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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most readers of this blog will be familiar with Boyd’s practice of exploring a variety of domains looking for what he called “invariants,” concepts that keep occurring in different fields. Here, for example, is his domain list from Strategic Game of ? and ?
From Strategic Game of ? and ?
The invariants he found in this collection explain the two question marks (All of Boyd’s works are available for free download from our Articles page).
What you may not be so familiar with is that the process goes both ways. That is, once he distilled out an invariant, it was often applicable to domains outside his original collection. In fact, this was virtually inevitable, as he observed near the end of his life in Conceptual Spiral (1992):
Taken together, the theorems associated with Gödel, Lowenheim & Skolem, Tarski, Church, Turing, Chaitin, and others reveal that not only do the statements representing a theoretical system for explaining some aspect of reality explain that reality inadequately or incompletely but, like it or not, these statements spill out beyond any one system and do so in unpredictable ways (14).
So the OODA loop, which started out as a concept from armed conflict — war — quickly spilled out into business, sports, politics, etc. One could argue that although these aren’t war, they are forms of conflict, thus the application of the OODA loop to them shouldn’t be surprising. But here is something perhaps less expected. This post introduces a paper from Lancaster University in England, “Rethinking reflective practice: John Boyd’s OODA loop as an alternative to Kolb.,” by Mike Ryder and Carolyn Downs (The International Journal of Management Education 20 (2022) 100703), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1472811722001057
Let me start by admitting that I have no idea who Kolb was or is and have never heard of “reflective practice.” But what is clear is that the OODA loop is making a major leap from any form of conflict into pedagogy — the art of teaching. Here is the paper’s abstract:
The world is changing and business schools are struggling to keep up. Theories of reflective practice developed by the likes of Schon (1983), Gibbs (1988), Driscoll (1994, 2007) and Kolb (1984, 2015) are outdated and unfit for current purposes. Problems include the chronology of events, the orientation of the observer, the impact of external inputs, and the fact that neither education nor the workplace follow a structured, linear path.
In response to these challenges, we propose a new ‘solution’: John Boyd’s OODA loop. We argue that OODA loops offer the chance to reshape reflective practice and work-based learning for a world in which individuals must cope with ‘an unfolding evolving reality that is uncertain, ever changing and unpredictable’ (Boyd, 1995, slide 1). By embracing the philosophy of John Boyd and his OODA loop theory, business schools can develop greater resilience and employability in graduates, preparing them to embrace change while also embedding the concept of life-long learning to make them better equipped to face the uncertainty that the modern world brings.
I am not going to get involved in debate over reflective practice, whatever that may be. However, having taught Boyd’s philosophy and OODA loop theory in graduate business school, I heartily concur with the last sentence of the abstract.
Before you read the paper, one caution. As you will soon discover, I am cited and quoted several times, granting me considerably more credit than I deserve. That being said, this is an excellent exegesis of some of Boyd’s ideas, particularly as they affect the “learning loop,” where we tweak our orientations to keep up with that “unfolding evolving reality” and develop the intuitive actions we need to respond to and influence that world. Boyd described this aspect of the “loop” in Conceptual Spiral, particularly slides 26 – 28, and drew his famous sketch of it in The Essence of Winning and Losing (1996):
The “learning loop” component of the OODA “loop” (emp. added)
Let me illustrate with a few quotes from the paper:
The real value of Boyd’s theory is in its approach to thinking and understanding one’s orientation with respect to the wider world…
A good example might be the student who memorises a long list of management theories and develops excellent speed of recall. While this may be a useful skill to pass an exam, what the student doesn’t gain is the intuitive ability to process factors and apply them to a given situation. This requires a far deeper level of understanding than a textbook or list of management theories can provide. Much rather, it requires knowledge and understanding beyond the formal realms of any given subject: it requires speed of contextual processing, rather than speed of recall.
This is why Boyd’s theory is so useful.
The application of the “loop,” the entire “loop,” to the process of teaching, itself, appears to me to be novel, and for this reason alone, I highly recommend this paper. I’m going to assume most of my audience aren’t professional educators (although we all end up teaching something to somebody at some point …). Whatever your occupation, however, it’s a great example of how ideas spread not by analogy but by first developing a deep understanding of their origins and meanings, and then applying this understanding to new domains.
Boyd first used this approach in “Destruction and Creation,” and, as he explains in the “Abstract” (available on the Articles page), continued to employ it the rest of his life:
Yet, the theme that weaves its way through this Discourse on Winning and Losing is not so much contained within each of the five sections, per se, that make up the Discourse; rather, it is the kind of thinking that both lies behind and makes up its very essence. For the interested, a careful examination will reveal that the increasingly abstract discussion surfaces a process of reaching across many perspectives; pulling each and every one apart (analysis), all the while intuitively looking for those parts of the disassembled perspectives which naturally interconnect with one another to form a higher-order, more general elaboration (synthesis) of what is taking place. As a result, the process not only creates the Discourse but it also represents the key to evolve the tactics, strategies, goals, unifying themes, etc., that permit us to actively shape and adapt to the unfolding world we are a part of, live in, and feed upon.
As Frans Osinga pointed out in his 2006 examination of John Boyd’s philosophy of conflict, Science, strategy and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd, the OODA loop is the best known but probably most misunderstood aspect of Boyd’s body of work. Even today, it’s very common to see people describe the OODA loop as a loop. However, when Boyd finally got around to producing a “sketch” of the “loop” (his terms), it was, as I’m sure practically all readers of this blog know, something entirely different.
From “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” 1996.
Why? The reason is that the OODA “loop” is an answer to a specific problem. It is not, for example a model of decision making — in fact, it simply requires you to make implicit and explicit decisions and link them to actions, all the while experimenting and learning.
On November 30, I gave a lecture on this subject to the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm. My host, Johan Ivari, arranged for it to be recorded and made available on the University’s web site. They broke it into two parts:
Slightly East of New 
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