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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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Disembodied Floating Clausewitz Head

Genghis John

Recent outbreaks in the ongoing Cold War between advocates of Maj.Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, KPB and advocates of Col. John Boyd, USAF (ret) coincided with other outbreaks between supporters of Sun Wu and Clausewitz. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that all such outbreaks would vanish into the maw of the Dread Zenpundit Comment Filter (DZCF), the same vortex that swallows <p>, <br / >, and other innocent HTML tags, never to be seen again. Yet, if these debates must rage until every tag destroyed by the DZCF is paid for by yet another tag marking up yet another piece of rhetorical excess, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

I won’t attempt to reconcile Sun-tzu and Clausewitz. That calling was fulfilled by the late Michael Handel in his Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought with an aplomb that is far beyond my poor power to add or detract. However, I will second Adam Elkus’ efforts in pointing out where the frameworks of Clausewitz and Boyd coincide.

As a long-time fan of the Utah Jazz, I’m used to unlikely tandems of Carls and Johns, though the Carl in one particular tandem changed the original spelling of his name:

Malone said his original birth name was Carl Malone, not Karl.

The way he tells the story, his grandfather used to tell him he’d be famous one day. So did an elderly woman who was a family friend. The woman suggested Malone change the spelling of his first name to Karl because it would look better on an autograph. And it happened. His mother changed the name (“Nowadays, it would take an act of Congress to do that,” he said) and years later Malone got famous.

Karl Malone AKA The Mailman was a 6’9″ redneck from the backwoods of Louisiana. He was the most muscular postal employee who ever lived.

Karl Malone

He almost didn’t join the NBA because he wanted to become a truck driver instead. He once found inner peace during the 1998 Finals by weighing trucks with the Illinois State Highway Patrol. Karl Malone was particularly famous for his mastery of the English language. My English teacher in junior high always told the class that her ideal job would be Malone’s English coach.

Karl Malone, like Julius Caesar, was a thing of wonder so vast that he had to speak about Karl Malone in the third person e.g. “This is Karl Malone speaking for Karl Malone. I have every right to say what I want.” or “This is Karl Malone saying what he thinks” or “As much as some of you guys might not like it, how is Karl Malone supposed to feel? When I feel good, I play good. Really, that’s the bottom line. It’s not really how Karl Malone feels.” or the infinitely recursive ”Karl Malone do what Karl Malone gotta do.”

My personal favorite Malonism was “The pebble has been snatched from my hand, and it’s time for me to leave, like Kung Fu. I must move on…continue to live in Utah, unless I get hit by a beer truck or something.”

There is deep Zen there.

John Stockton

The other member of the tandem was John Stockton AKA Basketball John AKA the Pasty Gansta. John Stockton was a 6’1″ Catholic schoolboy from Spokane, WA. Basketball John was infamously taciturn. He had the standing heartrate of a dead man and huge gripping hands. He shunned the spotlight as if it burned like a laser. When his number was retired and, later, when he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, fans were surprised by his unexpected eloquence:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxJcBjxV-jY]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCsABLjM6EI]

He managed to do it despite the blight of Zeke, a basketball weapon of mass (self-) destruction.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, a dream realized when a large black man and a small white man joined hands to develop a deep simpatico that made them into a single entity known as “Stockton-to-Malone”. John Stockton was the greatest point guard who ever lived. Karl Malone was the greatest power forward who ever lived. Stockton would pass the ball, becoming the all-time NBA assist leader, and Karl Malone would put it in the basket, becoming the second leading scorer in NBA history. They played together for 18 seasons, from 1985-2003.  They were tough, missing a combined 37 games to injury out of the 2,948 they could have played in.

In Life

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c34FunRSbzA]

In Bronze

In Victory

If one tandem of Karl and John can bridge a divide as yawning as the U.S. racial divide in pursuit of something trivial, surely the narrower differences between another Carl and John can be bridged in pursuit of something imperative. Sayre’s Law states that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” The corollary to this law is often quoted as, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low”. As the outcomes of actual politics and wars are at stake in the internecine wars between purveyors of the magic bullet and appliers of sustained mass, the cosmetic politics and wars of trivia must be quelled.

Here’s another stab:

1. Life is dominated by the trinity of power, control, and purpose.
2. Power is the possibility of friendly conditions.
3. Control is conditions friendly to aspiration.
4. Purpose is an aspiration of how life should be.
5. “Life is one damned thing after another.” said Elbert Hubbart. This is how the mind wants reality to be: sequential.
6. The mind desperately wants life to rigidly follow the progression from POWER → CONTROL → PURPOSE as if it was the progression from 1 → 2 → 3.
7. If life unfolded perfectly, an equal measure of power would be converted into an equal measure of control in order to achieve an equal measure of purpose.
8. While, power is always converted into control to achieve purpose, it is rarely perfectly sequential like the progression from 1 → 2 → 3.
9. The intensity of power, control, and purpose vary and even diverge because, in reality, life is many damned things after many damned things. Life is cumulative.
10. The mind must slice through this accumulation by separating the necessary from the superfluous with the razor of parsimony.
    

    Reason for parsimony

11. Parsimony follows three steps:
    1. Gather necessary observations from the environment
    2. Store necessary observations for future reference
    3. Throw away observations after they cease to be necessary
12. Parsimony operates on two different levels: strategy and tactics.
13. Two models illustrate the relationship between strategy and tactics: the Clausewitzian Trinity and the Boydian OODA Loop.
14. The Clausewitzian Trinity has three elements:
    1. primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force;
    2. the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and
    3. its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.
15. The Clausewitzian Trinity can be expanded as a trinity formed by three broader elements:
    1. the tacit: primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force, broadly equivalent to the knowable and foreseeable
    2. the contingent:the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam, broadly equivalent to the unknown and unforeseen
    3. the explicit: its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason, broadly equivalent to the known and foreseen
16. Behold Boyd’s Observe → Orient → Act Loop (OOA Loop):
    

    Automatic OODA Loop

    This is the tacit loop. It is largely automatic and even quasi-non-linear. It draws on Orientation without slowing down for linear consciousness.

    

    Orientation

17. Orientation is the source of the tacit within the Clausewitzian Trinity. Within the narrower scope of war, orientation is the source of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force as well as other tacit forces.
18. Behold the Observe  → Orient → Decide → Act Loop:
    

    Reflective OODA

    This is the explicit loop, the full flowering of the minds natural bias for sequential thinking. It draws on Decision:

    

    Decision

19. Decision is the source of the explicit within the Clausewitzian Trinity. Within the narrow scope of war, decision is the source of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason as well as other explicit forces.
20. Combined, the tacit OOA Loop and the explicit OODA Loop form Boyd’s combined OODA Loop:
    

    OODA Loop

21. Both the tacit loop and the explicit loop interact with the outside world:
    

    The Outside World and You

    The outside world is the source of the contingent, the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam.

22. The path from power to control to purpose follows the OOA Loop and the OODA Loop. It is 95% subject to the whims of the tacitness of orientation and the contingency of the outside world and 5% to the dictates of the explicitness of decision. Yet 95% of attention falls on the explicitness of decision and 5% on the tacitness of orientation and the contingency of the outside world.
23. Action, observation, and their interaction with the outside world is the basis of tactics. A tactic is basically the “one damned thing” or one of the “many damned things” that happen after each other. “One damned thing” or tactic is a complete flow from action to observation.
24. Tactics have the tendency to accumulate from many damned small things into one big damned thing. It’s the purpose of strategy to attempt to channel this accumulation into a semblance of a sequence, where it seems as if reality really is one damned thing after another building in a straight line from power to control to purpose.
25. Much of this may be explicitly controlled by that pole of the Clausewitzian Trinity and the explicit decision phase of the OODA. However, most will be tacit or contingent, the product of unconsciousness or fate.
26. Strategy is always present. There is no situation where there is an absence of strategy. There is only the experience of good strategy and bad strategy, much of which comes down to tacitness or contingency that ranges from the barely controllable to the absolutely uncontrollable.
27. Strategy is a balancing. It balances past, present, and future; power, control, and purpose; and the tacit, the contingent, and the explicit.
28. Much of strategy is accumulated by accident. Strategy is often a post hoc attempt to rationalize tacit assumptions and contingent events into an explicit pattern to make the whole thing seem like a product of conscious choice.
29. The process of forming strategy is largely an attempt to move a collection of loosely connected notions from decision to orientation, from the explicit to the tacit, to make the conscious notion an unconscious guide to action.
30. Strategy is successful when the tactical path moves from the OODA Loop to the OOA Loop.
31. Knowledge that encourages specialization, division, and disintegration grows at an exponential rate while knowledge that encourages generalization, unification, and integration grows at a linear rate.
32. This might be expanded further as trivia proliferates exponentially while the big picture proliferates linearly.
33. More narrowly, this becomes tactical understanding increases exponentially while strategic understanding increases linearly.
34. Humans are naturally drawn to tactical thinking over strategic thinking. The considerations of the moment tyrannize the considerations of the epoch. People usually are penny wise but pound foolish. They can’t see the forest for the trees but I suspect that even if the tree they were so intently studying fell in the forest, they still wouldn’t hear it.
35. Strategic understanding tends to fluctuate between periods of equilibrium and massive disarray.
36. The narrative underlying a strategic equilibrium, whether it’s called asabiya, the political formula, the national myth, the social consensus, or a paradigm, tends to be eroded and fundamentally undermined by increasing tacticalization. The strategic benefits derived from the original narrative, often the product of a fortuitous confluence of inputs, tend to diminish over time, driving people to increased tacticalization as a partial side-effect.
37. Tacticalization is driven by the fundamental human bias toward overinvestment in specialized thinking at the expense of general thinking.
38. Tacticalization is driven by a combination of the need to protect a parochial interest by erecting barriers against challengers real and potential, the habits of mind conditioned by immersion in a particular social niche, the need for specialized skills, and the imperatives of immediate necessity.
39. Tacticalization tends to build, creating increased complexity, until it exceeds the mental computing capacity of a group available at the time, and then crisis and even collapse follows.
40. Crisis is a massive razor that cuts through a thick accumulation and imposes simplicity on superfluous complexity. It makes straight the paths of society. Often times the outcome of this slicing is random and undesirable, driven more by the pul of the tacit orientation and contingent reality poles of the Clausewitzian Trinity rather than the weaker pull of the explicit decision pole.

