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Cooking the books

Dr Ray Leopold*

Of course, defense spending numbers are being manipulated: It’s in the DNA of those most intimately involved. That type of manipulation is well beyond the natural human concept which says that if you measure something, you change it. It is far more insidious.

I daresay that most of those in-the-know never expected anything other than manipulated numbers.  They’re not really jaded, they’re just behaving as Europeans, and a few others, have dealt with one another for centuries!

In a more colloquial context, I consider myself a veteran of three wars:  The Pentagon Wars, The Spectrum Wars, and The Telecommunications Wars, and I think you may find what I’m about to write is a bit different than you’ve seen before.  Jim Burton — who used the title The Pentagon Wars — along with many of you, too, have done a great job of covering The Pentagon Wars, but IMHO they were kids’ play compared to the Spectrum Wars and the Telecommunications Wars, and these other two will probably survive the walls of the Pentagon.  (Spectrum, of course, relates to ‘wireless’ while Telecom relates to all commercial communications.) 

For better context, maybe some of you are not aware that I was in the middle of ‘making the right things happen’ at WARC-92 in Spain, which allocated spectrum for HDTV, next-generation cellular phones, and Non-Geostationary Satellite Services (NGSS), and I was also in the midst of our FCC’s 1993 Negotiated Rulemaking for that NGSS spectrum, which much of the world had then also adopted.   FYI, WARC = World Administrative Radio Conference, held by the The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is an arm of the UN.

Strategy, Tactics and Documented Warfare precede Sun Tzu, but when you get to putting numbers on resources and then get involved in planning, no-planning (in the Boyd context), counting, accounting and reporting on those things, I think we’re in the nth iteration, where n = the number of generations of humanity.

When it comes to Europe, I will tell you that these kinds of things go back at least 450 or 500 years to revenue sharing associated with the money from postage stamps among those same countries.  When the telegraph was created, some people may think that it was aligned with railroads, but I think you will find that, even though telegraph lines oftentimes went along railroad lines, the revenue side of telegraphy was assigned to the post offices.  

In Europe, they created their PTs — their national and international postal & telegraph offices.  Then, of course, those PTs evolved as PTT s when the telephone came along, and those rules they created for those postal activities, then postal and telegraph activities, and finally postal, telegraph and telephone activities are still embedded in all that is done at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland.

So, when NATO and the UN came along shortly after WWII, those bureaucrats who began to staff their offices were already well-schooled in dealing internationally with numbers and revenue streams, with all of the skullduggery of centuries of their versions of rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures for officially cooking the books to their individual likings.  They were also well aware that their different nations didn’t necessarily calculate things or interpret them in a common way, but they always got along until they didn’t!!  

(Little wonder that they had so many wars and how many searched for a New World!  What surprises me more is how many folks here in America become so enamored with that Old World.)

On a personal note, there is also little wonder how John Boyd quickly concluded that we had to focus on the budget when we launched our development planning work on The Air Staff in June of 1973.  I do still have a paper copy of that planning and budget set of charts that he and I had used together when we had first briefed our work across the Air Staff from Nov 5, 1973 to May 31, 1974, and I’m especially glad that Chuck Spinney got excited about it, too; otherwise I may have never gotten back to engineering and those other two wars.  

When he and I had done those briefings together, John Boyd (who was spending most of his own time on the lightweight fighter) used to point out how I was the only full-time AF-wide development planner on the Air Staff (until Chuck came along to become the second), then I left amidst a rather interesting battle among a couple of four stars. and caught my breath again teaching engineering at the AF Academy, and Chuck became the only one; but Boyd got me back to the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) Staff (where Chuck was, too) for the early ’80s.  I had learned much from John which then made me unusually effective in those other wars, too. 

