Fascinating new column by Martin van Creveld: ”Konseptsia.”
As he defines it: “a Hebrew word we Israelis often use. It means, roughly, a system of interlocking ideas (sometimes known, in English, as “parameters”) that, taken together, form a framework for thought.”
Readers of this blog will immediately shout “orientation!” and as far as I can tell, you’d be right. I’ll leave it to Martin to illuminate any differences between the concepts.
Details aside, however, Martin’s column is all about locked konseptsia, and he gives three examples: The 1967 War, the 1973 War and the present situation in the Gaza Strip. For each of these, he shows how locked orientation led to disastrous consequences (subsequent heroic efforts to overcome the resulting debacles not withstanding).
So, for example, concerning the events of mid-1967:
As Israel watched, the konseptsia, which said that another war any time soon was highly unlikely, collapsed, triggering a crisis in the government and near panic among the population. In the end it was only by means of a full-scale Israeli offensive against its neighbors that the situation was saved.
I strongly recommend you read the entire post. Martin van Creveld is one of the world’s most astute military historians and was a significant influence on John Boyd. Here are a couple of charts from Organic Design for Command and Control (all of Boyd’s briefings are available for free download from our Articles page)
and
This notion, of a “directed telescope,” by the way, is very deep and will repay a lot of pondering. I would go so far as to claim (Don Vandergriff — feel free to jump in here) that it is required for mission command to work. To see why this might be, recall that Boyd suggested substituting “Leadership and Appreciation” for “Command and Control,” and here’s his definition of “appreciation”:
Appreciation, as part of leadership, must provide assessment of what is being done in a clear unambiguous way. In this sense, appreciation must not interact nor interfere with system but must discern (not shape) the character/nature of what is being done or about to be done;
Organic Design 34
John Boyd knew Martin van Creveld and recommended his works highly. Perhaps his favorite was Fighting Power (1982) (Expensive, true, but in my view essential to understanding military conflict, including the events of the present day).
Robert Coram’s Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, has just been translated into Korean.
It is fitting. As Coram recounted, 1st Lt John Boyd arrived in Korea on March 27, 1953, and on June 30, “Boyd was officially credited with damaging a MiG-15.” It happened on an illegal sortie across the Yalu River, where he was flying wingman for a Royal Air Force exchange officer. It was his only direct combat engagement. Hostilities ended on July 27, before he would have been promoted to element leader and become a “shooter” in his own right. You can read the details beginning on page 49 of the English edition of Boyd.
Through the good offices of Google Translate, I have confirmed that the language is Korean and that the text is indeed Coram’s Boyd (and not, say, Lady Chatterly’s Lover.)
You will remember Colonel Mike Wyly, USMC, ret., from Robert Coram’s book. I think Robert would agree with me that Mike was much more than an acolyte and was in many ways a peer of John’s.
They were both, for example, colonels when they met. John had years of experience developing and teaching air-air tactics, and Mike had commanded infantry units in combat (Jim Webb, future Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator, was one of his platoon leaders). John had spent a decade researching the basis for what became maneuver warfare, while Mike had written a masters thesis on a related topic and published extensively in the Marine Corps Gazette.
A few days ago, a mutual colleague asked Mike to comment on what Boyd would say about the situation in Israel and Gaza. Here’s what he wrote:
For the record – here’s MY answer to the question: “What would Boyd say?”
1. No difference:
Speed – a prompt and speedy OODA when it comes to orienting yourself based on observations, making firm decisions, and turning your decisions into actions.
Pit your strengths against enemy weak points.
Make multiple thrusts at once into enemy vulnerabilities and into avenues of approach.
Make it look like you are going to do one thing but do something else.
Maintain a solid focus of effort (i.e. Schwerpunkt).
Be bold.
Know when not to obey orders and take the action that will best exploit enemy vulnerabilities.
2. War is a “mind-game”, whether it’s heavy force against heavy, light vs. light, light vs.heavy, or heavy vs. light.
3. It’s not the size of the force that counts. It’s how you employ it. For instance, send me into the jungle to drive a big force that out-numbers me crazy. Or, give me a huge force to concentrate on my outnumbered enemy’s life-blood and I will wipe him out.
Boyd and I used to have these discussions, on and on. Boyd would give me an air-to-air scenario and I’d think it through and reply: “It’s the same on the ground…just terrain features instead of cloud cover, or mountains, etc.
Then I’d pose to him a scenario I had experienced as a rifle company commander in Vietnam. He’d think of a similar situation air-to-air.
In other words, have a fast OODA, moral resolve, and due caution when caution is called for.
