School of War - Ep 84: B. Rivera and M. McGrath on John Boyd

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Mark McGrath and Brian Rivera, hosts of the No Way Out podcast, join the show to talk about strategist John Boyd.  ▪️ Times      •    02:09 Introduction      •    02:59 Who was John Boyd?     •    06:03 “40 Second” Boyd     •    08:05 Air to air combat     •   09:45 OODA Loop      •    14:20 Getting inside the enemy’s loop     •    18:44 Fast transients     •    21:41 Patterns of Conflict     •   26:27 Military reformer       •    29:46 Blitzkrieg and Entebbe      •    37:43 Detractors Follow along on Instagram For more on John Boyd and from Mark and Brian check out the ​​No Way Out Podcast

Anyone who has been through officer training in the United States Marine Corps in recent decades will have studied a theory of decision-making known in shorthand as the Oudaloup, where observe, orient, decide, enact. You may have heard of it in other contexts, too. It's a popular tool taught in business schools and all manner of competitive environments where time-sensitive judgment is important. Its father is John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot of the last century, iconoclastic advocate for defense reform in the 70s and 80s,

and a charismatic figure whose thought extended far beyond this well-known acronym into theories of competition and strategy that he intended to be essentially comprehensive. His advocates tend to be fierce in their advocacy. His critics, well, they are also pretty savage. And despite the passions he arouses in limited quarters, many who are interested in strategy and warfighting haven't heard of him at all. Who was John Boyd?

We'll look into that today. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content.

Follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Ponch Rivera and Moose McGrath. Together, these gentlemen help run AGLX Consulting. Ponch is the founder and Mark is the chief learning officer there at AGLX Consulting. They're both veterans, Ponce from the Navy, Moose from the Marine Corps.

They are the co-hosts of the No Way Out podcast, a podcast focused on the thought and work of one, John Boyd, a man who we are going to discuss today. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the show. Yeah, thanks for having us, Aaron. So I got to say I'm embarrassed to have gotten to whatever episode mark we are at right now and to have not done an episode dedicated to John Boyd. Like any Marine of my generation, I was raised in the church of Boyd. I'm a Boyd acolyte. All of my thoughts on tactics and strategy in some ways are, you know, either they're downstream of Boyd in some way.

Either they are actually like a function of my study of Boyd and Boydism at Quantico in 2007, 2008, or there are some reaction to some disagreement with Boyd. So one way or the other, I'm in, and yet we've yet to really have a good discussion of him here on the show. So I'm grateful to you, gentlemen, who spent a lot of time working on him and indeed in the archives with him coming on to talk us through it. So why don't we just start with the big picture here? Who was John Boyd and why should anyone who's interested in military history or strategy or defense policy care?

So depending on who you speak with, and certainly if you speak to Ponce and I, John Boyd is probably the greatest strategist since Sun Tsu. And he's certainly the greatest American military strategist. And of course, that's our opinion. It's a subject for debate. But we're happy to defend that. He was an Air Force pilot that lived from 1927. to 1997. He was a fighter pilot, and at the very young age of the rank of first lieutenant,

started crafting what became the definitive air-to-air combat study in all-natal forces called the aerial attack study. He finished it as a captain. He had a long career retired in the early 70s. One of the things that he was most known for, other than being a very well-known, arguably the greatest instructor at the fighter weapons school at Nellis Air Force Base, John Boyd was the positor and creator of what's known as energy maneuverability theory and energy maneuverability theory that he again came up with as an active duty officer in the Air Force is a equation that I'm sure Ponce could tell you much more about being a naval aviator, but basically it informs all design ever since, particularly with fighter aviation around the

F-16, the F-18, and the A-10. It's basically, as a historian like myself would state it, it would be, how do we gain and lose energy faster than our opponents? That's a very crude term that maybe Punch could elaborate on. Bord retired and set on a course of deep academic work from roughly from the time of his retirement in 1974-ish to his death, his deathbed 97. creating all sorts of theories that were pioneering in the study of complexity on top of theories of competition, theories of conflict that we as Marines would most know him for some of his famous briefings, I'm sure we could get into. But he spent the last 20 plus years of his life and deep study coming up with ways that we can interact with complexity, ways that we could thrive

in complexity, as he would say, improve our capacity for free and independent action, focusing always on on people, ideas and things, and always challenging assumptions such that doctrine today would not become dogma tomorrow. So that's it in a nutshell. Well, why don't we start with air-to-air combat, which is where he had experiences, you know, both as an instructor. And I believe he flew in Korea, if I'm not mistaken. And of course, if you look at the stuff he starts to produce later in life about tactics

