School of War - Why John Boyd Still Matters

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

John Boyd was one of the most influential military thinkers of the 20th century, and the intellectual godfather of the U.S. Marines’ military strategy. Today, as artificial intelligence continues to transform battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East, author and retired Marine officer Ian Brown argues that Boyd’s ideas are more relevant than ever. Today, Brown joins Aaron MacLean to discuss how Ukraine is harnessing Boyd’s concept of narrative warfare, what Boyd can teach us about conflict in the age of AI, drones, and precision strikes, and his new book co-authored with Frans P. B. Osinga, Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals. 2:20 Who Was John Boyd?7:25 What Boyd Learned From Dogfighting15:37 From Air Combat to the OODA Loop23:49 Is the OODA Loop Really About Speed?29:33 What Do Blitzkrieg and Insurgency Have in Common?36:44 Surfaces and Gaps41:25 Why Did the Marine Corps Embrace Boyd?48:25 The Marine Corps’ Warfighting Doctrine50:25 Does Modern Warfare Challenge Boyd?53:18 Information as a Weapon53:53 Boyd’s Ideas Meet Drone Warfare54:55 From Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. This episode of School of War is also brought to you by Stratolaunch, a leading pure-play hypersonics company.  Stratolaunch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability, faster and cheaper.  Learn more about how Stratolaunch is accelerating the future of hypersonics at Stratolaunch.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, was the originator and high priest of a way of looking at competition that came to be known as maneuver warfare. Today, we talk about that tradition and about its significant impact in the institution of the United States Marine Corps, which embraces it as the foundation of its warfighting philosophy, even to this day. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war, this Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinity. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation.

He'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing ground, we'll fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Ian Brown.

He is a war game analyst. He was commissioned in the United States Marine Corps in 2003, flew CH53E super stallions. He is a contributor regularly to a number of publications focusing on war fighting, the Marine Corps related subjects, and he is the author of a book, A New Conception of War, John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and maneuver warfare.

Ian, thank you so much for joining the show. Great, Aaron. Thank you for the opportunity. Happy to be here. You know, I'm delighted to have you on for a number of reasons. One, the book is very interesting, but also because from time to time on the show, I will toss out lines like, well, of course, you know, being in Quantico in the early part of the 21st century, I was raised in the church of maneuver warfare, or I was raised in the church of John Boyd, or things like that. And while we have a number of Marine officers who listen to the show, we'll obviously understand what that means, I feel like to the rest of the audience, it's probably sort of a mysterious thing to say.

And in a way, this episode will be about exactly that, because your book is about how the career and work of this extraordinarily strange and interesting person, John Boyd, intersected with the institution of the Marine Corps, which considering that Boyd is an Air Force pilot is perhaps surprising. So let's start there. Let's start with Boyd as an Air Force pilot. Who was John Boyd, perhaps, for members of the audience who aren't as in the weeds of his career as some others will be? And what did he learn when he was a fighter pilot? Sure. Well, I like to characterize him as sort of a quintessential cold warrior because much as military career was defined, you know, in the, from the beginning to the end of the Cold War, actually. And he's somebody who still has a lot of influence sort of from beyond the grave today, which we can go into a little bit more about as well. But John Boyd was a, as he said, he was a fighter pilot. As many of his generation, he was a child of the Great Depression and went through all of the, the, the tribulations of that. And I wrote in my book that I think, well, he shared some of the same

characteristics of people in the Great Depression in terms of, you know, very self-driven, self-motivated and, you know, sort of feeling a conscious need that you got to produce, you got to bring something back concrete, you know, for the benefit of your home, your family, or your organization. I feel like he kind of firewalled those characteristics for himself in his own life. And that kind of leads into how he influenced the Marine Corps. But he, you know, Growing up, he did put on the uniform right at the end of World War II, but he not in time to see any action. However, he stayed involved in military service via ROTC to the point where he was eventually commissioned as an Air Force pilot just in time for the Korean War, went through flight training, getting to Korea kind of mid-war. And this is kind of one of the data points where it starts shaping his view of models of competition and conflict outside.

of pure warfare as a, both from his dog fighting time in an F-80, F-A-B-6 saver. And later on, he was a good enough pilot that he went on to the Air Force's fighter weapon school. So for, you know, towel gun, essentially for the Air Force and started developing some of the ideas about air-to-air tactics. And again, this is another data point that goes into looking, kind of looking beyond his immediate problem, trying to build frameworks to solve larger problems. And that kind of defined the rest of his uniformed life.

He was given some unenviable tasks in writing some Air Force acquisition programs that had sort of gone off the rails. So he had a lot of influence in making the F-15 strike-a-goe program into a better aircraft that it was currently on the trajectory to be. And as well, he was behind the design of the F-16 fighting falcon aircraft. But in the course of doing that, he, again, looking like building conceptual frameworks, he applied, trying to figure out ways to, you know, design better aircraft. He didn't just go back and sort of tinkering at the edges. He came up with an engineering equation that allowed you to essentially like pre-programmed aircraft performance based on doing math or conversely deduct aircraft performance by plugging its characteristics into the equation. And it's something that's still used today. military aviation. So if you're a military aviator, your tactics, whether you know it or not, are influenced by Boyd's energy maneuverability theorem. And, but in the course of this, again, he started sort of, you know, thinking about how to gain advantages in, in the realm of aviation, which later in his life extended into, how do I gain advantages in competition and conflicts, like kind of

writ large? And that's how he sort of, after he retired out of the Air Force in the late 70s, that's where he really started his intellectual work on, you know, I'm not, I'm not sitting in an aircraft cockpit. How do human beings think about their own survival? How do they think about competing and being successful in the future? And that framework would lead into his influence into the Marine Corps, although as we're talking about before recording, it's also influenced anybody sort of in the realm of competition. You know, people in businesses, people in sports. Anytime you have some sort of adversary who you're competing against, he was trying to do. develop a mental framework for thinking about how to win in that competition and not just win in the near term, but win in the long run.

