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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.

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A little busy

Working on my paper for the Boyd and Beyond Conference in Quantico mid-October. Will post after the event. The characterizations are strong but the plot still needs a little work.

I see De Niro as Boyd and Brad Pitt or Daniel Craig as me.

 

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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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Dr. Linda P. Beckerman

I just found out that Linda Beckerman died last September 18.

Linda was a close colleague when we were both at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA.  She was one of the most creative people I have ever known, in the “How in the world did you think of that???” category. Let me give one example:

One day, the president of the company told our boss that he wanted the mail system fixed. This may not sound like much, but in a large organization like Lockheed, spread out over a number of buildings, mail was the lifeblood of the company. A few facts about the case:

  • This was well before the Internet, and our internal e-mail system was slow and cumbersome. Attachments were problematic at best.
  • It typically took between 3 days and never for physical mail to go between departments. Probably the origin of the term “snail mail.” At the IBM building downtown, employees on different floors were known to send company mail via FEDEX, that is, through Memphis.
  • We were a union shop, so it was an offense even for staffers to walk down the hall with company mail

What she did, which I thought was brilliant, was not design a better mail system, but come up with a process that got the unionized employees in the mail room to create (evolve might be better) a new system.  How good was it? When 100% of our mail was routinely delivered the same day it was collected, we quit measuring. To better appreciate this, one of the first things I had been warned about in my company orientation session some five years earlier was the pitfalls of company mail.

You can read all about Linda’s solution in the paper we wrote.

Linda is probably best known on the Internet for a paper she wrote on the nature of war, “The Non-linear dynamics of war.” After leaving Lockheed Martin in 1989, Linda moved to Orlando, where she was, among other things, a game designer, dog walker, and ultimately head of a systems engineering effort for SAIC.

She was unique; she will be missed.