Theories of time and technology in war

Concepts of both time and technology feature prominently in existing theories of war, as well as in various explanations for battlefield success. Classic treatises on war in both eastern and western strategic thought, for example, frequently identify timing as central to successful operations. Both Sun Tzu and Clausewitz viewed exploitation of the opportune moment through variations in the ‘tempo’ or ‘rhythm’ of operations as the acme of military skill, though they disagreed on the appropriate balance between boldness and caution in achieving it.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, for Clausewitz, this temporal dimension was an inherent feature of war itself, whose nature he likened to a wrestling match or a duel between two swordsmen in which each grapples to find a moment of advantage over the other.Footnote ¹⁰ Technology has similarly been advanced as a core explanation for battlefield success, and for changes in the conduct of warfare more generally. The rise of both early modern European empires and Western military hegemony in the late twentieth century has been explained through reference to revolutions in military technology,Footnote ¹¹ while industrial capacity, economic development, and mechanisation remain central to contemporary discussions of military power.Footnote ¹² Indeed, privileged access to novel military technology has been advanced as a core explanation for battlefield advantage, and the gradual diffusion of such weapons is likewise seen as an explanation for wider systemic shifts in the character of conflict.Footnote ¹³

Yet, the relationship between technology and time in warfare remains little understood. In his examination of four successive periods of warfare, Antonie Bousquet observed a connection between the technological or scientific basis of war and the temporal character of military operations. Thus, Bousquet described early modern European armies as ‘mechanistic’, with troops ‘drilled into marching in step according to rigid tactical deployments and performing synchronized firing and reloading cycles at the highest possible tempo’ reflecting the ‘order, regularity and predictability’ of clockwork. With the invention of the internal combustion engine, however, the conduct of warfare transformed according to a ‘thermodynamic’ paradigm, with much of the twentieth century characterised by armies organised around motorisation and rapidity of movement. More recently, warfare has become ‘cybernetic’ – organised around the computer and the almost instantaneous passage of digital information. In turn, as artificial intelligence becomes the dominant technological paradigm of social and economic interaction, so Bousquet predicts that warfare will eventually become ‘chaoplexic’: networked around self-synchronising swarms of autonomous systems.Footnote ¹⁴

In Bousquet’s analysis, therefore, the dominant forms of scientific and technological progress provide the animating logic for military organisation and practice, which by extension comes to reflect the temporal orderings embedded in those same paradigmatic technologies. Such an understanding reflects a broader correlation between technological change and perceptions of time in society at large. Pre-industrial agricultural societies, for example, frequently divided the working day into a constant number of hours that varied in duration according to the hours of daylight. However, the combination of urbanisation, industrialisation, and the perfection of regularised clockwork timekeeping saw seasonal understandings of time replaced by standardised hours. In pre-modern Japan, local artisans even developed ingenious ways of adapting European clockwork to appropriately vary the duration of the hour according to the length of daylight, until the rapid military modernisation that followed Japan’s forced opening in 1853–4 necessitated the wholesale adoption of standardised ‘chronometric’ time. Indeed, pocket watches subsequently became a symbol of modernisation among ‘Westernised’ Meiji officers.Footnote ¹⁵ In a similar fashion, the development of railways in mid-nineteenth century European states gradually did away with the multiple local time zones that had existed between neighbouring towns and cities, sometimes as little as ten minutes different, as the newfound rapidity of railway connections and the need to run consistent timetables forced new national orderings of time.Footnote ¹⁶

In this view, technology acts more as a zeitgeist for the temporal ordering of warfare than an explanation for victory or defeat: it shapes overarching trends in the conduct of warfare and so comes to epitomise them, without elucidating how individual armies produce specific advantages relative to adversaries ostensibly navigating the same technological landscape. Here, Olivier Schmitt has advanced the concept of a wartime paradigm to describe the understanding of time embedded within a particular vision of warfare. For Schmitt, the present preoccupation with technological speed among Western armed forces is significantly the product of the political preferences of liberal democracies, for whom warfare is primarily understood as an exercise in risk management. Consequently, this ‘security–political imaginary’ legitimates and reinforces a parallel ‘socio-technological imaginary’ among Western armed forces, in which rapidity of action is seen as the route to easy victory on the battlefield. In turn, this enables repeated (and, indeed, almost incessant and unending) expeditionary interventions abroad to manage or mitigate perceived or potential threats to security.Footnote ¹⁷ While technology therefore plays a role in facilitating this wartime paradigm, in Schmitt’s reading, its present configuration is ultimately political and societal in origin. He argues, for example, that because perceptions of time vary according to socio-political context, wartime paradigms are anchored in ‘regimes of historicity’: ‘specific understandings of the articulation between past, present and future’ that variously influence the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.Footnote ¹⁸

Even so, the fundamental challenge to this contemporary wartime paradigm has come from not an alternate socio-political imaginary but rather the diffusion of key military technologies, as Schmitt has himself observed.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, arguably, technological overmatch is the lodestone of battlefield success in this account of the wartime paradigm of speed: for conflict to be politically acceptable, it must come at minimal societal cost, which means above all it must be quick and easy. What society is unwilling to pay in blood, it must make up for with technology. While the meaning, utility, and application of military technologies may be socially constructed around the values and politics of the people and polities that use them, these choices are nonetheless framed by the range of material possibilities practically available, which ultimately shape, constrain, and inform social and political preferences. This relationship between material possibility and societal application is particularly evident in co-constitutional accounts of the fluidity of design and application during early technological development, and its subsequent stabilisation as technologies mature.Footnote ²⁰ During the inter-war period, for example, various maritime powers initially developed very different designs of aircraft carrier (or indeed, declined to adopt them at all), reflecting pre-existing naval cultures and strategic requirements. However, combat experience during the Second World War gradually led to the emergence of a single archetypal paradigm of carrier warfare.Footnote ²¹ While organisational preferences shaped the initial development of technology in myriad ways, those same preferences then subsequently shifted in line with the material realities of optimal usage once tested in war.