and strategy and grand strategy, air-to-air combat is kind of his rhetorical jumping off point. So what, and he was 42nd Boyd, right? Wasn't that his, his nickname? So, Ponch, maybe you're the pilot here. What does it mean that he was 42nd Boyd? And how did air-to-air combat sort of set his mind working on these problems of human competition? All right. So first off, why 42nd Boyd, he had a running bet that he could beat anybody from a defensive perspective in a defensive setup. He can turn and defeat them in basic fire maneuvers within 40 seconds. That's where he got is the 42nd point. So the aerial attack study, what's important about the aerial attack study is he really had the ability to break

down the stick and rudder movement that pilots go through. So this cognitive task analysis is something that subject matter experts struggle with. So you and I could be a subject matter expert in something, but we may struggle with explaining it to others. That's where John Boyd excelled. He really had a knack for explaining how to move the aircraft, and that's where we got the aerial attack study, which is still pretty much relevant today. And going back to E.E. I remember sitting down in the ready room when I was a young cone in the F-14 community, and we're looking at these funny-looking diagrams, looking at, you know, MiG-21s or Meg-23s, Mick-25s, looking at the enemy aircraft and looking at how our aircraft can maneuver against them.

And it just gave us this ability to understand a rate and radius fight, how we want to fight another aircraft. At that time, I did not know that we got that information from John Boyd's EM theory. So it's pretty powerful. We look back at our history of flying fighter jets and not even knowing that Boyd influenced a lot of the tactics and performance of aircraft. And just to generalize out from that for folks who are not pilots, I mean, you would think that how to be successful in air-to-air combat would be like a pretty niche, like pretty technical thing to understand.

And you might be great at it, but that's great if you're a fighter pilot and not that applicable, you know, if you're going to go do other things. But Boyd uses how he's successful and how he finds in general people are successful in air-to-air combat to then start extrapolating out about competition in general. What is it about being successful in air-to-air combat? What are the principles of that success that he starts to found his thinking on other kinds of competition on? I don't think he really understands what made him successful in the cockpit until the 70s, when he's reflecting back on what life was like in F-86.

And when he reflects back, he recognizes that there are some control capabilities that the F-86 has over the Meg-15 and Meg-17, as well as the ability to observe more with a big dome or bubble canopy on the F-86. So if you look like a modern-day aircraft, an F-16, big bubble canopy, you can see a lot. So that ability to observe is critical on everything. But at that time, I don't think he's really understanding what makes an aircraft successful. That's what he's trying to pursue when he goes to Georgia Tech and learns a little bit about physics and gets stuck on entrance. on the concept of entropy, and then he overcomes that, and that's when he develops EM theory. So it's a journey for him. It's not one day he just wakes up and goes, oh, this is exactly how it works.

He spends his whole life reflecting back on all the lessons he had from World War II when he was a young airman. He was an airman, is that correct? Or was he in the Army? Yeah. So when he was over there post in Reconstruction, Japan, understanding what leaders were like and how bad leaders were leading him at the time to what he was doing. the Pentagon in the mid-80s, right? So he's reflecting back on his whole career as he builds out and before he sketches the hudol-loop. So it's not just one thing. Well, you said it. So now we should

describe what that is, because I think some listeners will have never heard of the utal loop. We were talking about observation and the bubble canopy and how being able to observe is important in winning dog fights. What's the rest of the loop? Because if people have heard one thing about Boyd, and I know it's a big part of what you guys talk about, this is not the only thing you should know about Boyd, it is the OODA loop. But for those who haven't heard of it, what is the uddle? Right now, many people get it as an observe, orient to side act, right, as a linear process, a passive process on the way we construct reality. That's not necessarily wrong, but that's not what he intended it to be. So many people call it a decision-making process, which it can be.

Right now, we're looking at it more as a way to understand reality. It has that capability. But I'll turn it over to Mark to give you a little bit more precise approach on how most people think about the UduLUPS for Mark. Yeah, I mean, as you know, Aaron, we probably got this as Marines. I mean, we thought we knew Boyd, we thought we had Boyd down, and it was the, you know, Udoloup, and you get inside somebody's Udoloup, and it was really that simple. And even Boyd's own thinking evolved around this. It originally started when he was at the base in Thailand running essentially black ops, but coordinating sensors that were being dropped in enemy territory. He originally came up with his idea of orienticide and act. And eventually it became Observe Orientalide Act.