There may now be quite enough books written about all of that, and I’m especially pleased with the books the two of you (Winslow Wheeler & Chet) have written!**

*Robert Coram included Dr. Ray Leopold among Boyd’s acolytes in Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, and provided a brief description of his career after the Air Force (p. 441). Among his many accomplishments, Ray is perhaps best known in these times for being one of the primary creators of the Iridium system, which is still going strong to this very day. You may also be interested Ray’s thoughts on Boyd, Robin Olds, and Operation Bolo included in an earlier post.

**Here are a couple of the better known: The Wastrels of Defense and If We Can Keep It, respectively. You can download a PDF of IWCKI from our Articles page.

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Conceptual Spiral in Boyd’s Own Words

In 1992, John Boyd released his last major presentation, Conceptual Spiral. Coming in at 38 slides and just shy of 3,000 words, it is roughly 10 times the size of his next and final presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing (TEoWL).

While his presentations through 1987 concern armed conflict, Conceptual Spiral displays 18 “outstanding contributions” to science, from Sir Isaac Newton to Chaitin and Bennett (1985), and similarly 39 from engineering.

In trying to understand Conceptual Spiral, it is important to keep in mind that although the slides can be read as a stand-alone document, Boyd generally did not give out hard copies to people who hadn’t sat through the presentation. Many of the slides are complex and present challenges to figuring out what Boyd intended.  Fortunately there is a complete recording of Boyd giving Conceptual Spiral to an audience at Air University as part of an Air Force project, SPACECAST 2020 .  The folks at AGLX have captured this presentation and transcribed it into written form, with Boyd’s slides embedded, which you can download as a PDF from their site. We also did a podcast on Conceptual Spiral.

I was heavily involved in Conceptual Spiral. Boyd would call and go over alternative phrasings for the various slides, asking what made the most sense, which alternatives read better, and so on.  Even with this, I got a lot out of the transcript.

For example, you will notice that Boyd is still describing the OODA “loop” as a real, sequential loop. If, however, you read the transcript carefully, you can detect that his concept of the “loop” is showing the first glimmers of change.  He is beginning to realize that the OODA loop he talks about here (he doesn’t use the term “OODA loop” in the text of Conceptual Spiral itself) is incomplete. As he concluded as far back as “Destruction and Creation” (1976), all theories for describing reality must be incomplete, so this fact came as no surprise to him. He takes a step in remedying this in his next briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing.

This realization, though, does not invalidate the conclusions of Conceptual Spiral. The loops of Conceptual Spiral are the engines that power the OODA “loop” sketch of TEoWL because, as Boyd explains in Conceptual Spiral, they not only “change reality through novelty,” they are also what changes our orientations to correspond with that dynamic reality. As he makes explicit on the first slide of TEOWL, their operation also allows us to create and employ the implicit guidance and control feeds of the “loop.” 

If your organization does not continuously generate new product ideas and new strategies, as well as improving the processes for introducing them to the external world, every passing day leaves you more open to competitors who will.

Even if you have read the text of Conceptual Spiral and even if you have heard Boyd give the presentation, studying the transcript will repay your investment in time.  

[Be sure and check out the Q&A section at the end. Although the recording did not capture the questions themselves, you’ll be able to infer their gist, and Boyd’s answers are clear.]

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All Warfare is Based Upon …

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1850)

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

All war, Sun Tzu once observed, is based upon deception. And in keeping with Lem’s pronouncement, he knew how to do it:

The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy. The Art of War, Chapter 11 (Cleary trans)

Like so much of Eastern philosophy, this bears deep thought,  For one thing, what do we mean by “deception”?  Is it primarily camouflage, disguising ourselves so that the opponent does not recognize us? Feinting in one direction while we attack in another? Publicly making misleading statements about our intentions?  All of these are deceptive, of course, but they all focus on what we’re doing, what our intentions are.  Sun Tzu, however, talks about the intentions of the enemy.  John Boyd’s definition captures this distinction:

An impression of events as they are not. Patterns, 115

Deception: Merely a Prerequisite for Surprise?

