The John Boyd collection (merged thread)

[stanleywinthrop]

breaks down for me is the point where Boyd fans present his concepts as if everything that came before is irrelevant. It reminds me a little of Vizzini inThe Princess Bride, "Have you ever heard of Thucydides? Mahan? CLAUSEWITZ?...Morons!"

The problem with this characteraztion is that, while some boyd fans may seem to forget it, Boyd's work itself is FILLED with references to, quotes from, ideas taken from, examples used, of those listed above and hundreds more of past military strategists, tacticians, and historians. The essance of his work is not some brand new thinking, but rather a synthesis of a large portion of prior military thinking. If you can do that yourself, then Boyd is irrelvent.

Back to the E-M work, remember he accomplished this as an engineer as it required a hell of a lot of math. Every fighter pilot today (at least in the west) lives and breathes the E-M theory; we have books filled with comparitive E-M diagrams of one's own aircraft vs. just about all threat aircraft in existance, comparing performance at various altidudes and combat loads, so that one can see a visible representation of his strenghts and weaknesses against that particular aircraft and develop a strategy to force a fight onto (metaphorically speaking) advantageous terrain. This type of analysis simply didn't exist before boyd.

[zenpundit]

This has been a marvelous discussion and I thank CavGuy for initiating it after reading Selil's review of the short book I edited. I've been following the thread carefully since Wilf gave me a head's up in an email and I wanted to put in a few words on some points of the debate on Boyd's relevance or importance to military thought.

I've learned a fair amount about John Boyd's thinking in the last few years though I do not have near the same level of expertise as do Boyd's collaborators like Chet Richards, Chuck Spinney or William Lind. Or that of Frans Osinga, whose book Science, Strategy and War is a must read for anyone who really wants to know what Boyd actually argued. I think that last point is one on which Wilf would agree.

There's been a discussion if Boyd merits being called "the greatest" or a "great" strategist or theorist. I think it's fair to say that Boyd himself would never have put forth such a claim of that kind or wasted time worrying about what people thought of him or whether he made a more significant contribution to the study of war than Colin Gray or Carl von Clausewitz. Boyd was more interested in learning, teaching and discussing conflict (moreso than just "war") and were he alive, I'm certain Boyd would be delighted with the Small Wars Council and the endless opportunities here for discussion and reflection.

Was he "great", much less "greatest" ? In his briefs, Boyd was trying to shift the paradigm of American military culture away from linear, analytical-reductionist, mechanistic, deterministic, Newtonian-Taylorist, conceptions that resulted in rote application of attrition-based tactics toward more fluid, alinear, creative -synthesist thinking and holistic consideration of strategy. Give the man his due, in his time these were radical arguments for a Pentagon where the senior brass of the U.S. Army had reacted to the defeat in Vietnam by purging the lessons learned of COIN from the institutional memory of the Defense Department.

To me at least, looking from a historical perspective, that's great. In a world with a population now close to seven billion, where the United States maintains a relatively small but expensively trained professional military, remaining wedded to attrition warfare would seem to be losing strategic bet. "Injun country" doesn't just have more Injuns than we have cowboys, they have more Injuns than we have bullets in the six-shooters our cowboys use. Moving the USMC away from an exclusive focus on attrition - and in the long run large portions of the Armed Services - by itself would lead me to use the word "great" in describing John Boyd's work.

Is Boyd a "strategist" or a "theorist" ? Historically, the 20th century is an anomaly because the Cold War and the advent of nuclear weaponry caused the center of gravity of strategic thinking to shift away from generals and admirals and toward statesmen and social scientists - except for George C. Marshall, our great postwar strategic thinkers were entirely civilian: George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and so on. The U.S. military reacted to the overriding strategic impetus of potential thermonuclear warby retreating psychologically away from the messy complexity of the world into a surreally compartmentalized military professionalism allegedly devoid of politics, economics and other questions considered routine variables by generals in past ages of warfare.

Boyd's briefs, however pedestrian this very self-selected group may find his military history, argued for that messy complexity properly being at the center of military thought. Moreover, and it's kind of amazing no one has mentioned it, Boyd hammered at how revolutions in science were changing society and were going to ultimately change warfare. I'll buy that there were a few other colonels or flag officers at the time Boyd was briefing who were deep reading military classics in an impressive way but I'm skeptical that the potential impact of complexity theory or Kurt Godel on operational art were frequent topics of discussion before Boyd wandered in with some briefing slides. He's a theorist. About what? Strategy.

