Boyd by Robert Coram | Trails

Boyd

Boyd

The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Robert Coram

Absent fathers forged titan ambition through unmet longing.

The first was when a teacher said to him, “John Boyd, you’ll never be anything but a salesman.” Even though John’s father had been a salesman, he took the remark as a biting insult; ... After he married, he told his wife that he heard those terrible words every day of his life, that throughout his career he was driven to prove he was more than a mere salesman.

Mastery means bypassing conscious thought entirely.

This is his way of pointing out that when one has developed the proper Fingerspitzengefuhl for a changing situation, the tempo picks up and it seems one is then able to bypass the explicit Orientation and Decision part of the loop, to Observe and Act almost simultaneously. The speed must come from a deep intuitive understanding of one’s relationship to the rapidly changing environment. This is what enables a commander seemingly to bypass parts of the loop.

Removing friction sometimes creates chaos.

Boyd said von Clausewitz’s second major flaw is that he spends a lot of time talking about how a commander must minimize “friction”—that is, the uncertainty or chance that always appear in the “fog of war.” He does not deal with maximizing the enemy’s friction—as does Sun Tzu—but only with minimizing his own. As Boyd said to Spinney, “Sun Tzu tried to drive his adversary bananas while Clausewitz tried to keep himself from being driven bananas.”

Decision-making speed determines conflict outcomes.

Understanding the OODA Loop enables a commander to compress time—that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. ... It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent.

Import order constantly or dissolve into disorder.

From this law it follows that entropy must increase in any closed system—or, for that matter, in any system that cannot communicate in an ordered fashion with other systems or environments external to itself. Accordingly, whenever we attempt to do work or take action inside such a system—a concept and its match-up with reality—we should anticipate an increase in entropy hence an increase in confusion and disorder. Naturally, this means we cannot determine the character or nature (consistency) of such a system within itself, since the system is moving irreversibly toward a higher, yet unknown, state of confusion and disorder.