Boyd’s Theories

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Unconscious orientation?

A study from the University of Arizona suggests that your brain takes in and processes information, even though you may not be consciously aware of much of the results.

As Mary Peterson, Professor of Psychology and Director of UA’s Cognitive Science Program, described the results:

Many, many theorists assume that because it takes a lot of energy for brain processing, that the brain is only going to spend time processing what you’re ultimately going to perceive, but in fact the brain is deciding what you’re going to perceive, and it’s processing all of the information and then it’s determining what’s the best interpretation.

This is a window into what the brain is doing all the time. It’s always sifting through a variety of possibilities and finding the best interpretation for what’s out there. And the best interpretation may vary with the situation.

Note the reference to orientation implicitly controlling observation –“the brain is deciding what you’re going to perceive.” It is possible, although the article doesn’t address this question, that the “non-perceived” information may be stored somewhere in your brain and may influence your orientation, that it may affect your actions.

The study also points out that the brain registers the presence of external objects in about .4 seconds, which may provide insight into the conditions necessary for operating inside an opponent’s OODA loop.

[Original article, “Your brain sees things you don’t,” on EarthSky.org, 13 Nov 2013.]

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Roll over, Beethoven

And tell Deming the news.

I don’t know what to say. As long-time readers of this blog, both of you, may recall, I’ve tried to cut Marissa Mayer some slack.  She inherited a difficult situation as the new CEO of Yahoo, and new leaders sometimes do dramatic things to signal the start of a new way. Patton was a master of this.

But now, she’s apparently decided to implement the worst leadership idea imaginable, one that even I can’t explain away. According to Kara Swisher’s article in All Things D, “‘Because Marissa Said So’ — Yahoos Bristle at Mayer’s QPR Ranking System and ‘Silent Layoffs,’” she’s introduced a ranking system for employees that forces managers to place their people on a bell-type curve. This means that some people are going to be ranked as sub-standard — possibly leading to being fired — no matter how good their performance actually is. In other words, if you, as a manager, have done the hard work of building a great team, you’re still going to have to offer up some percentage of your people.

What this does is introduce conflict into the team as people compete with their teammates not to end up in one of the bottom rankings. It puts a big premium on gamesmanship, brown-nosing, and in the current job market, maybe even sabotage. In other words, it’s a world class Einheit eraser, and without Einheit, you’re never going to have a world beating team. Well, you might if you choose your competition carefully.

To make matters worse, she doesn’t seem to be applying this same mechanism to her own team. As one employee put it:

Will the ‘occasionally misses’ classification apply to L2 and L3 execs also? At every goals meeting, we find senior staff who missed even the 70% goals. Thus, by definition, they should be classified as ‘occasionally misses.’ Two such classifications, and that person should be let go, amiright? How about we set an example for the rest of the company and can a few of the top execs who miss (or who sandbag their goals to make sure they ‘meet’)?

Which reminds me of Boyd’s concept of “moral isolation,” which he recommended you apply to your adversaries and not do their job for them on yourself:

Morally, adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well being to the detriment of others (i.e. their allies, the uncommitted, etc.) by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold.  (Strategic Game 47)

What about Deming? Oh yeah. Some of you may dimly recall his Fourteen Points. Here’s number 11:
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective. (emphasis added).
And his reasoning was virtually the same as mine: you kill any chance at unity and eventually the organization descends into a pit of backstabbing and CYA.
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Formlessness in space and time

In chapter six of the Sun Tzu text, we read:

Therefore, when you induce others to construct a formation while you yourself are formless, then you are concentrated while the opponent is divided. (Cleary trans., p. 106)

Boyd loved this concept. He called it the principle of dispersion, parodying the Army’s emphasis on concentration. The idea is that the opponent has to be on guard everywhere, while you know what you’re doing. Boyd took it even further: You can disperse not only in space, but combine it with dispersion in time, so that the opponent cannot recover from the first attack before the second is upon him. And the third. And the fourth. Think of how you reacted the last time things started happening faster than you could cope. Against a linear formation, you don’t need every attack to succeed. Often one will be enough, if it can penetrate and cause the opponent’s formation to begin to collapse. The next group of forces streaming in can complete the job. Boyd called this “operating inside the OODA loop.”