This article does not take fundamental issue with Schmitt’s description of the contemporary Western wartime paradigm, much less his identification of its present challenges. Rather, we refine Schmitt’s conception of a wartime paradigm by envisaging his security–political and socio-technological imaginaries as not equal partners in the construction of wartime paradigms but rather nested processes. As Hew Strachan observed, shifts in the conduct of war have often stemmed from technological innovations that ‘triumphed over geography, changing the relationship between space and time’ – with strategic implications flowing upwards from new tactical realities.Footnote ²² By extension, we argue that military organisational, political, and wider societal imaginaries of war all successively grow from the underlying material realities prevailing at the tactical level of warfare. Here, conceptions of time in warfare serve as a bridge between technological possibilities and societal preferences, providing an ordering principle around which armies seek to create tactical advantages that serve wider operational and political goals. But, to produce tangible battlefield advantages, these wartime paradigms cannot deviate from the range of possibilities created by prevailing material realities, rendering them liable to constant revision.

Of course, this does not imply that warfare is solely driven by technological imperatives. The construction of warfare can be thought of as an inverted pyramid, resting on its material foundations but with scaffolding extending upwards and outwards of social and political design. Rather like an inverted pyramid pivoting about its apex, states and societies make active choices about how they wish to assemble material military means into wider schemes of warfare that best reflect their institutional, strategic, political, and societal preferences and requirements. Ultimately, though, these must remain rooted in material and technological possibilities and constraints to be effective – and when that material basis shifts, the whole inverted pyramid must pivot or risk collapse. Thus, whereas Bousquet has provided a description of the systemic effects of technology on time in war, we take up Schmitt’s call to investigate the precise ways in which wartime paradigms emerge and the mechanisms through which they are revised by exploring the role of time and temporality in constructing that upward scaffolding of warfare from its material root, to provide a dyadic account of how armies use time to exploit technology in pursuit of battlefield advantage.Footnote ²³

This article proceeds in the following way. In the first section, we draw on ideas from cognitive psychology and military history; we introduce the concept of martial theory of mind to explain how armies use collective understandings of time and timing to agglomerate tactical possibilities into wider frameworks of warfare, by envisaging the potential effects of particular instrumental applications of time and technology on their imagined adversaries. Here, we develop a theoretical account of how armies instrumentalise time in tandem with technology to create battlefield advantage and, by extension, how material changes can undermine established wartime paradigms. In the second section, we then apply this framework to analyse the development of one important contemporary wartime paradigm – manoeuvre warfare – highlighting the material underpinnings of this doctrinal construct and the essentially technological challenges to its future application. In the penultimate section, we then survey potential ways to buttress manoeuvre warfare’s endangered ordering of martial time, and the alternatives to doing so, before offering some conclusions as to the wider relationship between time and technology in warfare.

Time and technology in the martial theory of mind

In its most fundamental sense, martial concepts of time provide an ordering function for military organisations, enabling them to structure their activities in militarily useful ways. At heart, all military tactics rely on the co-ordination of distinct actions in time and space, from the close-order formations of early modern Europe to the synchronised fire and movement of contemporary small-unit tactics. In its most elementary form, this can be seen in the concepts of collective timing instilled in soldiers through low-level training practices, such as drill. The drilling of troops – training groups of soldiers to undertake specific movements or actions at a set cadence in response to predefined commands – allows armies to control bodies of fighting men in the chaos and confusion of battle. Even today, soldiers are taught first to march ‘by numbers’ on the parade ground before they learn to co-ordinate their actions in the field, conducting stylised evolutions according to a set mitre as a precursor to tactical operations.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, as the sociologist John Hockey observed, even the lowliest infantryman is socialised ‘into holding collective perceptions of the relationship between time, danger, safety, and identity…into viewing time not as a neutral entity but one which may offer harm or safety in contingent amounts’.Footnote ²⁵

Importantly, collective understandings of time are also intimately connected to the material means by which an armed force wages war. Infantry drill, for example, emerged independently in ancient Sumer, Zhou China, and classical Greece as a means to synchronise the actions of infantry armed with spears or other long polearms. Such weapons provided a distinct advantage in reach over other hand-weapons, providing the enemy could not bypass the spear tip and close with its owner, whereupon a cumbersome polearm could become a distinct disadvantage. Consequently, spear-armed infantry fought in densely packed formations to create an almost impenetrable hedge of spearpoints, requiring individual warriors to co-ordinate precisely in time and space to ensure a united front against the enemy and to prevent unwieldy polearms from becoming entangled with each other. The origins of drill thus lie in the rehearsed commands and co-ordinated actions needed to synchronise the use of weapons – in time and space – to create dense infantry formations like the phalanx.Footnote ²⁶

With the advent of firearms, drills were similarly used to instil collective understandings of time and timing in an effort to maximise the strengths and minimise the weaknesses of black power weapons. The re-emergence of close-order infantry drill in sixteenth-century Europe, for example, was a direct response to the time required to reload an early musket or harquebus. Under Count Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch Republic developed a system of infantry drills that combined volley fire with countermarching, enabling successive ranks of musketeers to keep up a near constant fusillade against the enemy as each rank fired, withdrew behind their comrades, reloaded, advanced to the front, and fired again at a set tempo. Indeed, it is notable that co-ordinated methods of volley fire were almost simultaneously developed in Japan by the armies of warring feudal states in response to exactly the same technical challenge.Footnote ²⁷ Hence, while the precise design of such drills varied from place to place, it is evident that ideational and organisational choices were animated by the same material constraints and possibilities, often resulting in somewhat similar tactical and organisational designs.

