Boyd/Osinga Roundtable

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.

Read more

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,” 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.

 

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.

 

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)

System 1	System 2
Cluster 1 (Consciousness)
Unconscious (preconscious)	Conscious
Implicit	Explicit
Automatic	Controlled
Low effort	High effort
Rapid	Slow
High capacity	Low capacity
Default process	Inhibitory
Holistic, perceptual	Analytic, reflective
Cluster 2 (Evolution)
Evolutionarily old	Evolutionarily recent
Evolutionary rationality	Individual rationality
Shared with animals	Uniquely human
Non-verbal	Linked to language
Modular cognition	Fluid intelligence
Cluster 3 (Functional characteristics)
Associative	Rule-based
Domain-specific	Domain-general
Contextualised	Abstract
Pragmatic	Logical
Parallel	Sequential
Stereotypical	Egalitarian
Cluster 4 (Individual differences)
Universal	Heritable
Independent of general intelligence	Linked to general intelligence
Independent of working memory	Limited by working memory capacity

 

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.

Previous Roundtable Posts:

Wilf Owen

Introduction

Click here to view all posts in this discussion.

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.

Previous Roundtable Posts:

Introduction

Click here to view all posts in this discussion.