This is perhaps the best line: “So unlike Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz, or even Machiavelli, there is no body of work to disseminate, critique and discuss. Despite this, he is constantly cited as being as the best brain behind the so-called transformation of the US military.”

This insight will allow Biblical scholarship to leap forward, as I can think of someone else who left no “body of work” but is “constantly cited as being” behind the “so-called” transformation of the world.

I think this gets to Boyd operating in multiple but related roles – USAF officer, theorist, mentor, bureaucratic change agent. Roles that I think contribute to being greater than the sum of their parts but which can also be measured individually.

We have to recall the historical context in which Boyd operated and the highly antagonistic to outside information culture created by the senior leadership of the armed services at the time. Nagl quoted one of the Army’s own historians in Learning How to Eat Soup With A Knife as saying of MACV under Westmoreland and his patrons in the Pentagon, that ” They’d have listened to the French before they’d have listened to their own Special Forces” ( they didn’t listen to anyone else either – not the CIA, the press, State, the British advisory group or their own ranking dissenters). The same was true of the Air Force which was enamored of strategic bombing and little else. That kind of mental insularity needed to be broken.

Of course, many would say that little has changed in that regard but the top brass no longer can control the information agenda as their forebears in the 1960′s -1980′s once did.

That is fair enough that it was a book review and you have limited time and energy to respond to the abundance of ideas. I can understand you might be a busy man.

However, when you make claims about seeing no merit in certain ideas, or some ideas are dubious, then you need to say why you made those claims, otherwise people can’t judge the validity of your statement. Blogs are a marketplace of ideas after all, and the best ones rise to the top. Who knows, perhaps underneath your opinions you really do have great reasons as to why Boyd’s ideas are dubious or without merit, but for the moment you really haven’t extrapolated on why that is. I imagine zenpundit invited you because you had different ideas to us on this topic. That is great, but at the moment I personally think your argument against Boyd’s ideas is really weak. I dunno about other commentators but I would have expected something with a bit more rigour (am I the only one thinking this?). I’m just not seeing that, as I outlined in my above post.

As to the request to see what ideas Boyd has, why don’t you go check out the other blogs that are on the roundtable, tdaxp for instance has an excellent post up on the history of the ooda loop and the psychological underpinnings of it.

Boyd does seem to provoke comment!

This is far from a perfect review, but I had little time to digest the entire text and that was a .pdf file. I would like to have read the work several times (as I have done with BLH, Strategy, for example) and then given a more measured review. What I aimed to do was to provide my general view of the book, so there was something here to discuss.

I did my best to keep this from being in any way ad hominem. I think what Osinga did was an honest effort. I think Boyd was utterly unaware of his possible legacy. I have a great deal of respect for his “Be Someone or Do Something” advice.

I could have gone through every page of the book, blow by blow and would welcome the opportunity to do so. However, book reviews are limited in terms of acceptable format.

Though I am very happy defending my views on Boyd, there may be more mileage in actually discussing Boyd’s ideas themselves. Folks keep telling me I don’t understand his brilliance, so I would very much like to be let in on the secret.

Again, I stress, in terms of Military Thought, brilliant may not mean useful.

I really enjoyed Osinga’s book. I did, however, find the sections on the science really heavy going (not having any backgound in it). For this reason, I found Certain to Win a more useful book – CTW is the book I pass around to people interested in strategy.

The value of people like Liddell Hart, Lawrence, Fuller etc is that they challenge convention, provide new ways of looking at things, and broach new concepts for others to think about and develop. If the price of this is some exaggeration, selective reading of history and so on, then so be it.

I like reading Livy even though I know that his “history” of the Roman Republic is not accurate – one reads Livy for other reasons. Similarly, I like reading Liddell Hart not for his military history, but for the insights that he offers about strategy. I haven’t read much of what Boyd wrote, but I suspect that the best way to consider his importance or otherwise is not to get bogged down in the detail about whether he was right or wrong on particular points.

I don’t see any reasoning or evidence to support your views.

Your first critique of Boyd in relation where you stated “It should be remembered that Boyd left no definitive published work. He did leave behind a vast pile of slides, papers and considerable personal library, and this is what forms his legacy. So unlike Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz, or even Machiavelli, there is no body of work to disseminate, critique and discuss.” Can be answered that the premier method of information exchange in the military at that time was powerpoint presentations, slides and speeches. It is a shame he didn’t leave behind a book, but that is probably because he was construed by the communication method of his peers. He probably found it best to disseminate and discuss his thoughts in that manner. Secondly, his ideas were up to debate, that was part of his presentations. He welcomed people trying to shoot him down. Witness one of his acolytes Pierre Sprey to whom he referenced as “Buzz Saw” because that is what he did to Boyd’s ideas.