Well, before we come to that in his really influential period, which we're on the cusp of now, let's stick to aviation for a second because how he gets from understanding what works and what doesn't work in air-to-air combat and how that ultimately leads to all of his work in the 70s and 80s, which influences the Marine Corps institutionally very dramatically. amongst others, is really interesting to me. So say a bit more if you wouldn't mind about energy maneuverability theory and the implications of that. Maybe the idea as well.

I mean, if anyone knows anything about, if you know one thing about John Boyd, it's probably the Oudaloupe. You've probably heard of the Oudaloup and its origins in thinking about dog fighting. I just say a little bit more in detail about what he actually thinks about air-to-air combat and then we'll track it forward. Sure. So his initial kind of exploration into air-to-air combat, you know, sort of from an intellectual and a, you know, not just the tactics of what am I doing from one moment

to the next about how do I think about sequencing and organizing the tactics that I know in new and different ways because every engagement is going to be a little bit different. So, you know, you need a mental framework to think about every engagement in the context of, and then you also need a repository of actions where you're able to sort of stitch those actions together to suit the need of the moment. And his work on energy maneuverability initially kind of came from, it came from, you know, looking at aircraft design where he had noted when he was a fighter pilot in Korea. And this is sort of part of the myth of John Boyd and part of what I did in the book

is try and correct it just a little bit. But, you know, he did note that in engaging Soviet aircraft and in North Korean aircraft, that the F-86, which though was smaller, not necessarily as fast and not necessarily as heavily armed in an absolute sense, it seemed to do a lot better against its Soviet equivalence.

And he kind of wondered why. And that led to his kind of digging deeper into the why behind aircraft performance where a sort of common perception at the time was a better aircraft is a bigger aircraft, right? If you make it faster, put more guns and arm movement on it, that's inherently a better aircraft than a smaller, slower, less heavily armed aircraft. But what he sort of determined was that it's not those

absolute values, but it's the ability of the aircraft to shift in between energy states, from potential to kinetic energy and back again. And all of the different variables of an aircraft, lift, thrust, drag, weight, factor into how well the aircraft can shift between energy states. And the reason the F-86 performed better against its Russian North Korean counterparts was not that it was bigger or faster in an absolute sense, but because it had hydraulic-boasted flight control system, it allowed pilot inputs to reach the control services of the aircraft more quickly because the pilot wasn't having to use pure muscle force to drive those control surfaces around as compared to the Soviet aircraft where, you know, you've got wheels and pulleys and rods, and they move as quickly. as your muscles move against them. The hydraulic boost allowed faster inputs, which allowed for greater agility and maneuverability of the F-86,

even though it wasn't necessarily as fast or as heavily armed. And so he took that forward into, well, that's, you know, that wasn't necessarily sort of designed intentionally into the F-86. It was definitely a nice bonus to have that ability to ship between energy states.

How could that gain you an advantage in, if you deliberately, design that into an aircraft, where could you gain advantage? And so to deliberately design that in aircraft, you had to do some engineering and mathematical research, which ultimately led into an equation called the energy maneuverability equation or theory where if you have all those different performance aspects of the aircraft, you know, thrust, weight, lift, drag, you can calculate based on those known variables where an aircraft will have potentially lots of potential energy that you can then shed into kinetic energy to go faster, to climb, to climb,

or descend. Conversely, if you want an aircraft to perform in, you know, maybe have a very high thrust to weight ratio, right? Like you get a, you, depending on the lift you build into the wings, if you build it properly, you can get a much, much greater lift with a lighter engine, less fuel consumption, you know, which is, you know, better overall. Lighter aircraft is more maneuverable. And so he, And the equation itself, it only has a few variables in it. But it allowed him, first of all, like I said, to help re-engineer some of the problems with the F-15 program when he came onto it, where the program was initially make it heavier, make it bigger, make it more armament. Ergo, it'll be a better aircraft. And he was like, no, you're actually like gold-plating this thing and making it less agile and less lethal in combat because it's going to be so big and heavy.

they're going to be yanking this thing around like a truck in the sky, right? You don't want a truck. You want a sports car, if you can. And that allowed him to make the F-15 a better-performing aircraft by applying those engineering principles. And then the F-16, he was able to sort of design from the ground up to be the, you know, the lightest, most agile, most able to shift in between potential and kinetic energy states, gain and shed energy faster than an opponent, and have those advantages to be able to generate a better tempo in an engagement because you get to set the tempo of the engagement

because you can shift in between your energy stage faster. But then on top of that, other aircraft design programs would, took the equation and laid out dense volumes of charts where, hey, if I know my aircraft's performance, I can put it in kind of like a graphic where some places I have, you know, maybe lots of potential energy where I can maneuver and accelerate or turn really well. And in other cases, I may not have as much agility, right? And then if I take an adversary's aircraft chart and overlay it on top of my chart, I can see where I have advantages over my adversary, proven by math.