I miss him. And the long talks we’d have. Often when the phone would ring in the night and wake me up to that machine-gun voice: “Hey, Mike, I’ve been thinking …
Even if you’ve seen this, it’s well worth a second look.
Even if you know what the OODA loop is — especially if you know what the “loop” is — watch this video. Chuck was present at the creation, and he’s passing along nearly 50 years of experience with Boyd’s concepts.
For example, Boyd says that in a conflict, the key to success is the ability to build and effectively employ snowmobiles. Why? Which snowmobiles? How do we use them? Chuck will give you some insight.
Chuck embeds the “loop” into the entirety of Boyd’s work. As Frans Osinga points out in Science, Strategy, and War, although the OODA Loop is the best known part of Boyd’s writings, in many cases, the only known, it is not the only or perhaps even the most important.
[SEoN Editor’s note: The following is an opinion piece that addresses, to use Boyd’s framework, grand strategy, whose purposes, as suggested on Slide 139 of Patterns of Conflict (available for free download from our Articles page), include:
Support national goal;
Pump up our resolve, drain away adversary resolve, and attract the uncommitted;
End conflict on favorable terms;
Ensure that conflict and peace terms do not provide seeds for (unfavorable) future conflict.
As with all guest posts on this site, the opinions expressed are purely those of the author.]
We have a problem
I have a few questions:
Why is the United States committing industrial suicide?
Why are we not looking at and analyzing the economic models from our global competitors and responding with adjustments of our own to establish counter measures to make us more competitive?
Why is our government so addled when it comes to the establishment of industrial and other strategic policies?
Why do we continue to pursue a policy of industrial colonialism and chase the cheap labor dollar around the world to the detriment of our own working class?
Boyd’s acolytes worried that his ideas wouldn’t long survive him. Certainly the Marine Corps’ acquisition of his library was a huge step in ensuring that they did. It seems like the last several years have seen a surge of interest not just in Boyd’s ideas, but, which is vastly more important, using his philosophies to build and test snowmobiles in a variety of domains all across the world.
A couple of quotes from recent articles about the auto industry. The first is from the US, and the second from the UK, but I think you’ll get the idea.
In 2017, for example, there were 11 models available on the U.S. market for less than $20,000, according to Cox data. By the end of 2022, there were four. Then, by March 2023, only 2.
Among the cars discontinued last year was the Chevy Spark, the cheapest of which started at $13,600. Chevy sold more than 24,400 of those cars in 2021 — more than most luxury models can claim. Now, Chevy’s cheapest models cost more than $20,000.
“New cars, once part of the American Dream, now out of reach for many,” Rachel Siegel and Jeanne Whalen, Washington Post, May 7, 2023
And then,
European makers, prominently Ford, abandoning their entry-level models gifts a huge opportunity to predatory Chinese companies.
“Early Chinese cars were like the early efforts from Japanese and Korean makers: bad. No more,” Gavin Green – Car Magazine (UK), June 2023
About 18 months ago, we bought a Volvo XC60, the only car on the lot. It has the Inscription trim package — top of the line at the time — the B5 mild hybrid engine, and the advanced tech package with SAE Level 2 driver automation (same level as Tesla), and several other options. We were a little embarrassed because we really didn’t want anything so fancy, but now, it turns out to be right about the average price for a new car. And yeah, I know, Volvo is owned by Geely, a Chinese auto company (from 1999 – 2010, it was owned by Ford).
I had a lot of fun with this, and I hope you enjoy it, too.
As a reminder (for those of you who haven’t had the experience of doing one of these), this video is uncensored, unexpurgated, and most important, unedited. So if you see me making obvious mistakes, or saying something more than usually ludicrous, it’s a deep fake. I swear!
Ponch, incidentally, is co-author of The Flow System, which has a nice section on Boyd’s OODA loop, tying it into the Cynefin framework.
You may have seen that Microsoft has added ChatGPT capabilities to its search engine, Bing:
Now with a focus on AI, Microsoft recently invested about $10 billion in OpenAI, the research laboratory behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Microsoft also launched its new Bing search engine, created in collaboration with OpenAI. The search engine now displays ChatGPT-like skills, including writing personalized emails, translating texts in over a hundred languages and recommending various searches.
