A John Boyd Minefield at Small Wars Journal?

The release this week of The John Boyd Roundtable, Debating Science, Strategy, and War has sparked a spirited debate over at Small Wars Journal. One of their council members Cavguy
opened the following discussion thread, What's the big deal about John Boyd?

Cavguy begins by asking:

Okay,Probably stepping into a minefield here.

I was reading Selil's blog on the new Boyd book coming out and it got me thinking. First, I'll admit ignorance similar to I had on EBO a few months ago. I've heard of OODA (big shrug of shoulders, failed to see how it could change my life in any away) and know he was a deep thinking fighter pilot who concentrated on how to do things faster/better/more efficiently. I also understand he was a magnetic personality, kind of a Tony Robbins for the military.

Far from stepping into a minefield, Cavguy asked the kind of questions that any good officer should ask before following anyone into a proverbial or actual minefield. The ongoing discussion generated comments that John Boyd would have welcomed.

Council member Eden writes:

I have to say this has been one of the most stimulating threads I've followed in a while, and one of the reasons why I keep coming back here when I should be working. The references and explanatory notes have given me a better understanding of Boyd and his work - though I have to admit I have never been a fan.

Adding valueable insight to the discussion is William F. Owen.

He writes in part:

I have no beef with Boyd.

MY beef is with those who advocate him out of a sense of fashion, and mostly have little experience or knowledge with the wider and mostly more useful bodies of military thought.

Clausewitz is not simple either, but I get him. Most people criticising Clausewtiz haven't read his work thoroughly and/or discussed it with others. Boyd left very very little written work to "not get".

He left presentations that are now presented by others, and were constantly evolving.

The editor of the book which sparked this discussion, Mark Safranski writing as Zenpundit had this to add:

Great Thread! Now Boyd in context.....

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 war by 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.

Following this discussion, I was drawn to the theme of a column by Thomas Barnett: To rule high seas, make sea traffic transparent .

Barnett argues that:

One of the main problems in counterterrorism today is that there are so many people and vehicles and so much data and material moving through globalization's myriad networks that it seems virtually impossible to track it all effectively. Nowhere has this problem been more acute than on the high seas.

He writes about how former Adm. Harry Ulrich, then U.S. commander of NATO Naval Forces Europe addressed this problem:

Ulrich began stitching together a network of shore-based sensors ringing the Mediterranean. His naval command then began initial monitoring by tapping into the International Maritime Organization's existing Automated Identification System, transforming NATO's ability to track ship traffic in the Med.

Ulrich told Barnett in an interview in 2007.

"I don't do defense; I do security. When you talk defense, you talk containment and mutually assured destruction. When you talk security, you talk collaboration and networking. This is the future."

This led me to think about the evolving role of our military. Defense has been the mantra since the first family unit organized itself for protection against outside aggressors. As societies evolved so did the role of defense. When nation states find themselves interconnected by trade, culture and mutual collaboration, security becomes vital to ensure that those threads of connectivity remain secure. Much like a police force in a community, defense begins to move beyond guarding the walls to protecting the streets and networks beyond those walls.

To paraphrase both Tom Barnett and Admiral Ulrich the future, is security of those networks and threads of collaboration. Connecting the dots between the discussion at the Small Wars Journal's Discussion blog and Barnett, is that both represent a shift in the thinking of how we define the role of our military in the 21st century. In turn the contributions of those who take the time to share their thoughts on the Small Wars Journal blog adds much to this important subject.

Update: Defense and the National Interest has this post by Robert M. Toguchi an active duty Army colonel who draws a connection between Nassim Taleb's best-selling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and John Boyd's OODA loop theory.

Implications of the Black Swan

Toguchi writes in part:

In the case of responding to a Black Swan initiative, Boyd recommended several approaches to buy time and to regain the strategic initiative. They include: divert attention, use a multiplicity of options, create strategic depth, use rapidity, gain internal harmony, and magnify the adversary’s friction while streamlining one’s own. Using historical examples, Boyd demonstrated how these methods have great applicability to throw any adversary off of his game and to provide the breathing space for the U.S. to employ strategic options.

A Shameless Attempt at Self Promotion ;-)

As noted in an earlier post, a NEW BOOK, The John Boyd Roundtable, Debating Science, Strategy, and War has joined the millions of remnants of dead trees that are offered to a curious public every year. So in a shameless plug I heartily recommend this book as a quick primer to introduce you to John Boyd's mind.