Here, the psychological concept of ‘theory of mind’ provides a useful heuristic to conceptualise how military organisations seek to instrumentally manipulate the ordering properties of time to produce battlefield advantage over an adversary. In evolutionary psychology, theory of mind refers to an individual’s ability to comprehend and predict another’s behaviour by constructing a cognitive theory of the workings of their mind. The concept is typically illustrated through a vignette: Maxi has a bar of chocolate, which he puts in a kitchen cupboard. After Maxi has left the room, his mother moves the chocolate bar from the cupboard to the fridge. When Maxi comes back to the kitchen, where does he look for the chocolate bar? To understand that Maxi looks first in the cupboard, not the fridge, requires a theory of mind. Children normally develop theory of mind at around the age of five, though psychologists differ on its underlying origins. According to one school of thought, theory of mind is reliant on the ability to simulate another’s perspective – on the ability to imagine one’s own thinking in a given circumstance and apply this to another’s behaviour, to place oneself in another’s shoes. Importantly, theory of mind is therefore recognised as essential for designing elementary tactics. Without a theory of mind, it would be impossible to conceive of deception, feints, shock action, or surprise.Footnote ²⁸

By extension, we argue that armed forces use martial theory of mind – an appreciation of how the enemy will act, and therefore how to defeat him, based on a simulated or projected understanding of the enemy’s expected behaviour – to aggregate the tactical, ordering properties of martial time into wider instrumental schemes of warfighting at the operational level of war. Like the psychological concept, martial theory of mind describes the envisioned impact of an army’s instrumental application of time based around a simulated projection of the enemy’s reaction. Unlike the psychological concept, however, which seeks to understand a universal feature of human cognition, each army constructs its own theory of mind according to its own particular circumstances, revising it in the face of changing technological means, strategic circumstances, or adversarial conditions. As a result, multiple martial theories of mind may coexist or be pitted against each other, and the precise configuration of martial time underpinning each will vary accordingly. Nonetheless, we argue that martial concepts of time provide an ordering and structuring function in the construction of these mirror images, acting as a bridge between the social and material components of warfare. Thus, while martial theories of mind are not technologically determinist – they are subject to complex social, political, cultural, and strategic interactions – they are nonetheless technologically grounded: constrained by the need to find useful orderings of time that connect political and military objectives to material means, relative to the expected capacities and intentions of the enemy. Martial theories of mind instrumentalise time in order to master activity in physical space, but they must do so in relation to the physical capabilities of each belligerent (as either anticipated or experienced).

The concept of martial theory of mind also helps to explain how concepts of martial time, or in Schmitt’s language, wartime paradigms, come into being and why they are revised. By conceptualising wartime paradigms as a template for achieving victory rooted in expectations about how a particular application of material means in time and space will have effects on an adversary, the concept of martial theory of mind allows us to conceptualise the instrumental utility of martial orderings of time in relative and adversarial terms. Indeed, this reciprocal and adversarial interaction between belligerents has long been recognised as a driver of change in warfare, from Clausewitz’s ideas about war tending towards extremes to J. F. C Fuller’s description of ‘the constant tactical factor’.Footnote ²⁹ Here, we draw on the historian John Lynn’s model of change as rooted in the interaction between culturally conditioned societal ideal-types of warfare, known as a ‘Discourse on War’, and the emergent experience of actual conflict, known as the ‘Reality of War’. Lynn posits that when the actual experience of fighting no longer matches the dominant ‘Discourse on War’, it prompts a feedback loop that variously results in the revision of cultural imaginaries of war in line with actual experience, or else constrains military practice in ways that accord better with the dominant discourse.Footnote ³⁰

Although Lynn’s model was explicitly intended to challenge technological accounts of warfare, it tacitly acknowledges that the ‘Reality of War’ is invariably the product of an intersection between ideational and material factors, with the one directly shaping the other.Footnote ³¹ In so doing, it also helps to conceptualise how shifts in the material or technological basis of war might unsettle the ordering of time and space underpinning an army’s existing martial theory of mind. Indeed, arguably, finding a way to undermine the ordering logic of time and space in an adversary’s system of warfighting is the sine qua non of battlefield advantage.

Importantly, though, military applications of time have not always inherently favoured greater speed for its own sake. Rather, the material realities of tactical practice confer their own peculiar tempo and pace, such that advantage has not always been found in going faster. For the Roman legions, the pace of drill provided an ordering function that enabled predictability in planning. The Roman historian Vegetius, for example, argued that ‘the recruit must be taught the military pace… This can only be achieved if, by continuous practice, they learn to march quickly and in time’, such that Roman legionaries could be relied upon to cover twenty miles a day on campaign.Footnote ³² But for classical Greek armies, the tactical advantages offered by the phalanx necessitated control rather than speed. Consequently, Thucydides observed how Spartan spear-armed hoplites advanced ‘slowly and to the music of many flute players – a standing institution in their army, that…is meant to make them advance evenly, stepping in time, without breaking their order, as large armies are apt to do in the moment of engaging’.Footnote ³³ In particular, the evolution of European warfare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides an illustrative example of how different armies sought to construct advantage by manipulating the ordering principles of time, with successive shifts in material means undermining those same martial theories of mind to drive a gradual evolution in the conduct of warfare in pursuit of battlefield advantage.

