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?"Originally Posted by Cavguy
WM,
I have very little vested in any of the methods talked about, except perhaps Slapout Based Warfare.
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.
Bookmarks