I just finished Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History, and I thought it was fantastic — up past midnight turning pages. I’ve now started her Pulitzer Prize winning third novel, The Goldfinch. It is deep, dark and quite disturbing, where she compels us to relive our deepest fears, like when we were kids, home alone, well after sunset, imagining in more and more detail why our parents weren’t home. I’m not really sure I want to continue, so why not seek some advice by asking Bing/ChatGPT to compare the two novels? Here’s what it said:
Donna Tartt is an acclaimed American writer who has published three novels: The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). The Secret History and The Goldfinch share some similarities, such as being set in part at elite educational institutions, featuring a group of friends who are involved in a crime or a secret, and exploring themes of art, beauty, morality, and fate.
However, they also differ in many ways. The Secret History is a dark and suspenseful novel that follows a group of classics students at a fictional college in Vermont who murder one of their own under the influence of an ancient ritual. The Goldfinch is a sprawling and emotional novel that follows the life of Theo Decker, who survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and steals a priceless painting that becomes his obsession and salvation. While The Secret History is more focused on the psychological dynamics of the characters and their intellectual pursuits, The Goldfinch is more expansive and covers various locations, cultures, genres, and styles.
Both novels have been praised for their literary quality and originality , but The Goldfinch has also received some criticism for its length and plot. In 2014, The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
I had asked for the comparison in “professional” tone — from among the 5 choices ranging from professional to funny — of medium length, in paragraph format.
Here is the same request in “funny” tone and short length:
Donna Tartt is a master of writing long novels that take her decades to finish. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992 and tells the story of a group of classics students who murder one of their own in a twisted homage to ancient Greek rituals. Her third novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013 and tells the story of a boy who steals a painting after surviving a terrorist attack that kills his mother.
Both novels are full of suspense, tragedy, and obsession, but they also have some differences. For one thing, The Secret History is set mostly in Vermont and focuses on the elite world of academia, while The Goldfinch is set mostly in New York and Las Vegas and explores the seedy underworld of art dealers and criminals. For another thing, The Secret History has six main characters who are all equally guilty and complex, while The Goldfinch has one main character who is mostly innocent and sympathetic. And finally, The Secret History is inspired by a real painting by Carel Fabritius that was destroyed in an explosion in 1654, while The Goldfinch is inspired by another real painting by Carel Fabritius that miraculously survived the same explosion.
So if you like novels that are long, dark, and full of art history references, you might enjoy both of these books by Donna Tartt. But if you prefer novels that are short, light-hearted, and easy to read in one sitting…well…maybe look elsewhere.
You know, this is even more disturbing than Tartt’s novels. Nevertheless, we press on with The Goldfinch.
Bing/ChatGPT offers a style called “Blog Post,” incidentally …
An officer responds to a call reporting an active threat (active shooter) who is killing innocent people inside an office building. When the officer arrives, he is alone. Backup is at least ten minutes away and people are getting killed inside the building.
The officer makes the courageous decision to enter the building and attempt to eliminate the threat.
How would you do it? On pages 72 and following, the authors of Outcomes Based Learning describe an 8-step technique you could use. As you read through it, you’ll notice that it requires a fair amount of skill with your weapon and the ability to keep your focus in a time-critical crisis situation, not to mention a lot of courage. How would you teach officers to do it?
The way this topic might be taught is to make eight slides illustrating the actions at each step (just copy the illustrations from the book). You stand at the front and deliver a lecture. The students take notes and then take a written test, usually true-false or multiple choice to make grading easier. Those who achieve the required minimum score are certified.
The authors then conclude:
The approach outlined above is one of the most ineffective education methods in history.
They also note that it is undoubtedly the most widely used.
At best, you’ve taught people how to take a test, and since you’ll be rated on how many pass, you’ve probably taught the test. But what would happen in real life? Nowhere in all this have you trained officers to deal with situations that don’t follow the eight steps or prepared them to handle fear, smoke, screams, and bullets coming their way. In other words, how to actually clear a room.
Instead of teaching the process, the eight-step technique in this case, you might consider an alternative: Teach the outcome. What is it that you want to students to be able to do and under what circumstances, and prepare them to do that. As the authors put it:
True mastery of a skill or tactical technique is not just being able to execute the steps quickly and flawlessly in a neutral environment, but rather the ability to execute techniques under stress while reacting to unexpected variables and adjusting the techniques as needed in real-time to meet the demands of the specific situation.
The human brain actually has an internal mechanism that automatically prunes, eliminates knowledge or memory that the subconscious mind determines is not useful. … This is the reason why people often forget most if not all the knowledge they gain in high school and college.
This is confirmed by research — Prof. Ellen Langer of Harvard, for example, went into how we lose and recover memories in her book Counterclockwise. But my favorite explanation of this phenomenon was presented several years ago by Father Guido Sarducci: The Five Minute University. “In five minutes, you learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she is out of the school.”