Where else do we see formations? How about football? What would Boyd’s principle of dispersion / operating inside the OODA loop look like there? For a great example, check out “Ditka vs. Ryan: The Feud That Fueled the ’85 Chicago Bears” (in the print edition as “Hate, Jealousy, and Da Bears,” p. D10) by Rich Cohen in Friday’s Wall St. J. (paywall). This should give you the idea:

“As organized and experienced as that group of players were from the Chargers, they’d seen nothing like it,” [Chicago safety Doug] Plank said. “Mad dogs. Wild men. Coming from every side. A jail break. By the end, Dan Fouts did not know where to look: Should he try to find the open man downfield, or should he simply brace for impact?”

It was this confusion, planted in the mind of the quarterback, that made the 46 [the Bears’ code name for this type of defense] hum.

When briefing the section of Patterns of Conflict that deals with Clausewitz and Jomini, Boyd would critique these guys for their emphasis on order. He usually told the story of how despite this obsession, Jomini almost discovered the idea of operating inside the OODA loop. Jomini had written of a cavalry attack, where the usual tight formation broke down, and in the resulting confusion, the attackers broke through and won. Jomini concluded that the attack had succeeded in spite of the breakdown in the formation. Boyd said, “No! It succeeded because of it.” The Union attack on Missionary Ridge, November 25, 1863, is another example. In each of these cases (and many others) there was confusion, and one side could exploit it before the other could figure out what was happening.

So it isn’t that there is a balance or trade-off between structure / form and agility / formlessness. Formlessness, as the Sun Tzu text insists, creates its own form, and as Boyd noted, this often happens in time as well as in space.

Incidentally, the idea that only one attack has to succeed also carries over into football. Here’s Plank again:

“Football is chess,” Plank said. “You can capture all my pawns, but if I tip over that king [the opposing quarterback], I win.”

[By this way, perhaps this will answer the question of why Ender’s Game is so popular among the maneuver warfare crowd.]

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You build snowmobiles; snowmobiles build you

Your DNA is actually an on-going project of building snowmobiles, according to an article in this weekend’s Wall St. J. (paywall):

So stretches of DNA can be copied in particular cells and then pasted elsewhere, producing a novel DNA sequence … Transpositions also occur in the brain. Fred Gage and Alysson Muotri of the Salk Institute and colleagues first showed that human transposons are activated in stem cells in the brain around the time they are becoming neurons. In other words, when you make a new neuron, that old boring DNA sequence that you inherited isn’t good enough. Thus, the brain is a mosaic of neurons with different DNA sequences. “Genes Often Get Shuffled in Our DNA Deck,” by Robert M. Sapolsky

I don’t know what this means, but it is absolutely fascinating. As the article mentions, the vast, vast majority of snowmobiles don’t work, but a vital few do. Plants are especially good at this game, and bacteria, the most successful life form on the planet — you are, basically, just a life support mechanism for a bunch of bacteria — are masters.

 

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Why we need the Army, part I

This is the first in a series of posts by guest commentators to answer my complaint that I hadn’t heard a coherent, logical answer to the question of why we still need the Army.

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Yes, we do need an Army
by Lucretius

While my answer may not be as coherent as Mr. Richards would prefer, the USAF, USN, and USMC bring assets to the fight that while together may succeed in meeting the mission; without one of them, we may not succeed as quickly or as effectively in countering the threat(s) to our foreign interests or homeland.

We have instead created a system of redundancies and bloated administrative processes which bog down both the definition of the threat(s) and how to address it/them. Our entire military is shackled by a congress that has few members (or their extended family members) who have worn the uniform which frankly has resulted in DoD being curtailed by political (hidden and otherwise) agendas, vagaries, and shifting bipartisan bickering. Continue reading →

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Living with Amazon, part II

Last post noted that independent booksellers are holding their own against Amazon, and even increasing in numbers. They couldn’t do this if they were just more expensive versions of Amazon — sell a small selection of the same books, just at a higher price.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: What Amazon’s doing is working great. So you have to find something that Amazon isn’t already doing, which is sell a huge range of stuff, deliver it quickly, take it back if you don’t like it, and recommend other stuff based on your buying and browsing history. And — let me emphasize that — and for which customers will pay enough money to give you a viable business venture.

Continue reading →

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Do we still need the Army?

This is a question I raised in A Swift, Elusive Sword back in 2001. I still haven’t heard a coherent answer.