I used that post to introduce my colleagues, who in my opinion carried the bulk of what the book is about. My treatise dealt with looking at Boyd's strategy through the prism of military history and true to a historian's craft followed the empirical evidence chain that Boyd used to build his ideas on the foundation of past military achievements.

Our effort could not have been possible without the masterful work done by Lt Col, Frans Osinga of the Netherlands Air Force who wrote, Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, and W.F. “Fred” Zimmerman of Nimble Books, who sought out Mark Safranski, with an offer to publish the results of our roundtable.

John Boyd's theory the OODA loop has found traction in fields far from the world of military science.

Chet Richards uses the OODA loop strategy in business applications Boyd at FBEMBA.

And in the world of global supply chains, Shawn at Asia Logistics Wrap has this post, Asia Logistics Wrap: Global IT Deployment.

And politics, where Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report recently described John McCain's strategy as employment of the OODA Loop. McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama.
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There are over six billion ways to employ Boyd's strategy, one for every person on the planet, who in order to survive goes through those four simple stages every day.

Again, they are, Observe, then Orient, then make a Decision, then Act, on the data from the previous stages. Success means doing it faster and smarter than the other guy.

EARLY REVIEWS:
Shlok Vaidya:

Michael Tanji:

Pundita

Sam Liles:

The John Boyd Roundtable, Debating Science, Strategy, and War

NEW BOOK - The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy and War

Early this year I was invited by to participate in an online Roundtable on: Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Therory of John Boyd by Mark Safranski. The roundtable consisted of eight contributors who wrote essays and exchanged discussion comments as we reviewed the book Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd" by Dr. Frans Osinga.

After the discussion ended I wrote a postscript describing my feelings at being invited to be a part of this discussion.

It was a pleasure to participate in this discussion and read the comments of the other participants. This type of forum, held online holds promise for future discussions. No great decision was reached, and I doubt if anyone's mind was changed by any of the arguments. But everyone gained by reading the thoughts of others on the same subject.
This intersection of views gives purchase to a new tool with which to discuss the revelevant topics of the day. A sort of Junto society if you will, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto where in 1727 Benjamin Franklin founded a society to discuss the issues of the day. The Junto's Friday evening meetings were organized around a series of questions that Franklin devised, covering a range of intellectual, personal, business, and community topics. These questions were used as a springboard for discussion and community action. In fact, through the Junto, Franklin promoted such concepts as volunteer fire-fighting clubs, improved security (night watchmen), and a public hospital.
Ever since I began to read blogs and now write my own, I am struck with the similarities of the original intent of Franklin's group and the online blog community today. Another point that todays blog community has with American history is the similar tone and function of the blogs, in relationship to the prevalence of pamplets, extolling the virtues and vices of life under the British. Much has been made by historians, that this grass roots element was insturmental in uplifting the American spirit towards revolution, by the reading of thousands of pamplets in taverns every night.
Today's blogs instead of talking of revolution, are formulating revolutionary thinking, where new ideas are given an intersection to meet, and reasonable men and women can offer thought and comment, in order to find new innovations for the challenges that confront us.

Shortly after we completed the roundtable, the editors Nimble Press of approached us for permission to compile our essays into book form. The result of that effort has been published this week.

http://www.amazon.com/John-Boyd-Roundtable-Debating-Strategy/dp/1934840467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221928920&sr=8-1

http://www.nimblebooks.com/wordpress/

I want to introduce the authors begining with our editor, Mark Safranski, followed by Thomas Barnett, who graciously wrote the forward.

Mark Safranski - Teacher, Educational consultant. Adviser, Conversationbase, LLC. Contributor, HNN. Member, Small Wars Council. Blogger, Zenpundit, Chicago Boyz.

Thomas Barnett, Best selling author of "The Pentagons New Map" Blueprint for Action and

soon to be released "Great Powers, America and the World after Bush. "

Daniel H. Abbott is a doctoral candidate at the University ofNebraska-Lincoln. He writes at the blogs www.dreaming5gw.com and www.tdaxp.com. He has also written Revolutionary Strategies in EarlyChristianity: The 4GW Against Rome and the COIN to Save It,published by Nimble Books.

