Author: Chet

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Was the war really fought over oil?

The claim is often made that we invaded Iraq in 2003 to secure our access to its oil reserves, or, more cynically, to secure the profits of US energy-related companies. To me this policy made sense, at least in the short term. It was morally reprehensible and would probably hurt us in the long run but at least I could understand it. It made a lot more sense than the reasons the Bush administration announced: non-existent WMDs, non-existent cooperation between Saddam and Osama bin Laden,  and fulfilling the non-existent desires of the Iraqi masses to adopt electoral democracy and become close allies of the United States.

If securing access to oil were our real strategy, I would have expected us to cordon off the oil fields, empty the region of its indigenous inhabitants, and pump the place dry. As I said, morally reprehensible but a coherent strategy. We didn’t do that, of course. So perhaps we had a more sophisticated plan to achieve the same results? If so, it didn’t work very well. The average price of a barrel of domestic crude in 2002 in March 2013 dollars was $29.49. For 2012, it was $87.68. So we invested some $3 trillion (up from the original estimate of $80 billion), and what we got for it was a tripling of oil prices. Some bargain. Continue reading →

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Richards’s Conjecture on Truth and Beauty

Somewhere in my college days, we read Aristotle. I recall that he droned on about truth and beauty, but for the life of me, I have no clue about what he said. Or maybe I’m just recovering snatches from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Regardless, as a defrocked mathematician, I have an ambivalence towards these two notions. This may strike you as strange, “beauty” not often associated with mathematics, so let me explain. In mathematics, we work from guesses called “conjectures,” which we then try to establish by a finite series of logical steps, reasoning from assumptions (axioms) and from results already proven to be true. Once established, they get promoted from “conjecture” to “theorem.” It all sounds so dull when you put it this way. Continue reading →

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Newly Merged Airline Ends Coach Class Service

ATLANTA, Georgia — May 27, 2018 — (NYSE:DUA) — DeltaUnited-American (DU-A), the country’s premier global airline, announced today that it is ending coach class service and retiring routes and aircraft that serve the coach market. In conjunction with the move, the airline rolled out a new ultra-premium “Imperial Class,” designed for customers who own smaller jets, are awaiting delivery of their own intercontinental jets, or who appreciate the elevated level of door-to-door service, amenities, and attention to detail that a big airline can provide.

The airline noted that although all-business airlines like Eos and Silverjet have been tried before, but none successfully, the economic climate today is different. DU-A has no problem, for example, selling business-class seats for five times the price of coach, even though the seats only occupy four times the floor space. Competitors like Lufthansa and British Airways profitably operate limited numbers of all-business class flights, and this move is seen as the next logical step. Continue reading →

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Bill Lind: 4GW is Alive and Well

4GW is Alive and Well

William S. Lind
Special to Slightly East of New

25 May 2013

So “the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it (4GW) proposed”? How do you say that in Syriac?

The basic error in Chet Richards’ piece of April 19, “Is 4GW dead?” is confusing the external and internal worlds. Internally, in the U.S. military and the larger defense and foreign policy establishment, 4GW is dead, as is maneuver warfare and increasingly any connection to the external world. The foreign policy types can only perceive a world of states, in which their job is to promote the Wilsonian nee Jacobin, follies of “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are in fact, 4GW’s allies, in that their demand for “democracy” undermines states, opening the door for more 4GW. Continue reading →

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New editions of Strategic Game and Organic Design

Now available on our Articles page.

These two briefings are elaborations of themes that Boyd introduced in “Destruction and Creation” and Patterns of Conflict:

  • Strategic Game includes a long section on how operating at a faster tempo than an opponent can cause him to collapse. Frankly, I think Boyd made a mistake by devoting so much space to this topic (six pages) because it has fixed the notion of rapid tempo in people’s minds as the essence of Boyd’s strategy. Worse, some people confuse “rapid tempo” with “rapid OODA loop” (which appears in none of Boyd’s briefings).  It’s worth pointing out that he entitled this section “Illuminating Example,” not “essence of my theory” or some such. In fact, the very next chart explains the purpose of the “illuminating example,” which is the justification for building snowmobiles (and which is the essence of his theory as made clear in his “Revelation”):

We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. If we can do this, we will be able to surface new repertoires and (hopefully) develop Fingerspitzengefühl for folding our adversaries back inside themselves, morally-mentally-physically—so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s happening—without suffering the same fate ourselves.

