QPME: Warfighting: History of the MCDP, Roots of Maneuver Warfare, and the Doctrine in Action

 About this Site

The road to our current doctrine in the Marine Corps started well before the noted decade of change began. Our own doctrine points out many episodes of the application of Maneuver Warfare before we began to institutionalize our current philosophy of warfighting. The structure of the site should look vaguely familiar to you - it has been organized to look like the Marine Corps Planning Process. At each point in the circle, you can enter and find out more about a specific topic. Hopefully the institutional change the Marine Corps went through will make you interested in looking deeper. We hope, as LtGen Van Riper says, you will “cast your net widely” and realize that the tenets of doctrine do not necessarily arise strictly from warfighting but can be fed by a wide variety of concepts and themes.

Warfighting as a Philosophy 

Alfred M. Gray, Paul K. Van Riper, and John F. Schmitt discuss how the Marine Corps changed throughout their careers. The discussion revolved around warfighting tactics and maneuver warfare. The topic of this excerpt is "warfighting as a philosophy."