Multicasting refers to the transmission of packets to a group of one or more destinations. It can be very useful in military applications, such as command and control, in which a commander needs to send instructions to a group of tanks, users, or planes. Broadcast is a unique case of multicast, where all the nodes in the network are intended receivers. The broadcast case has been studied quite extensively in the literature, showing that the use of Network Coding (NC) requires fewer data transmissions than Packet Forwarding (PF). That motivates us to explore whether the same result holds true when only a subset of nodes are receivers. In this paper, we developed two linear optimization models that determine lower bounds on the number of required data packet transmissions when sending data in a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) from a single source to multiple receivers. The first model determines the minimum number of required packet transmissions under the assumption that PF is used. The second model assumes that data is distributed using NC. We derive lower bounds for different scenarios while varying the network size, network density, and the number of receivers in the multicast group and compare them with each other. Results indicate that the lower bounds for both PF and NC are almost the same for smaller network sizes (30 nodes or less), small multicast group sizes (5 or lower), or dense networks. However, for larger network sizes, sparser networks, and larger multicast group sizes NC is more advantageous than PF.