Dr. Chet Richards of Defense and the National Interest, a mathematician and business consultantand was one of Colonel John Boyd's close associates and collaborators.The only authorized briefer of Boyd's Patterns of Conflict, Dr. Richardsoperates two websites dedicated to Boyd's strategic theories, Defense& The National Interest and Chetrichards.com. Dr. Richards is theauthor of numerous books on business and military strategy includingCertain to Win, A Swift Elusive Sword and most recently, If We CanKeep It. Richards is also a retired Colonel in the USAF and wasformerly the Reserve Air Attache in Saudi Arabia.

Lexington Green, is an attorney and a blogger of Chicago Boyz

Shane Deichman is a nuclear physicist and the President/COOof EMC2 LLC. Deichman is the former Science Adviser to MarineCorps Forces-Pacific, was Experiment Operations Director at U.S.Joint Forces Command, and has served as director at scientific andprivate sector institutions such as The New England Complex SystemsInstitute, the Institute for Advanced Technologies in Global Resilienceat Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at Enterra Solutions, LLC. He blogs at Wizards of Oz, Dreaming 5GW.

Adam Elkus - free-lance writer for Defense & The National Interest, The Huffington Post,

Athena Intelligence, Foreign Policy in Focus. Blogger, Rethinking Security, Dreaming 5GW.

Frank Hoffman, a former Marine Officer and national security consultant, is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Quantico, Virginia as well as at The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies; and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Homeland Security. Hoffman is the author of Decisive Force: The New American Way of War and a contributing author to the new U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual.

Dr. Frans Osinga - Colonel, Royal Netherlands Air Force. Fighter Pilot. Associate Professor of War Studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy. Formerly, of Nato’s Supreme Allied Command Transformation. Research Fellow, Clingendael Institute of International Relations. Author of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.

And finally, your humble scribe, HG, whom by simple deduction is revealed within the pages of yonder book.

McCain and the OODA Loop

A-4's over North Vietnam

John McCain being taken prisoner October 26, 1967 North Vietnam

The OODA Loop in Practice

Forty one years ago next month will mark the anniversary of an unexpected consequence that has led John McCain to be where he is today. On October 26, 1967 John McCain was at the controls of an A-4 Skyhawk fighter bomber over North Vietnam. His mission was cut short by a SAM missile, and he spent the next five years as a POW.

A lot has been speculated about McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate. The articles below offer some reason behind how his mind works. Being a fighter pilot, McCain seemed to channel another lesser know pilot from the Vietnam War who has left an enduring legacy among those who follow military strategy.

Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report writes.

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop.

That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

Read the whole story below:

McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama

And as Barone noted:

I am not the only one to notice that John McCain and Sarah Palin have gotten inside the Obama campaign's (and mainstream media's) OODA loop. Blogger Charlie Martin sprang into pixels on www.americanthinker.com before I could spring into print with this column.

McCain and the OODA Loop

The line of the day, by Barone:

John Boyd would have been a terrific political consultant.

There will be more to come in the next two weeks about John Boyd, and how his strategy transcends all forms of combat, military, business and politics.

Pondering On the Eve of Independence

It is appropriate on the eve of the 232nd anniversary of the birth of the United States of America that we reflect on the state of the nation. A trip around the blogs this week finds two posts that will give you pause. The first is a post by Steve DeAngelis, Enterra Solutions offers a suggestion that the trademark product of Enterra Solutions, has an application in America. Development-in-a-Box™ at Home in America Steve begins.

In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman insisted that the next U.S. president needs to focus on "nation-building at home" ["Anxious in America," 29 June 2008]. Friedman laments the fact that America's economic situation is so bad that it will undoubtedly become U.S. voters' most important concern during the rest of the campaign season.

Steve's company Enterra Solutions is involved in developing investment and best practices in at-risk emerging nations, and has taken the lead in Iraq by working to set up new businesses that are home-grown enterprises. DeAngelis serves up this essay, in the belief that Enterra's core product, Development-in-a-Box will work here in America.

Steve continues;

I titled this post "Development-in-a-Box™ at Home in America" to connect with Friedman's idea that we need to conduct nation-building at home as well as highlight the fact that America, too, needs to ensure that it builds the future on best practices and global standards. That is the only way that U.S. companies will once again demonstrate the kind of competitive edge that they will need to compete in emerging markets -- the markets that hold the greatest promise of growth in the future. By focusing on competing in new market sectors, America can remain a world leader, but it must invest wisely in new infrastructure, improved education and training, and technologies that will make it more responsive to the global economy.