So if I'm ever up against a certain type of adversary, I want to try and be in those places where I have the most energy advantage against them and avoid those places where I have an unfavorable energy differential because that means they'll be potentially faster or more agile than I am. And I say it affects on military pilots. Even myself in, you know, flying the big, fat, I are hot, heavy 53 helicopter, there are still energy maneuverability charts in our tactical manual where if you look at the charts, there are places, interestingly enough, where if you're in a one-in-one engagement, say, with a fixed-wing tactical aircraft,

as long as you survive that first merge, right? Like, you don't get shot out of the sky initially. If they come by you and then they try and sort of come around again to re-engage you, a fast-moving aircraft has a huge radius of turn, whereas a helicopter

moving slower has a much smaller radius of turn. So you may actually be able to like dive, get down and terrain and hide and make it harder for that jet to come back and find you once it's done, it's 20 mile loop coming back around to where it used to be. So, you know, so Boyd has known a lot for, you know, his influence on the Marine Corps and the Ooloup and all those things. But all of that was sort of an output of, you know, doing some hard math and some real engineering work on how do I get my hardware to gain advantage over adversary hardware?

And then eventually that translated into, well, how do human beings potentially gain advantage over human being? is there any commonality between looking at those two problem sets? And this is where the Oudolip sort of becomes, I mean, it's not the whole of Boyd's thinking, obviously, even though it's sometimes perceived to be. But to me, it's always been kind of a link between this question of one-to-one combat, or at least combat between a very small number of individuals

and the sort of broader theories of competition that he comes to develop in the 70s leading into the 80s. So let's shift to there. So, you know, he serves in Vietnam really interestingly. It's a kind of fascinating project that, you know, I don't think there's a lot of, there's not as much public information about as there are on other aspects of his career where he's basically, you know, working on monitoring the Ho Chiman Trail with very high tech sensors in the intelligence community. I don't know if that has any effect on his work. Actually, interesting to hear you reflect on that. But as you said earlier, he comes back to the United States and he's sort of thinking big thoughts about the nature of comprehensive.

in general. How does the leap work from spending all those years thinking seriously about how a pilot triumphs in air combat, the sort of classic, almost pure form of combat, to a much bigger conception of how warfare in general armed conflict works? Yeah. So the Vietnam thing is interesting. There's actually not a huge amount of documentation from his time there. So it is a little bit of a mystery. But as you said, he worked on a special project. trying to use electronic sensors to track things on the Ho Chi Men Trail. It was not terribly successful. I think part of his job was shutting it down because it just wasn't working. But he sort of had the type of personality to make that judgment call of, if it's not working, stop doing it. You know, don't do the definition of insanity.

But the translation from his engineering work into larger conflict was we can, we can maybe come back and talk about the origins of the Oulu because in especially when I did research from my second book on Boyd, which came out last year, a revelation I had was kind of like the Oudoloup was not the beginning. It was like the capstone at the end of a lot of his thought. But the thing that made the jump was really in the process of whether he was looking at improving air-to-air tactics as an instructor at the fighter weapon school, whether it was trying to figure out how to design aircraft to gain advantage over adversary aircraft. His starting point was always, I need a larger framework or context to play within, to better

understand this problem. I need to not just be looking at the problem right in front of my face. I need a model of the world in which my problem lives to fully understand all the things that are surrounding the problem to solve it in a more holistic fashion rather than just you know, slap Band-Aids on it to try and make it better. And it was, you know, all these little data points, the F-86 performance, the design work it did, the energy maneuverability theorem. It, um, he wanted to sort of explore, you know, explore, is there, is there more to my idea of building building a model to look at survival and competition and gaining advantage outside of,

of designing aircraft or outside of thinking about fighter tactics? Um, and it led him to, to, to, to, to put some thought into one of his only written documents, which is about a 20-page essay called Destruction and Creation, but this was essentially like his experiment in building that model to look at human problems now, not simply engineering problems. And his thesis was sort of, if I'm trying to gain advantage,

I need an accurate perception of the world around me. I need an accurate perception of all the parts of the problem so that I have the right. information to make decisions about the problem and then act on those decisions, which as I describe it, you know, you were hearing like little breadcrumbs for the Oudaloo, but it's, uh, that's not what he was calling it at the time. This, it was just his conceptual framework for survival and in winning sort of the competition of life. And, and his thesis was to, to be able to survive, you got to build that mental framework larger than the problem you're

looking at. And then you have to constantly refresh and update your perception of, of the world around you so that when you're making decisions based on that perception, you're making decisions based on the most accurate model that you can get, not the model that you had five minutes ago or five years ago because, you know, at some point you simply decided, oh, I don't need to learn anything else. My perspective on things is all set. I'm just going to keep making decisions from that point on and never really reevaluate the world around me. He said that was dangerous. that could undermine your attempt to survival as an individual. So you got to build this model and then constantly update your information.

And going back to that, having a repertoire of information to apply to your problem, you want to have a deep well of knowledge you can draw from. And then just as in air-to-air combat, no two engagements are exactly alike. In human survival, when you come up against other humans who are trying to survive on their own terms, you may not agree on those terms and that may cause competition, that may cause conflict. But every time you come up against it, it's going to be different. And so you need a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience that you can chop up and rearrange and apply in new and different ways each time to best make those survival decisions.

And part of that well of knowledge is constantly looking at the world around you and essentially sort of not sitting on your butt and never reevaluating things that you've seen before and assuming that today is going to look like yesterday. And then from that essay, that essay was sort of his thesis, and then all of the presentations that he did later on in his life, the briefings he gave on everything from military history to the scientific method, those were explorations looking at evidence to see of, hey, does this model apply in different areas of human competition and human survival?