In the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great used extensive, precise drilling as a means to render the Prussian army ‘impervious to shock and surprise’ on the battlefield.Footnote ³⁴ During this period, campaigning was heavily constrained by the material challenges associated with moving and provisioning an army in the field, effectively precluding sweeping operational manoeuvre. Moreover, at the tactical level, the relative ‘immobility of artillery, [and] the inability of cavalry to break infantry formations’ made the infantry the dominant arm of service.Footnote ³⁵ Here, the relatively short-range and inaccurate nature of smoothbore muzzle-loading infantry weapons placed a premium on attritional, linear tactics in which rate and volume of fire mattered most. Hence, the logic of time embedded in infantry drill was intended to produce swift, automatic loading and firing sequences resulting in ‘[m]ore lead projected at the enemy in less time…a definite and obvious advantage when meeting troops not similarly trained’.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, foot drill conversely emphasised the steady, orderly movement required to maintain linear formations across ground, to ensure that as many musketeers could reliably bring their weapons to bear as possible. Although such methods were far from unique, the Prussian army was widely recognised as the most extensively drilled in Europe. In the words of one historian, the combined effect ‘had the advantages of a central nervous system. Everything went faster. Obedience was more nearly automatic…[and] victories over less well-trained opponents could be counted on.’Footnote ³⁷

Spectacular Prussian victories in the Seven Years War consequently led to widespread emulation of the Prussian method for decades to come, both within and beyond Europe.Footnote ³⁸ By the Napoleonic Wars, European armies had increasingly begun to codify these collective understandings of time and movement in national drill manuals, further formalising and regularising individual armies’ conceptions of martial time. The British army, for example, adopted its first set of standardised pan-army drill regulations in 1792. Prior to then, each regiment had operated its own set of parochial drill practices, such that ‘if a brigade of troops were brought together, it was very doubtful whether they could execute any one combined movement’.Footnote ³⁹ British army regulations subsequently proscribed the precise pace at which standard movements were to be conducted, stressing the importance of uniform measures of time. Drummers and musicians were ordered ‘not to deviate in the most trifling degree from the Time which will allow, within the minute, the exact number of steps prescribed by His Majesty’s Regulations’ and were required to practice ‘until the exact prescribed Cadence has been acquired’.Footnote ⁴⁰

By then, however, truly combined arms formations were beginning to come of age, unsettling pre-existing orderings of martial time. Various European armies had experimented with combined arms organisations during the later stages of the Seven Years War, but only on an ad hoc basis.Footnote ⁴¹ However, Napoleon’s semi-permanent corps d’armée pioneered a new kind of tactical and operational manoeuvre, in which each corps marched separately to converge on the enemy from multiple directions at the decisive point in space and time.Footnote ⁴² In part, this way of war reflected the vastly increased size of armies brought about by the mass mobilisations following the French Revolution. Equally, though, France’s Gribeauval reforms had lightened and standardised French guns, enabling artillery to keep pace with infantry and cavalry on the march and in the field, thereby changing the tactical relationship between each arm of service.Footnote ⁴³ Consequently, while drill manuals continued to emphasise order and regularity in the pace of tactical evolutions, combat experience increasingly highlighted the importance of rapidity of action to advantage in this more fluid tactical and operational environment. The premium this now placed on the speed of movement is evident in the interaction between veteran British regiments and inexperienced troops when first brigaded together during preparations for the Plattsburgh campaign in 1814, as one solider recalled:

Whereas the old Frederician understood martial time as a means to ensure order and control, the seasoned Napoleonic soldier increasingly considered speed to be the basis of tactical proficiency.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the development of breech-loading rifles and artillery had begun to undermine the utility of Napoleonic formations, creating a zone of fire that was increasingly deadly for infantry to cross even at pace.Footnote ⁴⁵ Simultaneously, though, the development of railways increased the potential for operational manoeuvre, allowing armies to rapidly mobilise large numbers of soldiers and deliver them to the battlefield at unprecedented speeds. Under Moltke, Prussia pioneered a new martial theory of mind using railways to overwhelm the tactical impasse through rapid operational envelopment, by concentrating fresh troops on a flank at a pace and scale far beyond the speed and capacity of Napoleon’s marching corps d’armée. As the leading proponent of this revised approach, Prussia reaped the benefits, first defeating Denmark in 1864 then Austria during six weeks in 1866, before laying siege to Paris in 1870–1.Footnote ⁴⁶ By 1914, however, Germany’s adversaries had updated their own martial theories of mind in response. Russian mobilisation surpassed Imperial German planning expectations, while the Belgian destruction of key railway infrastructure created an unexpected delay, undermining the Schlieffen Plan.Footnote ⁴⁷ By 1914, the playing field had levelled, precluding a rapid German victory in the fashion of the 1860s and 1870s. Ultimately, though, European armies had still to come to terms with the tactical challenges of modern rifles, artillery, and machine guns, resulting in a tactical stasis that unmade strategic and political preferences. In Lynn’s terms, reality trumped discourse.Footnote ⁴⁸