Much of what this important post strikes to the heart of what ails America. Perception is everything, and as the final paragraph in DeAngelis's post states.

Hope is the clarion call needed to re-instill the kind of values that made America great in the first place. People immigrated to America with nothing but hope in their pockets and they managed to build a great nation. We've gotten lazy as we've wallowed in our success. We have assumed that the good times would always roll and that we could continue to live large without working hard and remaining innovative. We need leaders who can make the clarion call and motivate a new generation to greatness. On that point, Friedman is right, "nothing else matters."

Important words from a man who has a deep commitment to leave a lasting legacy in the people his company is helping to stand on their own. His purpose in writing, is not to offer up new business opportunities for Enterra. This message has been championed by others, like John Kao at Innovation Nation. The majority of American's believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Direction of the country. Polls, posted on www.pollingreport.com/ show that more that between 70 and 84% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. The direction we think we want take will be tried by whoever becomes president in November.

Page 2.

Another post by Dan at tdaxp.com links to a scary article that describes an incident that had the perpetrators been from any country other than Mexico, it would have led to a call for a new front on the War on Terror, be opened against the country disgorging the killers.
Mexican Cartels and the Fallout From Phoenix Stratfor. After reading Dan's comments, please take the time to read the full article, and ponder what we have lurking in our midst. This followed by revelations about the City of San Francisco running its own foreign policy and immigration program in violation of United States Law. Young illegal immigrants lose their San Francisco sanctuary. No matter how hard the Mayor tried to distance himself from this growing scandal, the record speaks for itself. Newsom pledges to make SF a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

Anyone who reads this blog, or is a first time visitor who takes the time to read my earlier posts, know that I am a strong supporter of legal immigration and the rich benefits that our country reaps from assimilating new Americans from every corner of the world. But, if one breaks the law, they loose their ticket to ride, and they should be sent home, after paying their debt to society.

Final thoughts, one quote by Steve DeAngelis is worth repeating.

We've gotten lazy as we've wallowed in our success. We have assumed that the good times would always roll and that we could continue to live large without working hard and remaining innovative.

If we as a nation don't wake up and get back to the business of working hard and remaining innovative, we will whither on the vine of nations for lack of new leaves and the sap to make us grow. We must be willing to roll up our innovative sleeves and get back to the basics. Frank words, for a people grown fat and lazy, on the milk and honey of being the World's rich kids for half a century.

Thoughts for Sunday Afternoon

The posts that caught my eye this week are a diverse lot. But in reflection, they hold an element of connectivity.

Steve DeAngelis, posted on Two Views of the Emerging Geopolitical Landscape where he comments on book reviews in The Economist, that try and forecast the future political landscape of the world. He concludes his comments by referring to his colleague Tom Barnett.

I have heard my colleague Tom Barnett argue that most developing countries that embrace globalization and free markets do so as single-party states. He asserts that many Americans suffer from attention-deficit disorder when it comes to remembering how democracies emerge – "the process is slow and painful." Alternative futures analysis can be very useful in exploring how autocracies might evolve and what that might mean for the global economy.

Moving along to Chet Ricards blog, we are treated to a story connecting orientation, to genetic heritage, Note on Orientation: Genetic Heritage where Chet draws a connection to John Boyd's OODA Theory.

Orientation is an interactive process of many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.

Related to Chet Richards is the site Defense and the National Interest which introduces itself as:

Our aim is to foster debate on the roles of the U.S. armed forces in the post-Cold War era and on the resources devoted to them. The ultimate purpose is to help create a more effective national defense against the types of threats we will likely face during the first decades of the new millennium.

Thomas Barnett's in This week's column sees a great religious awakening on the horizon.

As our era features globalization's rapid and unprecedented advance, it will logically also feature the greatest single religious awakening the world has ever seen. Religion will become eminently more important because economic conditions will change more dramatically in coming years and decades than at any other time in human history.

Barnett's column deserves a careful read as he traces the development of the major religions and how they have been challenged by globalization. He offers two answers to that perceived challenge.

Based on the American experience, there seem to be two answers: (1) encourage nondenominationalism among the major sects of a country's dominant religion or among the competing religions; (2) allow the religion in question to maintain its social model of separatism while subjugating itself to the secular state.

