As we have seen, Boyd thought highly of what appears to be agility, but never used the word (with one exception) and never defined it in print. Several years after he quit distributing updated charts in 1986, he did change the “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” chart 144, to include “agility,” but he still didn’t define it.

While giving his presentations, though, Boyd would talk about agility, and he usually divided it between physical and mental (you cannot, as he would slyly remark, have “moral agility,” because that would be no morals at all!)

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Juan Cole, one of our most perspicuous observers on the Middle East, ran a blog post the other day that illustrates why conservatives have such a strong hold on certain segments of our society. The item featured a map showing average life expectancy by state, and Prof. Cole’s summary was:

With the exception of Utah, there is a pretty strong overlap between lower life expectancy and deep hostility to the Affordable Care Act. Those who need it most are most opposed to it.

Fair enough. But why? Although one can sympathize with Cole’s frustration, his conclusion illustrates why liberals are struggling so hard:

Know what that is called? Fatal stupidity.

So long as liberals have that attitude, they will feed the very movement they so righteously denounce. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Rick Santorum was making a credible run at the GOP nomination by shouting at his audiences:

They think we’re stupid!

Boyd suggested four elements of an effective grand strategy. You can look them up at Patterns 139.  The second is:

Pump up our resolve, drain away adversary resolve, and attract the uncommitted;

Politics is all about grand strategy, about attracting the uncommitted, particularly the swing voters who hold the key to most elections. Telling yourself — that is, locking in your orientation — that they don’t agree with you because they’re stupid will probably not produce effective campaigns.

[Note: I’m not making any statement about the ACA. I’ve been on government-sponsored, single-payer health programs (TRICARE and Medicare) for a while, and they seem to work for me. But, of course, the ACA is not a single-payer program.]

Boyd virtually never uses the word “agile,” but it’s hard to read any of his presentations without running across concepts that seem like agility.

For example, you’ll find this right at the beginning of Patterns of Conflict:

Idea of fast transients suggests that, in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop. (5)

“Fast transients,” “operate at a faster tempo or rhythm,” “get inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop” (whatever that means) certain have that agile feel.

Then a few pages over:

It is advantageous to possess a variety of responses that can be applied rapidly to gain sustenance, avoid danger, and diminish adversary’s capacity for independent action. (12)

“A variety of responses that can be applied rapidly,” sounds pretty agile (note that it is the application, not the responses themselves, that is rapid).

Boyd is closely associated with the style of combat known as “maneuver warfare.” Although that term doesn’t appear in Patterns, he does discuss a category that he calls “maneuver conflict.” and one of its components is:

Fast transient maneuvers: Irregular and rapid/abrupt shift from one maneuver
event/state to another.

Near the end of the theory section of Patterns (what follows is “Application”), in the “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” we find:

Adaptability: Power to adjust or change in order to cope with new or unforeseen circumstances (144)

Is “adaptability” the same as agility? About three years after Boyd “finished” Patterns, he redid the list on page 144. Among other things, adaptability disappeared and “agility” showed up, for only the second time in any Boyd briefing. Unfortunately he didn’t supply a definition.

Let me give one more example. In Strategic Game, which came out about a year after the final edition of Patterns, Boyd insisted that:

The ability to shift or transition from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an adversary enables one to win in air-to-air combat. (42) [Compare to “fast transient maneuvers” above]

This is significant because “shifting maneuvers,” say from turning in one direction to turning in another, or from climbing to diving, or from accelerating to decelerating (or any combination) was the original definition of “agility” in the US Air Force.

It’s even more basic, though. If “operating inside the OODA loop” is the same as agility, then agility is the foundation of all Boyd’s military strategy, as you can see from chart 132 of Patterns (too long to reproduce here) and from this paragraph in Strategic Game:

Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their O-O-D-A loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s really going on. (47)

From even this small sample, you should be able to see that concepts that seem an awful lot like “agility” permeate Boyd’s work and form a backbone at least to the destructive elements of his theory. Enough theory for now. We’ll explore what his ultimate definition was, and how it might apply to activities other than war, in later posts.

Accidentally published an unfinished draft (not hard to do in WordPress).  It should be up in a day or two.