Boyd’s Theories

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DNI Relaunches

Defense and the National Interest, the real one, not the faux site now at d-n-i.net, has relaunched courtesy of our friends at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

For the time being, it’s an archive — new content isn’t being added — and we’re still in the process of tracking down some of the original files.  Please let POGO know when you find broken links.

When DNI launched in 1999 it was unique:  The only site devoted to furthering the concepts originated by the late USAF Col John Boyd, and its original mission was to house Chuck Spinney’s commentary that applied Boyd’s strategy, and his own insightful analysis, to issues concerning national security.  Today, there are any number of sites that provide cutting edge commentary, including zenpundit, John Robb, Tom Barnett, and Fabius Maximus.  Please visit them and contribute.

POGO’s press release announcing the reposting of DNI follows after the fold.

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Ben was a better man than thou

From Today’s New York Times, the wisdom of sage Joe Queenan:

Thus, I was thrilled when my son decided to attend Franklin & Marshall College, founded in 1787 with £200 ponied up by Franklin, even though the tuition nearly bankrupted me. I would not have footed the bill had he decided to attend, say, Ole Miss or Central Connecticut State or Oral Roberts. I just wouldn’t have.

So, what did your son get for this budget-busting tuition?  The ability to critique Ben Franklin as does his old man?  Joe, for example, hammers Ben Franklin for being an idiot:

Why would the wise man walk, not run, when escaping from fire, a woman or an enemy? I’d run.

Well, Joe, perhaps as this Ole Miss graduate can explain to you, you might walk, rather than run, for several reasons:

  • So you don’t trip or knock into people, particularly those who are trying to deal with the problem
  • So you don’t give aid and comfort to the enemy by running away
  • So you don’t panic everybody around you
  • So you maintain your options and agility — easier to make an abrupt shift in directions when you don’t have so much momentum
  • So you stay oriented — again easier to do if you keep your head up looking around

Yes, Joe.  Amazing what you can learn at a state land grant university, in this case one offering more than 40 accredited doctoral programs, with the active research programs that support them (compare to F&M’s … zero).  And you didn’t want to write a check to Ole Miss because …

[John Boyd, the person whose work inspired my short list, had degrees from  the University of Iowa and Georgia Tech, both state-supported schools that would not have “nearly bankrupted” Queenan.  Guess that he wouldn’t have written a check to them, either.]

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People thoughts, etc., etc.

I don’t want to bore you all, but it’s hard to think of a more important topic in this day and time.  So far, I’ve mentioned the Naxelites in India and Jamaican drug gangs.  But the gold standard for swimming in the sea of the people nowadays is probably Hezbollah:

Ten years on since the withdrawal, the UN together with the Lebanese army patrol the border area. But flapping in the breeze along the fence are yellow and green flags of Hezbollah. Waving next to them is the flag of the group’s biggest foreign backer – Iran.

It is Hezbollah that has real control over what happens in southern Lebanon and many villagers say they like the arrangement.

“It’s the resistance, its weapons and [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah who make us feel safe here,” says Fawwaz Mohammed. “Without the resistance we could never be free.”

Update on Jamaica — reports that “thousands” of troops have assaulted Dudus’s stronghold.  The fact that, two days later, they’re still assaulting it tells you something.  Whether they eventually capture Christoper “Dudus” Cook, this cannot turn out well for Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding.  For one thing, Dudus’s gang, the “Shower Posse,” is (was?) closely affiliated with Golding’s ruling Labor Party.  And by launching the assault after initially resisting the US demand for Dudus’s extradition, Golding paints himself as more attuned to American interests than those of his constituents and countrymen.

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We didn’t expect to be treated like this

Not from Toyota:

Five months before the new 2002 Lexus ES hit showroom floors, the company’s U.S. engineers sent a test report to Toyota City in Japan: The luxury sedan shifted gears so roughly that it was “not acceptable for production.”

The warning was sent to Toyota Executive Vice President Katsuaki Watanabe on May 16, 2001. Days later, another Japanese executive sent an e-mail to top managers saying that despite misgivings among U.S. officials, the 2002 Lexus was “marginally acceptable for production.” The new ES went on sale across the nation on Oct. 1, 2001.

From “Toyota took cost-cutting approach on lurching Lexus models, records show,” Ken Binsinger, LA Times, 23 May 2010.

You can practice the Toyota Production System all you want, but by treating your customers — Lexus customer, no less — with such contempt, it all goes for nought.  The moral level trumps the mental and the physical, in business as in war.

Here’s a thought:

Moral isolation

occurs when we fail to abide by codes of conduct or standards of behavior in a manner deemed acceptable or essential by others outside ourselves.

From Strategic Game of ? and ?, J. R. Boyd, June 1987.  As Boyd notes  few charts later, your competitors cannot morally isolate you — that’s something you have to do to yourself (although competitors can make sure you get full credit for your actions).

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People thoughts must become guerrilla thoughts

Latest in a series.

For an example of how it’s done, read the Guardian’s series on Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a gang lord from Jamaica:

Coke is described as one of the world’s most dangerous druglords by the US justice department.