His final sentence offers hope.

American awakenings share a history of triggering mass social reform. The same can and should be true of globalization's current awakening.

Intrinsically linked to the challenges of change that comes with more and more people getting a fair slice of the pie is the ongoing clashes that are drawn along culture and religious lines. Heading into this next week our attention is drawn to observations made over at Information Dissemination by Galrahn, Observing the Rotation of US Naval Power to the Middle East. His read of these events:

As we read the events as they are disclosed in public sources, we believe the United States is on the verge of major offensive operations in the Middle East.

These rotational periods where strike groups overlap durations in forward theaters do occur every year, and are not abnormal, however it is noteworthy that this year the rotation coincides with a large naval presence from Europe in the 5th Fleet theater. We also observe the possibility that this massive increase of naval power may not be reduced as quickly as we observed it would last week.

And in a related post on Destroyerman, War Beckons, and another link, posted by Galrahn we are left to our own conclusions.

The Nimitz CSG currently on deployment to the Pacific is getting more escorts half way through its deployment. We observe it very rare for a CSG already on deployment to have escorts surged. Can't say we have seen this before, makes us wonder, what is going on in the South Pacific we aren't hearing about.

Time will reveal the whole story, until then we can only watch and wait and reflect on this post about a discovery from another time, Missing WWII Airmen are Identified.

OODA Loop: An Idea Heard Around the World

Earlier this year I was priviliged to be invited to participate in an online discussion entitled: Roundtable on: Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Therory of John Boyd. The forum was hosted by Zenpundit and the Chicago Boyz.

The reason I return to the subject today is because one of the blogs I frequently read, Asia Logistics wrap took up the subject of using the OODA loop strategy for something other that war fighting. In a post entitled Establishing a Global IT Roll-Out Rule Set, Shawn the host, sees the OODA Loop as a tangible asset in reducing mistakes in implementation of global IT deployment. He offers up suggestions of how the strategy would make sense to IT deployment managers.

The key here is that the OODA concept can act as the foundational approach to a global IT deployment; it should be ingrained so deeply in the minds of the implementation team that it drives subconsciously the continuous improvement and adaptability of strategy and tactics throughout every phase of a project--sales to support, support to upgrades, upgrades to support and so on.

Shawn goes on to write:

Such a template would not lock an implementation team into a fixed set of practices--rather, it would contain an always evolving set of best practices geared towards enhancing OODA Loop and empowering the full talents and capabilities of the implementation team.

Reading this post supports my view in later posts that the OODA Loop theory is applicable to a cornucopia of fields where planning and thinking are paramount to success and survival.
Japan in the OODA loop, Metacognition on OODA and Innovation, and Final comments on the Roundtable on Science, Strategy and War all point to applications other that strictly war.

Shawn next post delves further into how the OODA Loop can be implemented. Global IT Deployment: Principles to Remember. He offers an excellent road map to explain and guide those interested in using this theory in setting up best practices in a global enviornment. He says in part:

...... I believe an ingrained OODA loop discipline builds bridges to bring these regional or local pieces into synch as a global technology deployment progresses.

This will be a developing series and well worth following as Shawn details how John Boyd's OODA Loop can be a vital template for global supply chain management.

Final comments on the Roundtable on Science, Strategy and War

Col/Dr. Franz Osinga has posted a reply to the online reviews of his book Science, Strategy and War. He offered kind words for the review and commented that the United States is the best place for open discussions to take place. He went on to share the problems he had understanding John Boyd. The article is posted on zenpunidt.com Osinga Roundtable on Science, Strategy and War: The Author’s Reply and Chicago Boyz .

It was a pleasure to participate in this discussion and read the comments of the other participants. This type of forum, held online holds promise for future discussions. No great decision was reached, and I doubt if anyone's mind was changed by any of the arguments. But everyone gained by reading the thoughts of others on the same subject.

This intersection of views gives purchase to a new tool with which to discuss the revelevant topics of the day. A sort of Junto society if you will, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto where in 1727 Benjamin Franklin founded a society to discuss the issues of the day. The Junto's Friday evening meetings were organized around a series of questions that Franklin devised, covering a range of intellectual, personal, business, and community topics. These questions were used as a springboard for discussion and community action. In fact, through the Junto, Franklin promoted such concepts as volunteer fire-fighting clubs, improved security (night watchmen), and a public hospital.