And his conclusion was, yes, it does. but his presentations were explorations from that initial essay, that initial mental framework on how do the most successful humans, you know, what do they do to update their models? How do they apply their mental models? How do they gain advantage over their adversaries so that they're the ones who are winning at the end of the day and not the other guy?

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves,

targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. And the most pure expression of that in a way is the Oodal Loop, which of course, for those for whom that's an unfamiliar phrase, is this cycle of human decision-making, which begins with observation and then orientation

where you sort of figure out what it is that you're seeing and what it means, then decision and then action, but of course the trick is that it's a loop. So the action resets everything that you might be observing, And so you find yourself doing on a very tight tactical scale exactly the process, Ian, that you just described, constantly reevaluating the world in which you're living or the dog fight that you're having such that. And then the other sort of important part of the theory, right, is the person who cycles faster is generally the person who wins. That's actually the trick. And the person who is able to interfere one way or the other with the cycling of the other guy obviously then increases his relative efficiency of cycling. and thus is in the superior position. Is that more or less right by you? Yeah, I'd say it's the, like I said,

it is sort of the distillation. It's a simplified version of the decades he spent sort of exploring that concept. One thing I would note is that in his perception of how time works in that cycle, this is something that became clearer to me when I was re-listening to his oral presentations, the process of writing this book,

and the second book is, his concept of how time worked in that cycle. It was not necessarily going through it fastest in the absolute sense, right? Just like going back to aircraft design, it's not necessarily the aircraft that's got the fastest top airspeed or, you know, the potentially highest weapons payload. But it's the ability to understand how to control the tempo of your actions and your decisions. And it's always relative to your opponent. It's never in like a pure absolute sense. It's always relative to something else, to whoever you're competing against.

And so he would talk about, especially in his patterns of conflict briefing, which is where he really focuses on military history, this was sort of the favorite briefing for the Marines, right? Because it all talks about warfare. That's what they're, that's what they were learning at the schools they were at. But his point was like your tempo is always relative. And there may be times where you want to slow the tempo down to gain an advantage over your adversary as opposed to trying to go go faster and faster and faster. In fact, he says at one point in his briefing, like, if you you're, if you're only thinking about, like, I just got to, I got to go fast, got to go fast, got to go fast. And if it's not speed with a purpose, all you're doing is like burning yourself out and burning out your own energy, simply trying to achieve speed for its own sake. Whereas, you know, he talked about the Vietnam War, right, which he had a front row seat, too, and a lot of the Marines in his audience at the time had front row seats to Vietnam. And his point was, you know, the North Vietnamese, they slowed the tempo down, right? Because they knew that a longer tempo, was disadvantageous to us because we wanted to get in there.

We wanted to, you know, we wanted to win the war, you know, relatively quickly so that we, you know, it didn't extend commitment. It didn't require more resources and time and human lives on the American side. And the North Vietnamese understood that we don't necessarily have to win every battle. But if we slow you down and we bleed you over time, we're going to drain your commitment to this fight. So we're going to actually drain. We're going to slow this down as long as we can. and the U.S. never really started to figure out how to adapt to that slower tempo

and what was the ultimate result, the helicopters leaving rooftops in Saigon. And he also used sporting analogies to talk about the relative tempo. I got the sense that he was a real big basketball and hockey fan because he doesn't use a lot of football analogies but it's sort of the same thing

in terms of like clock management, right? Like if you're in hockey, if you're on a power play, you've got a limited amount of time to have an advantage. So you want to be as aggressive and energetic as you can to maximize your time on that power play. Whereas in basketball or football, you know, football you've got your two-minute drill, right? You may want to actually extend that two minutes as long as you possibly can to draw every advantage that you can from those two minutes on the cloth. And so it's not necessarily speed, but it's tempo.

That was the key thing in the Oodoo loop. And that tempo, it could be fast if that's, appropriate to what your what your adversary is doing, but it could also be slow to, to what your adversary is doing. If their goals require them to do something very quickly, all you have to do is keep them from achieving their goals quickly and extend that time. And then that makes it harder for them to achieve their goals. So one of the most interesting things to me, I remember going through patterns of conflict as a young Marine. And actually, I want to ask you, this is a bit of a digression, but where can one listen or watch to watch Boyd's lectures? Because he was a bit of

a strategic Socrates in the sense that he was a speaker and discusser much more than a writer. And I remember years ago finding on YouTube some really poor quality, grainy recordings of a version of patterns of conflict that were borderline unwatchable. Like I just couldn't. It was too much work and headache-inducing to try to actually follow what he was saying. Are there better quality versions out there? and then I'll come back to my substantive question. Unfortunately, there's not better quality versions. The versions that I used initially just for the extracts in the first book, and then which make up the entire content of the second book on Boyd,

there are, I'm familiar with the video you're talking about. That is one of the few recorded instances of Boyd presenting. The ones that I used were actually a series that were done at Marine Corps Command and Staff College over several days, roughly around 1989. It was right after Fleet Marine Force Manning 1 had just been published because he makes several

references to that book being out there and how it ties to the concepts he was talking about. But what I, yeah, so they were audio only recordings. Their quality was no better than the video. In fact, in a lot of ways it was worse. But part of my