The issue was — and is — that because the Army is designed for war on land, and because the advent of nuclear weapons has rendered war impossible except against weak, non-nuclear powers such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and because the USMC augmented by USAF and USN airpower and the forces of our allies are vastly more than adequate to engage in conventional warfare against Third-World opponents (and if our allies aren’t with us, should we be doing it at all?), why do we still need an Army? This is not an argument that the Army is incompetent, just irrelevant.

My suspicion is reinforced by a series of wargames recently conducted by the Army itself. As reported by Sidney Freedberg on the web site, Breaking Defense, “Adversaries around the world are catching up. By the 2030s some countries – or well-connected non-state forces such as Hezbollah – may challenge or even exceed American capabilities in a few key areas.”  So despite billions spent on R&D, the advanced technology labs of Hezbollah are outpacing us. This being the case, there is no sign that spending even more billions cannot be similarly negated.

Furthermore, even if we invest the money needed to stay ahead, techwise, it won’t be enough. As Freedberg opens his piece:

A massive wargame held here this week to explore the “Deep Future” of warfare in the 2030s demonstrated a stark truth — one that Clausewitz enumerated in his famous work, On War — there’s no substitute for sheer numbers, no matter how much high technology the Army buys.

We now have a situation with the Army that the more money we pump into it, the less advantage we get. Can you extrapolate this trend? It’s not clear that spending more provides no additional capability, relative to likely opponents, although inclusion of Hezbollah does make one wonder about this.

This is a case of zugzwang, a term originally from chess, where it means that it’s your move, but any possible move would make your situation worse (leads to a mate by the opponent, for example).  You’re not allowed to pass on your move in chess, for those who haven’t played in a while. The term has been broadened to include situations where you’re behind the power curve, that is, doing more just makes things worse. When one factors in the costs of more R&D spending and more people, especially in our current economic condition, spending more and getting less at the margin does hurt our ability to survive and prosper as a country.

The only solution is to quit playing this game. Invoke the Wookie Gambit and hurl the board to the floor. While you’re at it, re-examine the assumptions that got you into this position, in this case that a) a replay of WWII is still a reasonable planning scenario, and b) what decides the outcomes of conflicts are technology and numbers, in that order, which is about as far from the principles of maneuver as one can get (see, for example, Patterns of Conflict, chart 115, or Stephen Biddle’s excellent Military Power, pp. 20-25 — “technological superiority is no better than a coin flip for predicting victory and defeat.”)

It’s difficult to examine assumptions from within the system, even if the resulting problems are understood by the members of the organization. You can see this from Freedberg’s article. So the only alternative that makes sense is to wind down the Army as an organization that did its job but which we no longer need nor can afford.

This is not something that can happen immediately, and for the first decade or so, it won’t be cheap. Weapons programs typically have hefty cancellation clauses, for example, and the country must play fair with those who committed their careers to the Army. There will also be indirect costs: Weapons programs and force build-ups are the only fiscal stimulus programs that can make it through Congress, so ending them will put a further burden on the economy. But within a couple of presidential cycles, the benefits will become obvious as the country redeploys its treasure, manpower and brainpower.

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Personages of Merrie Olde England

tarletonThis gentleman is General Sir Banastre Tarleton, 1st Baronet, GCB.  Considered an outstanding practitioner of light cavalry tactics, he rose to the rank of full general and was in contention to command British forces in the Peninsular Campaign, a position that  went to one Sir Arthur Wellesley. He was also an adroit politician, representing Liverpool in Parliament from 1790 – 1812.

Like another outstanding cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Tarleton is more fondly remembered by his compatriots than by his opponents:  Both were accused of massacring soldiers who had surrendered, and both were ardent supporters of slavery.  In Tarleton’s case, his battlefield success worked against him on the grand strategic level as his alleged brutality became a rallying point for the revolutionary forces that ultimately defeated him.