No one expects Batman
No one expects Batman with a light saber
No one expects Batman with a light saber fighting a shark

SHARK!!!

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Re-posted from Zenpundit.com at the request of my co-author Lexington Green:

The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War

This post has been a long time coming.

A while back, we had a a symposium at Chicago Boyz to discuss and debate the superb book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans Osinga. It was a great discussion from which I learned far more about the ideas of the iconoclastic military theorist John Boyd than I had ever previously considered. Not everyone involved was an admirer of John Boyd, a few were initially skeptical and we had one certified critic ( though I had tried to recruit several more). Overall, it was the kind of exchange that makes the blogosphere special as a medium when it is at it’s intellectual best.

Shortly thereafter, via Dan of tdaxp I was approached by the publisher of Nimble Books, W.F. Zimmerman, who happened to be a military history buff and who was interested in working our loose online discussion of Dr. Osinga’s prodigious tome into a book. Initially, I was somewhat dubious but I warmed to the project at the urging of tdaxp and Lexington Green, and agreed to serve as the Editor and “herder of cats” in a project that would involve a large number of contributors with very different backgrounds and some fairly dense and esoteric material on strategic theory to digest and make comprehensible to a general reader.

A wonderful experience.

We had an excellent roster of contributors for The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War – Dr. Chet Richards, Daniel Abbott, Shane Deichman, Frank Hoffman, Adam Elkus, Lexington Green, Thomas Wade and Dr. Frans Osinga, who contributed several essays. Dr. Thomas Barnett sets the intellectual tone in the foreword after which the authors brought a wide range of professional perspectives to bear – cognitive psychology, military history, physics, strategy, journalism and, of course, blogging – in a series of articles that tried to explain the essence and dimensions of John Boyd’s contribution to strategic thought. Hopefully, we succeeded in creating an interesting and useful primer but the readers will be the ultimate judges, free to dispute our conclusions and offer contending arguments of their own.

I’d like to think that Colonel Boyd would have wanted it that way.

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This post by Adam Elkus represents the final, formal, contribution to this Roundtable and fittingly, after much discussion about grand strategy and John Boyd’s discourse, Elkus applies Boyd to our thorniest foreign policy problem – Iraq.

Analysis: Boyd, Iraq and Strategy

by Adam Elkus

How do the theories of John Boyd speak to America’s most important international security issue, the war in Iraq? This is no idle question—if Boyd is as revolutionary a strategist as claimed, what do his ideas say about the war? Or rather, what does the war say about his ideas? I will examine Boyd’s influence on network-centric warfare and the strategy of “shock and awe,” as well as the Boydian subtext inherent in larger geostrategic issues.

“Shock and Awe”

The operational phase of the campaign was heavily inspired by Boydian theory. US forces isolated, paralyzed, and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s government in record-breaking speed. Many observers–especially retired military analysts on the major cable news networks–had predicted a quagmire. Despite my own (continuing) opposition to the war, it was surprising—and exhilarating—to see a murderous tyrant’s apparatus of oppression rapidly smashed to bits with a minimum of American casualties.

The intellectual architect of the victory was Harlan Ullman, author of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Ullman’s doctrine was heavily effects-based, using rapid and overwhelming force to attack the enemy’s cognition. Every bombing, tank thrust, or combined arms attack was designed to sever the psychological, organizational, and technological bond that maintained the power of the Hussein regime. Although “Shock and Awe” is seen in the public eye as emblematic of the Bush administration’s hubris, it was the perfect tool for destroying Baathist Iraq.

Authoritarian regimes are not known for their adaptability, and Iraq was no exception. Hussein denied his subordinates the autonomy to act on their own or report accurate information, keeping them in constant fear of purge. Worse yet, any politician or soldier that had managed to rise to the top of the Baathist heap did so because of patronage, not ability. There was no way such a paranoid, authoritarian, and brittle system could survive the violent shock that “Shock and Awe” put it through. One can compare the effect to that of German blitzkrieg on Stalinist Russia in 1941.

Although the greater strategic literature of effects-based operations (EBOs) makes little reference to Boyd, it is not hard to see where the ideas originated. Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict synthesized the airpower and maneuver warfare theorists and tied their strategies to ancient Eastern theorists such as Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi. The end result was a strategy where force was designed to isolate, paralyze, and collapse the enemy instead of completely destroying his army. As Robert Corum and Grant Hammond recount in their biographies, Boyd’s tireless briefings created the intellectual environment for the military to create Boydian-derived (and frequently overlapping) strategic concepts such as EBO, “Shock and Awe,” and network-centric warfare (NCW).

Destruction and Creation

As Ralph Peters notes, the terrorists and guerrillas that oppose us in Iraq are even more “net-centric” than we are, with a fraction of our resources. Their networks have had tremendous success in targeting both Iraqi and American physical, mental, and moral centers of gravity with sophisticated military and psychological operations. Why is this?

Noah Shachtman’s article in Wired recounts some of the more common failings of these theories in regards to counterinsurgency. They are exclusively state-centric, they apply little to fighting insurgents, criminals, and terrorists, and they provide excuses for the Pentagon to sate the gluttony of defense contractors. Yet the real problem is that strategies like NCW, EBO, and “Shock and Awe” fail the most crucial Boydian test–they are all about destruction. They do not provide a means for, as Boyd would say, “vitality and growth.”

As Rupert Smith recounts in The Utility of Force, to win on today’s battlefield, the surest way to lose is to focus solely on destroying the enemy. Many (chief among them the tireless public diplomacy advocate Matt Armstrong) argue that the use of all segments of national power, military, economic, and political—is necessary for success. America has traditionally excelled at efficient, machine-tooled destruction, and failed at conducting the kind of holistic political-military struggle necessary for counterinsurgency.

Although the Bush’s administration’s epic failure in post-conflict planning has justly been savaged, there are many aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that would be familiar to a Kennedy/Eisenhower-era Cold War hand like Edward Lansdale. We blunder about with little knowledge of the long-term consequences of our actions, or even how those actions fit into vaguely-defined grand strategy. We back lawless “open-source militias” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, but to what end? What purpose?

Defense thought is also increasingly compartmentalized. Peruse any of the major military journals and you’ll see a blizzard of differing strategies, strategic concepts, and position papers, all which seem to exist in isolation to each other. Perhaps Boyd’s greatest strength was not the originality of his ideas, but his skill as a synthesizer, weaving the disparate strands of defense knowledge into a coherent worldview consistent from the tactical to grand strategic levels. Anyone familiar with American strategic history knows just how rare such synthesizers are.

The leading task for future generations of American strategists is to produce another grand vision for continued success and survival. Many have attempted this great challenge. Only time will tell which dreamer proves to be Boyd’s intellectual heir.

Originally posted at Rethinking Security.

Download Dr. Osinga’s Dissertation on Colonel John Boyd here (1.7 MB pdf).

Buy Science Strategy and War from Routledge.

From Amazon.

