William S. Lind divides modern warfare, since the Treaty of Westphalia, into 4 Generations. These can be used as an analogy in many aspects of life. Some have applied it to politics (his point stands, no matter your opinion of his politics). I will apply it to rugby.
In brief, and ignoring all of the subtleties (I have an unsubtle 2nd Generation mind), they are as follows:
1st Generation Warfare (1GW) is a head on collision between two forces. It is two opposing lines of infantry discharging muskets at each other and then charging with bayonets. No subtlety whatsoever. All it requires is discipline, usually from above, to not break the line. This is best seen as a scrum in rugby, with brute force pushing against brute force.
2nd Generation Warfare (2GW), also called Attrition Warfare, is summed up by the French dictum of "the artillery conquers, the infantry occupy". Bomb them into submission, and then take over the ground where the dead bodies lie. There is usually still a lot of centralised control, with little room for initiative or deviation from the game plan. In rugby, this is the South African style. Huge forwards or almost as huge centres run crash ball straight into defenders, hoping to plough through them. Repeated crashes weaken the defence, exhausting them (the attrition) so that an overlap is created and you can pass the ball down the line and run around the outside of their wings to score. Or so you can run over a bounced defender. The problem with this is that attrition is very expensive for what it achieves. Crashing a ball into somebody takes almost as much out of you as it does the defender. And as in WWI, when the repeated crash of army into army while trying to outflank on the wings failed, so with rugby: Players end up running into touch instead of over the try line, as the Allies' trenches ran into Switzerland instead of over the Rhine and on to Berlin. When your only way to get to your goal is to go through a wall or run hundreds of kilometres to find the end of the wall, people start looking for doors and windows in the wall.
Which brings us to the 3rd Generation of Warfare (3GW), also called Manoeuvre Warfare. This is a mindset, not just a set of tactics or strategies. Lind has written on this, and collaborated with the USMC heavily. The USMC manual Warfighting is an excellent resource for understanding the mindset required, and is very readable for a military manual. 3GW seeks to decentralise command, without losing sight of the overall goals. It seeks to attack where the enemy is weak, and avoid where he is strong. The All Blacks are the best exponents of this in rugby, and two videos show this well.
The first video shows the mindset over about 20 phases of play. The All Blacks don't attack head on, but they manoeuvre to create gaps in space and time for their attack to penetrate the defence.
Elephants:
Picking your battlefield. Instead of attacking from where the set piece occurs, for which the Wallabies are prepared, the All Blacks set up a second phase, the equivalent of a set piece, more centrally in the field. This is better for the attacking team because it creates 2 options for them, left or right, whereas from a lineout or scrum near the touchline there is only one direction to shift in. Options = instability, as the pick up artists teach us. The attacker can focus on the option his team plans to use, whereas the defender has to defend all options. This is how guerrillas act as a force multiplier for an army: They force the defenders to spread out and defend more places. Even Donald Trump tweets this lesson from Sun Tzu: "He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere".
Monkeys and Lions:
These two go together because they they are associated options. Either a drive close to the maul, or a drive one mid-length pass away. Again, this spreads the defence thinner than if they knew where the attack was coming from. In this clip, the All Blacks pretty much just alternate between them. You would think this would make it predictable, but in fact not - for two reasons at least. Firstly, in the stress of a rugby match against the World No. 1, keeping track of whether they went short or long last time is akin to expecting a soldier to count rounds fired in a gunfight, so he doesn't go "click" on an empty chamber. Not likely at all. People think simply under stress, so nature dictates that they will expect a Lion if that's what they just saw, or a Monkey if that's what they saw last. Secondly, the All Blacks have a 3GW mindset, in that they have distributed leadership. They have a leadership group, not just a captain and vice captain, and they have trust in their teammates' judgement. So there is always the option for one of the players to call for a double up on either of these options, or even just to tell a couple forwards to go left instead of right around the ruck.
Wider Attack:
And then in creeps the third option. Options increase uncertainty geometrically, not arithmetically. And when your options have options, it gets exponential. Notice how the flyhalf, Carter, had a runner outside him, and a second inside him. He could have passed to either. This is common at higher levels, where another common formation is a back behind two forwards - the pass can go to either forward for an elephant, or to the back to spread it further (with the forwards screening his movement from some defenders). You can see a variation on this in the second wide attack, where the two forwards are between Carter and the second backline receiver. The third wide attack shows the two forwards in front of Carter.
2min43sec:
"Notice how the forwards take control". Again, there is no centralised control by one player of the entire team or field. The scrumhalf trusts his forwards to do their job, and only steps in when he sees the opportunity for a wider attack. He is seeking a gap, to use the USMC Manoeuvre Warfare phrase, in space and time. Time is a crucial dimension, because a wide attack on a slow ball isolates runners and a close attack on a fast ball wastes an opportunity.
