Boyd’s Theories

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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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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.

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The least expected

The third intention in Patterns 132 reads: Select initiative (or response) that is least expected. The standard explanation is that the least expected response will produce surprise which we can then exploit. Seems obvious, but if you think about how most organizations pick their actions, it’s by some formula or just what they’re comfortable doing (“If sales are down, lower prices.”)

In war or the martial arts, surprise often produces disorientation and a moment of confusion and hesitation. This leads people to assume that time is of the essence, that we need to operate at a faster tempo than opponents to keep them off balance. This can be a powerful tactic, as Boyd explains in an “illuminating example” in Strategic Game, pp. 39-44.

But operating at a faster tempo isn’t strictly necessary, especially in forms of conflict other than war. But the “unexpected” effect can still work when, for example, you can let the opponent’s imagination do your dirty work for you. A great example of this is the chess match between then-reigning word champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue in 1997. The computer made an unexpected move:

“It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves,” grandmaster Yasser Seirawan told Wired in 2001, “and it sent Garry into a tizzy.”

Turns out that the unexpected move was the result of a bug in the software, but the effect on Kasparov was decisive:

The irony is that the move had messed with Kasparov’s mind, and there was no one to fix this bug. (emphasis added)

“Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence,” Campbell told Silver. “He had never considered that it was simply a bug.”

If we are able to operate at a faster tempo, we can decrease the time opponents have to figure things out, to operate inside their OODA loops, and pump up ambiguity, but the effect works even when this isn’t possible.

Note that the unexpected move was the result of an error in the software, which was corrected between games. Errors have produced similar effects on the battlefield — Boyd would often cite the Union attack on the center of the Confederate lines at Missionary Ridge that launched Sherman on the road to Atlanta.

Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov?  Klint Finley, Wired, September 28, 2012

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The pivot point

If you browse through the John Boyd Compendium on DNIPOGO, down near the bottom you’ll come across something called “Fast Transients.” If you open this briefing, you’ll soon find yourself immersed in Energy-Maneuverability charts and other technical fighter pilot stuff. If you stick with it, though, all of a sudden, with no prior warning, up pop Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can only wonder what Boyd’s audiences, enured to years of talk about turn rates, negative energy states, and out-of-plane maneuvering, must have thought.

Although all three of Boyd’s biographers mention this briefing, whose correct title is New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat, it remains an oddity to most people, probably because Boyd didn’t include it in the Discourse on Winning and Losing. For students of Boyd’s development, however, it occupies a special place:

  1. New Conception is the first work by Boyd that mentions Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law. While it is true that Boyd had been polishing “Destruction and Creation” for several years, Boyd actually released that paper to the world a month after New Conception.
  2. It forms an obvious bridge between the ideas of “Destruction and Creation” and Boyd’s work on land warfare that took form in Patterns of Conflict.
  3. More important, the fault line is clearly visible, in Chart 16.
  4. Most important, New Conception is the starkest example of the “dialectical engine” that Boyd proposed in “Destruction and Creation.” You don’t have to understand anything about energy-maneuverability to realize from charts 9-12 that Boyd was driving that methodology into greater and greater levels of complexity.
  5. Exactly as he predicted in “Destruction and Creation,” anomalies began to appear that required even more complexity to explain. Finally, Boyd realizes a new synthesis and proclaims it on the final chart: He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives. As Tom Christie notes, this is not a conclusion that one can derive from energy-maneuverability.
  6. Boyd makes expansive claims for his new insight — not only is this a “new conception for air-to-air combat” but also for waging war (chart 21). At this stage, of course, all he has to back this up is his intuition that he’s on to something new, elegant, and big.

So Boyd begins with geeky charts of fighter aircraft performance, has an epiphany, and is launched on the road to Patterns of Conflict. In fact, several charts from New Conception make an appearance, with various degrees of modification, at the beginning of Patterns.

It’s worth comparing New Conception carefully with Patterns. For example, the wording in chart 19 is similar to, but not exactly the same as that of Patterns 5.  Note that at this stage, Boyd still sees a fast transient as something an aircraft could generate (“natural hook”), but he also knows that in order to make good on his claim that he’s found a key to war, he has to get people into the loop. The OODA “loop” itself still lies in the future, but Boyd is already claiming that fast transients can produce mental and moral effects involving time scales, uncertainty, ambiguity, chaos, and these will prove decisive in war.

A PDF of New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat, from a new Apple Keynote rendering, is now available on our Articles page, from the menu above.

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A turning point in history

On August 31, 1975, John Richard Boyd retired after twenty-four years in the Air Force. He was forty-eight years old. … He was a natural leader, but he did not have the sort of management skills the Air Force looked for when they promoted colonels. Robert Coram, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War, p. 312.

Had Boyd been promoted and stayed in the Air Force, few of us would ever have heard of him.

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The truth about cyberconflict

Part 4 of Marcus Ranum’s series on cyberwar is now up on the Fabius Maximus site:

Parsing Cyberwar – Part 4: The Best Defense is A Good Defense

Let me rephrase some of his points:

1. Cyberwar is not war in the Sun Tzu/Clausewitz sense. As Ranum notes:

The big scenarios of cyberwar — “putting a country back to the pre-industrial era” — are overblown and ridiculous; generally they appeal to those who don’t really understand data networking or system administration. There are plenty of examples of successful attacks against individual point targets, but the big scenario does not follow logically as a consequence of a lot of small ones

2. As in other areas of group-on-group conflict, Einheit is critical:

At this point, we can be sure that anyone who builds a gas centrifuge cascade is going to be a little bit more careful about their software than usual; perhaps they won’t rely on the lowest bidder to configure it. And that, in a nutshell, is the whole problem. Cyberwar forces organizations to re-examine their trust-boundaries: who do they get to do what, and how can they tell whether their service providers and supply chains are tamper-proof? For a government like the US’, that seems eager to outsource practically everything, that appears to be the opening of a gigantic and very nasty can of worms.

3. Because of the nature of software, operating inside the OODA loop is critical. If you play offense in this field, you have to do what you’re going to do and then move on before your intrusion is discovered, analyzed, and the details of your attack disseminated to the world:

Since it has been revealed to the community and dissected at length, Stuxnet has done more to justify improvements in security systems than anything else; in that sense it was self-defeating. It is a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house, that will  serve to encourage more stone-throwing.

Ranum appears to be making the point that defense is the stronger form of this conflict. At the level of the individual company or home user, this may well be true (This is why I say that “On the internet, the best defense is a strong defense.”) But as with real war, the situation is more complex. For one thing, attackers often can succeed in their initial attack. And cyber conflict, as Ranum notes, needs to be considered within the larger arena of state-vs-state competition, where hacking and malware are only one tool.

Interesting series — suggest you check it out.