Previous Roundtable Posts

Introduction

Wilf Owen

Dan tdaxp

Dr. Chet Richards

Shane Deichman

Historyguy99

Zenpundit

Lexington Green

Author’s reply by Colonel Frans Osinga.

Click here to view all posts in the discussion.

POSTSCRIPT BY ZENPUNDIT:

I’d like to take a moment and thank Dr. Osinga and our reviewers – Wilf Owen, Dan of tdaxp, Dr. Chet Richards, Shane Deichman, Historyguy99, Lexington Green and Adam Elkus along with Jonathan, the site administrator of Chicago Boyz who was always at the ready with technical assistance. The roundtable was a great success because of your efforts and participation and I’ll count the experience as one of the high points of my time blogging. I would like to close this with words of wisdom from Colonel John Boyd, as recounted by Martin Edwin Anderson:

“One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you’re going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go.” [Boyd] raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised the other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something – something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”

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My struggle with Boyd

by Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD

Boyd’s work is titled A Discourse on Winning and Losing and the series of reviews and comments form exactly the sort of intellectual interaction Boyd sought to inspire. Judging by the quality of the reviews and comments it’s been a very fruitful week that has propelled the Boyd debate into a wider arena and has, I hope, given it a renewed impetus. It has highlighted how we should approach Boyd’s work as well as areas for further research.

Somewhat to my surprise there was only one seriously critical review that questioned Boyd’s work, which was immediately hit upon in about 10 comments. I hope, and I believe Boyd actually would enjoy and encourage, that at some point we’ll see a substantial effort which in Popperian fashion aims to critique either Boyd’s work or my explanation/interpretation of his ideas, all in the spirit of the ‘dialectic engine’, the term Boyd often used for describing his comprehensive OODA loop. The debate can use someone who can be to Boyd what Mearsheimer has been to Liddell Hart.

In fact, my own research on Boyd started out in that vein, but never got there. In stead of penning a ‘rebuttal’ to specific roundtable posts, perhaps I may absolve my obligation to conclude the roundtable discussion by adding some words concerning my own struggle with Boyd.

I first came across Boyd’s name during the 1980s when, as a young cadet at the military academy, I (had to) read about this ‘new’ maneuver warfare school of thought. In the post Desert Storm doctrinal debates in NATO working groups I met Buster McCrabb, then at the faculty of the USAF School of Advanced Airpower Studies, who handed me a set of Boyd’s slides (Patterns of Conflict). It did not make much sense to me and I could not quite see what the fuss was about. In 1998-1999 I was fortunate to study at the SAAS and attend an elective on Boyd by Grant Hammond who was then working on his Boyd biography. Armed with these lectures Boyd’s slides began to gain meaning and depth, resulting in a chapter on Boyd as part of a larger paper in which I lined up a variety of strategists in the context of complexity theory.

Back in the Netherlands, as the Director of Strategy and Air Power Studies of the Netherlands Defence College, I started to expand this chapter with the aim to develop a critique, as I had the impression that the ‘rapid OODA loop’ idea was somewhat limited and that Grant’s book was somewhat devoid of critical notes (which he admits by the way). It had already struck me that Boyd’s personal papers hardly contained political science literature, nor did I see much in terms of air power and nuclear strategy. Moreover, I did not see all that much on decision making theory which I considered odd in light of my understanding of the OODA loop as a model of the decision making process. I therefore drafted a 60 pp. paper in which I lined up most major concepts concerning decision making such as Allison’s models I-II-III, group think, Klein’s RPD model, etc., and examined what others had to say concerning the influence of stress, experience and culture on decision making. In addition I looked for other cybernetic models en vogue in the past 3 decades in decision making theory, all this in order to assess the validity of the OODA loop model. Meanwhile, Grant Hammond came over to deliver several lectures on Boyd to my students. My research (and Grant commented gracefully on a whole series of immature drafts) and Hammond’s lectures brought home to me three issues. First, after 150 pp of writing, I could not find that much fault with the comprehensive OODA loop and saw many similarities with other cybernetic models. Second, there was much more in Boyd’s work than ‘only’ the rapid OODA loop idea. Thirdly, if I still intended to develop a well-founded critique, I first needed to explain Boyd because at that point there was no solid accepted academic interpretation of his work. This was during the summer of 2001.

By that time I was seconded to the Clingendael Institute of International Relations as the MoD Research Fellow. 9/11, OEF and OIF for some reason required my attention and only during the summer of 2003 could I seriously pick up the Boyd research (which had been accepted as subject of my dissertation). By then I had discovered that any proper attempt to explain his work would require explaining his ‘formative factors’. As any dissertation has distinct limits as far as length is concerned, it quickly transpired that explanation and not critique would be the main aim of my research (and the first 150 pp were therefore binned).

That brings me to the book. My discussion of his formative factors is somewhat imbalanced in the sense that it does perhaps not convey the depth of this study of military history, in comparison to his study of various scientific literatures (the Routledge edition is shorter on the science bit than the thesis by the way). I chose to highlight the latter because military history is actually the most common – and more straightforward – source that strategic theorists derive their arguments from. Moreover, the discussion of Patterns of Conflict would reveal Boyd’s deep study of history and strategy anyway. Finally, I had the impression that Boyd gleaned quite a bit of original insights from in particular the scientific zeitgeist, but also that those insights came from studies not all that familiar to most people, and therefore in need of some elaborate explanation.

Initially I limited myself to those studies that were explicitly annotated and those that Boyd explicitly referred to (buying most of the books second hand at Powell’s). It struck me how significant and deep the scientific developments have been during the years that Boyd developed his ideas and how many cross references one can find among the books Boyd read. I had problems with understanding information theory but secondary sources helped out with that. A fruitful visit to the archives at the USMC University at Quantico underpinned my suspicion that Boyd was ‘deep’ into science from the first moment on, and that in his subsequent explorations he continuously found confirmation of his initial impressions that he laid out in the essay Destruction and Creation and A New Conception of Air to Air Combat. It also highlighted that the influence of science grew over the years in comparison to military history.

In the end I had to hurry finalizing the thesis as I learned in September 2004 I was to be posted to HQ SACT, the NATO HQ in Norfolk Virginia in January 2005. The thesis is therefore marred by a variety of editorial glitches. The subsequent Routledge edition has benefited from a major editorial (and painfully frustrating) process lasting about a year. It is shorter, more concise and it allowed me to add some relevant comments concerning Boyd’s scientific sources. For both the thesis and the shorter book I want to acknowledge my considerable debts to Grant Hammond, Chet Richards, Barry Watts, Dick Safranski and Bill Lind.

My own view of Boyd – briefly – is that (albeit biased) he developed a very impressive, rich and coherent set of ideas, often with elements of profound novelty, with a wide range of applicability (see for instance the presentation of Chet Richard’s et al on Boyd/4GW and the Iraqi insurgency, but also the various presentations/papers on the DNI site where Boyd’s ideas are applied in an increasing number of environments). It is many things and refuses to be captured by one-liners or simple icons. In my presentation at the Boyd Conference last July I tried to convey a sense of ‘what’ Boyd’s work is in the following slide.

A Discourse is:

An epistemological investigation
A military history & search for patterns of winning and losing
An argument against:
– Attritionist mindset
– Deterministic thinking & predictability
– Techno-fetishism
A rediscovery of the mental/moral dimensions of war
A philosophy for command and control
A redefinition of strategy
A search for the essence of strategic interaction
A plea for organizational learning and adaptability
An argument on strategic thinking

It must rank among the few general theories of war. He is certainly one of the prime contemporary strategists. Sure, his is not the final word on strategy. Indeed, he left an unfinished legacy, in line with his view that understanding war – a social behaviour with evolving features – requires a constant multidisciplinary search for improved and updated insights. Moreover, one will struggle if one wants to distil from Boyd’s work distinct ‘how-to’ guidelines for campaign planning. As with all major theorists and intellectual innovators there are also distinct ‘hooks’ in his work for developing critique. But as a guide on what sort of intellectual attitude and activity is required for understanding war and strategy I’ve found him invaluable. Trying to understand him was (and remains) a challenging but equally rewarding education. It has significantly broadened my intellectual horizon. Boyd made me think. And that was his whole point because A Discourse on Winning and Losing at heart is about ‘intellectual evolution and growth’, as he wrote in the margins of a number of books.

As with Liddell Hart or Clausewitz, a period will come when his ideas will be dismissed, completed or improved upon. Areas for further research might be gleaned from my various shortfalls. I did not explore to the full the literature on business and management, as I could not find that many direct references to that literature in Boyd’s work, nor have I properly assessed whether Boyd interpreted the various scientific literatures correctly. Although I believe Boyd was certainly not alone in applying concepts gleaned from the sciences to human behaviour, perhaps he sometimes overstepped the bounds, but I have not explored that either. Neither have I examined fully to what extend Boyd was unduly selective or biased in his study of military history (although at times I’ve hinted at it).