As Boyd explained it, to deceive an opponent, you must create a view of the world in his mind — his orientation — that is logical, compelling, and validated by observation, but which is wrong.  The enemy will intend to act on this impression, allowing you to, for example, trap or ambush him or attack in an unexpected, direction.  The key is knowing what his impressions, and thus his intentions, are.

How do we know “the intentions of the enemy”? One way is through your knowledge of the opponent, your fingerspitzengefuhl of how they act in various situations.  

If I was him, what would I most want me to do? Easy, I thought. So I did it.  K. J. Parker, Savages, Kindle Ed, Loc 619.

A new approach

But there is another, more powerful and more reliable way of knowing opponents’ intentions: You be the one who put them there.

His primary target is the mind of the opposing commander … Sun Tzu realized that an indispensable preliminary to battle was to attack the mind of the enemy.  Samuel B. Griffith, in his introduction to The Art of War.

In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary.  Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson on (successful) British attempts to shape Rommel’s impressions in 1941.

The idea is more powerful than just setting up the opponent for surprise. You can use deception to control the intentions, and thus the actions, of your opponents:

You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command.  Miyamoto Musashi, Book of 5 Rings (1645) trans Brown, et al., 1982.

Think Stork taking over the band in Animal House. Once you achieve this degree of mastery over the opponent, there is hardly any limit to the bad mental and moral conditions you can inflict, including ambiguity, hesitation, and destruction of the opponent’s cohesion. 

Bottom Line

Most of my readers will be familiar with these effects on the mental capabilities of the opposing side. So, here’s my main point. When we talk about creating impressions in other peoples’ minds, we’re talking mind control, or as it is often called, mentalism. There are people who do this for a living.

It seems reasonable to see if we can borrow some concepts from them.

Watch the this short YouTube video:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

Now, watch it again, and this time pay close attention to their explanation of why it works:  “We’re going to give the audience a story they can tell themselves …”  where part of that story is the intention: “You’re telling yourself that at no time will you allow your attention …”  Once they get to this point,

Penn and Teller accord deceptively with that intention. It’s important to note that Penn and Teller make a distinction between the deceptive actions we carry out and true deception, which is in the mind of the target, “That doesn’t fool anyone …”

I’ve put a few more observations on their act in the Notes to my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership, and you can download both from our Articles page.  Please do.

Here’s a more complex example involving not only the target but creating a team to exploit the target’s intention. It is one of the amazing and informative videos on the YouTube channel of the modern British mentalist, Derren Brown. Pay close attention to the first half, “The Gallery.”  It’s about an hour long, but in addition to being extremely entertaining, it illustrates the idea of what Penn and Teller call a “curating of attention,” that is, nurturing a story, an intention, in your subject’s mind, and then exploiting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWiKVAQRT4g

If strategy is deception, and deception is mind control, then strategy is mind control.

According to the Wikipedia page on the principles of war, none of them include deception.  It’s sometimes mentioned as an enabler for surprise, but as I’ve tried to show, it can be far more than that. When I establish my War College, developing fingerspitzengefuehl for deception would be the schwerpunkt. It would be taught by people who actually know how to do it.

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Colonel of Marines

It was at the squad level that future battles would be decided. … Wyly surmised that the Marine Corps was not taking care of the squads. (p. 160)

Just came in! Paperback from Amazon (only available format … for the time being?)

I’ve known Mike for some 27 years, now, and have been proud to call him a colleague. Although Robert Coram included him among Boyd’s acolytes, I happen to know that it was more of a mutual admiration society. Look at Boyd’s testimony to Congress, for example, on April 30, 1991.

You can download Mike’s paper, “Thinking like Marines,” from our Articles page. And Mike will be no stranger to those of you familiar with Certain to Win.

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New Version of Lost Arts

Leader. Magician? … Both??

