Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

“Jim, you may not win,” Boyd said to him. “But you can’t give the bastards a free ride. You’re doing the right thing. Stay with it, Tiger.”

“Tiger, the pace of life down here is different. About all these people can handle is one project a day, like going to the supermarket.”

In The Generals’ War, a book written by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainor after the war, Cheney is quoted as saying to Powell, “I can’t let Norm do this high diddle up the middle plan.” Not only did Cheney reject Schwarzkopf’s plan but he used Boyd’s language to do so.

“We kind of got inside his decision cycle.”

“You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”

(Belisarius, the Byzantine commander, was one of Boyd’s favorite generals and was an early practitioner of maneuver conflict; he always fought outnumbered, never lost a battle, and understood the moral dimension of war.)

Hammond’s book The Mind of War was published in the spring of 2001. It is a study of Boyd’s ideas and is written for an academic audience or for an audience interested in military affairs.

Legends of the Fall,

“Tiger, we hosed those bastards good.”

“sense of integrity and duty”

man whose very name causes defense contractors to tremble.

Burton learned from Boyd that if a man does the right thing, it does not matter how overwhelming the odds against him. There always is a way to victory. “No matter what the situation is, no matter how bleak or how dark things appear, how scary, there is always a way out,”

In viewing the instinct for survival in this manner we imply that a basic aim or goal, as individuals, is to improve our capacity for independent action.

A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from the specific-to-general.

The differential calculus proceeds from the general-to-specific—from a function to its derivative. Hence is not the use or application of the differential Calculus related to deduction and analysis? The integral calculus, on the other hand, proceeds in the opposite direction—from a derivative to a general function. Hence, is not the use or application of the integral calculus related to induction and synthesis? Summing up, we can see that: general-to-specific is related to deduction, analysis, and differentiation while specific-to-general is related to induction, synthesis, and integration.

Further, we can see that such an unstructuring or destruction of many domains—to break the correspondence of each with its respective constituents—is related to deduction, analysis, and differentiation. We call this kind of unstructuring a destructive deduction.

Clearly, such a synthesis would indicate we have generated something new and different from what previously existed.

We call such action a creative or constructive induction.

When this orderly (and pleasant) state is reached the concept becomes a coherent pattern of ideas and interactions that can be used to describe some aspect of observed reality.

Next, he proved even though such a system is consistent, its consistency cannot be demonstrated within the system.

shown that a consistency proof of arithmetic can be found by appealing to systems outside that arithmetic.

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.20

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.

Taken together, these three notions support the idea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch.

Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often.

Simply stated, uncertainty and related disorder can be diminished by the direct artifice of creating a higher and broader more general concept to represent reality.

Now, in relating this deductive / inductive activity to the basic goal discussed in the beginning, I believe we have uncovered a Dialectic Engine that permits the construction of decision models needed by individuals and societies for determining and monitoring actions in an effort to improve their capacity for independent action.

The result is a changing and expanding universe of mental concepts matched to a changing and expanding universe of observed reality.

The Crack in the Cosmic Egg,

Introduction to Mathematical Thinking,

Creativity and Intuition,