John Boyd

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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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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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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.

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Perils of locked konseptsia

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). 

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Boyd in Korean

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.)

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What would Boyd say???

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 …

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Confusion and disorder

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.

Enjoy.

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Who was John Boyd?

Mark McGrath and Brian “Ponch” Rivera discuss this on a podcast with Aaron MacLean. Listen in on Aaron’s site: https://nebulouspodcasts.com/shows/school-of-war/episodes/ep-84:-b.-rivera-and-m.-mcgrath-on-john-boyd

Aaron, incidentally, was featured on a podcast with Mark and Ponch in May: https://nowayout.buzzsprout.com/2109174/12751601-war-conflict-and-lessons-learning-building-better-leaders-with-aaron-maclean

And about a month earlier, I was also on a podcast with them: https://nowayout.buzzsprout.com/2109174/12568242-certain-to-zen-ooda-iohai-lean-and-more-with-chet-richards-phd

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.

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Another Podcast

A while back, Mark McGrath and Brian (Ponch) Rivera interviewed me as part of their No Way Out series.

No Way Out with Chet Richards on Apple Podcasts

No Way Out with Chet Richards on SPOTIFY

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.

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Creativity under fire

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.

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*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.