There’s a new version of The Lost Arts of Leadership now available on our Articles page. This presentation, originally created for the 2022 Kanban Global Summit in San Diego, reveals several techniques that are seldom taught in management or leadership courses but which effective* leaders have been using, wittingly or otherwise, down through history. They are available to you, with a little practice and imagination.

I inserted a new slide 5, documenting that ordering people back to the office is not leadership.  It’s micromanagement, and it gives talented people one more reason to consider their options.

It’s important to keep in mind that top talent is jumping ship even in an environment of mass layoffs in the tech industry.

The accompanying Notes, also on the Articles page, contain what I would have said during the presentation if I had had a couple more hours to give it.  They provide commentary, additional data, source citations, suggestions for further inquiry, and an occasional snarky remark.

Here is a YouTube video of me giving the original version of this presentation in August 2022:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcSg-gEFhA&t=9s  I strongly suggest that you carefully study the Penn and Teller video on the original slide 15 (now slide 16) starting at 15:40. It doesn’t play on the original version of the presentation linked above, but you can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA  What they’re illustrating is a very powerful technique for manipulating orientation.  One way to put it is that they’re operating inside their audiences’ OODA loops, Boyd’s favorite magic technique.

*”Effective” doesn’t mean that you’ll like them.

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The Autobiography of John Boyd

As far as we know, Boyd never wrote his life story or left any autobiographical notes. However, in 1977, about 18 months after he retired, he sat down for a long interview for the Air Force’s Corona Ace program.

Robert Coram included a lot of this material in his book, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, for which this interview is one of the sources. I think you’ll find it interesting, though, to read what Boyd said about his life in his own words, and you’ll pick up details that Coram didn’t have space to include in his book.

Although the document doesn’t provide any information about the interviewer, Lt Col John N. Dick, Jr., it’s clear from early on that Colonel Dick is also a fighter pilot, so the back-and-forth between these two guys is fascinating, and illuminating, in its own right.

Download The USAF Oral History Interview of Colonel John R. Boyd (5.8 MB PDF)

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I visit Austria

Hallstatt

I’d love to, again, but this time it was Austrian economics.

I know very little about Austrian economics, or economics in general, for that matter. Boyd majored in the subject for his undergraduate degree at Iowa (1951), and perhaps you can detect an economic underpinning in his discussions of Soviet revolutionary strategy (Patterns 67-68) and guerrilla warfare (Patterns 90 – 98 and 107 – 109).

It’s also worth noting that he did have at least one book on Austrian economics in his collection:

F.A. Hayek; The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, edited by W.W. Bartley III, University of Chicago Press, 1988 annotated

“Annotated” means that he scribbled in the margins and probably on the front and back pages.

With all that in mind, Hunter Hastings, whose LinkedIn description is “Value creation processes built on the principles of Austrian economics,” just published a podcast of our discussion on Boyd and entrepreneurship on his Value Creators Podcast:

As I mentioned in my last post, Hunter and Mark McGrath have written a paper on the many common points between Austrian economics and Boyd’s strategy.

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Actions of Individuals: Boyd and Austrian Economics

Wikipedia defines “Austrian economics” this way:

The Austrian School is a heterodox school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism, the concept that social phenomena result primarily from the motivations and actions of individuals and their self interest. Austrian school theorists hold that economic theory should be exclusively derived from basic principles of human action

In his first (and as far as I know, only) paper, “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd observed that:

Studies of human behavior reveal that the actions we undertake as individuals are closely related to survival, more importantly, survival on our own terms. Naturally, such a notion implies that we should be able to act relatively free or independent of any debilitating external influences—otherwise that very survival might be in jeopardy. In viewing the instinct for survival in this manner we imply that a basic aim or goal, as individuals, is to improve our capacity for independent action.

So, as you can see, there is potential for considerable overlap between the two philosophies.