First, oh, is actually going to be sense. A sense orienticide act is called the Soda Loop. But then he thought that I think it was kind of silly. Observations sounded a little better. He never wanted it to be called Uda, but it just, you know, an act, you know how it is in the Marine Corps and other places, acronyms get carried away. When you read his early work, say, around patterns of conflict or other things that came

right after his really a seminal codex. You know, his core document that everybody should know about and read and study destruction and creation, because everything is a riff off of that. Even in patterns of conflict, he's speaking about Udoloup as if it was somewhat linear, but as his thinking evolved, and he started studying things like the Toyota Production System. He started studying things like Japanese swordsmanship with Miyamoto Musashi. He started studying Zen. He started studying other Eastern philosophies, evolutionary biology.

You know, he's bringing this very multidisciplinary approach to, create the Udalaup Sketch. And as we introduce our own podcast that way, we say Udaloop Sketch. And when Boyd wrote that, Loop was in quotes and sketch was not capitalized. It's not meant to be something that gets taped up on your HUD and your fighter jet to follow a linear process. It's meant to be an abstraction of how we as humans understand reality, how we observe, how we sense unfolding interactions, how we based off of our cultural traditions, our personal history, our education, our knowledge, our psychology, our ability to break things down and build things back up, how we come up with decisions, which are essentially our hypotheses,

in turn that we test. And the loop is actually the learning. So really, it's an abstraction of how we learn as humans as we seek to adapt in complexity. And it doesn't matter if we're a platoon of Marines or it doesn't matter if we're a Fortune 10 company. wherever there's humans, this abstraction, this map, this sketch explains how ultimately what Ponce said, how we're how we're dealing with reality. Now, what's widely common or what's widespread is to see it reduced to Utilup. So I'm going to teach a class on firearms.

We're going to talk about Oudaloup. I'm going to teach a class on this. I'm going to talk about Oudaloup or you can see from some of the big consultants they'll have. Udoloup is just this linear circle. And it's absolutely not that in the deeper that you dig on board. Starting with destruction and creation, riffing from there, you'll see very clearly that Oudaloup, even in its final, quote-unquote, form sketch that we saw, it's meant to be amended. It's meant to be changed. One of our first guests was Dave Snowden, that is famous for the Kenebun framework. And he said, it would be interesting to see if John Boyd had lived another 10 years to see how

the Oudaloup, as we know, it would have adapted and changed because it was all meant to be a work in progress. Yeah. So just to make it a little bit more concrete for listeners who are sort of hearing this for the first time. And I take your point that, you know, it's not about air-to-air combat. It's, you know, exclusively,

it's about life in a way. And also, I think you made this point very well that it's, it's in a way, no one, no one ever has to teach you how to think this way. You do think this way. It's a description of something that is a natural human process. But just to stick for descriptive purposes

to the air-to-air combat scenario for a second. So there you are. You're a fighter pilot. You find yourself in combat. You are, you are, observing in the literal sense that you're looking around, and then how does the process play out? How does it just describe how you win in air-to-air combat in Boidean terms? Yeah, so you have to go back to your training, which develops your orientation, right?

So that previous experience that you get in the cockpit, that air sense, that flying by the seat of your pants matters. So you go out there and you practice these things, these technical skills, you know, the stick and rudder movements of the aircraft. You can think of the same thing in sports, right? you've got to have the technical skills built up. And what we're trying to do there is once you have those skills, now you're trying to employ an aircraft.

So that orientation, through that orientation, we look externally to make sense, create that situational awareness of the external environment, right? So we know our weapon systems. We know our capabilities. We understand the enemy. We understand their capabilities. And now we're trying to do something to get inside their udolip. We're trying to maneuver our aircraft, position ourselves between the sun and the

the enemy aircraft or whatever gives us an advantage to create those mismatches in there. So that observation, or excuse me, that orientation is absolutely critical because we're going to go through a loop between observation, orientation, and observation. And then we'll make some decisions, some covert decisions, internal decisions in our mind, in our cockpit, in our section, in our division that may have been pre-beforehand. I will make those covert actions and we'll kind of run through those counterfactuals, if you will. And then we'll make a decision to act on them, to actually emit some type of action by maneuvering the aircraft,

offsetting in a certain direction. And then when we come to the merge, or we actually meet beak to beak, if you will, at 500 feet or 200 feet, we're going to go back to that energy maneuverability theory that we know, that previous experience, that we have that pre-brief or pre-planned first move against that particular aircraft. Are we going to go one circle or two-circle fight against them?

Are we going to let him make the first maneuver? Are we going to find out what he knows about combat aviation? Are we going to watch him go horizontal or are we going to watch from go on the vertical? Because that will tell us quite a bit about the capabilities of that pilot. So we're going through the whole cycle all the time. It's continuous, right? And then we're going to go ahead and employ our weapons the best we can. Now, if we're at a disadvantage, if we're losing, if we find ourselves, you know,

and this is always a hard thing for humans to go through. And that's to just cut things loose and just blow through and run away. but we're trained to do that, right? So at some point, we got to decide, hey, I'm just going to blow through this. This guy's too good for me. I don't have the position. I don't have the gas. I don't have the awareness of his wingman.