While the ordering applications of time relative to space are particularly obvious in the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foot drill, the same fundamental relationship between martial time, martial means, and tactical advantage continued even after close-order drill ceased to be the modus operandi of European warfare. During the First World War, for example, the creeping barrage sought to overrun enemy trenches by combining the relative strengths of artillery and infantry in a new martial theory of mind. A continuous barrage of artillery fire would gradually advance across the depth of the enemy’s line, enabling the infantry to cross open ground by following closely under cover of the bombardment, seizing enemy trenches before their occupants could mount a defence. Ultimately, though, the tactic required the precise co-ordination of infantry and artillery in time and space. In a period before the invention of mobile two-way radio sets, advancing troops were largely unable to communicate with their own gun line. Consequently, the moving curtain of artillery had to be sequenced to the expected pace of the infantry’s advance, who would find themselves rapidly exposed if they lagged behind the scheduled rate of advance of the artillery. Such a practice favoured control over speed, seeking to overwhelm enemy fortifications through the methodological application of firepower and movement in a precursor to modern combined arms manoeuvre tactics. As a result, ‘gunner time’ subsequently became the chronographic reference point for all arms of service during military operations in the British army.Footnote ⁴⁹

This article now turns to examine the development of contemporary Western doctrine of manoeuvre warfare to illustrate how martial theories of mind use time instrumentally to produce battlefield advantage from material conditions. In so doing, we show how shifts in the underlying balance of technological capabilities can undermine existing and facilitate new martial orderings of time and technology, unbalancing the inverted pyramid on which contemporary wartime paradigms rest.

Making and unmaking a martial theory of mind: Time and technology in manoeuvre warfare

The contemporary wartime paradigm of manoeuvre warfare embodies a distinctive martial theory of mind grounded in assumptions about enemy decision-making. Its emphasis on tempo, simultaneity, and momentum reflects an expectation that accelerated cycles of decision-making and will progressively dislocate an adversary’s ability to respond coherently. In this sense, manoeuvre warfare treats time as not an external constraint but rather an instrument to be wielded against the enemy’s cognitive and organisational processes. As one US military proponent argued,

Importantly, in manoeuvre warfare, the promise of decisive effect derives from not speed per se but rather a belief in temporal asymmetry as a source of operational advantage. However, as we will argue, the ability to produce this temporal asymmetry has in practice substantially rested on underlying technological asymmetry.

In its modern form, manoeuvre warfare developed from the US doctrine of AirLand Battle, as part of wider efforts to reinvent the US army following its bruising foray into counter-insurgency in Vietnam. In the Cold War British army, where the British Manoeuvreist Approach likewise represented the maturation of a wider programme of institutional and doctrinal rejuvenation, manoeuvre was simultaneously seized upon as a way to offset increasingly overwhelming Soviet mass.Footnote ⁵¹ In both these doctrines, battlefield success pivoted around the ability to (re)act quicker than the enemy, enabling the swifter belligerent to judiciously apply force in such a way as to prevent the enemy from being able to respond effectively, thereby producing outcomes disproportionate to the force applied. However, it was the novel understanding of ‘tempo’ as a property inherently tied to the passage and processing of information, rather than movement over distance, that set modern manoeuvreism apart from its historical combined arms antecedents. According to the manoeuvre proponent Brigadier Simpkin in his influential Race to the Swift, ‘it is really the acquisition, processing and dissemination of information that lies at the root of the speed and accuracy with which fire can now be applied’, such that ‘tempo’ became increasingly reliant on disembodied processes rather than physical movement.Footnote ⁵²

The concept of the OODA loop, or decision–action cycle, was central to this shift. Developed by US fighter pilot John Boyd, the OODA loop (Observe–Orientate–Decide–Act and back to Observe) posits that military effect is contingent on a process of decision-making that begins with information collection, proceeds to process this information, before coming to a decision that is then implemented – the outcome of which provides a new input for a subsequent decision–action cycle. The military commander and his staff that can effectively ‘turn’ their decision–action cycle the quickest will successively outpace their opponent, as the gap between one side’s action and the other’s reciprocal decision consecutively accrues until such a point that the slower side can no longer make sense of the battle or effectively respond. Like a fighter pilot able to bank quicker in a dogfight, the combatant with the faster effective decision–action cycle could ‘get inside’ their opponent’s OODA loop, allowing them to seize the initiative and force their will on their opponent – just as the more agile jet fighter dominates the aerial dogfight. Thus, generating the fastest tempo, or the pace of activity constituting the OODA loop, became the essence of success in manoeuvreist warfare. Here, tempo acted in concert with other time-linked concepts, like momentum – in physics, an object’s mass multiplied by its velocity, and hence in manoeuvre warfare, the ability to maintain tempo – and simultaneity, or the ability to produce a concurrency of effect on the enemy.Footnote ⁵³

Although commonly presented as a decision-making heuristic for friendly forces, the OODA loop functions in practice as a temporal model for the effect of a particular ordering of time on the enemy. It rests on the assumption that adversaries recognise, interpret, and respond to unfolding events through identifiable decision–action cycles that can be compressed, disrupted, or displaced. The pursuit of tempo within manoeuvre warfare therefore reflects less a concern with absolute speed than a belief that accelerating one’s own OODA loop will progressively invalidate the enemy’s capacity to orient and respond in time. The OODA loop thus operationalises a specific martial theory of mind, projecting an adversary whose effectiveness is constrained by a temporal lag in cognition and action. While the introduction of manoeuvreist doctrines like AirLand Battle therefore reflected an institutional re-imagining of warfighting concepts, as Lock-Pullan has argued,Footnote ⁵⁴ its conceptual origins and practical adoption in the late Cold War nonetheless relied upon changes in the material and technological conditions of war.