impetus for the second book was to remove that barrier of having to like have your ears bleed out from listening to these terrible recordings. So the second book is full transcripts of all those recordings so that you can actually re-boid or, you know, if you search through it in a PDF form, to get to the content without the pain of listening to the recordings because they are bad. And now that I've finally put them down in print, I have zero intention of ever going back from listening to them because they're just, they're hard. They're a barrier to learning about

him. So that's why I put it in print. Well, that's a tremendous public service, Ian, thank you for doing that. Okay, so back to substance then. I remember being struck as a young officer going through the sort of, it would later be PowerPoint, but, you know, the slideshow that he developed to go along with it, from which you can gain a lot, actually, even without the commentary. Being struck by the parallel that he draws between the North Vietnamese and Vietnamese communist victory, which, of course, even though there are maneuver forces at work, is, you know, that those maneuver forces

are not so great at defeating American maneuver forces on the battlefield. Really, it is the insurgency and the clever approach to tempo, as you put it, that saps American will before maneuver comes in at the end of the game and finishes everything off. Mneuvre in the traditional simple sense of the term, not the broader sense.

And he draws a link between Vietnamese, you know, thinking about how to fight and Blitzkrieve. And it is the strangest thing at first, because to the, you know, sort of the normal, intelligent person and who was a little bit about Blitzkrieg and a little bit about, you know, the Viet Cong, no two things could seem more dissimilar. The Vermacht, you know, using all the most modern tools of technology to pierce through French lines and destroy this great army in a matter of weeks. Classic of, I mean, there's something new under the sun, but it's also a kind of classic, dramatic story of conventional warfew. and then something that is in very large part dependent on insurgency and guerrilla tactics. What a strange comparison to draw?

How do they go together, Ian? Yeah, it is a very striking contrast. And this is one of those places where we're actually having the audio and now the transcripts is helpful to understand how he connects the two because he says it on the slides, but it's not immediately obvious sort of how the connections work. But I think the connective tissue there is it's looking at that, how do I gain an advantage over an adversary? And a theme he comes back to was looking for ways to, you know, to undermine, to degrade, to corrode, to break up the adversaries of various components into what he like to call non-cooperative centers of gravity. you know, like Klauswis talks about center of gravity and, and Boyd has some interesting critiques of Klauswitz and his briefings, which are sort of, that's a digression. But like he sort of wanted to get away from like the idea there's one center of gravity to an adversary. An adversary is made up of multiple pieces, multiple human beings, multiple military organizational components and all the way up to like the whole government, right? The government's made up of different components. And the connective issue between the Bliss Creek and the insurgent was, trying to find ways to break up those various centers of gravity,

those areas of strength in your opponent, and make them unable to interlock and cooperate and work effectively with each other to the point where the part, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You break up and degrade and corrode the parts into less effective, you know, weaker, slower, disorganized, you know, potentially confused,

lacking full information and by doing so that's what you can start to gain it and gain asymmetric advantage because now your opponents these more sort of free floating centers of gravity which used to when they were together

they work really well but if they're discordant if they're out of harmony if they're broken up they don't they're not as nearly effective and then you can impose your own tempo on how you go after those remaining

unconnected centers of gravity So, you know, for the Blitz Creek, that's a very, that was kind of a very real physical approach where I'm going to find the wee points in my adversary's line. I'm going to smash, you know, dry through it very aggressively, make that that weak point wider. And then that's going to force my opponent into a reactive condition where, you know, the military elements that used to have harmony, well, now they're confused because they don't know where I am. And as they get more disorganized, that disorganization kind of builds on itself, which creates new opportunities for you to further break them. him up. He liked to say like, you know, scarf them up was a favorite phrase of his in this approach. And it doesn't require you to actually destroy every one of those centers of gravity, where if you can rip them apart and keep them from working together, you can gain territory. You can get after vital, you know, C2 nodes or logistics places. And, you know, example of defeating the Germans defeating the French army. The French had like larger numbers, large. tanks, better tanks, but the Germans broke through the C2 connected tissue that let those forces

work effectively together, which allowed them to, you know, overrun France very quickly without causing the same bloodshed of World War I in the process. Whereas the insurgent, the insurgent's not looking necessarily for those physical weak points. They're looking for those mental and moral weak points in their adversary, and that may not be the military formations at all. You know, the North Vietnamese assessing their American opponents, they knew the weak point was the connection between the American people and the political and military leadership in the United States. So their activities were looking at how do we break those two things away from each other so that the political and military leadership in America doesn't get the benefit of that tight,

harmonious connection with the center of power that is the people, which is the ones who ultimately sort of dictate through their desire to participate or not participate the contour of a war. And, you know, the North Vietnamese and the Viacon, they lost a lot of battles tactically, but it was the perception that they were able to keep fielding forces, that they were able to, that there was a discordant message from military political leadership saying, we're winning, we're running, you know, victory is right around the corner. And every time a North Vietnamese or Viet Cong attack went forward, it made that message look like a lie.