Last week’s roundtable itself however is indicative of the rising stature of Boyd, a decade after his death. This roundtable also confirms once more my view that, among the Western nations, the US harbours the liveliest intellectual environment for debating security and strategy related issues. From my perspective it was very gratifying – indeed flattering – to read all the positive comments. But I am also sincerely modest. The roundtable was first and foremost about Boyd’s intellectual legacy, and I consider my book akin to the Sawyer or Cleary introductions to Sun Tzu; they serve as texts to tease out meaning of sometimes rather cryptic sentences and paragraphs handed to us by greater minds. As I’ve told Chet Richards, Dick Safranski, Grant Hammond, Bill Lind and Frank Hoffman, what pleased me most about their positive reviews of my book in the past two of years were their remarks that I’ve done justice to Boyd’s intellectual efforts. That was my main aim but also my prime concern throughout the process.

Boyd generously shared his ideas, liberally handing out his presentations, all with the intent to educate. He would probably have loved the blogs. Hence, although I am probably shooting myself in the foot with this, but in the spirit of Boyd, I have attached a pdf copy of my dissertation from which the book has been derived. Let’s spread the meme of Boyd’s ideas.

Any questions/comments? You can contact me at: fransosinga@yahoo.com

Download Dr. Osinga’s Dissertation on Colonel John Boyd here (1.7 MB pdf).

Buy Science Strategy and War from Routledge.

From Amazon.

Previous Roundtable Posts

Introduction

Wilf Owen

Dan tdaxp

Dr. Chet Richards

Shane Deichman

Historyguy99

Zenpundit

Lexington Green

Click here to view all posts in the discussion.

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Why Didn’t Boyd Write a Book?

The study of the life and thought of John Boyd has taken a major step forward with the publication of Col. Osinga’s Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. The earlier books are not superseded. Grant Hammond’s The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security is an overview, and probably the best introduction, with both biography and an overview of the ideas. Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War is more of a straight biography, focusing on the remarkable man more than the remarkable ideas. Where Coram drilled down on Boyd’s life and personality, Osinga has drilled down on Boyd’s intellectual foundations and his ideas. Osinga’s book is the more challenging read, though it is written in a nicely plain and comprehensible style, given the rather dense set of ideas that Boyd formulated and conveyed. Osinga’s book has a further strength. He is respectful but not worshipful of Col. Boyd. Rather than saying “Boyd was the greatest strategic thinker since Sun Tzu”, Col. Osinga sets out what Boyd’s strategic thought actually was, and lets the reader decide where he belongs (if at all) on the “top ten list”.

I strongly suggest that anyone with the remotest interest in Boyd buy and read Col Osinga’s book.

Col. Osinga’s book suggests so many connections to other writers, to other issues, and to contemporary concerns, that I could have written a lengthy review essay just based on my many underlinings and marginal notes. Time and space will limit me instead to a few observations on one sub-topic.

Boyd presents an analytic challenge. He was not an author. He did not write a book. He was nonetheless the originator and presenter of ideas and theories and arguments. He read a very large number of books, carefully, mining them for ideas, to fortify or challenge intuitions he had about conflict, strategy, winning and losing. Over time Boyd moved his reading more and more into realms paralleling his apparent core interest, away from the realm of military history and theory, taking the idea of strategy to high levels of abstraction. Boyd looked for analogies, for insights which could only be gained standing outside the particular area of interest. In fact he believed that this process of “standing outside” was the only way to understand the system or subject under consideration.

Boyd organized his theories and arguments into briefings, not into books and articles, as an academic or journalist writer would be expected to do. The written residuum of these briefings is Boyd’s slides. But the slides are only the skeleton of a briefing. Boyd himself gave life to the slides. Boyd’s briefings were dynamic in all senses. Boyd was speaking and arguing, responding to the audience’s questions, or even their expressions of irritation or agreement that may not have been voiced. The process was interactive, and as the briefings were given over and over, they were refined. Boyd’s presentation slides evolved over time, and were subject to change at any time, though as he refined his presentations they firmed up. But, in theory, none of it was necessarily fixed.

Some of the contributors and commentators to this roundtable have offered the thought that it is “too bad” that Boyd never wrote a book. In a sense, Col. Osinga has provided the “bookification” of Boyd’s final work, so if we want “Boyd’s book”, we now have the nearest approximation that is probably achievable. As Col. Osinga notes, there will be no more Boyd briefings. So, a compilation of what can be preserved is very much worth having.

However, the absence of a book from Boyd is not an oversight, nor is it to be regretted. Nothing Boyd ever said or did causes me to think he had any serious interest in writing a book. Time and energy are finite. The opportunity cost of writing a book, and all the attendant hassle, was not worth it to Boyd. He was doing something else.

Boyd had a famous speech he would make to people he encountered professionally whom he respected, which went, more or less like this:

…one day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go that way and you can do something – something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. …If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?

I suspect that to Boyd, writing a book was more a “being” than “doing”. Why? Surely writing a book, adding to the stock of ideas, setting those ideas out in the world in a coherent and permanent way is “doing”?

But what Boyd actually did – read, think, argue, and make live, in-person briefings — was more consistent with his own theories and his own ethic of “doing”. This is true for several reasons.

First, Boyd was theoretically committed to “living, open-ended” systems. As Boyd put it:

Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all taken together, show that we cannot determine the character of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder – mental as well as physical. Point: We need an external environment or outside world, to define ourselves and maintain organic integrity, otherwise we experience dissolution/disintegration – i.e., we come unglued.
 
Living systems are open systems; closed systems are non-living systems. Point: If we don’t communicate with the outside world – to gain information for knowledge and understanding as well as matter and energy for sustenance – we die out to become non-discerning and uninteresting parts of that world.

By this analysis, once a book is written, it is dead. It is already superseded before the first copy is printed. Hence, Boyd kept his briefing process open. The Boyd briefing was a living and evolving thing in a way a putative “Boyd book” could never have been. Col. Osinga specifically notes Boyd’s “deliberate refusal to ‘finish’ a briefing.” The briefings were never set in stone, as a book would have to be. Again, this is not to say there is no value in writing and reading books. Boyd read lots of books. But he did not write one himself because he was doing something different from what book-writers do.

Second, a related point, Boyd may have realized that if he wrote a book it would have become a sort of “Koran”. Once something is down in black and white, it takes on a life of its own. It becomes canonical, an ur-text to be consulted for wisdom. Boyd was surely aware of his intensely charismatic style of leadership. He gathered a remarkable group of talented people as friends, students and allies. I suspect that he wanted to avoid to the extent possible a cult of personality, where his dynamic and living approach would harden into an orthodoxy. Some of this process seems to be happening in the writing of William Lind. For all the value of Lind’s thinking and analysis, Lind has a “closed” and doctrinaire tone very much at odds with what I understand to be the Boydian approach. For example, Lind’s enunciation of a small number of books as “the canon” is profoundly un-Boydian. Boyd’s book-pile was ceiling-high, and he found analogies and metaphors and insights in books seemingly unrelated to military matters. There is not a fixed canon to understand strategy, nor can there be. Valuable books are where you find them, and they come along all the time, and the ocean of books is vast.

Just as the old German manuals had stamped on the examples provided “not a formula!”, so Boyd’s ideas cannot be applied in cookie-cutter fashion. Had Boyd written a book, the temptation to do this would be inevitable, since the “master” could be cited for this or that purpose, and legalist wrangling would replace analysis of real facts. As it is, the reduction of Boyd’s thinking to “Boyd = (simple version) of OODA loop” is already unfortunately well advanced. Hopefully, Col. Osinga’s book will help to arrest that trend.

Third, I will venture yet more speculation. Boyd’s main aim, I think, was not the promotion of a set of ideas, or even an analytical approach, but the creation of a kind of person. This is the key thing he spent his time “doing”. Boyd did of course believe in his OODA loop as a valuable and accurate insight. And he did of course believe that the kind of intellectual openness he taught was the correct way to study and think and approach problems. But he was not in the business of promoting “one killer slide”. In fact, the OODA loop slide emerged late in the development of his thinking.

Boyd was aiming his presentations at his audience at multiple levels. At the lowest level, he could get the listeners to think in terms more akin to what he had discovered than they had previously done. Such listeners would be open to innovative ways of thinking and doing, at least. That was a minimum level of success.

