The John Boyd collection (merged thread)

[PhilR]

I never bought any of the 4thGW warfare stuff and i dont believe any thinker of quality did either: Too simplistic; too sequential; too much of a rehash of Marx's epochs but with a liberal democratic switch to it. But it sounded good though and it soothed and it fit neatly in with the airpower/techno fetish of the 90s that all wars could be reduced to targets for destruction and that friction in war was gone; and more painfully for the American Army it produced the nonsensical notion of "maneuver out of contact, "certain knowledge of the enemy," and "quality of firsts."

Hey Tom Odom, I thought in that famous photo of John Warden in flight rompers in Checkmate with SecDef Cheney, John Boyd was in his rompers too albeit mystically in the background nodding approval

gian

I'm not a big fan of 4GW, but I'm sure they do not associate themselves with air-centric, "sterile" solutions or dominant knowledge, etc. Quite the opposite. Warden and Boyd wore the same uniform, but that's about the limit of their similarity.