This picture of Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows him as a Lt Col in the uniform of the British Legion, which he commanded. It hangs in the National Gallery in London, and therein hangs another tale. I recognized the picture immediately upon entering the Gallery and took it with my iPhone on Monday, flash off.  As I was reviewing the image on the phone, a polite voice informed me that photography was not allowed.  Great, I’m going to end my visit to England under arrest. But after apologizing, I was was allowed to keep it and the guard and I entered into a discussion of Tarleton, who, I assured him, was well known to students of American military history. He was, however, dismayed to learn that Tarleton is reviled in the States as “Bloody Ban” and the phrase “Tarleton’s Quarter” means no quarter at all. You may remember him caricatured as “Col Tavington” in the Mel Gibson film, The Patriot.  Students of US military history also remember that he got his butt kicked, to use the technical term, and his legion destroyed at The Cowpens. That defeat, coming soon after the British loss at nearby Kings Mountain, made the position of Tarleton’s boss, Lord Cornwallis, untenable and began the retreat to Yorktown.

A most civilized discourse in a country that we often dismiss as just a smaller version of America but with funny accents. But it is not, and more on that in another post.

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Spinney on Lind

By now, most of you will have read Bill Lind’s piece on John Boyd that ran in the American Conservative this week. I learned of Bill’s article when Chuck Spinney sent it to his mailing list. Here’s Chuck’s introduction (reprinted with his kind permission):

Most readers of this list should be familiar with the name, if not the ideas, of the late American strategist Col John R. Boyd (USAF ret).  Boyd was my mentor and closest friend, and I am deeply indebted to him for the knowledge he so generously bestowed on me.  While no short essay can capture the entirety of Boyd’s thinking, attached below is an excellent introduction to what some might call John Boyd’s art of war.  It is written by my friend and colleague Bill Lind, a leading contributor to the Military Reform Movement in the 1980s.  Of particular importance is Bill’s concluding point about ‘open systems.’  But you need to understand Boyd’s work to understand the centrality of this point in strategy and grand strategy.

Lind’s essay is very timely, given that Republicans and Democrats alike have driven America into a grand-strategic cul de sac that is weakening our position abroad, while wrecking our democracy at home.  IMO, this grand-strategic trap is a self-inflicted wound and is well summarized by Lind. (Boyd’s criteria for a sensible grand strategy can be found here.)  Hopefully, Lind’s essay will tweak your interest in Boyd’s important work.

Exiting America’s grand strategic mess will not be easy because the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex and its wholly owned subsidiaries in academia, the thinktanks, the pol-mil apparat, and the mass media have a vested interest in continuing down what has become a clearly a self-destructive evolutionary pathway.  A parasitical “faction” is now exploiting the interplay of chance and necessity to benefit itself at the expense of the “whole.”  Boyd’s ideas — particularly those relating to his moral design for grand strategy — offer a way to begin thinking about how to get off this pathway and return to one where the interplay of chance of necessity leads more naturally to salutary growth at home and abroad.

If you are not familiar with Boyd and his ideas, my advice is to start with Robert Coram’s superb biography, (about 100,000 sold and still in print).  It is by far the best general introduction to the man and his work.  Those interested in heavier lifting can dive into James Fallows’, Chet Richards,’ and Franz Osinga’s analyses of Boyd’s strategic thought.  For the truly masochistic, a complete compendium of Boyd’s briefings slides can be downloaded from this link.  But beware, these briefings are long, albeit highly condensed, idiosyncratic, and a bit didactical.  Nevertheless, determined readers will find their study to be infinitely rewarding, because like the writing of Sun Tzu, their essence is one of ever expanding timelessness.

Chuck Spinney
Cannes, France

Chuck and I have edited all of Boyd’s briefings, and the latest versions of these are available on our Articles page. The link that Chuck provides will take you to the Boyd archive at DNIPOGO, where you can also find pdf’s of the original charts in all their typewritten glory.

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Tipping: The Aussies weigh in

James Fallows posted a comment on tipping from a reader in Australia:

We do not tip in Australia. We find it demeaning to the tipper and the tippee. We have a relatively egalitarian society (compared to the US), and social safety nets that preserve the dignity of the poor, the sick, the hapless and the downtrodden. Yet we are an aggressive capitalistic society, like the US. Why then, are there these differences?

Tipping, to us, is an insult. It insults our egalitarian core. It reminds us that we once were servants to undeserving masters. We have abandoned this relationship, and I can assure your readers, that levels of service (eg in restaurants), in Australia, are not seriously diminished by the lack of tipping.

I agree with Fallows’s assessment — that this certainly rings true — but the real point is not tipping, per se. It’s orientation, or rather orientation lock.