A higher level of success would be to get his listeners to see that they needed to widen their thinking and step back from their preconceptions and look at a larger picture. This was particularly true in the Cold War era military. As the Cold War era ended and we began to face new and as yet inchoate challenges, Boyd was pushing his listeners to be open to radical rethinking. As Boyd put it:

We can’t just look at our present experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experience and the strategic world we live in.

This is a demanding intellectual program for anyone who seriously tried to undertake it. Mastering the canonical material in one field is hard enough. Boyd is saying, be ready to go beyond all that, to look at what you do skeptically, from without, and be ready to use what you learn.

The ultimate level was demonstrated by his “elevator speech” to people who approached him and were drawn to his ideas: To create well-formed “doers”.

The three levels then are (1) conveying ideas, (2) providing intellectual formation, creating a certain way of thinking, and (3) providing, beyond these, personal formation, creating people who operated to some degree as Boyd himself would have done.

Boyd did not want to send forth from his briefings a bunch of people carrying a “how to” manual of Boyd’s Greatest Hits. Rather, he wanted a large army of people who at least understood that there were alternative pathways to studying issues of professional concern, including the OODA loop, broadly understood. Beyond that, he wanted Boydian thinkers, who would at least take his analogic approach and look for patterns rather than formulas, etc. And beyond even that, he wanted, at the highest level, people who would adopt what we might term a “Boydian ethic”.

Boyd’s asceticism and intellectual drive, his sacrifice of virtually everything the world values for the development and application of his ideas, is a living embodiment of service. Of course, Boyd’s life has the peculiarities of his particular and unique personality. But the larger message is – to do something great, to do something important, to live the warrior ethic of combat and sacrifice for victory, you will likely have to adopt the classical virtues of fortitude and humility and self-denial. Mere physical courage is not enough. People fear failure and humiliation more than death and wounds. Wars are often lost in a grey corridor somewhere years before the first shots are fired. Battles fought there, with no glory, no medals, no recognition, can be decisive. Boyd is asking: Can you be the person to fight those? Do you have what it takes, mentally and intellectually, but also in terms of personal character? So, to those who were open to it, Boyd was teaching not only with his briefing, but with his approach to life and service.

A book would have been a distraction from all that.

A final note.

There is so much more in Col. Osinga’s book, that I wish I had time to discuss.

For example:

* There is an article to be written about the analogies between Boyd and Hayek, on the ideas of spontaneous order, and perpetually imperfect information.

* There is an article to be written about Boyd’s concepts of cooperative behavior and Alan Macfarlane’s study of the roots of civil society, i.e., theoretic v. empirical study of this phenomenon.

* There is an article to be written about the new scholarship on World War I and what Boyd might have made of it, and what it does to the growing orthodoxy of “4GW”.

* There is a lot to be thought through and to be written about the idea that Boyd’s seemingly more abstract thinking is in fact highly relevant. We now face a “Huntingtonian” world of cross-civilizational interaction and/or conflict between the USA (and/or the Anglosphere, and/or the “West”) on one side, and the very different mental worlds of the the Chinese and Muslims on the other side. A “Boydian” cross-disciplinary approach is virtually mandated.

And I noticed these items only on a rather harried and rapid read-through of the book. A careful reading will suggest many other ideas for further analysis.

Col. Osinga has made a huge contribution by putting much of Boyd’s thinking before us in a format which is orderly and usable. This achievement will make such further comparison and analysis possible in a way that they were not previously.

I look forward to a renaissance in “Boyd studies” inspired by this remarkable book.

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Much of this roundtable discussion and the the larger conversation on other sites, has centered on the merit of John Boyd’s ideas and how well-deserved is his rising reputation as a strategic thinker. This is understandable, given the focus of Science, Strategy and War, it is natural to hone in on the subject of Dr. Osinga’s study, the colorful and enigmatic Colonel John Boyd. I would like to take a moment and first consider the nature of Science, Strategy and War itself because this book represents a remarkably well-crafted example of scholarly writing.

With Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, which began as a doctoral dissertation, Colonel Frans Osinga engaged less in typical research and analysis than an expedition into intellectual archaeology. Boyd left a legacy that was at once impressive in terms of its depth and cognitive range, yet frustratingly elusive in the paucity and obscurity of the primary sources and the complexity and difficulty of the secondary ones. As many commentators have pointed out, John Boyd left behind no magnum opus; just a few formal papers, aging briefing slides, notes and copious marginalia furiously scrawled in books in fields as diverse as higher mathematics, classics, military history, theoretical physics, psychology, economics, philosophy, evolutionary biology and cybernetics.

The great historian Leopold von Ranke told his students that it was a historian’s job to “…show how it really was”. For Dr. Osinga, that meant getting into the head of John Boyd as his thinking evolved over several decades. For example, reading what Boyd read in order to ascertain how well Boyd understood, say, Complexity theory or Clausewitz, Postmodernism or Polanyi, Godel or Guderian. Most scholars would find that kind of secondary reading, absolutely required before subjecting Boyd’s briefs to a rigorous critical analysis, daunting. Thumb through the notes and bibliography of Science, Strategy and War and read the periodic commentary by Osinga on Boyd’s use or exclusion of particular sources – for example, Schumpeter, Douhet, Liddell Hart and van Creveld. This is not an analysis that could have be done with drive-by citations and Osinga’s effort shows in the resultant quality of Science, Strategy and War. Dr. Osinga, in my view, has “shown how it really was”.

Osinga’s John Boyd is a master synthesizer, itself a relatively rare intellectual quality, but also the author of highly original insights regarding the principles of moral conflict who wanted to teach his audience to be creative, adaptive, strategic thinkers who were hungry to survive and thrive in the competitive environment of life. Boyd was among the first to grasp that human organizations were really complex, adaptive, systems (what complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam would call “superorganisms”) that thrived or declined in accordance with Darwinian conceptions. Boyd was, as I infer from Science, Strategy and War, an apostle of dynamism and the ecology paradigm just now coming into vogue. It was a pity that Boyd died when he did as the subsequent advent of network theory and research into scale-free networks and modularity have done much to lend validity to his strategic speculations and reinforce his rejection of static, mechanistic, linear thinking in military affairs.

What remains to be done with Boyd or exists outside the scope of Science, Strategy and War ? There is the matter of Boyd’s influence on the 1991 Gulf War, acknowledged by senior officials but unknown in specific detail. Boyd’s contribution to Marine Corps doctrine and other schools of thought ( NCW, 4GW, EBO) have been dealt with piecemeal by other authors, notably Robert Coram, and Boyd’s principal collaborators but not in a systematic fashion. Boyd’s efforts in the military reform movement also cry out for closer examination as well the continuation of the Boydian debate by Boyd’s disciples and critics. These matters have yet to be brought under one roof in the manner that Frans Osinga has done with Boyd’s strategic theory and remain as projects for investigation by future scholars.

Colonel Osinga has written a pivotal book in Science, Strategy and War that will be the touchstone text on John Boyd, an emergent classic at the intersection between 20th century intellectual history and strategic theory.

Buy Science Strategy and War from Routledge.

From Amazon.

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I’d like to highlight a post that, while not part of the roundtable unfolding here, certainly represents an informed and welcome addition to the discussion of John Boyd’s strategic vision as analyzed by Dr. Frans Osinga:

Frank Hoffman, the respected military theorist and contributor to the excellent SWJ Blog has weighed in with a timely review:

“Unlocking the Keys to Victory”

The intellectual contributions of the late Colonel John Boyd, USAF, have already been the subject of two fine biographies. Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War provided a window into Boyd’s life as a fighter pilot, technical innovator and maverick defense reformer. Grant Hammond’s Mind at War John Boyd and American Security summarized Boyd’s main arguments. Both of these efforts are well regarded and helped rectify the limited record Boyd left behind. Regrettably, Boyd’s career is too often truncated into well known “OODA Loop.”

But Boyd had a lot more to offer. His contributions to flying tactics, fighter development, and operational theory are profound. The historical analyses and scientific theories he employed are not well documented nor well understood. This is principally due to Boyd’s reliance on briefing slides. Colonel Frans Osinga fills out our collective understanding with The Science, Strategy and War. In this very deliberate review, the author works his way through the arguments and source material of Boyd’s famous briefs including “Patterns of Conflict” and “A Discourse on Winning and Losing.” He highlights the diverse sources that shaped Boyd’s thinking and offers a comprehensive overview and remarkable synthesis of his work, and demonstrates that Boyd’s is much more comprehensive, strategically richer and deeper than is generally thought.

Read the rest here.

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By Historyguy99

Col/Dr Frans P.B. Osinga of the Neatherlands Air Force wrote this work as his doctoral thesis. It is a superb, clearly written journey into the mind of a great thinker. For myself, someone who is seeped in the essence of history that for the most part took place before John Boyd’s time, I found the book a stimulating read.