Two central pillars of manoeuvre warfare first emerged as responses to tactical stagnation in the First World War: tanks and infiltration tactics. Building on the idea of elastic defence, the German army pioneered infiltration tactics as an organisational and conceptual means of regaining the offensive. Perfected by elite stormtroop units, infiltration tactics combined fire and movement with stealth and flexibility in order to penetrate weak areas in the enemy’s line. These breaches were then exploited in depth, bypassing and enveloping enemy strongpoints (which subsequently became isolated and untenable) to maintain the momentum of advance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the British found a technological rather than conceptual means of achieving the same goal through the invention of the tank. However, neither fully came of age during the First World War. During the summer of 1918, ‘infiltration…generated a downward focus in which there were no objectives – just a process, ultimately leading nowhere in particular’ – save the premature culmination of the Ludendorff Offensive as the ‘vaunted storm troopers eventually exhausted first their bag of tactical tricks, then themselves’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Equally, while British theorists wrote presciently on the possibilities for armoured warfare during the inter-war years, the British army struggled to make good on its wartime first-mover advantage. Unable to marry the speed of fast tanks with the costs of infantry mechanisation, the British army favoured slow and heavy infantry support tanks and separate light but fast ‘cruisers’, thereby preserving their pre-existing order of martial time.Footnote ⁵⁷

Instead, it was the inter-war Reichswehr that first combined tanks with infiltration tactics to develop a new instrumental ordering of time and space in the form of armoured Blitzkrieg. For the Panzer generals, ‘speed was the new mantra; rapidity of movement and thought was the key to modern battle’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In inter-war German exercises, for example, motorised units advanced at a rate of 100 km a day – ‘a pace unmatched since the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages’ – while the Wehrmacht actually increased momentum during the German invasion of Poland in 1939.Footnote ⁵⁹ Importantly, this new martial ordering of time was the product of not simply mechanisation but also communication technologies. Rapid exploitation required co-ordination, with Blitzkrieg dependent on the passage and processing of information via radio nets as much as armour and petrol.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Showalter concluded, although Blitzkrieg ‘was certainly not a structure of concepts’ like manoeuvre warfare doctrines later became, it did give ‘a technologically based literalness to an abstract concept’.Footnote ⁶¹

Prior to US AirLand Battle, however, Cold War NATO doctrines such as Forward Defence had reverted to fundamentally attritional and positional visions of warfare with a fundamentally different understanding of how time related to advantage on the battlefield. In his 1985 attack on the utility of attrition for NATO, Brigadier Simpkin outlined how attritional thinking viewed time as a resource or constraint rooted in movement over ground, as in a speed = distance/time calculation. Here, time was inherently tied to physical factors like ground, going, weather, and equipment, and significant only in specific relation to the possible rate of advance over a given piece of terrain, or the necessary dispersion intervals of a column of troops moving along a defined route.Footnote ⁶² In contrast, the new manoeuvreist concept of tempo held time to be significant only in relative terms. The absolute time of a given evolution mattered little, so long as it was comparatively faster than the enemy. As Simpkin explained, the ‘factor here is not chronometric time but the time needed to complete a change-and-response cycle, response time, or the “decision loop” as the Americans call it’, precisely because ‘The Russians evidently regard two actions as “exerting simultaneous pressure” if one follows the other within the enemy’s response time at the level affected’.Footnote ⁶³ Time now became an elastic concept that could only be measured in relation to the enemy’s ability to respond. Victory could only be ensured by higher tempo relative to the enemy, measured by a faster OODA loop rather than activity in physical space. As Strachan observed, ‘Manoeuvre now clearly meant much more than mobility; indeed, it defined the thinking commander’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Understood through the lens of a martial theory of mind, it is evident that tempo represents neither raw speed nor frenetic activity but instead a belief about temporal dominance over an adversary’s decision-making processes. Manoeuvre warfare presumes that relative advantage flows from acting in ways that consistently outpace the enemy’s capacity to comprehend and respond, thereby generating cumulative decision asymmetry. Tempo, in this sense, encodes an expectation about how and when the enemy can be made to fail, rather than a simple imperative to move or strike rapidly. In the context of its Cold War reinvention, however, manoeuvre warfare was particularly attractive because it exploited qualitative Western advantages in technology to offset quantitative Soviet advantages in weight of numbers – something particularly appealing to senior British and US officers concerned in parallel about institutional decline and seeking opportunities for professional rejuvenation.

By the late 1980s, the so-called digital Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) had envisaged radical new possibilities in military communication, command, control, information gathering, and firepower. Digital communications provided new links between headquarters and units, providing a broader, deeper, and more rapid passage of information. Connected sensors in aircraft and satellites promised an unprecedented view of the battlefield, identifying targets and speedily queuing increasingly precise munitions. War appeared to be on the cusp of fast, clinical, and lethal ‘networked’ transformation, which linked systems of geographically dispersed observers, decision-makers, and smart ordinance–created ‘sensor-shooter loops’; on this new ‘transparent battlefield’, to be seen was to be destroyed.Footnote ⁶⁵ New RMA technologies were thus recasting the physical battlefield as a digital battlespace, in which physical terrain, distance, and weather no longer constrained the collection and dissemination of information or the reliability of kinetic effects. All now hung on the passage and processing of information: on the relative rapidity of the decision-making cycle.