2min52sec:
Decisiveness. McCaw spots a gap and seizes his opportunity. He is decisive and takes initiative, contrary to the plan, to advance towards the team's goal of scoring. His teammates do not hesitate, wondering if they should still obey orders while McCaw is being different. They all attack immediately. This may seem obvious, but it is common to see players stand up and think before acting - even at Test Match level. Notice how around 3min05sec the lock moves the scrumhalf out of the way, whereas earlier the scrumhalf took command for wide attacks. The man with the vision leads, the rest follow with trust in their teammate.
3min59sec:
Decisiveness again. A gap is found and exploited. The momentum is kept up once the defensive line is cracked. Immediately the pace picks up, to overwhelm the Wallabies' OODA loop. The repeated tackles have lulled the Wallabies into a slow, grinding mentality. Suddenly the All Blacks increase their tempo through the OODA loop, and the Wallabies end up one step behind until Smith gets it down. Notice how the Manoeuvre Warfare gap is now not in time and space initially, only in OODA loop speed. Mealamu, the hooker, has nowhere to go with two or three defenders in front of him. He slows, appears ready to set up an Elephant, and draws the defenders in before acting differently and giving it to Carter. Now Carter doesn't have a gap, but he has a much thinner line of defence against him. He only has to straighten up to split the defence into the drifting players outside him and the straight on players ahead of him. And Smith gets the ball in the gap.
The second video shows how the All Blacks use different tactics to neutralise a specific threat.
Pocock, the Wallabies open side flank, is one of the world's best fetchers. He is a huge threat as a fetcher, much more than he is as a counter-attack runner or tackler.
The first tactic used against him is McCaw checking him, as a guerrilla move. Not holding him, which would be akin to engaging the opposition in battle. Just a little sabotage to make him less effective at quickly getting to the breakdown to turn the ball over. So this is just dynamiting a railway line, something any resistance fighter could do.
Next is swamping him at the ruck, and later you will also see the All Blacks focus on bringing him to ground at rucks before he can turn the ball over. This is a 2GW move: Destroying the opposition with overwhelming force. Because life, war and rugby are not perfect theory, so sometimes you have to use cruder methods if you want to win. And usually winning is more important than failing beautifully or losing honorably. This is a reminder to not be a binary thinker.
The video then shows an All Black prop, Franks, clearing Pocock out at the ruck before he gets close to the ball. While similar to the previous point, this can be seen in a 3GW light as a force holding off enemy reinforcements long enough for the attackers to exploit the gap in time and space. The line between 2GW and 3GW tactics can be blurry, but the mindset shows through.
And then, at 2min06sec, we see the 3GW mindset in one of the most beautiful displays of Functional Displacement ever. You can displace your enemy in space, by making him be where you want him to be instead of where he wants to be. You can displace him in time, by making him get there later than he needed to be. Or you can displace him functionally, as the All Blacks do here. Pocock is a threat as the second man to the breakdown, where he can force a turn over. It is arguably the reason he is in the team to begin with. (Lest you think I exaggerate, I am convinced the breakdown/turnover laws, worldwide, were changed a few years ago because one man, Heinrich Brussouw, was so expert in his first year at Test level at stealing the opposition's ball - it's that important). So the All Blacks, instead of only displacing him in time and space, displace his function from fetcher to tackler. Now he is no longer a world class threat, he is just an average tackler like the other 29 men on the field - nothing special at all.
Granted, Pocock managed to free himself enough to contest. But then at 3min17sec McCaw displaces him functionally again. And the All Blacks get clean ball with barely any effort at the ruck.
At 3min43sec, we see how a big threat, like Pocock, is effective even though he isn't stealing the ball. McCaw appears to be designated as the Pocock-killer, blocking him and clearing him out any time there's a risk. While the Wallabies lose his turnover skills, the All Blacks lose one of their better ball carriers by committing McCaw to every breakdown. Their maths being Weak Offence > Being Turned Over. This is part of the reason D-Day turned out as a win for the Allies in WWII: The Germans committed serious forces to defending Calais, because the Allies had Patton leading a fake army preparing to invade there, while the Allies had a weaker offence absent Patton. The Germans ended up being weaker on defense in Normandy, and that's where the Allies actually invaded.
While a 3GW mindset sees the All Blacks ruling the world, the Nazis lost WWII to the 2GW Allies. This was not a triumph of 2GW necessarily, but more of another equation: Strategies > Operations > Tactics. Fighting the Americans and Soviets on two separate fronts was never a winning proposition.
And the 4th Generation of Warfare (4GW)? This is less about the how, and more about the what: Attacking the legitimacy of the state itself. Since the tactics of this draw from all of the previous generations, I am going to do the same with rugby and look backwards. Rugby is a 4GW win against the 'state' of soccer. When William Webb Ellis picked up the soccer ball and ran it over the line to score, he destroyed the legitimacy of soccer as a manly sport. Now real men play rugby.
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