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New version of “Meaning of Life”

A few tweaks to “John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, and the Meaning of Life,” now available from the Articles page.

Changes:

  • Page 2: A footnote supplying data to reinforce Boyd’s contention that one of the invariants he discovered, the one underlying both blitzkrieg/maneuver warfare and guerrilla warfare, has been “extraordinarily successful”
  • Page 15: Corrected the page citation for the Balck quote (with a hat tip to Feral Jundi)
  • Page 21: Added a cautionary note on using the military version of “operating inside the OODA loop” for conflicts other than war
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For better value, change your values

Air Force Lt Col Dan Ward has another great piece on how to break out of the cycle of acquisition programs that are ever more expensive, ever later, and in many cases, ever more irrelevant. Obviously the first two make the third just that much more likely.

Perhaps to better accommodate the crowd here at Fast Transients, he’s done this one in graphic novel format: The Comic Guide To Improving Defense Acquisitions. (2.9 MB PDF)

Pay close attention starting at around page 8, where he explains how orientation (which calls “values,” as in “things we value”) shapes our decision making. So if, as he writes, we value complexity, perhaps as a sign of sophistication (or — my interpretation — because we can hire more people thereby increasing profit and political pull), then we’ll focus our efforts on justifying the complexity and the additional cost and time it implies rather than trying to make things simpler.

[Check out Mark Thompson’s comment over at Time’s Battleland.]

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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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The Casual Vacancy, a casual review

J.K. Rowling’s’ new book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, is positively Faulknerian. No, I’m not talking about the length of her sentences, but in tone and characterization, it reminds me of his classics like Absolom, Absolom! Light in August, and The Sound and the Fury:

  • It takes place in a small town and exploits long-standing relationships among the town’s inhabitants
  • It deals with “the human heart in conflict with itself,” as WCF put it in his Nobel acceptance speech. And so many of them to deal with.
  • There are Snopeses, lots of them.
  • It’s really dark. Few people laugh, and when they do, it’s rarely a good sign.

Fiction is such a personal preference, so I hesitate to recommend specific works to other readers. As for me, I liked it, but then I like Faulkner a lot, too. And such contemporary noiristas as James Lee Burke. Rowling truly lives up to Faulkner’s imperative:

[Man] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

Can Pagford be a 21st Century Jefferson and Yarvil the new Yoknapatawpha? She left enough threads hanging that it should be easy, if she wants to do it, to weave a new tale about them.  I, as a former resident of Jefferson, certainly hope she does.

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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 Casual Vacancy

J. K. Rowling’s new book just came. I ordered it last week from Amazon, the hard copy because it was only a couple more bucks than the Kindle edition. I feel bad, greenwise, but I can loan this to spouse, kids, friends, etc. Would it be too strong to say that publishers are stupid?

Vacancy was just released yesterday. Amazon had promised it by Monday via 2-day shipping — I signed up for Amazon Prime — but it was in today’s mail. A great example of zheng / qi: meet expectations and then some. Amazon is VERY good at this.

This will be my first book by Rowling, although I’ve seen several of the Harry Potter movies. Let you know.