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To the residents of Tivoli Gardens, the poor west side of Kingston where his gang has immense support, he is the benefactor who provides them with food, acts as mediator in disputes and even sends their children to school. They call him Presi, Bossy, Shortman or, most commonly, Dudus.

Residents, not affiliated with the gang, have erected their own barricades:

In the centre of Kingston today, residents could be seen standing behind roadblocks on street corners. Several barricades appeared to have been erected not by gunmen or gang members, but by ordinary residents seeking to protect themselves, or to obstruct the police, who often have a poor reputation for corruption and brutality.

A similar situation erupted in Brazil in 2006, when a gang called the First Command of the Capital shut down Sao Paulo for several days.

What could happen in Jamaica is that the government takes such losses in combating the gangs that its police and security forces refuse to engage.  At this point, the state has failed, and it will probably require massive and expensive intervention by the US to prop up some semblance of a government.  The alternative, that Jamaica, like India, works out a modus vivendi with the mini-state in its midst, was foreclosed when the US decided to force Jamaica to honor the American request to extradite Dudus to New York.  We should be careful what we wish for.

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When guerrilla thoughts are no longer people thoughts

Support for the guerrilla cause can quickly dry up:

The continued agonizing over the May 5 killings was apparent during Greece’s latest general strike on Thursday. Roughly 20,000 union members marched through Athens, a fraction of the more than 100,000 who took to the streets the day of the murders. In the end, the anarchists also took part in Thursday’s protests, but turnout was modest, and those who did participate were peaceful.

“It’s a shock. We always thought of ourselves as people who are victims, not people who create victims,” says Panagiotis, an edgy 30-year-old who helps organize cultural events within the anarchist scene and condemns the killings. Like most members of the movement, he would only gave his first name.  “In Greece, Anarchy Yields to Soul-Searching,” Marcus Walker, Wall St. J., 22 May 2010.

As I noted in COIN, tight integration of guerrillas and people is critical if the cause is going to survive.  Otherwise, the public will — correctly — view the guerrillas as thugs and criminals.

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COIN

“Insurgents” are people out to overthrow the government in some part, perhaps all, of a country and replace it with themselves.

“Guerrilla warfare” is a style of fighting.  It can be used for any purpose, including prosecuting an insurgency or resisting an occupying force of foreign troops.  It can also be an adjunct to conventional operations in a more traditional war between states.

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Certain to Win now at BN Digital

For $7.99.  Such a deal.   Works with iPod/iPhone/iPad, Blackberry, Windows and Macs, and of course with the Nook e-Reader.  Download free apps from their site.

Search their site for Certain to Win, or try the following link:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Certain-to-Win/Chet-Richards/e/9781450046329/?itm=3&USRI=certain+to+win

Why “certain to win”?  Well, I get reports that people who cultivate a deep understanding of this stuff develop ways to apply it that lead to orders of magnitude improvements in time to do things (and more important, to learn from what they do).

This is not a “how to” guide.  You internalize the principles, you reach deep understanding, and then you will naturally generate ideas for implementation within your organization and learn from the efforts you make.

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Fast transients?

Boyd first used the term in his briefing “New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat,” which he completed in August 1976.  He defined them in terms of the ability to “both lose energy and gain energy more quickly while outturning an adversary.” (18)  The significance of this statement was that until about the late 1960s, fighter aircraft designers had concentrated on the ability to gain energy — fly higher and faster, for example — but not to lose it.  Boyd was suggesting that you needed both, and more important, the ability to transit between the two states quickly.

Fine, but limited, it would appear, to dogfighting — air-to-air combat with short-range weapons.

But on the next chart, he began to generalize: “The idea of fast transients suggests that in order to win or gain superiority, we should operate at a faster tempo than our adversaries or inside our adversaries’ time scales.”  He concluded that if we can do this, we will appear ambiguous to our adversaries and “thereby generate confusion and disorder.”

Confusion and disorder. Wow. Between these two charts, Boyd has somehow transitioned from the Red Baron to a theory of combat, if not conflict, from the mathematical to the psychological, from engineering to strategy.

He concludes with “He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives,” in air-to-air combat and in waging war.

There are still plenty of unanswered questions, of which the most important is what does “quickest rate of change” mean if you’re not in air-to-air combat, where Boyd gives a precise definition?

However, even at this point, Boyd has uncovered the essence of what he would later call “operating inside the OODA loop,” and it wouldn’t be too much to say that the next 11 years, which took him through Patterns of Conflict, Strategic Game and Organic Design, were elaborations of this basic theme.

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The story of John Boyd

As told by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to the cadets of the US Air Force Academy on April 2, 2010:

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1443

Scroll down about half way.  The “to be or to do” speech is a few paragraphs before the end.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that John is finally receiving recognition from the Defense Establishment.  Now you may think it’s pushing things a little to call Bob Gates a member of the defense establishment, and perhaps you’re right, considering that he spent nearly his entire career as an intelligence professional.  But he’s been SECDEF for going on four years now and was also an Air Force officer, commissioned from OTS in 1967. That ought to do it.

I think John would be delighted, also, although (curmudgeon that he was) he’d try to hide it.