The John Boyd collection (merged thread)

[wm]

WM,

I have very little vested in any of the methods talked about, except perhaps Slapout Based Warfare.

I didn't mean to suggest that you were one of the guys with a vested interest. In fact, I suspect that when you were leading that Tank company team in Iraq, you seldom, if ever, asked yourself a question like :"What would CvC or John Boyd suggest I do know?"

Seriously, what prompted this thread was my confusion over the near sainthood of John Boyd by certain organziations, and their strong claims that he was America's greatest military theorist.

I tried to answer that. I suspect that a lot of us who did grow up in the metricized afterbirth that came from MacNamara-era MBO and zero-defects thinking were so traumatized that avoidance of critical, original thought became ingrained as a self-defense mechanism. Boyd became a hero/sacrifical lamb of sorts because he did buck the system. However, I have submitted previously that his take is really not new and is missing some critical pieces of the explanation. For one thing he doesn't explain how we get from Observe and Orient to Decide and Act in a timely and meaningful way. Second, he doesn't explain how we avoid the problem that was the motto of several of my frat brothers: "Let's do something, even if it is wrong." IOW, he does not show how we verify that our observations and orientations were properly focussed and conducted correctly. A Boydian explanation is IMHO embeds the "And then a miracle happens . . ." part of many explanations or the Deus ex machina found in too many movie plots.

[Ron Humphrey]

Are we differentiating between applied theory and theoretical constructionist here. Or does that really make a difference when trying to pin the tail on a tiger

[Umar Al-Mokhtār]

military iconoclast. As far as "greatest" military theoretician...eehhh maybe not so much IMHO.

He did not really come up with anything new to add to the theory of warfare, what he did was pointed out the inter-relationships and added to the never ending debate.

And the "so what" factor Wilf advanced shouldn't be taken as a smack down, he was expressing what many who are very well read in the military arts felt when looking into Boyd's briefing. Now certainly for many others it proved to be a sort of revelation; but to go back to the 6 year old analogy, if, for some reason, the kid is already fluent in calculus, when he takes the class his reaction will be 'so what I already know this stuff.' Not to smack anyone just to say 'check, got it, let's move on.'

I respect Boyd because he took on the system from the inside, he certainly played well to the dumb, cigar chomping, fighter pilot stereotype, which caused many to underestimate him. His genius lay in his ability to be a governmental guerrilla, an insider insurrectionary, a bureaucratic insurgent…and more metaphorical descriptions I can't match up right now.