And if you do, and doing that enough over time created mistrust and discord between the public and the military and political leadership to the point that, you know, the public essentially withdrew its moral support for it, at which point, you know, the military and political leadership in the United States had to, you know, ramp down their participation because that they'd been the public and the military political leadership had been broken into non-cooperative centers of gravity by the way the. insurgents operated. It's a really interesting account. I had always thought of it in terms of surfaces and gaps, which in a way is something you're just saying in a phrase right out of the Marine Corps warfighting doctrine, which will be our discussion of which will be the conclusion of this episode. But the idea that... Yeah, similar ideal. Yeah, exactly, that, you know, taking maneuver warfare, this conception that Boyd is developing is standing in contrast to attritional warfare, where the idea is to seek out the enemy and destroy him, destroy more of stuff, then he can destroy yours. And so you win in the end just to give a bit of an unsatisfyingly

simple version of it. Here, rather than attacking the surfaces where he's strongest, you find the gaps. So in Blitzkrieg, you're driving through in places where there's opportunity to get around behind. It's a very physical, as you said, conception of surfaces and gaps. Whereas in the insurgency context, you might say that it is the potency of the opposing counterinsurgent conventional force itself that is the kind of surface. Why would you go grinding yourself against that needlessly when there are perhaps more conceptual gaps that might be sought, for example, public opinion in the United States, things like that? He also draws the analogy, if I recall correctly, in patterns of conflict between the stalemated Western Front, but which, as the war goes on to 1917, 1918,

increasingly sophisticated penetration tactics, sort of forerunners of Blitzkrie, given though they don't move as fast or not quite as successful, but using poison gas and armor to penetrate and try to move back into deeper echelons of trenches, deeper areas of the enemy's space in order to try to collapse their system, versus T.E. Lawrence out in the desert,

fighting an insurgency, who also is seeking out Turkish gaps, exploiting vulnerabilities to collapse Turkish power by going after the railroad, for example. I just, to me, sort of grasping the connection he draws between the guerrilla tactics

and the penetration tactics as perhaps classically exemplified by Blitzkrieg, to me is sort of the core of the whole thing. There's more to it, of course, but to me, that's always sort of the foundational thing. More important, honestly, on some level than the Udaloop. Yeah, and it's, and, you know, to re-emphasize the connected tissue,

It's the it is a common theme of services of gaps and then something he does talk about consistently in patterns of conflict and his other briefings is there's also there's also a informational or or strategic narrative and messaging element to all of these approaches whether it's you know classic armored blitzkrieg or T. Lawrence or the Via Kong floating around you know trying not to fight right like trying to pick away at you and prolong the conflict. It is, it's not just the, the act of breaking things into non-cooperative centers of gravity, but it is the message of, hey, we just did this and you can't stop us. Or, or, like, we can't stop us. You can't slow us down. Or if you're the North Vietnamese, you know, you can't speed this up, right? Like, we can keep nickel and dimeing you all day long and you can't stop us.

And, and that's something that in getting outside of the slides and outside of, you know, MCDP1 and really digging into a boy in his own words. Again, that's something that really was kind of illuminating to me in getting this stuff outside the slides was all of this has a narrative, a messaging, a moral, not in the sense of right or wrong, but sort of moral in the in the elements that sort of bind individual humans to each other or bind parts of a human organization to each other. that messaging can can corrode and undermine the the connective strength of those different centers of gravity in the just as much as the physical aspect of splitting them apart so you merge those things together you know both whatever your physical activity is along with that message of um i'm doing this and i'm winning and you can't stop me and that's an incredibly powerful uh tool to gain advantage uh because a a you know as it says an mcdp right like positions are rarely given up because somebody runs out of you know bullets or material they're

given up because in the commander's mind they can't hold it anymore so part part of that is getting into the the mind of your adversary to uh you know almost inception like like plant that seed of how do i not going from like how do i stop this to man it really looks like i can't stop this and once that idea is lodged in your brain that you cannot a you cannot oppose a you cannot oppose what your adversary is doing, that is tremendously demoralizing, and it's really hard to sort of, like, get that poison out and replace it once that little worm has started working its way into your brain that I can't stop this. So Boyd is developing this way of thinking about conflict. There's more to it than this,

but this is what we're discussing right now is obviously a foundational element of it. Meanwhile, there's the United States Marine Corps, and this is one of the strangers plot twists of the story and of Boyd's career, that it is the Marine Corps of all institutions that gives the strongest embrace to this set of ideas such that, you know, well into the 21st century, I think it's fair to say that the Marine Corps conceives of itself as a maneuverist institution. What is going on in the Marine Corps after Vietnam that creates the conditions for these ideas to suddenly be so relevant to its senior leadership? Well, so the, you know, So we've got Boyd over here in one quarter, and, you know, he's exploring how do I,

how do I gain advantage over an adversary and how do I win and not just win, you know, but survive and thrive in the long term. And then you've got the entire, you know, the United States military, which has just come out of Vietnam. And the message they took with them was, we've freaking lost, right? Like as dissatisfying and as much as you want to try, you may want to avoid that conclusion, like I said, the helicopter is leaving the roofs of Saigon. That was the picture right there of we lost. We failed to achieve our objectives in that war. That is not what the American taxpayer gives us money to do to fail. So how do we succeed in the next war, right? Because the world's not, you know, getting any more peaceful. And so to be fair

to all the other service branches, right, like all the, you know, Army Air Force, I don't know about the Navy, you know, Navy didn't necessarily have as much skin in the game in Vietnam as the other services. But other services, you know, they came out and there was this sort of period of self-reflection of we failed. We cannot do this again. What do we do to make it better? And each service sort of followed its own path of, you know, how do we fix this? And the Marine Corps challenge was, you know, Army and Air Force to a certain extent, they can go and ask, you know, more money, bigger budgets, right? Give us more people, give us better tools.