I don't know what else is out there or I have another objective that I need to achieve. Then we can make other decisions. So you're going through the full process, and it's not O-O-O-D, it's O-O-O-D, back to O-O-D, maybe an action that we take that's internal, maybe the counterfactual. what if, maybe a quick, if we see this, we're going to do that type of thing. And then those actions that actually we emit through the external environment. There's a lot more to that. That's a little bit more to describe.

The implicit guidance to control, that pathway that leads from orientation to action, you could think of those as our technical skills, right? That stick and rudder capability that we just know how to fly the aircraft. What we don't want to do is we don't want to be in a position in a fight where we have to think about those technical skills, you know, stick and rudder or in case of basketball or football, how to throw a football or how to dribble. You don't want to be thinking about that. And it's very simple.

If I'm thinking about that, I'm wasting more energy on that. Therefore, I don't have the excess free energy to understand what's going on around me to create that situational artist and to create mismatches for my opponent. So that's a kind of a rough sketch of it. But I think for the most part, that might help people understand that it's not a linear process. Right. You said something in there that, as I don't need to tell either of you, you know, sort of has become a cliche, but I think it's still, it points to something important that we should understand, which is this notion that you win when you, quote, unquote, get inside the other guys, Oudaloo. And I'll phrase that back to you guys in a way that is a little bit more detailed and I'm curious to know your reaction. So whether it's air to air combat, you know, racket sports is another really clean sort of environment in which to observe this phenomenon. It's the person who a doubt. to change or who, you know, ideally is dealing out change and both adapting and dealing out

change faster than the other guy who tends to win. That has always seemed to me to be the core Boydian insight that the Oudalup is designed to capture. Is that, is that fair? Is that how you guys understand it? Well, what you're referring to is fast transient. So as we cycle through the process faster, as our orientations become more aligned with reality and we're creating a state of flow.

We're able to see things and recognize things quicker than the opponents than the rate of change. We can decide an act of what's called fast transience where we can hit an enemy so fast or a competitor so fast or in a way that mystifies them in a way that smashes their cohesion, shatters their cohesion,

where they don't know what they're doing. They don't know what game they're playing. They don't know what sport they're in. They no longer know what business they're in. They're incapable of observing effectively what's actually going on or making any decisions or actions inside of that because their orientation is misalliance divergent from reality. A really easy example is when you see people teach Uda Loop as a linear process,

that's exactly what you want your competitors to be doing. You want your competitors to be understanding Uda as a simple four-step process because those of us that understand it or seek to understand and constantly try to learn and relearn it better and better and kind of what Pontch is talk about is multi-layers, multi-level. You're going to have an edge and you're going to see. things quicker, you're going to be able to act on those things that you see quicker to the point where the other side's never going to know what happened. So let's kind of move forward here in Boyd's thinking, like I'm sort of, in a way, I'm asking

these questions in the order that these things get laid out in patterns of conflict, which is one of the great presentations that he used to give in the, in the, the DOD community and beyond. But, you know, if we start with the, with air to air combat and we start with observe, orient decide act, and we can kind of, I think, as we talk, I hope folks can kind of start to see how in these really pure kinds of competition, whether it's air-to-air combat, racquet sports was the other one. You know, when you're watching a tennis game, test match, and you see the guy who's losing, they're starting to, they've got to race forward, then they've got to race back, then I've got to race forward. They've lost the initiative. They're reacting to the player who has

the initiative. The player who has the initiative as a consequence of everything we've been discussing, right? It is able to deal out and adapt to change faster than the person who's about to lose that point. Like we all know, we've all seen this. This is describing just a human phenomenon that in pure one-on-one kinds of competition can be quite easy to see. But Boyd's contention, and what you're getting to here that I want us to talk about is that it's not just the sort of pure one-on-one kinds of competition that this description applies. It applies, as you put it, on everything from fighter jets up to Fortune 10 companies. You know, when one company out maneuvers another company in terms of market share.