John Boyd, known as 40-second Boyd, for always being able to defeat an opponent in air combat within that time constraint, was a maverick, who left no great written treatise to explain his theories. What was left behind after his death were lecture notes and vu-graphs. Dr. Osinga carefully ginned those notes into a readable text and gave even the most un-military minded, a window on how not only John Boyd thought, but how humans and on a broader scale, all organisms adapt and survive.

John Boyd’s legacy has been his OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Action), some would conclude that his contribution is revolutionary, or that it was based on selective cherry picking to support his thesis. The contributions of John Boyd are important because they draw from a vast store house of specialties, such as history, science, and behavior for support. He mulled these concepts over in his great mind and shared them in marathon lectures lasting up to 18 hrs.

The benefit of this work is to draw attention to Boyd’s theory and stimulate thinking, something that in a modern technology centered universe, is often left to pre-conceived notions.

Boyd defined the Art of Success as:

Appear to be an unsolvable cryptogram while operating in a directed way to penetrate adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist;
 
yet
 
Shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

Boyd concludes with:

The first sentence is an advice to remain, in the words of Sun Tzu, unfathomable to the enemy, yet operate coherently in several levels of war and across different dimensions.

Multi-syllable words for a simple concept, survival.

Today, strategist debate what generation warfare we have now evolved too. I am no expert in those fields and would be treading on frozen cellophane to try and cross that river. This book helps us understand the changing environment of both war and peace. In a historical prospective, we can reach back into earliest time or to the remote jungles of New Guinea fifty years ago, when two men would meet in the forest, they would first, observe, then, orient to get best posture for survival, make a decision, kin or enemy, take action, fight or break bread. In the simplest terms, these decisions have played out in ever complicated scenarios ever since.

Dr. Osinga’s book may turn out to be more read than any biography on John Boyd because he addresses the meat of what Boyd was trying to say in hundreds of lectures. He does this by providing the reader with Boyd’s ideas to ponder:

Categories of conflict:

Three kinds of conflict

Based on his ‘panorama’ of military history, Boyd argues that one can imaginethree kinds of human conflict:98
 
Attrition Warfare – as practiced by the Emperor Napoleon, by all sides during the 19th Century and during World War I, by the Allies during World War II, and by present-day nuclear planners.
 
Maneuver Conflict – as practiced by the Mongols, General Bonaparte, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, Union General Ulysses S. Grant,Hitler’s Generals (in particular Manstein, Guderian, Balck, Rommel) and the Americans under Generals Patton and MacArthur.
 
Moral Conflict – as practiced by the Mongols, most Guerrilla Leaders, avery few Counter-Guerrillas (such as Magsaysay) and certain others from Sun Tzu to the present.

In a historical sense looking back to draw from the examples of strategies that worked or failed are most helpful when one realizes that an old saying frequently used by an old soldier I once knew, that the Army suffers from CRS, IE, can’t remember scat, (my word to keep it cleaner) is still the norm.

Using the above examples of Attrition Warfare and compare it with Maneuver Warfare.

Spartans vs Thebans led by Epaminondas,who adopted the strategy at Leuctra. The strong left wing advanced while the weak right wing retreated.
Or: Patton’s end run around the Germans accross France vs Hodge’s attrition warfare in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

And Moral Conflict vs Attrition and Maneuver Warfare

Going to Vietnam ready to fight WW III, and finding ourselves fighting a stealthy foe, reminiscent of our own colonial Indian wars.

Dr. Osinga concludes that John Boyd’s work serves a greater purpose that his OODA loop idea.

Boyd’s ideas involve much more than exclusively the idea of ‘rapid OODA looping’ or a theory for maneuver warfare. Contradicting those who categorically dismiss the validity of the OODA concept, the idea was found to be deep and rich in ideas,explanations, hypotheses, propositions, concepts and suggestions concerning conflict in general. These concepts are firmly based on a thorough study of military history and informed by insights on learning and the behavior of social systems derived from various disciplines.

What this book serves to tell us is that in order to survive, one has to be ready to adapt. This is illustrated in our current strategy in the so called long war. The understanding of Boyd’s strategy also relate in every aspect of life from the mundane to profound.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone. “Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd”

Cross-posted at HG’s World

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By Shane Deichman

In an October 1939 radio broadcast, Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union as “… a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same can be said of the late Colonel John Boyd, whose prowess as a fighter pilot and whose lectures on the relationship between energy and maneuverability revolutionized the U.S. Air Force – but who published no books. Rather, his legacy was left in a stack of acetate vu-graphs (thankfully digitized by Chet Richards) and reams of personal papers. For his studious review of the latter, distilling the mind of Boyd into book form, Col/Dr Frans P.B. Osinga deserves our gratitude. He has played Clausewitz to Boyd’s Napoleon.

In Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Osinga presents us with a fascinating “deep dive” into the evolution of a brilliant thinker – a thinker who devoted his life to applied learning and teaching. Though it is unfortunate that Boyd did not see fit to publish his theories in book form (unsurprising given his professional environment far from the Ivory Towers of academe), it is evident from his 1,500+ presentations that he rigorously developed and willingly shared his ideas. Boyd’s stamina (both mental and physical) to lecture for more than a dozen hours at a time is testament to his devotion and his determination to succeed.

Osinga nicely complements the work of Boyd biographers (most notably Coram, Hammond and Richards) by dedicating the preponderance of his 300+ pages to how Boyd’s thinking evolved – describing his intellectual influences from the expected (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz) to the unexpected (Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi). Particular attention is given to the influence of classical physicists (Newton) as well as quantum theorists and mathematicians (Heisenberg, Gödel).

Boyd embodied the now-popular notion of the “Medici Effect”, a horizontal thinker who integrated perspectives across multiple, seemingly-divergent disciplines into a cohesive whole. His insights have proven applicable to a wide array of topics, and foretold of the emerging science of complexity theory (though I dislike Osinga’s use of the composite term “chaoplexity”, which undermines the distinction between “chaotic” – i.e., non-linear and seemingly random – and “complex” – i.e., a large number of interrelated properties or parameters). Given the swagger of the fighter pilot who bested the “best” in air-to-air combat in forty seconds or less, there is no doubt that Boyd – were he alive today – would be a prolific ‘blogger, and a Chicago Boyz contributor whose inputs would outweigh all of our Roundtable writings combined.

While many associate Boyd solely with the “OODA Loop”, he has given us far more than just a lexicon – just as Tom Barnett’s work is far more than simply “Core – Gap” and “Leviathan – SysAdmin”. Regardless of one’s willingness to accept his ideas, the sheer effort Boyd invested in his research – and Osinga’s effort in compiling the salient points for us – is an invaluable tool in anyone’s intellectual toolbox.

The motto of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration is Litera Scripta Manet: “The written word endures.” It is ironic that intellectuals tend to revere the commentator more so than the subject on whom they write: Herodotus over Leonidas, Thucydides over Pericles, Clausewitz over Napoleon. If history is consistent, then in a hundred years the name Osinga may be equally associated with the name of Boyd.

Cross-posted at Wizards of Oz

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Where Boyd Got the Discourse

By Chet Richards

The attached chart is my contribution to the Big Boyd Blog-a-thon starting Monday, February 4, 2008, over at the Chicago Boyz blog.

Boyd, like Clausewitz and Musashi, drew on the totality of knowledge in his day for ideas. As Osinga and Coram documented (and I know from personal experience), Boyd devoured his sources. We used to joke that if Boyd didn’t write more in a book than the author did, it must not have been a very good book. As a result, he developed not just a knowledge of but a fluency in most of these subjects.

Sources in the red and blue zones are largely documented within his works (the leftmost red zone is military history and the other is military strategy). They, along with Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law, underlie “Destruction and Creation” and Patterns of Conflict. The rest of the blue zone feeds into and is cited in Strategic Game of ? And ? and Organic Design.

Then there’s the big gap, 1987 – 1995 and finally the OODA loop appears in his last briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing. What happened? Partly it was probably the emergence of the prostate cancer that would later kill him, but partly it was that with the fall of the Soviet Union it became clear that the era of war deciding things among the major powers was over. So he turned his attention to other things, including business and most particularly the types of business strategy based around the Toyota Production System. One reason for this was not that he drove a Toyota (when I visited him in 1992, he had a Honda and a Mercury), but that the descriptions of the Toyota System mirrored to an uncanny extent what he had written in his earlier works on warfare. [There's more on this in Certain to Win.]