you know, maybe we can fix whatever the problem was, because as large services, they, they, they have the advantage of having a lot of resources available to them anyway, whereas the Marine Corps has always been the smallest of the service branches. And, you know, they have always, their budgets always split with whatever, you know, the Navy happens to give them. And so their, their challenge was, all right, we came out of Vietnam, we failed. We cannot fail again. How do we write the ship and make sure that we are, we are, we are organized. How are, you know, how are we preparing for the next war? But we can't ask for more people. We can't ask for more money. We can't ask for more stuff because that's just not coming. That's just not, you know,

what the Marine Corps gets. So if we can't gain material advantage, how do we still find advantage in some other realm against a future adversaries? And their, their challenge was, you know, we're out of Vietnam or back into you know kind of late Cold War period now well what's been going on the Soviet Union has not been resting it is still continued to export material it's continued to

export its organizational structure to a lot of its you know client states so Soviet Union still presents a problem and if I'm the Marine Corps man the Soviet Union military is always going to outnumber and outgun me

but I can't as as the first responder essentially to, you know, as part of the nation strategy, sent in the carriers, send in the Marines. So if the Marines are going in there, they're going in to win, the nation expects them to win. How do they do that against a material larger adversary when they can't get more material themselves? So they try, like, if we can't do material, how do we, maybe if we have a different approach to how we fight is a way to gain advantage. And so, you know, this is right. This is, you know, serendipitous timing where Boyd is our already looking at, how do we gain advantage? And Musha Boyd's message was it's not about more firepower.

It's not about a bigger jet, a faster jet, or a bigger tank. It's about understanding your opponents, not just their physical, you know, strengths and weaknesses, those centers of gravity, but those mental and moral organizational tendons that bind them together and make them operate effectively, if you can go and attack those and break up those mental and moral tendons, that keep those centers of gravity cooperative, then you can offset the physical advantage because those physical advantages are no longer working together to give you mass,

the ability to have these things physically operating together. So the miracle is like, all right, well, we don't have more people, but we can certainly think differently about how we think about our adversaries. And so they looked at essentially, developing a style of warfare, organizing their forces to identify

those mental and moral connections and their adversary and try and aim their physical forces at those. To unhinge, to outmaneuver, if you will, to shifting your tempo back and forth so that you offset lack of size with a more unpredictable style of warfare where

you seem to be everywhere and nowhere your adversary's been broken into smaller pieces. They're not organized or fighting effectively together. And if you can impose that onto your adversary, you can still win whatever the next war might look like. And the fun thing, the cool thing about that is, you know, as a first responder, right, the Marine Corps, you don't know who your adversary is going to be. It could be Soviet Union, it could be a Soviet client state, but you might get called back

to another, you know, jungle war against an insurgent or open desert warfare somewhere else. which could have radically different equipment. Or al-Qaeda, an insurgents in Iraq, as the case turned out to be. Or, you know, just, you know, picking situations out of a hat. You, you, and those, those tables of organization and equipment in your adversary could look very different, right? The common thread, though, is your adversary is still made up of human minds. And if you can understand the human organizational patterns of your adversary, that means you can find those surfaces and gaps in those organizations and develop strategies to cut those things up, degrade them, separate them

cognitively, mentally, and morally from each other by your style of warfare and then gain advantage that way. And as long as there's always a human on the other side of the battlefield, your philosophy of warfare will always apply. And that was very attractive to the Marine Corps. Well, let's talk about that very last thing that you said, because, I mean, of course, this all gets codified. in Marine Corps doctrinal publication 1, MCDP1 war fighting,

which is the Bible of the Marine Corps for a very long time. I believe it's still operative. Is it not even? Oh, yeah, it's still the capstone doctrine. It's still the Bible. But I feel like I could make a case that in 2026, I don't really, I want to elicit your response to this. That would be really interesting way to conclude.

That given the evolution, the acceleration of the sort of censor-strike, complex that is coming into being as Boyd is reaching his period of flourishing. I mean, indeed, like his failed work failed maybe too strong, but the project he engages in that you characterize it's not super successfully on the Ho Chiman Trail is all about electronic sensors. The Al-Dipur war occurs. Obviously, later there's desert storm. I mean, we have this new way of warfighting come into being.

And today with artificial intelligence, we see the tempo that these sensor strike complexes are able to operate at and the democratization of sensors and of precision strike to, you know, adversaries or units that would just never have been able to afford them, you know, 20, 30 years ago. This is sort of the new reality on the battlefield. There are ways to look at this. I mean, you can look at the relative stalemate in Ukraine as an example, but there are ways to look at this kind of war fighting and say, well, we're kind of back to attrition. We're kind of back to tech that favors the defense.

We're back to situations that favor centralized control as opposed to the kind of more. disaggregated control, the mission type sort of orders that maneuver warfare favors, because with the sensors in the AI, a relatively small group of commanders can interpret the whole battlefield and make decisions accordingly and at pace. So what, Ian, is the future of Boydism in a world where, I mean, maybe you reject some of the premises, but in a world where some of the premises that I just articulated govern. Yeah, so I think, yeah, the world we live in today is certainly different from the one that he initially, you know, it's different from the post-Vietnam world. And that's also different from the world.

At the end of his life, he died in 1997. So he had sort of, you know, he'd seen Desert Storm, right? And he had seen how, you know, whether you call it Revolution in Military Affairs or, you know, the development of the precision strike complex, as you mentioned. You know, but he'd sort of started to see, he was seeing the bow waves of change coming down the road. and his influence on the Marine Corps was very strong coming into this new world, you know, up to the very point where it is, after he died, Commandant General Charles Kulak, like said,

because of Boy's ideas, like he was as much a, like, maneuver force commander or Desert Storm as anybody else, because his ideas drove everything that we did. But yeah, the world now is different than the one that he, when he died. But I think, and something I've explored a little bit more, and not in the books, but in sort of presentations I've given on the books is,

I think Boyd recognized the contours that were coming, and a lot of the language and concepts he uses in his presentations, they're conceptual, but they were, they were ideas waiting for platforms to manifest. And he died before those platforms themselves could manifest. But I look at, I look at the world now, as you just describe it. You know, you have incredibly high levels of awareness.

