Military Affairs

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.

Previous Roundtable Posts

Introduction

Wilf Owen

Dan tdaxp

Dr. Chet Richards

Shane Deichman

Historyguy99

Click here to view all posts in the discussion.

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.

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

Previous Roundtable Posts

Introduction

Wilf Owen

Dan tdaxp

Dr. Chet Richards

Shane Deichman

Click here to view all posts in the discussion

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

Previous Roundtable Posts

Introduction

Wilf Owen

Dan tdaxp

Dr. Chet Richards

Click here to view all posts in the discussion

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.

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