Ever since I began to read blogs and now write my own, I am struck with the similarities of the original intent of Franklin's group and the online blog community today. Another point that todays blog community has with American history is the similar tone and function of the blogs, in relationship to the prevalence of pamplets, extolling the virtues and vices of life under the British. Much has been made by historians, that this grass roots element was insturmental in uplifting the American spirit towards revolution, by the reading of thousands of pamplets in taverns every night.

Today's blogs instead of talking of revolution, are formulating revolutionary thinking, where new ideas are given an intersection to meet, and reasonable men and women can offer thought and comment, in order to find new innovations for the challenges that confront us.

Metacognition on OODA and Innovation

The past week of postings have covered a diverse field of subjects, from emerging generations, to a changing America, and an examination of the OODA loop strategy, and how it relates to all aspects of life.

All of the above posts are linked to innovation and the adopting of new ideas and tools, that will effect human interaction. Steve DeAngelis adds to the ongoing discussion on innovation on his blog today entitled; Innovation Takes Hard Work. A most interesting innovation was shared by Steve with his readers, it came by way of an email.

"Speaking of intersectional innovation, I received an email from Frans Johansson with some interesting news for those of you who might not have read his best-selling book The Medici Effect. His publisher, the Harvard Business School Press, provided him with a pdf of the entire book, which can found on his web site www.themedicieffect.com. Anyone can download it, post it, and share it with a It's the first time HBR has ever done anything like this. It's pretty innovative in its own right.

This all leads back to is metacognition, thinking about thinking, it is how we learn to, visualize and adopt those innovations to survive and flourish. When a society, or a person becomes complacent and feels that all their needs are met, they begin to stagnate. In a nutshell, this seems to have aflicted the United States, we seem to have let ourselves go on a binge after the end of the Cold War. We were on top, secure, rich, and envied by most of the world. Now, we are waking up to find we've spent our savings on a 18 year self-indulgent party. This can happen to people too, they become secure in their enviornment and allow themselves to be emotionally drugged by the ease of life.

Take for example someone who gets a great education in a field they truly love. Then they take a job that provides a good income, but it's boring and mundane. That person soon finds themselves drugged by the paycheck. The chance to make a contribution fueled by their passion, is delayed and takes a backseat to having a secure life. One day, that person comes to work and finds that their position has been eliminated. They are faced with the reality of reinventing themselves. The fear of surviving kicks in and they observe their situation, then orient themselves to their choices, and then decide what action to take. Failing to do this leads to economic and social destruction.

Human nature when faced with these circumstances, will find a way to succeed. I myself was a product of this complacency. It took a system perturbation, to make me see my world through a horizontal lense and act.

Examples can be found in Dr. John Kao’s book, Innovation Nation (Kao’s site is here) of how businesses and countries when faced with dire futures found ways to adopt and innovate their way to success. His book is more than a primer on telling America how to regain it's position as the most innovative nation in history. It is a lesson to everyone who reads it, that the true source of innovation is ingrained in our common heritage as humans. It is up to each of us to think about our own OODA loop and how to use it.

Japan in the OODA loop

Yesterday, I posted a review of Col/Dr. Frans Osinga's book:Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd" as part of an on going roundtable discussion. Today, Tom Barnett posted a link and comments about Japan's changing business strategy, Japan gets more American, around the edges .

The Economist article Tom links,Going Hybrid: describes how Japan, faced with a 15 year drop in GDP, has begun to recover by being innovative, and creating a hybrid economic system based on both the Japanese and American systems.


The thing that struck me as I read Tom's post and the article is what Japan did was in line with John Boyd's OODA Loop theory . On a grand scale countries, can not react like fighter pilots and turn on a dime. But just for a momment, consider what Japan did.

Faced with a dropping GDP, they first "O" observed their situation, then they "O" oriented themselves to the options available, and made a, "D" decision to "A" act, and create a hybrid economic model to begin to turn things around and survive.

Anyway, just a brief example to feed into the discussion taking place over at Chicago Boyz about the above referenced book by Dr. Frans Osinga.

Roundtable on: Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Therory of John Boyd

This post is written as part of an ongoing roundtable on Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy, and War. over at Chicagoboyz.net and cross posted on zenpundit.

