Larry Kummer

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A sure-fire cure for optimism

Ruins of Athens, drawing by Louis François Sébastien Fauvel, 1753-1838. The British Museum

[Editor’s note: John Boyd insisted that to succeed in conflict,

We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. Strategic Game, 45

It is in this spirit that SEON offers the following by my longtime colleague, Larry Kummer, with whom I sometimes agree and sometimes don’t.]

Larry Kummer,
Editor, the Fabius Maximus website

Over the past 23 years I wrote 5,200 posts at the Fabius Maximus website (11 million views). Most were diagnostic, investigating how we got into this mess. The most useful were predictive, helping us prepare. These proved quite accurate. Here are three of my current predictions:

First: The defining characteristic of our time: We have entered another singularity, a veil we cannot see beyond. A transition to unimaginable outcomes. The process has already begun. A generation ago, who imagined that grade schools would become trans groomers, or that middle aged soccer moms would become the Left’s new street warriors? All we know is that the world will look different on the other side. The West as we know it is dying. Too many changes coming too fast: feminism, mass migrations, revolutionary politics, the crash of the Debt Supercycle, radical new technologies, and Nietzche’s “collapse of all values.”

To survive we must, as we have done before, reinvent the West with new values. The modern Left (post-1964) knows this, and logically they have become a revolutionary force. It is an open source movement (no controlling center), with next-generation values (non-Marxist). They have gathered vast resources and powerful alliances. They have effective recruitment (e.g., street warriors from Antifa thugs to middle-aged soccer moms), sophisticated tactics and strategy, and unifying doctrines. Most notably, they have played two aces. These by themselves might result in a victory for the Left:

  • The Long March Through the Institutions, with so many vital institutions dominated by the Left. Leftists infiltrate institutions, then repurpose them. The press, entertainment, and education industries have become great fortresses from which they project power. Giant churches and corporations become activist machines to the point of self-destruction, gutted to serve higher goals, as lamprey eels consume fish.
  • Open borders–the flood of Third World people to drastically change US demographics. NYC, Portland, Minneapolis are just the first wave of our new politics.

My greatest analytical error was a failure to see that there would be little organized opposition to the Left. Only now have the first glimmers of organized resistance appeared (e.g, Kirk’s Turning Point USA). Hence their series of mind-blowing victories. The right’s weak institutional support means their occasional wins only slow the Left. Trump discovered this in his first term and is re-learning it in his second, hence the pivot to foreign affairs.

The right might learn this when the Left recovers Congress and the White House. They will reverse all of Trump’s Executive Orders. Trump exercised vast new powers. The Left will wield and expand them to advance the Revolution.

Second: Since 1648 the West has run by the Westphalian rules, an era of warfare between nations (plus occasional civil wars). The post-WWII era was new phase of this, as the tactics of Fourth Generation Warfare allowed weaker nations to defeat powerful foreign armies. A new era is coming of Fifth Generation Warfare which will break the Westphalian mold as warfare between civilizations ignores national borders, as the Western peoples, and perhaps some of East Asia’s (broadly defined), realize that we share the same internal foes and unite to fight their common revolutionary enemies.

This evolution from the post-WW2 era will resemble 4GW and anti-communist conflicts, but cubed. No front lines, not even inside nations. Alliances will be between factions of societies. Most ideological differences will be subsumed in a larger conflict, because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As for the sides and the nature of that conflict, I leave them to your imagination.

Third: The nature of war comes in part from the imaginations of participants. Americans of the post-WW2 era grew up with stories of the Space Patrol (Star Trek is one such), plus national and transnational organizations to maintain order (UNCLE, GI JOE, SHIELD, etc). The young today have little or none of that. In their stories the Federation is corrupt. Police are broken or evil. GI Joe was destroyed. SHIELD was corrupt and incompetent.

Instead they have stories like Warhammer 40,000. They see that the universe has no rules, no benign guiding hand. Only the struggle against chaos. Survival is most we can hope for. Our youth unconsciously prepare for what is coming.

IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY WAR

“In the 41st Millennium, warring factions of an ancient civilizations fight endless battles across innumerable worlds. Humanity stands alone, beset on all sides by the heretic, the mutant, and the alien. There is no mercy. There is no respite. Prepare yourself for battle.”
 The core description of Warhammer 40,000.