You stated “Despite this, he is constantly cited as being as the best brain behind the so-called transformation of the US military. The main problem I have with Osinga’s work is that this is just accepted, with no examination of the evidence that Boyd is worthy of all the accolades that are heaped upon him.” The problem I think you have here, you think Boyd is stuck in some ideological stone. Ideas aren’t like that, they move, they influence others. Boyd was an influential node on an ideological network at the time. His ideas mutated, or influenced other ideas and people. If you were to trace back some of the major ideological transformations in the U.S. warfighting (going from todays COIN, to EBO, to 4GW, to Boyd, to further back) they would eventually pass back through Boyd. That doesn’t mean Boyd was some be-all and end-all of U.S. strategy, it means he definitely was part of the ideological chance.

Now, this is part of your post I have a problem with. You stated: “I found myself writing “so what” in the margins far too many times. Those who are convinced of the efficacy of the OODA loop, will find much to aid in the defence of their position, while those of us who see no merit in the idea, are left un-swayed.” You ask So what? I ask Why? Why, and to what, did you say so what? Why are you not convinced of the OODA loop. You need to back up your assertions with reasoning and evidence. The onus is on you, since you are making the claim. There is plenty of reasoning and psychological studies on decision making loops to make Boyds theory quite relevant (Dietrich Dorner’s ‘The Logic of Failure’ or Klein’s ‘Sources of Power’ come to mind).

In your next paragraph you do the same thing: “is of dubious merit to either a student or practitioner of the military profession … this insight did not translate to an understanding of land warfare and strategy in general.”

Why is it of dubious merit, and why doesn’t it translate to landware or strategy in general? I almost feel embarrassed asking this, one would think you would add reasons and evidence to your claims.

In relation to the Liddel-Hart claim … I haven’t read the J.P. Harris book, but I have read the Bond and Mearsheimer. Bond’s main critique against Liddel-Hart, if I remember rightly, was of his mistake to favour defensive warfare against Blitzkrieg, when at one stage he was a champion of blitzkrieg. With Bond’s work I ask “so what?” too. Liddel-Hart got it wrong. That wouldn’t be the first time. Strategy and tactics is more about adapting to circumstances than looking for some handed down, perfected stone tablet of SOPs to run off. The Mearsheimer’s book ‘Liddel-Hart and the Weight of History’ is a good one. You allude to one of Mearsheimer’s aims in the book of Liddel-Harts (LH from now on) role in the policy-making process. That is a nice tangent, are you trying to allude that Boyd was the same and we should be wary of his influence on policy? If so, nice argument by analogy.

This paragraph: “Add to this any informed analysis of the “Strategy of the Indirect Approach,” and it would seem that Boyd was greatly influenced by at least one thinker of dubious merit.” is a whopper. Firstly, no doubt Boyd was influenced by LH, however he only quotes LH once, in one brief, patterns of conflict to be exact, and mentions the indirect approach twice, in hundreds of slides. Secondly, if LH was dubious, perhaps Sun Tzu and Napoleon and other strategists were also dubious since LH idea of the indirect approach was influenced by them. It would seem the entire realm of strategy is built on a house of cards.

I’ve probably rattled on enough. Regarding, the author leaving out Allenby and Simpkins influence. You should have really entitled your post “argumentum ad ignorantiam”. Your whole argument against Boyd is an argument from ignorance. You believe that lack of evidence of Boyds readings of Allenby, Simpkins and others constitute proof that Boyd doesn’t know what he is talking about. That isn’t proof, it’s a logical fallacy. I sat here and laughed for a good five minutes when you mentioned that military thought should be the product of logic and empirical evidence as it was clear you have no idea what those two terms mean as you have provided no evidence to some of your claims, and confuse lack of evidence for proof of your position.

Oh, and lastly, an attack on Boyd as a quasi-cult leader? Are you serious, that is all you have, perhaps you have heard of Ad Hominem as well?

I was also surprised to see Liddell Hart cited as a major influence. Osinga does say that LH was not trying to do sound history, but rather to write a polemic that would prevent a rerun of the Western Front attritional battles. However, how does one generates a viable theory based on defective history? I found myself wondering what an out-of-history John Boyd could have told Douglas Haig that would have been of value in 1916, or 1917 or 1918? That is a rhetorical question, but I ask it in all seriousness and I do not have an answer. Would he only be able to say, we should have never gotten ourselves into this strategic cul-de-sac in the first place? Or that the half-trained Kitchener armies should somehow be aware of and be able to execute stosstrupp tactics? Are we stuck saying Boydian ideas are only workable in “Boydian situations” employing “Boydian militaries”? If you are stuck in the wrong kind of situation and/or with the wrong kind of military are you doomed?

Yes.

I welcomed Wilf’s participation because I knew he was going to challenge many preconceptions, spark debate and provide a very strong contrast with some of the other reviewers. His military background and theoretical interests are also very different from John Boyd’s and Colonel Osinga’s. A clash of views here is expected to be lively ( yet remain respectful).