Martial time had become relative, and in the process, freed from physical space. Sustaining this new concept of tempo would require significant institutional accommodation, as well as further technological innovation. As the processing and dissemination of orders became seen as the greatest impediment to speed of action, organisational changes were required to ensure the passage of information and guarantee tempo in NATO armies as well. Organisational flattening, a decentralised culture of mission command, and a doctrinal focus on achieving the conceptual paralysis of the enemy over and above the destruction of his force elements all followed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet, while the fundamental principles of manoeuvre warfare have been widely internalised by US allies, the technological and organisational force transformations required to deploy it have been far less profound among many European NATO allies. In part, this reflects more limited European defence expenditures in the post–Cold War period, alongside some concern at the increasing dependence on pure technological superiority in US models of warfighting.Footnote ⁶⁷

The profound advantages produced by manoeuvre warfare, first witnessed in the decisive and one-sided result achieved by US-led forces in the 1991 Gulf War, initially startled even US military planners.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nonetheless, some scholars have rejected the centrality of technology to the successful practice of modern manoeuvre warfare. Stephen Biddle has stridently argued that successful manoeuvre ultimately stems from skilful force employment rather than technological or material factors, in the form of a ‘modern system’ of joint and combined operations.Footnote ⁶⁹ Certainly, as an imaginary of victory, manoeuvre warfare is defined primarily by a martial theory of mind in which time is ordered in relative terms, as a means to overwhelm the potential for enemy resistance through swifter and therefore more decisive decision–action cycles. This typically requires both combined arms actions and skilful handling of forces, though arguably manoeuvre warfare is more than merely combined arms tactics. Yet, while it is undoubtedly true that forces possessing the material capabilities of manoeuvre warfare may nonetheless fail to use them effectively,Footnote ⁷⁰ the ability to conduct both tactical and operational manoeuvre nonetheless requires possession of the systems and capabilities necessary for undertaking and co-ordinating joint and combined operations, such as armoured vehicles, precision artillery, air power, and communications systems.Footnote ⁷¹ They are a necessary but not sufficient condition for joint and combined operations, and by extension for manoeuvre warfare.

Critically, moreover, what matters most to the advantage envisaged by manoeuvre warfare’s instrumental application of time is relative technological disparity, as a precursor for creating temporal asymmetry. The initial impetus behind the Cold War adoption of manoeuvre warfare stemmed from a desire to recast Western quantitative weaknesses vis-à-vis the Red Army’s mass in terms of qualitative advantage, and manoeuvre warfare has since come to rest ever more directly on technological overmatch. The US-led coalition in 1991, for example, evidently enjoyed a non-trivial technological advantage, but Operation Desert Storm also made extensive use of deception and operational envelopment, including a sweeping outflanking manoeuvre through Iraq’s western desert. By contrast, the US-led campaign in 2003 employed a more direct approach, relying on technological asymmetry as much as skill to generate and maintain tempo. The ground invasion took the form of a rapid push directly towards Baghdad, preceded by a sustained arial bombardment of so-called shock and awe. US troops subsequently undertook a series of ‘thunder runs’ into Baghdad: rapid frontal attacks using heavy armour and overwhelming firepower to steamroll Iraqi defenders, seizing Baghdad’s central government district in a lighting smash-and-grab thrust that collapsed the Ba’athist regime without the need for extensive urban fighting. In one instance, the US 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade penetrated 20 km into central Baghdad in just two hours, enabled by advance strikes against Iraqi heavy weapons by long-range missiles, and facilitated through successive artillery barrages that supressed each key road junction minutes ahead of the moving column of US armour.Footnote ⁷² Such tactics undoubtedly required skilful force employment, but their pace and tempo also depended on technological superiority.

Technological diffusion and the future of manoeuvre warfare

Arguably, the importance of technological ‘force multipliers’ to the conduct of manoeuvre warfare has only increased in recent years, as the underlying principles of its martial theory of mind have become widely understood. A constellation of technologies including precision guided munitions, satellite surveillance, and electronic warfare suites have allowed the United States and its allies to locate and strike enemy forces with relative impunity, while suppressing their adversaries’ ability to interfere with these processes or do the same in response. However, technological diffusion also now presents a profound challenge to the Western wartime paradigm of manoeuvre.

In particular, so-called Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2AD) techniques have begun to undermine the technological basis on which the battlefield advantages produced by manoeuvre warfare depend. Importantly, although A2AD employs similar underlying technological capabilities to modern manoeuvre warfare, their acquisition and employment reflect a different martial theory of mind. A2AD specifically aims to blunt manoeuvre warfare by undercutting the ability to generate tempo. Indeed, rather than simply creating a mirror image of Western manoeuvre forces, A2AD techniques are characterised by the combination of discrete high-technology systems (intended to counter similar Western capabilities in critical areas such as electronic warfare) with large-scale, cheap, and disposable systems (such as drones and man-portable air defence and anti-tank weapons) to produce tactical stasis. By preventing capabilities in one domain from supporting another, A2AD seeks to deconstruct the ability to generate paralysing overmatch at decisive points through joint and combined operations, stalling momentum and allowing forces in each domain to be engaged separately and defeated in detail.Footnote ⁷³