For a quarter century, Larry Kummer has been writing for and editing the Fabius Maximus website. He is a former Boy Scout Leader and retired Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He has also written extensively for this blog, most often under his pseudonym “Fabius Maximus.” Although he hasn’t posted much recently, he has promised to reactivate his blog; I’ll let you know.

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A few thoughts on “Speed versus Quickness”

Credit: Oxford, Bodleian Library, LP 186

Larry Kummer*
August 25, 2025

Perhaps Chuck is over-conceptualizing the D-Day operations. The whole D-day deception – Operation Fortitude – is the stuff of legend. But there is little evidence that it affected German deployments in a meaningful way. A bigger advantage of the Allies was Hitler’s bizarre command structure for the defense.

As for D-Day, the accounts differ in their key details. Hitler was by then a meth-head, possibly sedated around 3 am by his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. When the call came at roughly 6 am about activity at Normandy, it is uncertain if he could have been awakened. Perhaps his aids didn’t try. He got the news at roughly noon, along with his generals’ request for permission to move the tanks. Sometime that afternoon Hitler ordered the tanks unleashed.

How long did Fortitude’s deception ops delay Hitler’s response? If the tanks had been released at noon – a few hours earlier, in full daylight, fully exposed to Allies’ air power – how would it have affected the outcome? We can only guess.

I said that perhaps Chuck “over-conceptualized” those events. He described them as a very high-level abstraction – and, like all such, of value to the extent it is useful. Here, I’ll offer another perspective that is simpler and, in my opinion, equally useful. As Boyd said, you have to slice the problem from many different directions.

Another example of conflating OODA loops with a simple action is Operation Mincemeat, intended to confuse the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Like Fortitude, it was wildly complicated. But with a different twist in the ending, the story of which doesn’t require OODA loops.

Mincemeat had excellent results. A key part was “The Man Who Never Was,” a fake British officer whose corpse washed up on the Spanish coast with secret documents in his pocket. But the two key Germans in Spain who forwarded this hot info to Berlin saw through the trick. Desperate to justify their cushy jobs, however, they reported their actions as a valuable opportunity. If they had been more honest and loyal, this might have alerted the Germans to Sicily as our next target.

History is contingent: The German’s D-Day alert did not reach the Normandy zone; two corrupt Germans did not blow the whistle on Mincemeat. These are factors that move history.

In the present day, discussions of 4GW (and 5GW and 6GW) that center on OODA loops show the decay of the military arts in America: bizarrely abstract and very complex. Suitable for a nation that tied in Korea and lost every significant war in the following 70 years.

Oddly, the winners in those wars did so without such awesome PhD-level theories.

Part of our problem stems from a focus on the wrong aspects of Boyd’s theories, like Paleolithic hunters given a telescope – who then use it as a microscope. I recommend we broaden our approach to Boyd. For example, we should take to heart his description of grand strategy in Patterns of Conflict, slide 139:

  • Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
  • Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
  • Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
  • Attract uncommitted states to our cause. End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts.

It’s worth pointing out that this section culminates in his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” slide 144, whose purpose is nothing less than to “Improve fitness as an organic whole to shape and expand influence or power over the course of events in the world.” The acronym “OODA” doesn’t appear anywhere on that slide.

In fact, my candidate for Boyd’s greatest insight applies at all levels, from building a strong society, to grand strategy, to building a military, to tactics:

“People, Ideas, and Hardware. ‘In that order!’ the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.”

Ideas spread best when in their simplest (or core) form. Christianity had its fastest rate of growth of converts before the Gospels were written, telling people little more than ‘Christ died for our sins and rose again.’ Another way to say this: The passages I quote are Boyd 101. Only when those are mastered should his disciples attempt to teach Boyd 201. That time might be many years in the future.

*Larry Kummer is the editor of the Fabius Maximus website, writing about these matters since 2003 (often presciently). [Editor’s note: His description. I am not prone to disagree, although one must contend with the blind hog syndrome.]

Here are some listings of posts on his site:

On OODA Loops (warning, Chuck and I are both featured, more prominently than we deserve):

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ooda+loop%22+site%3Afabiusmaximus.com

On 4GW:

Military theory & practice