In some ways, the same processes are occurring. Boyd talks in patterns of conflict. Maybe I should ask you guys to talk a little bit about what patterns of conflict is, but talks about how it applies really to all forms of strategy in a military sense, whether you're talking about winning on the battlefield to winning at the theater level

to winning at the national strategy level. How is it that this sort of applies up and how does he talk about it in patterns of conflict? I think this is how Ponce and I actually became friends here ago talking about this, we actually went back instead of starting about patterns of conflict, went back to destruction creation. Destruction creation is really the document that you have to understand, to understand anything that Boyd's going to talk about, whether it's patterns of conflict, whether it's conceptual, spiral, strategic game, et cetera. Because in destruction creation,

what Boyd is saying that we inherently, in our experience in the universe, have to, overcome three things. There's three things that we constantly have to account for. One is entropy, two is uncertainty, and three is incompleteness. Entropy in that if we close our systems, disorder is only going to increase. Incompleteness in the sense that we're never going to have perfect information. And then uncertainty being that we can never fix two points, it comes from Heisenberg, but essentially saying that we're not, we can't with any accuracy predict the future. Now, there's a beautiful epistemology of this by Franklin, aka Chuck Spinney, who is Boyd's closest accolade, it helped them illustrate the Oudoloup. And the epistemology is a great thing to read

with the paper because destruction creation is the only thing you ever published. It's also very dense. Now, go to patterns of conflict. Everything that comes out of that, so patterns of conflict, as you refer, that's his big, famous brief that's luring in a lot of the great strategic thinkers. So for our own service, the Marine Corps. You know, the Marine Corps is doing a lot of soul searching after Vietnam, wondering why did we lose? Why did this happen? And Boyd tapped into that with his thinking, We have a great episode on this with G.I. Wilson was one of his collaborators about how do we get to change the way we think about conflict, not how we make decisions faster, not other things that are inherent to that from a highest level. How do we change the way that we view this with the order of people, ideas and things, with conflict as a human experience, a human undertaking, and technology being the least important. Technology, again, people, ideas, things. Technology is not important. Technology is what we lead with.

He went through history to show that oftentimes, so this is patterns of conflict, which there are several iterations that you can see in the archives, he shows over time it wasn't technology that was the deciding factor. It was people, maybe how they used technology, but the way the people thought, whether it was Alexander the Great, whether it was Hannibal, whether it was Napoleon,

they thought differently, they saw differently, they made different observations, they saw what others could not. They were able to overcome biases. They were able to act with speed. They were able to try things, take bigger risks, such that, back to what you were saying, that cycle would accelerate.

And then the other side would not know would hit them. They would not know what happened. What Boyd did with patterns of conflict was he went back after he got out of the Air Force, after he had written destruction and creation, he went back and he surveyed every battle he could find in human history. And the patterns of conflict, that he's identifying are those where people were thinking and looking at things differently

and able to get much different outcomes, even if they were, and especially oftentimes, if they were undergunned, underfunded, overmatched, that kind of a thing. Yeah. I've always thought that was one of the reasons for Boyd's appeal is the, well, I mean, in addition to the autodidactic quality of his work, which I grant some people, you know, hold against him. I think others, certainly those who received his briefs, you know, there's a way in which someone like him who's sort of self-taught, you know, especially later in life, they have a kind of enthusiasm, right? They're learning, they're learning in real time, and that's exciting, and that usually makes for a great teacher. And you can see, I mean,

you can watch that, I've never found anything with really good quality, but you can find some of his presentations on YouTube and online, and you get that sense of this guy who was just a really charismatic, galvanizing teacher. But in addition to that quality, the notion that at its heart, this theory that he comes up with, that, you know, in Marine Corps context, we, you know, gets called or is, you know, a version of it is maneuver warfare or maneuverism. It is, there is this emphasis on the individual. It's almost a kind of heroic emphasis, which cuts against, you know, so many of the trends in late 20th century defense thinking or American strategic thinking in general that are, you know, driven by technology, sort of deterministic, sort of attrition

oriented. John Boyd is, if you guys have seen Top Gun Maverick, which I'm, you know, I hope, I see at least one nodding head mark. I hope I don't have to end the interview right now. But John Boyd is Maverick, and everything he is fighting against is the Ed Harris character, right, who wants to shut everything down so the drones can fly. There's something heroic about the picture that Boyd is painting. Yeah, Boyd, so Ponce alluded to the time where Boy was in the Pentagon, and it should be, it should be stated, and this is another reason why people hate John Boyd was that he was the godfather of the military reform movement. And this is the movement that's going out there and proving and demonstrating that, you know, pork and largesse do not win wars. We just had that proven to us in Vietnam. Lightweight, maneuverable, quick thinking, educated leaders, educated, educated marine soldiers, airmen, sailors, that sort of a thing.

That's what wins wars. It's people. It's not machines. People fight wars and they use their minds. So when Boyd was in the Pentagon, they were tearing up the Bradley fighting. vehicle, the B-1 bomber, the stealth, other things. I mean, they were going to town on this, and their math was ironclad. You could read the book Pentagon Wars. You could read National Defense by James Fowles. You know, they were ironclad, and they were the absolute enemies of bureaucracy.

And that's another thing where he's a threat to people, because there are weapons programs, their systems, there's schools of thought that are, you know, quote unquote, the popular thing or the thing in power, but they're not necessarily effective. They're not necessarily good at winning awards. So that was one of his driving factors was why did we get creamed in Vietnam? As Boyd would say, you know, they had AK-47s pajamas and bicycles. And we had everything. We had sensors. We had radar. We had tech. We had the best planes. We had the best everything. And we lost. You know, he was like a minor public figure in the early 80s, right? Doesn't like James Fallows was writing him up. You know, the defense reform movement was itself a big deal in the Washington

press. And Boyd was a known quantity. There's no question. If you go on C-SPAN and you type in John Boyd, you can see his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. And that testimony is actually critical for a couple of reasons. One is it because he reemphasizes, you can see it, him saying people ideas, things. People wage wars, not machines. And they use their, people use their brains. The other thing is that he went to bat for two phenomenal leaders, from our own service, Colonel Mike Wiley, and talked about how he was basically had his wings clipped as a colonel and never saw a higher rank because he was a maverick in bringing these innovative ideas to the Marine Corps.

The other one was that he mentioned by name, who actually did make Brigadier General, was Ubo Vasta Seig, who was the head of what's called Sam's, like the School of Advanced Military Studies at Leavenworth, who used to bring Boyd in to speak to, I think, command staff college students out at Fort Leavenworth. And these were controversial figures. These are scholars. But Boyd went to bat because that's what, you know, that's what he was. But I guess this overall point was weapon systems, money, capital, that's not going to win.

It's how we look at things. It's how we think about things. It's our philosophy. It's our morals. It's our ethics. It's our rejection of evil and corruption, which he talks about in great detail. Those are the things that are going to thrive in complexity, not tech, not new toys, not new widgets, not new airplanes.

personal. So, so let's, we talked about air-to-air combat. Let's talk about a different jumping-off point for Boyd. He's got three in patterns of conflict, if I recall correctly. There's air-to-air combat, there's Blitzkrieg, and then there's the Antepe Raid. Those are his three sort of ways to get the conversation started. And Blitzkrieg is obviously one that, you know, it's, it's become controversial with some of his critics in the present day, which I want to get to. But, you know, this goes to the heart of maneuver warfare versus attrition warfare. What, What is it about, you know, say the German campaign in France in 1940 that catches Boyd's attention and that points him towards, you know, an understanding of how competition works?

That the other side had no idea what was happening and they didn't know what game they were playing when the German Panzer divisions came upon them. They had no idea. They thought it was going to be a repeat of the last war, which is the Maginot Line, which were to build up this big Magininal line, this big monument to technology and capital, and the Germans went around it, they went over it, and they did it so quickly to the point where the other side's just, their decision looks just crashed. They just implode. They don't know what game they're playing. It was unlike anything else. You mentioned on Tebby, I would point people to Stephen Pressfield, though I know you've had on the show, his book, The Lions Gate. The Lions Gate is one of the best,

the best books, I think, on Uda that you could find from a historical warfighting example. and you see that the Israeli defense forces took those lessons well and they probably do them better than anybody else. I think that that, you know, Lionsgate's a tremendous book and shows up very clearly. You know, and Tebi was another one. I mean, they lost one officer. Benjamin Nanyahu's older brother was the only officer. The only person killed on that raid on the Israeli side. And it happened so fast that nobody knew what was going on and they just didn't know, you can't answer that.

You can't compete with that. You can't respond to that. You can't react to that. Those are the things that those things would have in common. The jumping off point about the fighter thing was the design, that they were looking for a lightweight fire that could pump and dump energy faster. That would be more maneuverable than. But Pontch, I think Pontch would point out what the Navy taught Boyd,

because his own thinking of all. Yeah, there's a story that was happening down in Eglin. This is right when our Navy weapons school stood up, Top Gun. Some of the Top Gun Bros went down to Eglin, I think it was Eglin. And they met up with Major Boyd at the time, and he was pushing his EM theory. And at that time, this is before destruction and creation, before he wrote that. And right about the time, the YF17 and YF16 were under development.

But the story goes something like this is they're reflecting back on the Air War in Vietnam, trying to figure out if F4 should fight Miggs. And Boyd made it very clear that on his theory, his theory, the FFOR should not have anything to do with the MIG. I think it was MIG 17 or MIG 21, I can't remember. But regardless, the topic of the theory, that is the MFORI should not have. gunbrose said, you forgot about the most important thing, and that's the person in the cockpit, the human in the cockpit, right? On your theory, that's one thing. But you put a human in there, you just created a complex adaptive system, right? And I believe the top gun bro is actually

kind of reoriented John Boyd in the early 70s about, it's not about the technology. And again, this happens before destruction and creation. But that orientation is something that I think John Boyd lived afterwards is, hey, look, I was wrong when I tried to take an engineering approach to human systems. You can't do that, right? And of course, we know that today, especially after we learn more about complex adaptive systems. And of course, Mark mentioned the Kenevin framework and Dave Snowden. So there are some interesting connections there.

But yeah, that's a, you know, Boyd wasn't always right. But when he was wrong, he adapted. Yeah. So just sticking with, you know, say France in 1940 for a second. and just to put a little bit more texture on it for folks who are thinking through these things for the first time. So speed, got it.

Everything's happening very fast. And we had thought it wouldn't happen this fast, but it's happening fast. But what specifically is happening? What is it about the kind of multi-axis penetration warfare that the Germans are engaged? And by the way, I mean, they are not the sole inventors of this kind of maneuver.

It's just a very clear example of it. And I guess it was important to Boyd, right? Because he interviewed these guys, as I understand it, in what the early, 70s when they're working on the A-10. He's talking to a bunch of former Nazis about close-air support for the Vermacht. And that's how he sort of, as I understand, he gets interested in all this stuff. So what is it that's happening so fast? Because it's not just speed, right, that causes

this collapse of the French system and the British. No, you're right on. So there's a couple, there's a lot of acronyms that Boyd would use and we don't have time to go through the mall. And Pontch and I can't believe me for days because we love this stuff. We live it. But V, you start with this one, V-H-R-I, you know, variety, harmony, rapidity initiative. That would be something that would get me to a point where I would have speed, where I have a myriad of options. My people I'm leading are flexible within those options. We can do them rapidly.

We harmonize together around an intent or, you know, we talk about mission command. I can talk about schreepunk. And then we take the initiative. We don't punish initiative. We empower at the lowest level to make decisions, to take initiative that they can act faster. That's what the Germans had. And by the way, that's what they had been developing for years and years and years after

Napoleon, the expert on this as Don Vandergriff, and this is one of the big driving forces behind mission command. But it was very similar to Boyd that they would have Einheit, which would be mutual trust. They would have Alftrog's tactic, which would be mission type tactics, where we understood the clear intent. And then we had a contract with our leader to accomplish that intent and then turned the freedom to do whatever was allowable or possible to achieve that attempt, all in service of the Schwerpunct, all in service of the focus and direction that we're heading as a team, as individuals, as an army, as a division, as a group, as a squadron, whatever. That was really the edge that, again, these are all human-centered things. And this is what Punch and I do for a living.

It's all human-centered. These are all human-centered things that the German focus on. Do they have good technology? Did they have Stuccas? Yeah, they had all that. But all of that was serving people that were using very specific ideas within a warfighting framework. And the technology served that. It wasn't the opposite.

And so if you look, I mean, just to bring it to something closer to the present day, like at the Marine Corps, just the U.S. effort in general, but the Marine Corps, First Marine Division specifically in 2003 in the invasion of Iraq, You see, you know, not an effort to get online and destroy in detail Iraqi forces that are lined up in the defense, but rather these multiple axes of penetration designed to drive deep into the Iraqi rear area, mess with their communications, sever their communications. So chaos drive towards critical objectives. And you have subordinate commanders who are empowered to act within commander's intent, right, which introduces this flexibility and sort of energy into the system. Is that fair that, you know, OIF1 is like another example of the kind of maneuver warfare that we're talking about? Yeah, and look at the contrast after. So, yes, that's how it was fast and quick.

And then look at the contrast after. We didn't understand the moral mental aspects of warfare. We focus too much on the physical, whereas the guerrilla fighter, and Boyd, by the way, elaborates on guerrilla fighting. And anybody that's interested in insurgency and anybody that's interesting guerrilla war fighting has to understand, John, Boyd, that's a, that's a, that's a classic example where we just didn't understand what was, what was, what was going on afterwards. So, so we've got just a few minutes left. So I want to talk real quick.

And I mean, obviously we could go on for any of us could go on for for some time on these subjects. But this question of Boyd's critics, there was this book that came out just a couple of years ago, the blind strategist, John Boyd in the American Art of War, which is, you know, it's a high compliment, frankly, is a, you know, a defense policy and military strategist to have whole books written an attack of you. So for somebody who probably deserves more attention than he got, that he receives at least some fierce negative attention, what are the main lines of assault on Boyd? What are the main lines of critique? Well, we talked about the fact that he was an autodidact. We talked about the fact that he was not an academic in the traditional sense or in

the, you know, the establishment sense. I think that a lot of it, too, is jealousy that an officer in his own recognizance in his free time while he was, you know, training. Fighter Palis at Nellis, raising five children, one who had special needs. I mean, this was a busy guy. I don't know if John Boyd ever slept. Some of the critics, you know, you mentioned that book, and I'm not going to give it any airtime. Ian Brown has done the best work on that, and I would direct everybody at that.

I don't want to take up time on the show talking about that book, but essentially it's a flawed understanding of Boyd. It's a flawed understanding of complexity. Punch and I get a lot of posts when we put up things on the Utilup, and I know what Punch is favorite ones are and where they come from, and maybe he would share with that. But most of the people just flat out misunderstand, or they've already reduced Boyd to a simple four-step linear process to deal with symmetry to deal or where they think they can engineer human systems. They don't understand complexity. They don't understand uncertainty. They don't understand volatility.

They don't understand ambiguity. And that's, I think, probably where most of it stems from. What else would you add to that punch? I know you're spot on. Every village has an idiot. The internet brings them together. so that's that's that happens quite a bit can i let me lay out what i think is is one sort of common line of of critique and i want to get your response to it it would go something like this there's something undeniably kind of crisp and clean and useful about boyd's insights into competition the more sophisticated understanding of the ootloop that we've been talking about is his his understanding of the role that change and adaptability to change plays and competition there's there are aspects of it that are

Deniable and he expresses it better than, you know, hardly anyone. And that gives you deep, and you'll, you hear the critique starting here, deep insight into tactics. If you want to understand how actual competition, you and me fighting right now or two groups fighting or competing in something right now, work, go to Boyd. But in his charisma and his, I mean, there's an infectious enthusiasm to Boyd. And there's a kind of, as we were talking about, there's a kind of way in which he, he makes you feel like you can be the hero of your own story, people then go too far, and Boyd went too far in his estimate of what it is that he actually understood, and that it's not, it's not as it were,

a theory of everything. There are elements to strategy that he underplays. The technology does play a role, but, you know, raw force-on-force and correlations of power do play a role, and that for whatever reason, Boyd under-emphasizes the roles that these factors and others can play, in pursuit of a kind of, you know, almost advocacy for the factors that he believes are the most important. And that advocacy has a kind of energetic, enervating moral quality to it that is exciting, but in that excitement, you can kind of lose, lose sense of the y'all. How do you guys take a swing at that? Well, I guess I'll go first. I mean, again, it comes with a complete misunderstanding of Boyd, and I would defy anybody, I would guarantee that they've never read

destruction of creation. They've never read Chuck Spinney's epistemology. They've never read science strategy and war by Franzo Senga. They've never gone through his briefs, which there's multiple iterations, and they certainly haven't spent any time in his archives like Punch and I have done repeatedly, and they may have not drawn any connections to the scope and canon of the inputs that Boyd used. I mean, just in destruction and creation alone, I would bet that most people have never read any of those, never read any of those sources. And then when you, when you see Boyd reduced to merely tactical, you're actually missing the value of Boyd. The value of Boyd is not on tactics. The value of Boyd is on big picture strategic thinking that's going to have an effect on your

entire life, every aspect of it, wherever you're making decisions and actions. And that's got to be, that's what you hope your competitors don't understand, right? And that's what we actually work with organizations and teams to help them understand that and readily identify their competitors where they don't understand it because it's a massive advantage once you do. Once you see it, you can't, you can't unsee it. What else would you add to that punch? I mean, it's just the competition, collaboration, and conflict, those are three things that are happening. And if you think about neurons in your brain, they're going through an oot loop as well, right? It's the same thing. Cells, cells in the body, any biological capable of system out there is running through its own oot loop. And we're starting to see updated research, if you want to call it that validating a lot that Boyd had. And remember Boyd pulled a lot from cybernetics, neuroscience at the time, complex adaptive system, system sinking, Toyota production system, you name it. But today we're starting to see some clear lines between how humans and all sentient systems

make sense of their environment. And that's what we're starting to show folks through the show is here's a nice connection from constructal theory, constructa law, the free energy principle active inference to John Boyd-Zootle. Why? Because he looked at the same underlying principles years and years ago. So a lot of connections there. All right, Mark Moose McGrath, Brian Ponch Rivera, co-hosts of the No Way Out podcast, the team at AGLX consulting. It's been a great conversation.

I really appreciate you guys making the time. Thank you. Thanks for coming on our show, and thanks for having us on yours, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.