use of these concepts across different doctrinal levels of warfare, and a third one is the expansion of their use into non-physical domains of warfare without the needed theoretical basis for this expansion. Coherent doctrine needs a standardised set of definitions. To achieve this, the context of the doctrine needs to be defined.