Col/Dr Frans P.B. Osinga of the Neatherlands Air Force wrote this work as his doctoral thesis. It is a supurb, clearly written journey into the mind of a great thinker. For myself, someone who is seeped in the essence of history that for the most part took place before John Boyd's time, I found the book a stimulating read.

John Boyd, known as 40-second Boyd, for always being able to defeat an opponet in air combat within that time constraint, was a maverick, who left no great written treatsie to explain his theories. What was left behind after his death were lecture notes and vu-graphs. Dr. Osinga carefully ginned those notes into a readable text and gave even the most un-military minded, a window on how not only John Boyd thought, but how humans and on a broader scale, all organisms adopt and survive.

John Boyd's legacy has been his OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Action), some would conclude that his contribution is revolutionary, or that it was based on selective cherry picking to support his thesis. The contributions of John Boyd are important because they draw from a vast store house of specialties, such as history, science, and behavior for support. He mulled these concepts over in his great mind and shared them in marathon lectures lasting up to 18 hrs.

The benefit of this work is to draw attention to Boyd's theory and stimulate thinking, something that in a modern technology centered universe, is often left to pre-concieved notions.

Boyd defined the Art of Success as:

Appear to be an unsolvable cryptogram while operating in a directed way to penetrate adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist;
yet;

Shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit andstrength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommittedso that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

Boyd concluded with:

The first sentence is an advice to remain, in the words of Sun Tzu, unfathomable to the enemy, yet operate coherently in several levels of war and across different dimensions.

Multi-sylable words for a simple concept, survival.

Today, strategists debate what generation of warfare we have now evolved too. I am no expert in those fields and would be treading on frozen celophane to try and cross that river. This book helps us understand the changing environment of both war and peace. In a historical prospective, we can reach back into earliest time, or to the remote jungles of New Guniea fifty years ago, when two men would meet in the forest; they would first, observe, then, orient to get best posture for survival, make a decision, kin or enemy, take action, fight or break bread. In the simplest terms, these decisions have played out in ever complicated scenarios ever since.

Dr. Osinga's book may turn out to be more read than any biography on John Boyd because he addresses the meat of what Boyd was trying to say in hundreds of lectures. He does this by providing the reader with Boyds ideas to ponder:

Categories of conflict:

Three kinds of conflict

Based on his ‘panorama’ of military history, Boyd argues that one can imagine three kinds of human conflict:

Attrition Warfare – as practiced by the Emperor Napoleon, by all sides during the 19th Century and during World War I, by the Allies duringWorld War II, and by present-day nuclear planners.

Maneuver Conflict – as practiced by the Mongols, General Bonaparte, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Hitler’s Generals (in particular Manstein, Guderian, Balck, Rommel) and the Americans under Generals Patton and MacArthur.

Moral Conflict – as practiced by the Mongols, most Guerrilla Leaders, avery few Counter-Guerrillas (such as Magsaysay) and certain others from Sun Tzu to the present.

In a historical sense looking back to draw from the examples of strategies that worked or failed are most helpful when one realizes that a saying frequently used by an old soldier I once knew, that the Army suffers from CRS, IE, can't remember scat, (my word to keep it cleaner) and it is still the norm today.

By using the above example of Attrition conflict and then compare it with Manuever conflict, one gets an image of how innovation can overcome conventional wisdom to win.

Spartans vs Thebans led by Epaminondas,who adopted the following strategy at Leuctra. The strong left wing advanced while the weak right wing retreated.
Or: Patton's end run manuever around the Germans and across France, vs Hodge's attrition warfare in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

And Moral, verus Attrition and Manuver conflict;

Going to Vietnam ready to fight WW III, and finding ourselves fighting a stealthy foe, reminicent of our own colonial indian wars.

Dr. Osinga concludes that John Boyd's work serves a greater purpose that his OODA loop idea.

Boyd’s ideas involve much more than exclusively the idea of ‘rapid OODA looping’ or a theory for maneuver warfare. Contradicting those who categorically dismiss the validity of the OODA concept, the idea was found to be deep and rich in ideas,explanations, hypotheses, propositions, concepts and suggestions concerning conflict in general. These concepts are firmly based on a thorough study of military history and informed by insights on learning and the behavior of social systems derived from various disciplines.

What this book serves to tell us is that in order to survive, one has to be ready to adapt. This is illustrated in our current strategy in the so called long war. The understanding of Boyd's strategy also relate in every aspect of life from the mundane to profound.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone.
"Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd"