Sea Control - Sea Control 601: Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Ian T. Brown is a retired Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter pilot, with multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pacific throughout his career. He has written dozens of articles, reviews, and short stories on military history, military theory, future war, and wargaming, to include the book A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (Marine Corps University Press, 2018), which was added to the Commandant of the Marine Corps' Professional Reading List in 2019 and remains on the list today. He has also contributed to or developed several commercial wargame designs, including the card game #Maneuver Warfare, published by the Dietz Foundation in 2025. J. Overton is co-host of the Sea Control podcast and edited the essay collection “Seapower by Other Means: Naval Contributions to National Objectives Beyond Sea Control, Power Projection, and Traditional Service Missions.” Links - Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals: John Boyd's Vision for Thriving in Chaos.  New Conception of War  Marine Corps University Press online order form (can be used for hard copies of all their books, including “New Conception of War” and “Snowmobiles”)  #Maneuver Warfare card game: 

Welcome aboard Sea Control fans, this is Jay, my guest today is Ian Brown, who's going to talk to us about his book, Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, John Boyd's vision for thriving in chaos, and we'll probably just talk about whatever else we can riff off of that because there's a lot going on right now that's pretty cool um ian you're no stranger to the podcast and probably not to our listeners either but could you tell us a little bit about yourself sure i think uh the last time i was on the podcast i had i was freshly retired maybe out of the marine corps but that's who i am or who i was i'm a retired marine corps officer i did uh 20 years primarily as a siege 53 echo helicopter pilot but i did some other stuff like i did a

a fact tour with uh first battalion seven marines i spent some time in the requirements world and then my final billet in the marine corps was with the brew crew like center for innovation future warfare at marine corps university which was man if i if i could like if i could just written my own job description for like you know just do whatever i want to in the marine corps it would have been that job because that was it was fantastic i got to do a lot of a lot of cool stuff like my own podcast for example um or on behalf of the center and um as you mentioned you know we're talking about a book today but i've also done a fair amount of uh writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction related to military topics uh not always maneuver warfare but a lot

of maneuver warfare stuff but also you know military history war gaming uh things like that um i do work as a war game analyst for a private defense contractor although i uh i do other game designs in my own on my my copious free time and uh had my first commercial game published last year and it's called shockingly maneuver warfare but uh it's a card game it was my attempt to sort of put maneuver warfare doctrine into a tactile package that you could touch and interact with um so uh yeah that's me so they but uh but snowmobiles and grand ideals is um probably the the latest latest big thing outside of the game itself that i've had released Nice. Yeah, we will have links to the Maneuver Warfare in the show notes here and some of your other writings. And I want to say I had sort of read some of your stuff, but I believe I got to, I guess, virtually know you during when the early days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

I mean, the I was following the broadcast was like really golden sort of inside information there. You were you were having good people on there and just discussing what was going on there. And I really was. That was an excellent podcast. So anyway, thanks for doing that at the time. I'll just shout out to you on that. Yeah, I I thought it was important to do because, you know, part of the goal of Marine Corps University and professional military education is to get people ready for the next war. Right. And, you know, the next war was happening time now, starting in twenty twenty two. So, you know, I sort of thought we had a responsibility to try and, you know, follow it and translate whatever insights and things we were seeing for the benefit of our students and our audience. So, yeah, I'm really glad we had a chance to do that.

I feel a little bit bad because we sort of sort of left it on a cliffhanger because both myself and my compatriot, the Russia chair, Dr. uval weber i retired and then he he left marine corps university to do other stuff so the very last episode on our special russia podcast was um uh for gojin and his mutiny with the wagner group and so yeah we're like boy what's gonna happen with those guys you know because well we'll never doubt my guess i never know i guess he's fine then yeah i guess i know i assumed he was okay i'll leave it at that uh like tony soprano we'll assume he's still going fine somewhere Thanks so much. Reminder that all opinions given are our own and not necessarily those of any other organization,

which we are now or maybe have been affiliated. So before we get into it too much. So let's start off with John Boyd, of course. Maybe not as well known in naval maritime circles as in Air Force and Marine Corps. I'm thinking there. He's, at least for me, for a long time, he was sort of relegated to just, he was OODA loop guy. If you had to put all the strategist in, that's the one thing you knew about John Boyd. Oh, OODA Loop, sure. And that's referenced a lot, probably incorrectly by most of us, but it would be frequently referenced.

So tell us who was John Boyd and why does he still matter to listeners of SimpSexy Control Podcast? Sure. So, yeah, we're going to come back to that point of, you know, is John Boyd just the OODA Loop guy on some of the notes I jotted down for the following questions? because that was sort of part of a illuminating thing that I found when I was working on this second book about him. But for Boyd himself, I'm not going to try and like redo his full biography because there's a lot of biographies already written about him to include a very short biography chapter that I wrote in my first book on him, New Conception of War.

So if readers want the short version, they can check that out. But he was a, I like to call him sort of like, he was a quintessential sort of Cold Warrior. like the cold war sort of defined um basically all of his time in uniform yeah all of his time in uniform um he was you know he was born born during the great depression which had a certain impact on his like which gave him a a strong sort of independent streak um but it also gave him uh sort of this this really strong sense that like he should repay that independent streak with something concrete and useful right so like you know because so like you know his father

passed away when he was at a young age so he had to step up and you know sort of be help help be one of the breadwinners for the family and you know so he would just he'd like go and disappear and sort of do stuff but he would always make sure he like when he comes back he's done something for the sake of the family and i think those two things sort of like defined his personality through most of his life um in terms of his military career he was a little bit too young to get into world war ii he had joined he joined the army air force like right at the end of the war uh he was a i think he was like a automated turret machine gun turret technician on bombers but didn't he didn't see any action he did a little bit like occupation time in in japan and

post-war um but he sort of stayed plugged into the military he did air force um rotc and got commissioned in the air force um and he's because he sort of had a suspicion that you know cold war started starting to take his shape there was probably going to be other wars the way things were looking and sure enough you know 1950 the korean war kicks off and as a air force officer now he was an f-86 saber pilot um he did see he saw action in the korean war um he's got some really interesting stories from his own oral histories of accidentally on purpose going north to the alu river to go try and find migs and um there was one occasion where they found migs and then all of his radios and guns stopped working so uh he and his wingman were like completely

defensive just trying to like get the hell out of there before they got shot down um uh but after after that he was a good enough pilot that he went to the air force's um fighter weapons school which you know for for the navy folks right that's basically top gun for the air force um you know so that was how good he was as a pilot he was instructor there and it was it was sort of his time there that was really like the little kind of the kernel of when he started exploring broader ideas about um gaining advantage um surviving in a competitive environment um and it sort of it started with his um with trying to like sort of codify avia or tactical air-to-air tactics but it obviously went a lot farther so uh he did he got an engineering degree from uh

georgia tech i want to say um as part of his work in engineering he developed the energy maneuverability theory which is a a quantification of aircraft performance based on you know thrust weight drag lift all those things but it was kind of groundbreaking because it could it has it has since then both defined how we design aircraft and we and it's also used to help understand the performance of your aircraft against adversary aircraft so like every every Every U.S. military aviator since then has touched and interacted with Boyd, even if they don't know it, in the energy maneuverability diagrams that are in their tactical manuals. To include my own helicopter, the CH-53, despite being slow, fat, and a giant IR target, has energy maneuverability math done so that you, to give you a sense of how you might survive if,

hey, if a fighter jet was ever trying to engage you, that's not great for you. But, like, if you can kind of survive that first merge and force them to have to, like, go and turn around and re-engage you, you have a much tighter turn radius than they do. you can actually potentially evade and drop down and get into terrain so by the time they've gone 10 miles and come back around you've been you've disappeared right and that's the kind of thing the the energy maneuverability equation can help you understand is there are places where you may have advantage and it helps you understand that um he did he did design work on the f-15 and the f-16 fighter jets um and then kind of near the end of his uh your air force careers when he really

started getting into not just how do i gain advantage in sort of aviation stuff but it you know things that had built up during his military career that got him to think about how do i gain advantage in other environments right and that is sort of what translated into his uh his post military career work of of exploring those ideas and expanding on those ideas on gaining advantage advantages in uncertain environments and and that's sort of what defines that's what he talks about in all the presentations i wrote about in the book um he kind of did like an informal lecture circuit in his post-military years and presenting these briefings to pretty much anybody who was interested in listening to him for six hours because they are not short briefings um and

um the marine corps was really the uh the service that kind of glommed on to him the strongest and um it deeply shaped how the marine corps thought about its own sort of post-vietnam changes and um and that's sort of what um boy did he did a few other things and sort of like the 1980s military reform movement and you know how do we not have vietnam again how do we make our military better but uh but the marine he had a special spot for the marine corps and so when he when he passed away finally um it was there were tons of marines at his funeral um not a lot of air force representation um but his personal papers and all of his recordings and such are held not by the air force history division or archives it's the marine corps that has all

of john boyd you know retired air force pilots um personal papers and that's where uh that's where i i went to those archives a lot to do the work on this book right could you i was going to ask how you i'll go into two here how'd you get interested in him in the first place um and then the i heard just a little bit about the amount of work you had to do to let's get a little bit bit of the i guess historiography of getting these this work together because he's written two books on boyd and that's he did not as people don't know although he had notes he didn't actually if you're looking up john boyd's big book of strategy it ain't there that he wrote himself so you had to go through lots of stuff to get it so how'd you get interested and then tell a little

bit about the work that went into this book please yeah um so the yeah the fact that he didn't write a book is sort of why why book number two exists um it's kind of it's like partly to help future me if anybody wanted to research him i've tried to make some you know this this stuff a little bit easier to access but um i kind of got interested in him um kind of going back to like you know boyd is the oodo loop guy sort of is that that simple thought and it was during um i was doing a a tour in quantico in a you know not an operational billet in sort of a um in a headquarters billet so i found the bandwidth to be able to pursue a master's degree and one of the um the masters uh one of the courses was on military thought and theory

and uh the final paper was on you had to sort of summarize the all the thoughts of one of the big military theorists that we looked at and during the course and i was the only military person in that class and so i sort of assumed everybody else is going to pick like sun tzu or klaus fitz you know one of the big names out there right um and i was like well um you know i know as i know was a Marine, like there was this guy, John Boyd, who he did something to do with our war fighting doctrine. And I remember hearing about the OODA loop when I'm going through flight school. So I'm going to pick Boyd and maybe I'll learn some brownie points for at least like not writing the one millionth essay about Clausewitz. And I also sort of assumed that if me as a Marine whose

doctrine Boyd influenced, if I didn't know that much about Boyd and to me, he was kind of just the Oodaloo guy, then I was assuming my instructor who was a, um, not a, not an American military retired officer, but he was retired Canadian military officer. I was like, if I don't know this guy in my own service, I'm just, my instructor probably doesn't know him either. And I'll, and again, I'll get maybe brownie points for, you know, doing something a little more, uh, a little more niche that maybe he's not heard of before. Um, this naturally backfired badly on me because when I gave my paper proposal to the instructor, he was like, uh, Hey Marine, um, Boyd is one of my favorites. Don't, don't, don't bleep it up. Um, you can imagine what the bleep means. Um,

and that, that kind of like, that started me down this path of, uh, well, first of all, I had to do a really good job on that paper because the instructor would know if I didn't. Um, but then in, in the course of writing that paper, it sort of started opening my awareness to this larger narrative of what did john boyd actually do to the marine corps what how did the marine corps actually develop this maneuver warfare doctrine that we get handed the doctrinal book you know early on an entry-level training but nobody ever really explained you know to us like why is why was this important enough at the time why does it still matter and so i essentially i wanted to i wanted to tell that story to first of all to myself as a marine i'm

like kind of feel like i should know this right um but but then i also thought like other marines should hear this story because this is a really one it's a really cool story about a time in marine corps history when you know we were trying we were there's a lot of change going on and we were trying to figure out how do we not how does how does the next war not look like vietnam how do we do better um but also there's just a lot of really there are a lot of really interesting interesting individuals in the story of you know what how what drives institutional change right like there's some of it comes from the top down but a lot of it came from the bottom up um you know from lieutenants and captains and majors and such like you know writing and undergoing this

really robust intellectual debate about what defines the character of war in general and sort of what defines the marine corps approach to war because you know we have certain constraints right we're the smallest service we're never going to have as much money or as many people or as much equipment as the army navy or air force but we still have a role to do as you know kind of america's first responder right you know something bad goes on first thing you do is send in the carriers and send in the marines right and we'll slap a band-aid on it and you know until the bigger forces come online um and so and this and maneuver warfare was sort of the marine corps is the answer to we're never we're not going to have as much money people or stuff how do we still

win if we are up against a a larger opponent um and you know during the 80s that was still the soviet union because soviet union was still doing stuff while we were in vietnam um and when we came out of vietnam they've been very busy you know sharing equipment sharing um tables of you know organizational um um structures with client states so there's good chance of you know 1980s if you're fighting somebody in africa or somebody um maybe in other places in asia they might look a lot like the soviets and then there was always what if we fight the soviets right um so this was the marine corps answer to how do we win that fight or are part of that fight um and and so the and so the interest i it turned into my my capstone thesis for my master's and then i uh my my

instructor um for the capstone advised me to send it into the marine corps history journal um which had sort of just stood up as a they were sort of changing their publication um perspective to try and have a more like academic type journal uh you know like a universe like a university would publish right they didn't really have one so they really they wanted that my my instructor was like hey they're probably looking for new content right like this this will help them out right send them send them 80 pages of free content and the response was no this is too long actually to be an article in our journal however if you would like to make it longer and flesh out some of the uh some of the parts we'll turn it into a book and we'll publish it um i didn't really know any

better so i was like yeah that sounds great let's write a book sure and uh that's how it came out Yeah, how am I going to be, right? So that's how the first book came out. And then I had, I really wanted to write, I kind of, in the process of doing the first book is when I got, you know, much more deeply into the archives, especially into the recordings they had of all of these briefings and John Boyd talking to Marine Corps students at the time, you know, sharing his thoughts with the Marine audience. And, um, I had sort of, I sort of hoped that we could publish, uh, publish those things as part of the first book timing just didn't work out. It turns out transcribing is really hard. Um, so I weren't, I wasn't able to finish those products, but then, uh, I was able to convince the Marine Corps university press to do a follow on basically like, Hey, we did like some excerpts from these presentations. I think it would be great, not just for the Marine Corps, but for any future researcher on Boyd to have these things published in a written form because otherwise a

lot of his ideas are really hard to access you have to listen to these recordings and the quality of these recordings is not great um so this is this is of course it's not like this this is like somebody in a room with a tape recorder I imagine something like that that is that's exactly what it is like yeah um they have digital transfers from the cassettes but like in the Boyd collection you they still have the cassettes themselves you know if you really if you really want to run the risk of putting those through a tape player sure um but but yeah the and because it was like basically you know it sounds like an omnidirectional microphone at the back of a classroom right sound quality is not great so um it's painful to listen to and so i i'm like again i

want to say future me the trouble of listening to these things let's put this in writing let's make a you know a searchable um you know annotated thing that can be a reference publication for anyone who wants to know like what enjoyed john boyd actually say about x now we now you know now you can research it and you don't have to like dig into the archives to go to to get there yeah nice and and it is and it's again it's available in show notes l book and there's also a uh it is also available in audiobook form not read by uh yeah it's not but still works though it still works though it's free so it's great it is out there for everybody um did you i guess did you did you key off of your if it's it's sort of a lecture are people asking questions at the time

do you get what like are people going like what are you talking about that kind of thing just i'm just curious are you getting questions from like mid-grade officers going hey man i don't understand or get into that more yeah yes you are um and this is this is one of the um one of the things i found when i was you know listening to the the briefings because i the slides for his briefings have been available in the public domain for a long time so they're not hard to find but you get from the slides alone you don't you don't get a sense of like how did boyd present these ideas right and And in those recordings, you find out that it was it was almost a Socratic dialogue in some ways where, you know, Boyd had his own, you know, his own content, his own speaker notes in his brain that he wanted to get through and which were tethered to the slides in his presentations. But as you as you read the book, the snowmobiles book, you'll see that like student like students, they would freely be like, hey, sir, I don't understand what you just went over here.

Can we dig into this a little bit more? and he he would he would entertain and answer all those questions um in fact he would get like he would he would go off on tangents um you know for 10 or 20 minutes away from the slide that he was briefing uh you know until until people's questions were answered um and that's that's consistent across all of the briefings that he does people like it was it was a dialogue it was a discussion it wasn't just him like you know reading the slides basically and we that's something i i think we don't get from uh i mean we we don't have clauswitz's uh you know the notes from his lectures or so at the at the warehouse there in prussia so yeah that's that's pretty

cool i heard a little bit i read read some of this and that that intrigued me quite a bit there um and boy to go off there you were talking about how his i mean what the subtitle of this book about uh driving in chaos he's uh maybe like 30 years ago you had since sunza was getting a lot of uh was he being used in the business world a lot you had those sort of like those those books i i i have heard on a few things now where at least ooda loop is getting referenced by in business there it's gone beyond the military too are you i don't know is that has that happened have you have you encountered that or um probably i i have um and in fact i was on a um a zoom call yesterday with the gentleman who was sort of specifically asking about you know how do how

how do Boyd's ideas apply to the, to the commercial worlds of commerce and business? And yeah, I know, I know that, you know, the OODA loop is a easy it's an easy hook to try and, you know, use to tell, tell people, Hey, we just got to, we got to cycle faster and, and, you know, get through our decision-making quicker and we'll, we'll gain a competitive advantage. And I, one of the things in writing the first book,

this became a little bit clearer to me but in doing the second book it became crystal clear was that um not only could like not only was the OODA loop like not the central thing in Boyd's ideas you could you could dig through the expanse of his material across all of these different presentations and really not touch the OODA loop that much at all um and so that's kind of one of the things in in occasions where I've had to talk about you know the second book since it's been out is i really kind of drive try and drive home like john man john boyd is not only not just the loop there are so many different things he talks about that we could spend an hour or two hours or three hours digging through it and not hit the loop once and you would actually not be missing

any of the core content because that was not the engine that drove his ideas um thanks yeah nice and i think that's for for any of our listeners whatever your field of interest there in the general maritime realm that's something to to get into if you think well that's just dude luke i sure i i kind of understand that there is going through this book there is so much more that i think uh whatever your field you'll get stuff out of that or just just daily living and obviously chaotic times it's pretty interesting um as a little bit of a teaser since the name of the book is starts off with snowmobiles what could you go into uh could you go into what's the snowmobile thing yeah so um i i chose that title for a very deliberate reason um and that's because it was an

analogy that boyd referenced in basically all of his briefings as sort of sort of a scene setter to get people people's brains warmed up to what he was going to get into and it's kind of a shorthand for um his his overall framework of how to like how do i look at a uh a changing world and discover and find new solutions right to rather than just do the same old thing over and over again how do i find new and creative solutions to the problems that are around me and so the snowmobile analogy is i'm hopefully i i managed to hit all the parts here but he it's a thought exercise he does with the audience so he's like hey think of uh you know think of you're riding your bicycle right now i want you to take the handlebars from your bicycle

hold on mentally hold on to the handlebars and get rid of everything else now i want you to shift. I want you to imagine like you're, you're skiing down the ski slope on a mountain or you're water skiing on a lake, right? I want you to hold onto the skis, get rid of everything else. Now let's shift again. You're, you're going to a toy store with your kid and you see like a toy tanker or a tractor on the shelf and it's got, you know, the Caterpillar treads on there. I want you to hold onto the treads, get rid of everything else. And then I want you to think about a, uh, you know, think about a, you know, a car engine, right? You know, the, the thing that makes the wheels turn and transports you, just hold on to the engine and get rid of everything else.

And then he says, right, so what do you have in front of you? It's what appears to be a collection of junk, right? Like I've got bicycle handlebars, a pair of skis, some rubber treads, and a big hunk of metal for an engine. Like what do I do with all these things? But if you reassemble those disparate parts, you get something new. You get a snowmobile. You get a, a, a new and unique solution to the problem of how do I, how do I rapidly transit a really harsh, you know, um, snow, snow road in an Arctic environment, um, you know, and do it without having to snowshoe or like cross country ski myself.

Um, you have it, you build a snowmobile to, to, to do the work for you. Um, and it was, it was funny, like it's, and so he uses that, like, like I said, as a scene setter. um but it's funny i gave um the one of the first uh lectures i did on the book after it came out was to a bunch of army national guard folks in washington state and i had one guy come up to me afterwards he said yeah i did i was stationed up in alaska and then like you like you don't understand how important snowmobiles are until you're stationed in alaska because your your humvees just like they cannot operate up there we go everywhere using snowmobiles like that is the only way to solve that problem so so he really you know it sort of tickled him that that was part of

the you know the thought product the thought experiment that boy did nice yeah i found that fascinating not something i thought about but i i think the almost near universal like ability of his some of his ideas come through in that uh little analogy there one simple analogy um don't want to get too uh immediate too topical of course we're recording this march 12th 2026 just for a timestamp there whenever folks are listening but there's a lot going on in the world right now are you seeing um or what i guess what boyd things do you see right now and i would think there's a lot based from from aircraft flying around to just general tactics and maneuvers but just maybe too large a question but i thought it's right now um when i when i saw that question on the question

bank um i'm like this is actually something i thought about a ton um and uh i it was very much on my mind when i was trying to finish this book um because things kept happening um like i i i actually kind of um i i hit pause on on book development partly because of russia's invasion of ukraine because i shifted a lot of my extra time and attention to generating those those podcast episodes. So to analyze what was going on. Um, but as, as that war was unfolding, I saw a lot of, a lot of things that I think Boyd would have recognized and, and could point to, um, things that were sort of more conceptual when, when he was speaking, but which he had the framework for understanding. Um, and so I, the, I think the delay, you know, I, I hate the fact that it

happened. But the delay gave the war in Ukraine almost as a case study to some of the things Boyd's talked about. And then, you know, right as I was getting closer to the drafts getting published, you know, the October 7th attacks happened, right? And sort of ever, ever since that date, like the arc of the Middle East has radically changed up into time now, you know, where we're currently you know um pounding the crap out of iran um but i'd say the the the thing i sort of i've taken away from all this and why i think the book is arguably i say i said in the preface like i feel like unfortunately the world we're going to have more of these laboratories of conflict to see boys ideas you know employed or not employed i still again i wish it wasn't

the case um but i'm seeing i hate to i hate to say i freaking told you so but i told you so um and i think we're seeing more of that and i think one of the big things that i that i've taken away um and it's something i i've i've tried to wrap into the the lectures i do about this second book is um is talking boyd has again he's not just the oodle loop guy right he actually has a ton to say about strategic thought about um grand strategy at the national, um, global level. And, um, a key part of that was using, using the best way to ensure your own success, your own survival, um, in a uncertain and highly competitive and changing world is to get others on your team to help you, right? Other people who share your values, who,

share your goals, who can potentially help achieve those goals, you know, in places that you can't directly operate, like, you know, they're there, you're not, but they can help you achieve those goals. And so the best way to have like long lasting survival and success for your own sake is to get other people, other groups to do it with you, right? And you can apply this from an individual organizational or nation state level, right? Like, if you're an individual, you want to have friends, because you can call on friends in times of need, right? If you're an organization, Like a military organization, you want a good command climate so that people show up to your unit ready and willing to work and accomplish the mission to the best of their ability. If you're a nation state, right, like you want partners and allies who can do things for you that you – or enable things for you that you can't do on your own.

um and so i you know we can take take time now as a case study of that arguably um both in in good and bad ways um to be to be blunt and again these are my opinions you know no nobody else is related to me but um that i think we've put a lot of strain on the the effectiveness of the bonds of alliances and partnerships that are very beneficial um and you know they're strained they're not broken but the more you push on those it's possible to have very negative impacts that could in the long term hurt our ability to you know project ourselves and and pursue our national interests uh globally um because a lot of that depends on our friends willing to let us do that um and so if i i did i did make a bunch of notes on this because you you gave me the question so

if you'll if you'll like to so like let's explore time now like i said right like operation epic fury um we're seeing the results of it every day um all other issues aside um as an example of the raw military capability of the united states like we it is a it is a case study demonstration of just how much our military can overmatch other militaries right Like, we got a little taste of that in Venezuela, but that was arguably not a great use case because Venezuela has been, you know, their military, you know, has never been trying to project power. They're just there to keep, you know, the Chavista regime in control. Whereas Iran, you know, it's not as big as us, but it does, it has projected power beyond its borders in a lot of very troublesome ways. um so now but you know we've never really had a use case where it's us toe-to-toe and it turns out

you know we're running like at least in the air right we're running all over them um they they cannot stop our ability to just impose our will from the air um all across their country but how did we what enabled that right um in the run-up to this conflict um we saw like the we saw weeks of repositioning forces closer to the theater movement of aircraft and ships through other people's airspace through other people's waters so that meant when the war finally started rpr our forces were like in the most advantageous places possible so that we can do high sortie rate generation right bombing around the clock we can do that because our airplanes are really close and um we got all our tankers close by too to keep the birds up in the air right get our ships

closer reduces the flight time for your long-range strike munitions from naval platforms uh it lets having uh let's our isrs that's loiter longer over the target area right because they don't have to fly halfway around the world to refuel right we can just pop them to an allied country gas it up and get it back out there um it also means that in you know in in the when things go wrong like when we take casualties we can rapidly get our troops to higher echelons of medical care places like ramstein right and the medical facility there so that it greatly increases the odds that our our people can survive the injuries they get on the battlefield all of like all of that like you know it's our planes dropping the bombs and our drones doing

the isr but all of that stuff that enables that is the willingness of those allied and partner countries to support us in doing that it's the logistic support it's access basing and overflight it's intelligence sharing that that makes our military much more capable than it would be if If we just did all of this, you know, on our own from Conus, right. To which, and, and Boyd would say to this, duh, I told you so, right. Like when you have others contributing to your strategic goals, it makes it that much easier to achieve them. And so that's why like when you, you, you want to sustain that,

you don't want to strain it or break it. And, and, and we've been really sort of, you know, pushing the boundaries of how strong those ties are. And whether it's things like, you know, not really being grateful for blood that was spilled alongside our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, threatening the territorial integrity of allies, or looking again at Iran, like, there's a lot of countries we didn't tell we were going to go into this fight, and now they're the ones getting hit, right? it's not us it's them and we didn't tell them this was coming um and so um this is where i this is where i think like we need more void um it is more it is more important than ever not the OODA loop but the his strategic thought of how do you ensure your own success your own long-term survival how do you how does how does our military get to do the awesome things that it does um it

by partners and allies it is by other people invested in our own success because our success helps with their own success it's a mutually beneficial relationship and um you know it it makes us much more capable and able to achieve our goals when we've got friends working alongside us um helping us out so i'll i'll stop there well that's it that's a mic drop moment there from hood loop to snowmobiles to that bringing it right up to the minute there if you if you again if you like me earlier it sort of thought boy it's just the loop guy this this was that blast notice i didn't mention that it'll loop once you did not exactly we didn't we didn't hear though that's fantastic um thanks so much for that that rundown and that was that was really great i think

it again anyone listening to this got something out of that and and and also makes you want to dive into there's so much more in the book because again yes there's so there's so much more so go into it um link's gonna be in the show notes um this was a huge amount of work i imagine put this together um what else are you working on anything else right now yeah um i have a hard time yeah because most of us are too stupid after we do a large project we start the next one instead of just hanging out yeah um but i i say most of my my extracurricular time is now devoted to um war game design so um they said i you know i was very happy to get my first game published last year which of course means i get to work on the next game after that right um so i've got um

i i don't know if you were or maybe some in your audience are familiar with the littoral commander uh commercial game um i believe i i know i'm pretty sure you've had the the designer sebastian bay on a previous he's been on a few times yep i think he's been at least yeah so yeah so that that's his brainchild um it's a game that i leveraged i leveraged the prototype very heavily when i was at marine corps university because i thought it was it was one of the the few if not the only things that sort of captured like the future marine corps problem set um uh in an understandable fashion and and because i i used it a lot i did a lot of like game modification and scenario modification while i was uh still on active duty and i'm i'm working now to um to

of build on some of that stuff to build some new expansions so i have an expansion for norway an expansion for ukraine that are um getting worked on getting worked on i'm doing the work right now um to do those and then i've always got a couple of other like game prototypes kind of in the bucket but they're not really quite as close so that's the littoral commander expansions are the main thing that i'm working on um i do not have another boyd book in the works um i sort of feel like i have i have done my part to try and bring you know um things that were stuck in the archives out to a wider audience and so i hope others like sort of take that and run with it um because i have tried to provide as definitive a source in snowmobiles and grand ideals

as i can for hey boyd never wrote his own version of on war but like this is the closest we're going to get right without resurrecting him from the grave so um i would i would love for others to to take that and expand on it because i sort of feel like i i've done all i can at least for now nice and that's out there for the you and the good folks at marie corey university press it's out there for free everybody so again check it out it's great yeah the price is right the price is right man all right well thanks again so much for being on um we'll have links to all that stuff and uh it can follow you on linkedin where you you put a lot of good stuff on there keep up on your projects and um with that we'll uh turn it over to kimber's men and uh talk to you everybody

next time thanks again goodbye Thank you.