Amos C. Fox, Maneuver is Dead: Land Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2026. £85.
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
Thoughtful books on war are central to diplomatic history, for diplomacy deals with wartime as much as peacetime, while the latter entails preparations for war as well as its deterrence. The likely nature of conflict influences the apparent potential capabilities and impact involved in the turn to war, and all of these require attention from diplomatic historians as they help frame consideration of options as well as the very context of policy.
A bold and ambitious book by Fox, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the American army who is Professor of Practice with the Future Security Initiative at Arizona State University, seeks to overturn current operational military thought and is strategic counterparts in order to replace manoeuvre doctrine by one grounded in the salience of wars of attrition and the corresponding significance of both positional warfare and combined warfare methods. It suggests, with reason, an American obsession with a reading of earlier German doctrine and a related failure to understand the meaning and value of attritional practices. A snappy book (possibly overlong notes and bibliography keeps the text to 182 pp.), it draws on a widespread reading in the literature and a pertinent consideration of recent conflicts, notably in the Middle East and Ukraine. Fox writes with interest not least about the dangers of engaging so much with ‘the technologies that seem to dominate the day’ (182) at the expense of understanding the value of controlling equations of exhaustion. He argues that manoeuvre is defunct because it was never a dominant form of warfare, and due to urbanisation, the small size of armies, battlefield transparency, and insufficient space for manoeuvre.
This is most interesting but a few suggestions can be made. First, the focus on attrition and exhaustion is scarcely new but well established not least in the theories and practices of guerrilla and irregular warfare that do not appear to interest Fox. China and Cuba are not here as sources of theory, while related practice, notably in Africa and Central America, is somewhat absent. This contributes to a classic problem with many works of assertion and case studies, with the former sweeping and the latter selective. This selection is a double one: both reading from case studies that apparently support the thesis and assessing the case studies in a particular way.
In practice, of course, land warfare tends to have components of the manoeuvrist, positional and attritional states and doctrines. Possibly Fox should have pursued this variant of hybrid warfare, although it would not have made for such a gripping title and thesis. To write manoeuvre out of fast-moving conflicts such as those in Mali and Sudan would be a surprise. Furthermore, just as urban terrain can act to atrophy manoeuvre, so the contrast can also be the case with urban spaces falling rapidly, as recently in Syria.
In part, the problem appears a classic American one, namely the operationalisation of strategy so that the independent contexts and variables set by the latter are subsumed within a model based on operational discourse. As Fox correctly notes, the Germans got this wrong in both world wars, and others have copied from it. This is not only the case with America. In addition, the current NATO focus on raising expenditure for essentially weaponry devotes little attention to a subtle assessment of purpose and priorities, the last a key feature in strategy.
So a very interesting book, but insufficiently cautious and contextual.
