Author: Chet

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A3, Einheit, and the conceptual spiral

Boyd didn’t like to leave anything to chance. While he recognized that uncertainty is the atmosphere of conflict, it affects all sides, like the weather. Unlike the weather, however, you don’t have to take what nature gives you; you can pump up uncertainty in the other side. Boyd’s suggestion for doing this was to conduct experiments on your opponents, learn from these experiments more rapidly than they do, and then use your updated orientation to better shape and adapt to the situation. By doing this, you can throw more novelty at them than they can handle, while at the same time handling theirs with aplomb. Continue reading →

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Another thing to make you feel old

As if I really needed it.

The Department of Energy has announced that the Titan supercomputer is now open for business at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Titan can clip along at 20 petaflops, that’s 20,000 trillion calculations per second.

Back when I first got into computing, the big kid on the block was the IBM 7030 Stretch, which hit an amazing 1.2 mips, that is 1.2 million instructions per second. The computer we were using, the IBM 1620, could do on the order of 700 – 800 additions per second, which was really fast compared to what most people could do by hand.

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New version of “Meaning of Life”

A few tweaks to “John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, and the Meaning of Life,” now available from the Articles page.

Changes:

  • Page 2: A footnote supplying data to reinforce Boyd’s contention that one of the invariants he discovered, the one underlying both blitzkrieg/maneuver warfare and guerrilla warfare, has been “extraordinarily successful”
  • Page 15: Corrected the page citation for the Balck quote (with a hat tip to Feral Jundi)
  • Page 21: Added a cautionary note on using the military version of “operating inside the OODA loop” for conflicts other than war
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For better value, change your values

Air Force Lt Col Dan Ward has another great piece on how to break out of the cycle of acquisition programs that are ever more expensive, ever later, and in many cases, ever more irrelevant. Obviously the first two make the third just that much more likely.

Perhaps to better accommodate the crowd here at Fast Transients, he’s done this one in graphic novel format: The Comic Guide To Improving Defense Acquisitions. (2.9 MB PDF)

Pay close attention starting at around page 8, where he explains how orientation (which calls “values,” as in “things we value”) shapes our decision making. So if, as he writes, we value complexity, perhaps as a sign of sophistication (or — my interpretation — because we can hire more people thereby increasing profit and political pull), then we’ll focus our efforts on justifying the complexity and the additional cost and time it implies rather than trying to make things simpler.

[Check out Mark Thompson’s comment over at Time’s Battleland.]

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Feral Jundi on Balck

Feral Jundi [Arabic: draftee or private], who has commented on posts here from time to time, has a great piece on Hermann Balck.

Balck was undoubtedly Boyd’s favorite among the field commanders of WWII, ranking this relatively junior commander in such company as Stonewall Jackson, U.S. Grant, Field Marshals von Manstein and Rommel, and the US Generals Patton and MacArthur (Patterns 111).

For more information on the Truppenführung and the “Prussian” system generally, I strongly recommend Fighting Power by the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld (Greenwood Press, 1982).

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Let the cannons speak!

At Quantico, getting ready for the Boyd & Beyond conference that begins in about two hours.  I’ll be doing the lead-off, on the evolution of Boyd’s ideas, which culminated in Conceptual Spiral.

On the way up yesterday, we stopped at Cold Harbor, which is (I think) the bloodiest hour in American military history, producing some 6,000 casualties. People often cite it as evidence that Grant was an incompetent commander, just an unimaginative practitioner of hey-diddle-diddle-right-up-the-middle attrition warfare.

We can discuss that another day. In the meantime, consider Vicksburg and the fact that over the course of the Richmond Campaign, Grant’s army actually suffered a lower percentage of losses than did Lee’s, and Lee could ill afford the higher casualty rate.

Anyway, a disaster, which I’m hoping to avoid this morning.

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The Casual Vacancy, a casual review

J.K. Rowling’s’ new book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, is positively Faulknerian. No, I’m not talking about the length of her sentences, but in tone and characterization, it reminds me of his classics like Absolom, Absolom! Light in August, and The Sound and the Fury:

  • It takes place in a small town and exploits long-standing relationships among the town’s inhabitants
  • It deals with “the human heart in conflict with itself,” as WCF put it in his Nobel acceptance speech. And so many of them to deal with.
  • There are Snopeses, lots of them.
  • It’s really dark. Few people laugh, and when they do, it’s rarely a good sign.

Fiction is such a personal preference, so I hesitate to recommend specific works to other readers. As for me, I liked it, but then I like Faulkner a lot, too. And such contemporary noiristas as James Lee Burke. Rowling truly lives up to Faulkner’s imperative:

[Man] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

Can Pagford be a 21st Century Jefferson and Yarvil the new Yoknapatawpha? She left enough threads hanging that it should be easy, if she wants to do it, to weave a new tale about them.  I, as a former resident of Jefferson, certainly hope she does.

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How to put yourself out of business

This belongs in the “don’t they ever learn?” department. A company breaks its explicit promise to customers for its own (internal) convenience:

“Android users outraged over Motorola’s broken promise.”

I don’t know what to say.  What is it about corner offices — real or virtual — that makes people go stupid?

The worst part is not the customers who believed them and got stiffed, or even people like me who, reading this, will be most reluctant to do business with Motorola in the future. Fact is, I probably wasn’t a serious prospect anyway. The worst damage is the message such behavior by senior executives sends to the people within Motorola, that what can only be described as serious ethical failure is OK, if it makes money for the company in the short term.

Because Motorola’s handset business is owned by Google, one has to wonder where the rot will stop.