During the war in Ukraine, for example, both Russia and Ukraine have used drones as a surrogate for precision missiles, and to saturate the tactical battlespace with disposable surveillance and kinetic effectors. The difficulty of covertly massing armoured forces in the face of satellite surveillance and drone screens, and the tactical vulnerability of armoured vehicles to modern conventional anti-tank munitions and drones, has created a potent challenge to manoeuvre. Electronic warfare, meanwhile, serves both to facilitate friendly drones and to impede the enemy’s, while also contesting the rapid acquisition and passage of information on which the co-ordination of manoeuvre at pace relies.Footnote ⁷⁴ At heart, therefore, A2AD in Ukraine has produced a similar tactical challenge to that of the First World War, with ostensibly similar results: technological changes in surveillance and firepower have outstripped both technical and organisational abilities to protect and move troops, resulting in a slow, griding attritional war. But whereas stasis in the First World War was the emergent by-product of technological diffusion, A2AD is deliberately intended to deconstruct manoeuvre warfare. As Amos Fox has argued, ‘expeditious mobility is the prime condition that must be satisfied to implement manoeuvre’, something he describes as ‘situational mobile asymmetry’ over the enemy. But it is not the increasing prevalence of urban fighting or unfavourable geography that fundamentally challenges manoeuvre warfare today, but rather technological diffusion. Ironically, while the core technologies of 1990s RMA have made the battlespace more transparent and far deeper, they are not making offensive action quicker – despite the increasing speed of sensor-shooter loops and the rapid mobility of missiles and drones. Instead, transparency now threatens to make speed irrelevant, precisely because even the most technologically sophisticated conventional forces can no longer reliably survive being seen.Footnote ⁷⁵

This shift has strategic as well as tactical and operational considerations. For NATO to uphold its commitment to the Baltic states, for example, NATO armies might conceivably have to move troops long distances from home bases into a theatre of operations before facts on the ground change irreversibly. In so doing, they must navigate European road, rail, and air networks logistically divided by separate political and administrative structures, but increasingly united under an adversary’s long-range missile umbrella.Footnote ⁷⁶ NATO armies now face a dilemma: do they abandon manoeuvre warfare altogether to construct a new martial theory of mind, or should they seek to bolster existing martial orderings of time through the pursuit of novel technological means? In principle, both might be possible, albeit with very different expectations for the future conduct of war.

On the one hand, some commentators have argued that the changing character of conflict necessitates a radical rethinking of Western precepts about warfighting, including the jettisoning of manoeuvre warfare altogether. Reasoning that the increasingly small size of Western professional armies will make operational manoeuvre untenable, Anthony King has argued that attritional set-piece battles in and for urban centres are likely to predominate in the future.Footnote ⁷⁷ Fox likewise conceptualises warfare in increasingly attritional terms, arguing that Western armies must busy themselves with ‘overcoming futurist Verduns’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Certainly, combat experience in the Russo–Ukrainian war provides a possible template for alternate, slower ways of warfare. The best Ukrainian brigades have begun to develop a martial theory of mind based around the methodical isolation, suppression, and destruction of Russian positions in a contested zone of contact around 15 km across, via seven sequential phases of operation. Beginning with a wide-ranging survey throughout the depth of the enemy battlespace, this process makes extensive use of unmanned systems and indirect fire to sequentially locate enemy positions and enablers, blind or defeat enemy surveillance and artillery, and cut off forward troops from resupply and mutual support, thereby enabling a ground assault on the isolated, suppressed, and degraded target by infantry and armour. This process might take five to ten days from start to finish, with some individual phases taking twenty-four to forty-eight hours each, with subsequent progress conditional on successful completion on each preceding step. Thus, in this martial theory of mind, technology and time are traded to preserve the lives of attacking soldiers, reducing potential casualties from ∼50 per cent to ∼5 per cent compared with a more conventional combined arms assault.Footnote ⁷⁹

Yet, on the other hand, successful manoeuvre has not been entirely absent from recent fighting. In the autumn of 2022, Ukrainian forces were able to exploit interior lines to generate operational surprise, rapidly retaking a significant area of territory around Kharkiv in the north and east with the assistance of newly supplied Western equipment.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, similar lightning advances subsequently proved impossible to achieve during the 2023 summer, despite high hopes that further Western training and equipment would facilitate a breakthrough.Footnote ⁸¹ It is therefore possible to envisage a future in which the slow, methodical, and sequential kind of operations described above are used to generate favourable conditions for momentary periods of manoeuvre warfare – perhaps by creating ‘windows of opacity’ by massing sufficient systems to overwhelm local defences.Footnote ⁸² Indeed, at heart, the US doctrine of multi-domain operations seeks to preserve the essence of manoeuvre warfare – including its central understanding of tempo – by extending and hardening the existing linkages between warfighting domains such as land, air, space, and cyber. Arguably, this represents the retrenchment of existing ideas rather than their replacement; it hopes to overcome a challenge to the existing paradigm by generating greater overmatch in each domain, thereby securing the ability to move, communicate, and hence find purchase on the enemy through tempo.Footnote ⁸³ Yet, the ability to do this will practically require the acquisition of new technological systems and accompanying organisational processes – though opinions differ on the degree of technological revolution required.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, while opponents and advocates of future manoeuvre warfare foresee very different futures for Western warfighting, both tacitly recognise the centrality of technological superiority to the manoeuvreist martial theory of mind. Whether this can be maintained, however, remains in doubt.