This is, incidentally, the only mention of the German word Fingerspitzengefühl in any of Boyd’s material.

  • Organic Design is an ode to implicitness, continuing a theme he began back in charts 78 and 79 of Patterns. The word “implicit” occurs some 20 times in this short presentation, including in his definition of “orientation” (chart 15) and in discussions of the inherently implicit nature of human beings (charts 2, 19, 21, 22, etc.). It’s worth pointing out that Boyd did not draw a clear distinction between the concepts of “intuitive” and “implicit.” The briefing concludes with his re-conceptualization of command & control.

Deletes references to d-n-i.net and belisarius.com. These URLs have been taken over by someone else and have no relation to the original sites.

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Happy Birthday, Richard

As most of you know, Wagner, had he lived, would be 200 today.

As a kid in 8th grade, I had a connection to the master. My father commanded the 1st Recon SQDN of the 2nd Armored Cavalry at Christensen Barracks near the town of Bindlach, Germany. The barracks, actually a complete base with housing, school, and what I think was an old Luftwaffe airstrip, overlooked Bayreuth. From just outside the front gate, one had an excellent view of the city, including the Festspielhaus shimmering like Valhalla in the sunset.

Back in eighth grade, I couldn’t have told Wagner from Verdi (or Elvis), and it was not until a couple of years later that a high-school buddy (who went on to become chair of a university German department) introduced me to the wonders of Wagner’s music.

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And we thought Apple had lost its touch

Turns out, it’s still highly innovative, just in other areas:

But Irish tax law only considers companies residents of the small European country if they are managed and controlled there. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service, meantime, only counts corporations as American if they are incorporated here.

The result: Apple pays little or no taxes to either country on much of its international revenue, according to the report.

–“Apple Avoids Overseas Taxes, Panel Finds,” WSJ (paywall)

As the article explains, Apple incorporates many of its international operations in Ireland, but “manages and controls” them from Cupertino. One subsidiary didn’t  file a tax return, anywhere, even though it took in nearly $30 BN between 2009 and 2012.

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Offense vs. Defense

The question of offense vs. defense is as old as strategy and was discussed most famously by the Prussian general and author, Carl von Clausewitz. Although he maintained the superiority of the defensive (“properly understood”), he was not one to champion a passive approach to war:

Every defensive, according to its strength, will seek to change to the attack as soon as it has exhausted the advantages of the defensive, so therefore, however great or small the defense may be, we still also include in it contingently the overthrow of the enemy as the object which this attack may have and which is to be considered as the proper objective of the defensive. (end of Chapter IV, Book V) Continue reading →

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Where the action is

Boyd wrote that orientation is the most important part of the OODA loop (Organic Design, 26).

Far be it from me to contradict the master, but a good exercise for you would be to explain why each component of the OODA “loop” is the most important. I’ll get you started: Without action, who cares what the rest of your OODA “loop” is doing? As Boyd himself began the “Abstract”:

To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world. (emphasis added)

Because action is the only thing that opponents, competitors, allies, the undecided, and customers see.

Where the action isLooked at this way, the OODA “loop” is a device for representing how we evolve our capability for putting actions into the world. As I explain in “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” if you use the right one, the one Boyd put into his last briefing, you can generate any pattern of actions that your imagination and preparation allow.

This, from a recent conference. The circular pattern in blue just indicates that these links are operating and does not imply that they are firing in sequence (i.e., waiting on each other). Click for a larger view.

My paper, and Boyd’s “Abstract” are available from the Articles page in the menu, above.