Chapter 3: The Seven Guiding Principles

Overview

Many years ago, as a cadet hoping someday to be an officer, I was poring over Principles of War, listed in the old Field Service Regulations, when the Sergeant-Major came up to me. He surveyed me with kindly amusement . Don t bother your head about all them things, me lad, he said. There s only one principle of war and that s this. Hit the other fellow, as quick as you can, and as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain t lookin !

”Sir William Slim ^[1]

At the risk of outdoing the sergeant major, we have distilled from Warfighting seven guiding principles of maneuver warfare : targeting critical vulnerabilities , boldness , surprise , focus , decentralized decision making , tempo , and combined arms . These principles, potent when applied individually and devastating when applied in subsets or as an integrated whole, provide a useful framework for thinking about business strategy.

In this chapter, which we offer as a stand-alone reference, we introduce each principle with an after-action review of the Israelis actions in the 1967 War, as profiled in the previous chapter, and an illustrative example from the business world. We also preview the modern-day practices that the Marines employ to foster maneuver warfare in their organization in an effort to lay the foundation for our subsequent recommendations as to how you can foster maneuver warfare in your organization.

Please note the words introduce and preview . In the subsequent seven chapters, each principle will receive its own in-depth treatment, with numerous supporting examples and prescriptions to illustrate the appropriate application of maneuver warfare and selected counterexamples, to illustrate the downside associated with misapplication. But in this chapter we start with the basics.

^[1] Slim, Sir William, Defeat into Victory , 550 “51.