This book will give you ideas on how to construct training programs that produce real world outcomes in real world situations and that students will remember when they need them. There is almost no limit to what these outcomes could be. They offer a few suggestions:
Attribute 1: Willingness to Question Authority Attribute 2: Aggressiveness and Boldness Attribute 3: Judgment and Responsibility Attribute 4: Moral Courage Attribute 5: Adaptability Attribute 7: Situational Awareness Attribute 8: Confidence Attribute 9: Critical Thinking Skills Attribute 10: Problem-Solving Skills (“That being said, it is also important not to fall into the “there is no wrong answer” trap. When it comes to most problem-solving challenges as we have already said there is never a single right answer but there are indeed always wrong answers.”) Attribute 11: Initiative
Somewhere in this list, there are attributes that affect your organization, whether you are a military unit, a sports team, a business team, or an educational institution. And it won’t be that difficult to get started. You won’t need to master volumes of arcane theory in order to derive a lot of benefit: “In fact, you can most likely continue training in all of the same areas and even conduct many of the same types of training events. OBL will simply add a valuable element to the equation that will change the way you approach training and think about training.” (7)
There are many interesting side roads in the book that you should explore. Take “knowledge,” for example. Knowledge applies to everybody and every type of organization, and I think you’ll find a trove of useful ideas in the chapter “Pursuit of Knowledge.” Some data, for example, do need to be committed to memory:
The ultimate goal is not just to memorize these weapons capabilities in list form but rather be able to look at a map and intuitively visualize the range circles sprouting from each weapon. Then when you look up from the map at the terrain in front of you those same range circles unfold in your mind. … intuitive decision making is almost always preferable to analytical decision making in battle because intuitive decision making is much faster and generally more effective.
The trick is which data to memorize, and then how to tie these facts into intuitive decision making so that they don’t just become courses in the Five Minute University, regurgitated for the test and then quickly forgotten.
All of these practices, including memorization and development of intuitive execution, must support the author’s insistence, noted above, that we master the ability to “execute techniques under stress while reacting to unexpected variables and adjusting the techniques as needed in real-time to meet the demands of the specific situation.” The American strategist John Boyd coined a term for this ability. He called it “building snowmobiles,” and maintained that the ability to do this is the essential skill that separates winners from losers.*
What the authors have produced is the first practical handbook for building snowmobiles, and one that is accessible to everybody. I think Boyd would be very, very excited about this book.
A couple of notes. First on the treatment of OODA loops. The authors claim that “Taking action will by definition change the situation, requiring the pilot to repeat the process all over again, observing, orienting, deciding and acting. This cycle repeats in a continuing ‘loop,’ thus the term OODA Loop is another descriptor for Boyd’s decision cycle.”
As I have argued at length in my paper “Boyd’s OODA loop,” (available for free download from our Articles page) this model doesn’t really work very well. Boyd himself came to realize this when he drew his OODA “loop” sketch (reproduced in my paper) in The Essence of Winning and Losing. The authors of this book are well aware of this, however, and explain their use of the circular model thusly:
Whether or not the last few pages accurately captured Boyd’s thinking, they certainty capture how the average military leader interpreted Boyd’s thinking. … Most importantly, the simplified narrative is more accessible and in some cases easier for most people to apply to real-world problems.
As I also note in my paper, the circular model is a subset of Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch and does accurately represent his model of learning, that is how to build and employ snowmobiles. Creativity and leadership under fire. And since learning is what this book is all about, I can endorse their use of the circular representation, even if it is not a good model of decisions and actions in a rapidly changing situation.
Also, a note on authorship. No author is listed, but the principle author is the leading expert on outcomes based learning, Don Vandergriff, author of many works on improving leadership in critical command situations, including Raising the Bar, The Path to Victory, and Adopting Mission Command: Developing Leaders for a Superior Command Culture.
Don told me that the Special Tactics Staff provided support and contributions. Incidentally, the general background of the Special Tactics team comes out of Tier-1 Special Missions Units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_mission_unit and Special Forces.
I strongly recommend this book. You’ll find all sorts of interesting topics, all in a highly readable style that you will find difficult to put down. No matter what your occupation, by the end of this book, you will be building better snowmobiles faster.
——— *The idea is that a snowmobile takes bits and pieces from what’s readily available — in this case, what we already know — and combines them in a new way to solve a problem. Boyd describes the process and importance of building snowmobiles in his presentation Strategic Game of ? and ?, available from our Articles page.
Slightly East of New 
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