Maneuver warfare is a buzz phrase popularized in the 80's by retired Air Force Col John Boyd. The concepts are ageless.
The idea of maneuver warfare is to confuse your enemy and make his own actions appear more and more useless or even counter-productive. To illustrate this, Col Boyd came up with the concept of the 'OODA loop'. This inelegant term stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action.
If you can see what the enemy is doing, orient your activities to that, decide what to do and act faster than he, then his operations will tend to come unglued. Take the German campaign in France, 1940.
The Germans approach the Muerse (sp) river. The French, with their World War One mentality, figure it will take five days for the Germans to bring up siege guns to blast an assault crossing. The Germans 'bring up' 1,500 Stuka dive bombers and cross the same day. The Frogs are flummoxed. Their OODA cycle was totally disrupted and things came totally unravelled on them. It wasn't unusual for French brigade HQ's to pick up their land line phones (The Frog army having eschewed radios) and heard someone on the other end speaking German.
Lee's Chancellorsville campaign and Grant's maneuvering around Vicksburg also had their opponents asking, "which way did they go?"
Maneuver warfare also posits seeking different centers of gravity, rather than strength to attack. If you are fighting a mechanized foe, can a raid or air strike wreck a bridge he depends on for supply? Can a clever use of terrain blunt an enemy or magnify your capabilities? All successful infantry commanders are very serious students of terrain. N.B. Forest comes to mind. Omar Bradley is often thought of as plebian, but he kept a scale map of all of Europe in his trailer on a scale to show promnent terrain features. Crazy George Patton was also a master of maneuver warfare techniques. His "hold 'em by the nose while you kick 'em in the ass!" was a MW manifestation. Patton also was bold enough to take risks that he knew his tactical air power could recoup. Patton made prodigious use of his reconnasiance assets. This all pertains to his campaign in France. After that, MW techniques were hard to apply as the terrain he was in defintely favored the Germans, as did the weather, Montgomery (g) and supply.
Fight smart, is the MW way.
The OODA loop concept is often hard to see in the historical record, because one good iteration means you won't need a second.
Walt