Was this just a coincidence? It turns out that it was not, as Boyd realized primarily from Thomas Cleary’s book, The Japanese Art of War. As this chart suggests, Boyd was quite familiar with the influence of Taoism on Sun Tzu and thence on Mao and Genghis Khan (and perhaps from there on the Blitzkrieg). Cleary’s book, which became one of Boyd’s favorites, also linked Sun Tzu/Taoism through Zen to Musashi and the modern study of the martial arts, which resonated with Boyd since his early career could be described as kung fu at 30,000 ft.

This stream also flows through Zen to present-day Japan and the Toyota Production System. Although he never included any Zen works explicitly in his briefings, we did discuss its influence on Toyota when he was reviewing the early drafts of what became my book, Certain to Win. I have no indication, by the way, that Boyd ever actually practiced any Zen techniques or that he ever read more deeply into it.

The more research I do in these areas, though, the more striking the connections between Boyd’s work and Zen concepts like clearness of vision, non-attachment to (fixed) forms and concepts, fluid awareness, and spontaneity. In fact, ideas such as these, along with Prigogine’s notion of far-from equilibrium “dissipative structures,” are what distinguish Boyd’s ultimate concept of the OODA loop, with its centrality of Orientation, from the cyclical version that he started with.

So when we’re comparing Boyd to other strategists, it is important to place everyone into historical context. A chart like this for Clausewitz would be sparse by comparison — the red zones including personal experience and down through about Napoleon (no Sun Tzu, of course), and the blue would stop at Newtonian mechanics. There would be no green zone at all. Such a comparison is, however, most unfair. Were Clausewitz to have lived in the late 20th Century, there is no reason, given his history, to think that he would have limited himself to the knowledge base of 1831 any more than Boyd did.

This entry was originally posted at Certain to Win.

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A History of the OODA Loop

By Dan tdaxp

This post was written as part of the roundtable on Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War. Contributions have already been made by Chet Richards and Wilf Owen.

“To a certain extent the argument is valid that Boyd offered merely a synthesis of existing theories, a contemporary one, important and timely regarding the context of the 1970s and 1980s, but only a synthesis.”
Osinga, 2007, pg 29

John Boyd’s OODA Loop divides cognition into four processes, perception (called Observation), unconscious or implicit thought (called Orientation), conscious of explicit though (called Decision), and behavior (called Action). Frans Osinga’s “Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd” does an excellent job describing the origins of Boyd’s learning theory in the writings of Skinner, Piaget, and the cognitivists. However, Osinga’s text excludes ongoing research into theories of learning related to OODA, as his text is focused on the development of the OODA model in particular rather than contemporary adaption. Fortunately, a recent review article by Jonathan St. B.T. Evans serves helps complete the picture, though the OODA loop is not mentioned there by name. Osinga’s book is well worth purchasing, and can be thought of as as prolegomena to all future OODA work.

The OODA Loop

The “OODA loop,” or “Boyd Cycle” (Osinga, page 2) is a dual-processing model of thought. That is, it supposes the existence of two seperate central executives inside each human mind. The first of these, “Orientation,” is activated immediately by perception (called Observation by Boyd) and is capable of directly controlling behavior (likewise, called Action). Orientation is closely associated with long term memory. As Osinga writes on pages 236 to 237:

In order to avoid predictability and ensuring adaptability to a variety of challenges, it is essential to have a repertoire of orientation patterns and the ability to select the correct one according to the situation at hand while denying the opponent the latter capability. Moreover, Boyd emphasizes the capability to validate the schemata before and during operations and the capability to devise and incorporate new ones, if one is to survive in a rapidly changing environment…. verifying existing beliefs and expectations, and if necessary modifying these in a timely matter, is crucial. The way to play the game of interaction and isolation is to spontaneously generate new mental images that match up with an unfolding work of uncertainty and change, Boyd asserted…”

The second central executive, Decision, analogous to conscious thought, or what attention is spent on. As Osinga writes, “Decision is the component in which actors decide among actions alternatives that are generated in the orientation phase.” Unlike orientation, decision faces limits in how much it can handle, and therefore relies on orientation to present it which simplified and categorized chunks in which to work.

John Boyd’s model was purposefully designed as an cognitive and learning theory based on mainstream work within psychology. As Osinga writes on page 53:

On 15 October 1972 he wrote from his base in Thailand to his wife that ‘I may be on the trail of a theory of learning quite different and – it appears now more powerful than methods or theories currently in use’. Learning for him was synonymous for the process of creativity

In particular, Boyd’s theory was based on the work of Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, and the earlier cognitivists. Boyd combined each of these traditions, though revised some elements. From Piaget he both took the concept of mental structures, as well as suspicion of the power of logical analysis alone as a proper epistemological tool. To again quote Osinga (page 68)

Boyd also came across another source of uncertainty. As Jean Piaget asserted in the book Boyd read for his essay, ‘In 1931 Kurt Gödel made a discovery which created a tremendous stir, because it undermined the then prevailing formalism, according to which mathematics was reducible to logic and logic could be exhaustively formalized. Gödel established definitely that the formalist program cannot be executed’.

As Osinga describes in Chapter 3, “Science,” Boyd drew from both Skinner and the cognitivists the power of environmental feedback. Consider the relatively trivial cognitive or cybernetic proposition on page 72 that:

“A feedback loop is a circular arrangement of casually connected elements, in which an initial cause propagates around the links of the loop, so that each element has an effect on the next, until the last ‘feeds back’ into the first element of the cycle. The consequence is that the first link (‘input’) is affected by the last (‘output’), which results in self-regulation fo the entire system.

Osinga then proceeds to discuss the OODA loop as Boyd applied it, touching only briefly on Chapter 7 of some applications of Boydian thought to areas of military operations. However, Osinga does not emphasize the areas in which the OODA loop itself is still unique, but only compares it to either incorrect renditions of the OODA model (such as the “simplified” rendition Osinga shows on page 2) or to theories that preceded OODA (such as a cybernetic model without feedback and “(Reflex)” instead of orientation or System 2, on page 75).

Consider, for instance, two other models, one by Jon St. Evans published in 2006 and the other by Richard Moreno, published in 1990. Using different terms, the Evans model describes the role of Orientation (called by him System 1) and Decision (called by him System 2). Orientation or System 1 initially activates, and it may either lead to conceptual change or else inform further System 2 deliberation. However, Evans’ model lacks the cybernetic or cognitive function of feedback, and does not describe how the last function would inform the first. Boyd’s OODA loop, by attaching both Action and Observation to the environment, therefore may be described as a completed Evans model.

Information Processing

Likewise, the OODA loop completes the Moreno model. Moreno’s description of learning focuses on the transformation of information in the external world to long term memory. In particular, Moreno’s ongoing research focuses on the limited ability of explicit though to handle all information that should be learned. However, Moreno does not view long term memory as much other than an end-state for information (rather than the abode of Boyd’s Orientation or Evans’ System 1). Additionally, like Evans, Moreno does not connect the last stage of his model with his first.

Dual Processing

Just as Osinga does not compare the OODA loop with other contemporary models, he does not describe contemporary research that further describes the difference between Orientation and Decision. The research on the subject is now well established, and Table 2 in Evans’ 2008 paper “Dual-Processing Accounts of Reasoning, Judgment, and Social Cognition,” in the 2008 edition fo the Annual Review of Psychology, provides a synopsis of the distinction between Orientation (System 1) and Decision (System 2)

Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War is a groundbreaking book on the OODA loop, describing in excellent detail how it originated. Buy it. What is needed now is an comparison of the OODA loop to contemporary theories of learning and an application of OODA in light of the newest research.

References
Evans, J. St. B. (2006). The heuristic-analytic theory of reasoning: Extension and evaluation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(3), 378-395.
Evans, J. St. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629.
Mayer, R.E. (1996). Learners as information processors: Legacies and limitations of Educational Psychology’s second metaphor. Educational Psychologist, 31(3/4), 151-161.
Osinga, F.P.B. (2007). Science, strategy, and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd. New York: Routledge.

This entry is cross-posted at tdaxp.com.

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Wilf Owen

Introduction

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By Wilf Owen

The central premise of this book is to explain the military thought of the late Colonel John Boyd. The intention is honest enough, and indeed it is somewhat extraordinary that ten years after the death of a man that so many have lauded as being a giant of late 20th century military thought, no one has previously attempted to do what this book succeeds in doing.

The fact that no one previously attempted such a task is to my mind indicative of John Boyd’s actual contribution to military thought. I admit to being a Boyd sceptic and this book merely confirmed all my doubts about his work, which I had harboured since reading the Coram and Hammond biographies. This book, like the biographies, is based on the premise that Boyd was an important and profound thinker on War. This is not a view I would share, but I concede he was vastly influential. Influential does not mean good. Was Boyd any good is the question the book should answer.

