Some odds and ends before going on...
Cavguy wrote:
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Energy/Maneuver. As it sounds that isn't really new - Sun-tzu really covered it in his concept of "chi", didn't he? There is an energy/spirit (there is no good translation for "chi") that is a key factor in military victory, gaining that is key.
That's not what Boyd was working on or what he meant by the term. Energy-Maneuverability theory was completely different. He was quantifying the amount of potential energy that a specific aircraft (i.e., "Aircraft Specific Energy") accumulated--and how fast it accumulated it for specific Air Combat Maneuvers. Likewise, he quantified how much and how fast that potential energy was converted into kinetic energy for certain ACM. I'm going to get overly simplistic here, but some aircraft add energy better than others in various dive profiles--the old F4 Phantom II immediately comes to mind. When the F4 pulled up into a climb out of those dives, it could use a good bit of that accumulated potential energy to help carry it up faster in the climb. E-M theory explained why F4s did so much better fighting in the vertical plane (climbing and diving) to negate the tighter turn radius of their MiG opponents fighting in the horizontal plane, especially at low altitudes. His mathematics changed the way we think about and compare aircraft to each other--mathematics we still use today.
Wilf writes:
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In my opinion, Robert Leonhard is simply light years ahead of Boyd because he has contributed original, insightful and useful work, that you can read in books.
Well, I'm a fan of Bob's work which is the most understandable articulation of contemporary tactical military thought, but his books are not without flaws. I could get into that in another thread if anyone is interested so I won't tangent off the current thread here. He knows what my quibbles are; nevertheless, I was heavily influenced by him and it's reflected in my own professional writing. But Boyd has gotten far more exposure--and far more impact--than Bob Leonhard has. At least so far. We'll see in about thirty to fifty years from now.
Indeed, the most irritating thing about Boyd's work is that he left us next to nothing. Those briefs are hollow shells without his verbiage ("speaker notes") behind it. Or even the man behind it, as he could handle questions quite well. There's no body of work that he's written. So we rely on "the disciples" to interpret him and expand upon what he said. Christ wrote not a single book of the Bible and we know of him through his disciples and the interpreters ever since. Yup, the religious aspects really do appear to apply here.
People's frustration ("What's the big deal?") is certainly relevant and germane because--to those well-read in the art of war--we read Boyd's interpreters and shrug our shoulders. So what? Don't we all know that? Didn't we all know that? Like I said, if you don't have the kind of itch that Boyd's ideas were meant to scratch, he doesn't do much for you.
But to appreciate why he had the impact that he did, you have to put yourself back into the climate that existed in the Pentagon/DoD when he got there. Robert McNamara had implemented a heavily systems analysis approach to readiness and procurement--that, plus the natural inclination to package programs to Congress in ways domestic politicians could understand--seemed to pervert the force development process. There was a very heavy atmosphere of distrust about military advice; to McNamara and his followers who remained even after he was gone, what the military guys had to say seemed too fuzzy and "unsubstantiated." Read H.R. McMaster's terrific book DERELICTION OF DUTY and Lewis Sorley's HONORABLE WARRIOR for some necessary insight into what it was like to be a senior uniformed official in those days. And you can imagine how this translated into the action officers who served them. James Burton's book THE PENTAGON WARS is a good discussion of the latter.
So in walks "Genghis John" who has both the formidable quantitative skills and the historical background to detect any statistical hocus-pocus, and the burning, unquenchable desire to stop the B.S. going on that seems to substitute for sound military planning in "The Building." He embarrassed the hell out of people, and they didn't like being made fools out of. But his arguments were typically far better grounded than theirs were, and so demanded attention. When seniors tried to ignore him, he didn't play fair and often bureaucratically ambushed them. He proselytized through his "marathon" briefings which basically got people to think--if nothing else--gee, he's a really smart guy. If he doesn't like something, we better at least pay attention.
The reason those briefings were so long is that--and it's embarrassing to say this--most military people in the U.S. simply don't have a broad understanding of the art of war. Not really. The schools just don't give it to you. Much of this kind of understanding has to be achieved through a lot of self-study, which most don't have time to accomplish. And the DoD civilians had even less background. So Boyd had to lay some very basic theoretical groundwork that he should not have had to do in his briefings to establish the necessary context for where he was trying to go.
In my mind, Boyd did two things that are somewhat enduring, and I'm sure there will be discussion thread posters here who will disagree. The first is that he took "classic" art of war theory and added to it recent scholarship and thinking from a wide variety of fields. Osinga and Burton both talk about this, but Osinga really lays it out the best (and it also makes him hard to read if you are not familiar with the source books/theories). So Boyd "modernizes" a lot of old thinking. Now some will not be impressed by this, and I understand that. Some will wonder why that was necessary or even useful. I will tell you, if you've ever worked in the five-sided puzzle palace and you have a grip on military history and the art of war, you know why he had to do it. Using modern science, modern scholarship, modern/contemporary ideas were much "shinier" to the systems analysis oriented decisionmakers--it was harder for them to refute Boyd when he was quoting all this stuff. Had he stuck to the classics, he would have sounded like the old dusty generals they'd blown off previously.
Proof of his impact is that much of Boyd's ideas and terminology crept into DoD documents and planning--albeit often imperfectly. Leonhard has not so far enjoyed that kind of exposure and adoption, although I'd agree with Wilf that he deserves better than this.
The second thing is his theory on command and control and the nature of violent competition, shorthanded into the "OODA Loop"/"Decision Cycle." This is very complex idea that gets simplified and a lot is lost. Interestingly, the Soviets were looking at the very same things within their "Troop Control" military science, so I'm not sure who should get credit for the concept--Boyd or the Russian theoreticians. There's another master's thesis/PhD dissertation topic for somebody. I understand the OODA Loop is very much at issue and there are a lot of good criticisms of it. But I won't be able to address that here--I'll do it in the OODA Loop discussion thread over the next several weeks. Suffice it to say that those of us in the command and control business had to think of things differently because of that work--indeed, we'd not had the depth and focus that was needed before this particular theory was articulated. Was it a new theory? While the idea behind it isn't, the way it was discussed/applied was--and was a necessary foundation for both German School and Soviet School MW. But this brief summary isn't going to satisfy the skeptics, so I'll have to explain much more over at the other thread.