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Chet Richards is a consultant and lecturer on Boyd’s ideas as applied to business. He has the keen logic of a mathematician and he saved me from many mistakes.
He quoted Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”
Boyd’s exile ended with a vision so amazing and so profound that it convinced both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps to change their basic doctrines on war fighting.
To “bend” an airplane was to pull more Gs than the enemy, to put one’s aircraft on the inside of the pursuit curve and gain the advantage from which he could fire.
He talked to learn: as he went through his monologues, his thoughts bounced around, various theses were tried and rejected until finally he had gained a better understanding
They headed back to ops for the debrief, the most important part of the mission. How well a fighter pilot conducted the debrief was one of the most important criteria in evaluating that student as a possible instructor.
situation awareness boils down to two things: first, the pilot must know the enemy’s position, and second, he must know the enemy’s velocity. (Boyd would later change “velocity” to “energy state.”)
At the same time Boyd was reading widely and thinking ahead and searching for ways to get a grasp on his “learning theory.” When he talked of learning, he did not mean studying but rather the process of creativity.
Boyd knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce his needs to zero. Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.
The danger—and this is a danger neither seen nor understood by many people who profess a knowledge of Boyd’s work—is that if our mental processes become focused on our internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality.
In both instances the ability to transition quickly from one maneuver to another was a crucial factor in the victory. Thinking about operating at a quicker tempo—not just moving faster—than the adversary was a new concept in waging war.
whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.
They remained ambiguous because Boyd still believed ambiguity created opportunities for unexpected richness.
the end. This is laborious work, because von Clausewitz
must minimize “friction”—that is, the uncertainty or
engagements with a brief artillery barrage with smoke and gas
The most amazing aspect of the OODA Loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.
computer models do not take into account the single most important part of the cycle—the orientation phase, especially the implicit part of the orientation phase.
The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such fashion as to get inside the mind and the decision cycle of the adversary. This means the adversary is dealing with outdated or irrelevant information and thus becomes confused and disoriented and can’t function.
The best drawing of the OODA Loop was done by Spinney for Boyd’s briefings. It shows a very large orientation part of the cycle. Becoming oriented to a competitive situation means bringing to bear the cultural traditions, genetic heritage, new information, previous experiences, and analysis / synthesis process of the person doing the orienting—a complex integration that each person does differently.
Understanding the OODA Loop enables a commander to compress time—that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A
A little over halfway through the briefing, Boyd begins building his snowmobile.
The leaders’ incentive was to force increases in their budget and to funnel more money to defense contractors, and they said whatever they needed to achieve that goal.
“swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations, and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)
“There is not just one solution to a problem,” he said. “There are two or three or five ways to solve a problem. Never commit to a single solution.”
Burton knew he stood at a crucial point in his career and in his life. This was the place he had heard Boyd talk about so many times, the to be or to do fork in the road.
By now Burton knew as much about ballistics and vaporifics and blast lung and all the other arcane disciplines as did the Army. He was inside their minds and knew how they thought and how they reacted.
Burton had the Fingerspitzengefuhl to move rapidly through the OODA Loop and stay ahead of his adversary, and he found the experience exhilarating.
Richards set up two Web sites (www.Belisarius.com and www.d-n-i.net) to showcase Boyd’s ideas and how they relate to business.