The book itself is a work of real scholarship. It is well written and well laid out, and Osinga does the best he can to make some of the more tedious aspects of Boyd’s work appear interesting. This is a not inconsiderable task given the nature of the material. 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. 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. While the work does illustrate the detail of Boyd’s military thought, 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. Such is the nature is of military thought with all it’s human and intellectual impedimenta.

At the end of the day, you are still left with highly complex, arcane and somewhat pointless body of work, which is of dubious merit to either a student or practitioner of the military profession. Boyd undoubtedly knew and understood more about fighter air to air combat than almost anyone else in the USAF, but this insight did not translate to an understanding of land warfare and strategy in general.

The most intriguing part of the work is the revelation that Boyd was strongly influence by Basil Liddell-Hart and his work on the “Strategy of the Indirect Approach.” What Boyd, seemed to be unaware of, what that Liddell-Hart is a figure of some considerable controversy, as the works by Brian Bond, J.P. Harris and John Mearsheimer have clearly shown. Liddell-Hart probably did more harm than good, and might even provide a case study in the dangers or tampering with national defense policy, while unhindered by data or deep understanding. 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. I had always believed that Boyd started with a clean sheet of paper and studied military history with a view to identifying common patterns of success. Osigna’s research seems to indicate this is not so. Boyd seems to have embraced the inter-war polemicists, such as Liddell-Hart, Fuller and even T.E. Lawrence, certain that their insights may hold some kind of truth. To accept Lawrence, as having some kind of insight is particularly odd, unless one is prepared to give General Allenby more, if not at least equal, merit. Indeed Osinga’s work mentions Lawrence some 37 times while never once mentioning Allenby. Critically this might indicate that Boyd swallowed whole, Liddell-Harts self-serving criticism of Allenby.

However, my scepticism of Boyd’s contribution and the value of his work will be entirely irrelevant to an audience largely convinced of his sagacity. At the end of the day, those who believe John Boyd to be a great military thinker will merely cite this work as demonstrating it. Indeed I would suggest the Boyd’s reputation was built largely on the reaction of the audiences, and thus fan base, to his many lengthy presentations. That reaction was that an elderly and clearly well read Air Force Colonel an combat veteran had to be saying something profound and his citing of works that, at the time, almost certainly none of his audience had read (in the pre-internet book finding and .pdf age) merely contributed to image that they were standing at the feet of an intellectual giant. Everybody wants to love an outlaw, critique and radical thinker. “In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king”. This is in no way to suggest that Boyd was a fraud or that all of his audiences were stupid. They merely formed opinions that existed in isolation from ideas and information that would have challenged Boyd’s insights. The British military thinker, Brigadier Richard Simpkin pre-deceased Boyd by eleven years and one year after the publication of his magnum opus Race to the Swift. The size of the work, combined with the rank and the death of its author seemed to convince a whole generation of British and US Army officers that the work had un-questioned merit. Thus, it is of note, that Simpkin, an extremely well-known and widely published student of Deep Operations Theory, and thus it’s illegitimate step child, manoeuvre warfare, is not mentioned in Osinga’s work once. Indeed Simpkins views on Maneuver warfare are some of the most useful there are, yet it seems to have made no impact on Boyd’s work, or none that seems worthy of mention. This, in itself, is incredible. Even more so, in that Simpkin mirrored Boyd’s use of the language of science, and specifically physics, to create analogies he deemed useful to military theory (as did Clausewitz!).

The merit of this book is that it contributes to a necessary debate on the perceived relevance of John Boyd to useful modern military thought. To my mind, this debate is long overdue, as Boyd’s ideas are often cited as being the foundation of a whole raft of vastly dubious concepts such as Maneuver Warfare, Effects Based Operations, Fourth generation warfare and even Distributed Operations. Military thought should be the product of logic, and empirical evidence. Indeed the faults in Boyd’s work, like many other military thinkers, lies in its selective use of evidence to support pre-existing conceptions of how something might be done better, and then branding this as insight, instead of confirmation of what we already knew. Ultimately, the thought itself becomes irrelevant to the human need to have a hero to follow or a bright new idea to cling to. Boyd contribution is to provide that in abundance, and this work succeeds in providing what should be judged a generally accurate analysis of the material that supports those beliefs.

Mr. Owen is the Editor of Asian Military Review.

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Introduction

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Despite having been an influential and controversial figure inside the Pentagon, the late Colonel John Boyd has only recently come to wider public attention due to the excellent biography written by Robert Coram. Even so, much of what the public knows about Boyd relates to popular anecdotes of his connection to the F-15 and F-16 fighters and Boyd’s consultancy to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney on the eve of the First Gulf War. Of Boyd’s ideas, the best known would be the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide Act) which has become a fairly widespread diagram in military literature and also in business management courses where competitive decision making is emphasized. Other than that, the corpus of Boyd’s work is well known only to a relatively small number of collaborators, reformers, theorists and military professionals who had been personally influenced by Colonel Boyd.

This was partly Boyd’s own fault. A tireless briefer and formidable mentor, Boyd wrote only a few papers and never attempted a magnum opus, preferring to evolve his thinking through the intellectual give-and-take of briefing sessions, deep reading, discussion and reflection. While Boyd’s slides remain readily available online at DNI and Belisarius.com, the context that Colonel Boyd created when he gave his talks is not always obvious to the viewer. As a result, a summative statement and analysis of Boyd’s strategic theory had been lacking until now.

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans P. Osinga has filled that breach. A meticulous study of the origins and meaning of the ideas of John Boyd, Science Strategy and War has been endorsed as “The book John Boyd would have written” by no less than William Lind, a Boyd collaborator and the “Father of Fourth Generation Warfare”. As such, Science, Strategy and War is the most complete exposition of Boyd’s ideas that we are likely to see for some time to come.

But what are those ideas? Are they as valid and important a contribution to the art of war as Boyd’s defenders and biographers claim? Do they have relevance in today’s wars or offer wider application beyond military strategy? Has Dr. Osinga gotten to the heart of the matter in his book, Science, Strategy and War ?

These are the questions, among others, that this roundtable will attempt to answer. Our reviewers are an impressive group who will tackle John Boyd and Frans Osinga’s treatment of him from a variety of perspectives. To introduce them (some prefer to blog with varying degrees of anonymity and I am respecting that):

William F. “Wilf” Owen – A military writer and Editor of The Asian Military Review. A military theorist with a special interest in tactical doctrine. Wilf Owen served for twelve years in the British Army and is a member of the Small Wars Council.

Shane Deichman – Former Science Adviser to JFCOM. Particle physicist. Managing Director of Operations for IATGR. Managing Director of EnterraSolutions, LLC. ORCAS (Oak Ridge). Blogger, Wizards of Oz, Dreaming 5GW.

Adam Elkus – free-lance writer for Defense & The National Interest, The Huffington Post, Athena Intelligence, Foreign Policy in Focus. Blogger, Rethinking Security, Dreaming 5GW.

Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz

“Dan of tdaxp” – Dan of tdaxp is currently working on his third advanced degree, a doctorate in psychology. Computer programmer/web designer. Lecturer. Blogger at tdaxp, Dreaming 5GW.

“Historyguy99″ - Historian. Veteran of the Vietnam War. Blogger, HG’s World.

Mark Safranski - Teacher, Educational consultant. Adviser, Conversationbase, LLC. Contributor, HNN. Member, Small Wars Council. Blogger, Zenpundit, Chicago Boyz.

We are also very pleased to have an author’s rebuttal/response at the conclusion of the reviews, from:

Dr. Frans Osinga – Colonel, Royal Netherlands Air Force. Fighter Pilot. Associate Professor of War Studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy. Formerly, of Nato’s Supreme Allied Command Transformation. Research Fellow, Clingendael Institute of International Relations. Author of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.

Please feel free to join in on the discussion in the comments section whether you are a reviewer or not, a military buff, skeptic or are simply curious about John Boyd and Science, Strategy and War.

Next up, our first review.

ADDENDUM – Other Links of Interest:

“John Boyd’s Book” by William S. Lind

“Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of John Boyd – DNI Review by Chet Richards, DNI Editor”

“Where Boyd Got the Discourse” by Dr. Chet Richards

“Boyd and Lind Rebuttal” The Small Wars Council

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Briefly:

On Monday, February 4th, Chicago Boyz will be hosting a blogging roundtable on Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans P. Osinga. Slightly over ten years since his death, the influential strategist and iconoclastic USAF Colonel John Boyd remains a subject of controversy despite the fact that (or more likely, because) many of his ideas impacted and informed military “transformation”, Network-centric Operations and the theory of 4th Generation Warfare.