You have high levels of information exchange. You've accessed so vastly more amounts of data. You know, you've got the internet, which is sort of democratized information sharing. You have, you know, the ability to mesh all these different, you know, these sensors that didn't exist. You know, back in Boyd's day one, now these sensors exist. Two, you can mesh them using things like artificial intelligence to gain a much more hyper. accurate perception of the battlefield. But I think a couple things.

One is that he would recognize all of those as simply new avenues and opportunities to get at the human beings at the end of those chains. Right. We've developed, we've got new vectors of attack, which is fantastic because part of his thesis of conflict is you don't want to just, you know, have one line of advance. You want multiple lines of advance because that generates, that puts, your opponent out balance, right? Like if I'm depending in one place, as opposed to defending in 10 places, it's much harder for me on the defensive now because I got to wonder which attack is real, which is not, which could become real, you know, if I don't pay attention to it long enough. So all of these new things are new vectors to get after that human being at the end of the chain. And another piece of it, I think, is on top of just the technology is the, again, going back,

to that informational narrative that comes out of how the technology is used and the perception it creates for yourself and for your adversary. These are new vectors now to impose that cognitive uncertainty, that demoralization above and beyond the tactical effect of the technology itself. Actually, I talked about this a little bit. I did a presentation to Swedish Defense University a couple times where they were sort of talking about like how does how does boy apply to us today essentially was the question they were asking and so um you know I was looking at the Nagar al-Khabrock war which um had just prior to the invasion of Ukraine I gave a first version of this to the Swedish defense university and to me Nagar al-Kabrach was like now we're seeing met now we're

seeing some of the things boy talked about in platforms he he only had ideas now we've got platforms and then, you know, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, and we had a much bigger laboratory for these things. But the connected tissue is not just, you know, Nagar al-Kabrock, you've got new drone technology,

which is democratized firepower and allowed it to be used precision firepower down at a much lower level at a much cheaper cost. And forgive me, I forget which side was the one that was better at doing this, you know, but it was very obvious.

Azerbaijan. They seem to have the upper hand. Azerbaijan seemed to have the apprehend there. Yes. And they were the ones who not only are they using these new, these drones to offset, you know, material advantage, you know, to fly a drone into a bunker rather than that you don't need a bunker buster. You just fly the drone into the bunker now, right? Man, that's, as a defender, that's pretty demoralizing. But on top of that, they're, you know, recording the attack as it goes on.

And then they're sharing it out on, on their own social media, their own, you know, their own networks to drive that point home, not to the soldier in the bunker, who's probably dead now because the drone just got in there, but it drives the point back to the population of their opponent, to the political and military leadership of the opponent of, hey, not only do I have this great technology and, hey, look, look what it just did to your bunker, but you can't hide the proof that I can do this to you and you can't stop me. And so that that narrative, that narrative becomes a weapon just as much as the drone itself becomes a weapon. weapon. And that narrative can give you actual advantage on the battlefield by by causing negative

effects on your opponent just as much as the weapons do. So then we fast forwarded to, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine where, hey, Russia's got some pretty big material advantages at the start of the war, right? But I think that Ukraine had a very effective narrative messaging strategy to go along with whatever their tactical strategy was on the ground to to demonstrate you know not only um you know not only have you blown up Russian tanks hey but here's we're going to show to the world how good we are at blowing up Russian tanks um which one you know you know creates a a positive message for them saying hey it kind of like you know Churchill right just give us the tools we'll finish the job right like we're if we're this good with just a handful of weapons that you've given us

give us some more, we'll put them to good use, and we can, you know, we can beat back the Russian invader if you just give us the right tools, because look how good we are doing it. And then on the flip side, it imposes that negative messaging strategy on the Russians where, you know, again, like we've blown up your tanks, hey, here's the video going out on Telegram, showing all of your Russian friends, you know, how they just, how their freaking turrets just popped up into the sky because of how effective we are. And I think, you know, you can fast forward to time. now where Ukraine's long-range deep strike attacks against, you know, deeper and deeper parts of Russia is now imposing that negative narrative message on the Russian population, you know, that Putin has tried to sort of wall off and protect from the war. Well, the war is more and more arriving at their front doors to a point that control of telegram or control of media channels can't hide anymore. It's that message of, look what we can do to you and you can't stop us. Maybe you want to reevaluate your strategy if you think this war is good for you in the long term because, hey, we're getting better at doing these things to you and you can't stop us. So the narrative is as much a weapon as the weapons themselves. And I think Boyd would, he sort of intuitively understood that when he died. I think if he looked at time now, he's just, he's seeing the platforms come to life that he was thinking about. And some sides use them very well tied to that strategic narrative weapon. And some sides use them poor. but I think he would recognize them today,

which is why I think he's still very applicable time now, even though we're now almost 30 years removed from when he laughed to walk the earth. Ian Brown, author of a new conception of war, John Boyd, the U.S. Marines and maneuver warfare, and the author of a second book, Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, collecting Boyd's remarks. Thank you for the really interesting conversation,

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