Much of Boyd's work is modeling a process of dynamic synthesis, of continual learning and adapting competitively and reaching to fields further and further away from "pure" military concerns in order to generate new insights. That's been criticized in this thread repeatedly as lacking in "originality" ( except at the time, no one else was doing it). That was a feature, not a bug, gentlemen. If the U.S. military then or now was overflowing with creativity, novel problem solvers and was a true "learning organization" - to borrow Dr. Nagl's phrase - then Boyd would fail the "So, what" test.

In my humble opinion, the military, while a good sight better on the "learning" score in 2008 than in 2004, still has a ways to go.

[Norfolk]

Boyd might be accurately described as both a great air power theorist, and a great military reformer of the late 20th century. The Aerial Attack Study and the E-M Theory are landmarks in military aviation, and his efforts in reintroducing the military to many of the military classics (partially or largely neglected or ignored during the 60's and into the 70's) have gone a long way to at least putting them back on a competitive footing with the systems analysis/managerial styles of thinking so dominant over a generation ago. If anything, Boyd might be described as the Great Tutor, at least to the USMC, if not quite the rest of the US Armed Forces, and as someone who tried to impress upon military minds that war was and is fundamentally an art. Science is there to support that Art, not to displace it. I expect that Boyd would be rather upset with some of what some people have tried to do with his observations. In any case, however, the institutional amnesia of the Armed Forces at the time predisposed open minds to receive Boyd as the font of verboten knowledge.

Wilf wrote:

As Umar Al-Mokhtār points out, SO WHAT? is the acid test of military thought. Is it true? Is it useful?

Or put another way, can you make it, work? And if so, when, where, and how? At the risk of crossing over into the MW thread, some very promising theories or concepts may be difficult or impossible to put into practice, and for a variety of reasons: deficiencies in leadership, discipline, and training; lack of forces or resources; political constraints or considerations; the characteristics, conditions and circumstances of the AOR; the Enemy who gets a vote in this; and last, but certainly not least, CvC's friction. Guderian's ideal of defeating the enemy by destroying his "nerve centres" rather than outright physical destruction of his forces in the field is the classic example of a concept that was great, but impractical. In the event, the Germans had a difficult enough time trying to prevent the escape of Russian troops (who tended either to rejoin their own armies, or to become partisans harrying the German LOCs) from the great encirclements that Armoured Forces made so much easier to achieve than in the past. Similarly, von Manstein performed brilliantly at a number of places; the Crimean campaign was a marvel of manoeuvre - amongst other things - but Sevastopol itself had to be taken the hard way, by the methodical destruction of an enemy that could not be readily turned out of his positions or his defence critically incapacitated by the loss of certain "nerve centres". Months were spent just making the preparations, during which time manoeuvre was more or less out of the question anyway. Second Kharkhov lies somewhere in between the example of the Crimean Campaign as a whole, and the Siege of Sevastopol in particular.

In any case, when some of the finest generals of the 20th century, commanding some of the finest troops of the time, found themselves with little or no choice but to engage in "attritionist"-type methods, then it is vital to accept that not only do concept have limitations - known or unknown - but that there will always be greater or lesser limitations on when, where, how, and by whom those concepts can be used, if at all. I doubt that Boyd himself was not acutely aware of this, but I fear that many of those who have drawn upon his work may not possess this same degree of awareness, let alone an acceptance, of, certain persistent and often irreducible limitations on how workable theories or concepts may be in frail human hands. Personally, I'm more or less fine with Boyd, and some of his work is must-know when dealing with air power matters. As to his role in promoting what came to be MW Theory, I'm still okay with that to the extent that he was trying to get people to think, and using military classics as well as his own unique contibutions to that end - though I strongly disagree with many aspects of MW Theory. I do see him restating many of the military classics from a unique perspective, which is good. I may or may not agree or disagree with his takes on these, but that the way thing's work.

However, to go so far as to claim that Boyd is the "American Sun-Tzu" or at least the "Greatest" of his time or whatever is at least premature; some of his observations and propositions may require a good deal more time to become fully relevant (or at least clearly observable), and some of his (and especially some of his followers') observations and propositions are limited in their practicality or suffer from some critical flaws, just as virtually all theorists do. To echo Selil, Boyd is someone (amongst many others) whose observations and theories are something to be kept in the tool box for use when, where, how, and to whom, they may be useful and workable. Boyd himself took this same approach, and it's the right one

[slapout9]

I have located the suspect and he is doing a lot of talking but want answer any questions. The link below is to Boyd Himself giving his Conceptual Spiral presentation. They are numbered 1-8. The one below starts you off, from there just follow the numbers. The audio is not that great but nothing I can do about that. Later Slap..world greatest detective and stuff




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_fjaqAiOmc