In a recent paper, “Orientation: Bridging the Gap in the Austrian Theory of Entrepreneurship,”
Hunter Hastings and Mark McGrath point out some of these. Let me give you one example:

The paper introduces the concept of orientation as the source of entrepreneurial judgement. Orientation shapes observation and precedes decision-making and action. Orientation is the locus of human preferences and biases; it is the origination source of hypotheses; it is where human cognition resides. It is the source of “human thinking, perceiving and knowing”, and of “a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.” Decisions and action flow from orientation. We trace the pathway to the concept of orientation that is well-established in the writings of Ludwig van Mises and many more Austrian school economists

This is a significant paper, and I recommend it highly. In my next post, I’ll report on a podcast that Hunter and I just made. In the meantime, you might check out Mark’s conversation with me on his “No way out” podcast.

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Faded glory

Spring is starting in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

One of the first signs of Spring down here: This old redbud greets visitors to our community.

Every year, though, it puts out fewer blossoms and plays host to more of the ghostly Spanish moss.

I know how it feels.

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Boyd and Bolo

January 2 was the 57th anniversary of Operation Bolo, Col Robin Olds’ bold plan to ambush North Vietnamese MiG-21s. Briefly, USAF F-4 Phantom IIs shot down 7 MiG-21s with no losses of their own. Wikipedia has an extensive article on Bolo.

Air Force Col. Robin Olds in Southeast Asia – 1967- commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. (U.S. Air Force Photo)

So the question arises: Did John Boyd know Robin Olds? Robert Coram mentions Col Olds one time, on page 213 of his bio of Boyd, calling him “legendary,” but doesn’t mention any meetings between them. A potential common thread was Capt Everett “Razz” Raspberry, who had been a student of Boyd’s at the Fighter Weapons School and was Col Chappie James’s wingman on Operation Bolo. Coram details how Razz used the tactics and techniques he learned from Boyd at FWS to great effect in Bolo.

I asked Chuck Spinney, who referred the question to Ray Leopold. Here’s Ray’s answer:

While there’s little doubt in my mind that John Boyd and Robin Olds at least knew of each other, I don’t think they ever collaborated on anything. Bear in mind that Olds, already a triple-Ace, came out of WWII as an Army Air Corps Major, while Boyd was just joining the Army as an enlisted guy destined for our occupation force in Japan.

I had to look this up, but Olds was a Lieutenant Colonel in ’51 and a full Colonel in ’53. He was already a living legend, married to a Hollywood star, and never any indication that Boyd and Olds had ever flown anywhere near one another. Had anything significant happened between the two of them, we would have heard about it, and I never heard anything.

I do recall Boyd making some passing references in small talk about Olds when Olds was in the news for some reason, but nothing of any significance.

I was also there with Boyd the first time (and then every other time) that he visited the AF Academy, and during that first visit he made a point of scheduling an appointment with the Commandant of Cadets (Hoyt S. (Sandy) Vandenberg, Jr., the son of the former AF Chief of Staff, who was the second Commandant of the AF Academy after Robin Olds). I sat with the two of them for about an hour as they talked, and I don’t recall Robin Olds’s name coming up during that conversation.

Regarding Bolo, Boyd respected what Olds, Razz and the others had accomplished, and I think he also had a sense of pride in having briefed so many SEA pilots on his EM work and how they would have the best advantage over their enemy aircraft. I don’t recall Boyd ever mentioning that he had briefed Olds, but he may have. And, I would imagine that if he hadn’t briefed him that Olds was sufficiently interested to have gotten the most pertinent information from either Razz or someone else.

As such, IMHO, Robert’s treatment of this topic, or non-topic, in his book is on target (with his absence of anything significant).

Incidentally, Boyd was already at the Pentagon at the time of Operation Bolo. Coram included Dr. Leopold among Boyd’s acolytes and provided a brief description of his career after the Air Force (p. 441). Perhaps he is best known for being one of the primary creators of the Iridium system, which is still going strong to this very day.