[Ed Beakley is a retired Naval Aviator with 170 combat missions in the A-7 Corsair during the war in Vietnam; all total, he has over 3000 hours in 20 different military aircraft. In his last military tour he was Test Director and Lead Project Test Pilot for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile Program.

Ed is a 1968 NROTC graduate from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, a graduate of the Naval Post Graduate School with a Masters in Aeronautical Engineering, and a graduate of the Flight Research Inc. Test Pilot and Flight Test Engineer Course. He is a member of the International Test and Evaluation Association, Naval Institute, the Association of Naval Aviation, and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

He founded and manages Project White Horse, exploring leadership in the post 9/11 world.]

Recommendation for my Nashville, Litton HS, Vandy, and generally below the Mason Dixon long time friends:

Don’t know if you’re familiar with author Robert Coram out of Atlanta. Fiction writer but his last four books prior to Gully Dirt were biographies of military folks — all of which I highly recommend, not because of military or war connection, but because of the story telling of some really great, brave, and unique Americans. See: http://robertcoram.com/portfolio/# Continue reading →

Celeste Headlee of Georgia Public Broadcasting interviewed Robert Coram on his new memoir, Gully Dirt. Listen to a replay (16 min) on the GPB site.

My agent, Jeannine Addams, and her company have a new web site.  Please go take a look:

Find my section under “Why travel with us?”

The phenomenon of locked orientation, where we get trapped into what Boyd called a “pattern of actions and ideas,” can be deadly in a conflict. We all know this, yet it still happens.

One reason is the implicit guidance and control link from orientation back to observation that influences what we observe, creating a “cognitive bias.” Left undampened, this feedback loop so narrows our field of observation that our brains don’t register data that our eyes actually “see,” producing “inattenional blindness.” Perhaps the best known illustrations are the famous “invisible gorilla” experiments. There are many sites and videos out there, so just Google the term and watch. Continue reading →

Apparently the Russians. In “The Moscow School of hard knocks: Key pillars of Russian strategy,” 17 Jan 2017,  CNA analyst and former NDU program manager Michael Kofman
offers vivid illustrations of ideas that Boyd developed in his various papers and presentations (all available on our Articles page).  He doesn’t cite Boyd, but you’ll recognize the concepts.

I have no idea of how Kofman came across these ideas — Boyd has nine pages of sources at the end of Patterns of Conflict, so he isn’t claiming that he thought most of them up. Regardless of how Kofman discovered them, he establishes that they certainly do work, but unfortunately not for us. Continue reading →

In his only paper (as opposed to hours-long presentation), Boyd concluded that

According to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics one cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.”

In other words, to even stand a chance of reducing “confusion and disorder,” or “friction” as Clausewitz called it, you have to go outside the system.

It turns out one reason that Amazon seems to work so well is that it understands this principle. In “Amazon’s Friction-Killing Tactics To Make Products More Seamless,”  the company’s product management and engineering PMO, Kintan Brahmbhatt, gives several examples of where friction comes from  during product development and how to overcome it. All involve going outside. Continue reading →

Research on the physiology of “choking” under pressure suggests that the reason isn’t that you think about it too much, but that you think with the wrong parts of your brain.

On those (unfortunately rare) occasions when I’ve had to sign more than about a dozen books, the first few flow naturally and reinforce the impression of literary greatness. There comes a point, though, when my hand takes on a life of its own, and I can’t finish the signature. Signature becomes scrawl. Choke.

Research indicates that the parts of the brain that smooth out our previously learned actions — areas like the cerebellum and the premotor cortex of the cerebrum — get overridden by the prefrontal cortex of the cerebrum where our conscious thought resides.  The prefrontal cortex is great for thinking, but when it starts micromanaging the cerebellum, disaster often ensues. Continue reading →

Here’s a fun way to start your weekend: Play with the new Google Translate app on Android or iOS.  I mean “fun” in the sense of “How much longer is your white collar career going to last?” You may be wondering about the connection.

If you’re in a traditional blue collar job, like manufacturing, the writing’s been on the wall for a long time. For example, “Industrial robots will replace manufacturing jobs — and that’s a good thing”

There is no denying that the U.S. and Canada have been losing jobs to offshore competition for almost half a century. From 2000 to 2010 alone, 5.6 million jobs disappeared.

Interestingly, though, only 13 percent of those jobs were lost due to international trade. The vast remainder, 85 percent of job losses, stemmed from “productivity growth” — another way of saying machines replacing human workers.

All this suggests that many of those jobs that do come back from overseas will go to robots, and it doesn’t take a lot of searching on the Internet to see that this is the latest big meme.  Continue reading →