Military Strategy (John Boyd)

Col. John Boyd was a modern military strategist who had a significant influence on planning for the 1991 Gulf War.

Unlike most other military strategists Boyd never wrote a book on strategy. The primary works reflecting his perspective on warfare are Discourse on Winning & Losing (a several hundred slide presentation) and "Destruction & Creation" (a short essay).

In the "Destruction & Creation" essay Boyd attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for his theories on warfare. In it he integrates Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics to provide a context and rationale for the development of the OODA Loop.

Boyd inferred the following from each of these theories:

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: any logical model of reality is incomplete (and possibly inconsistent) and must be continuously refined/adapted in the face of new observations.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: there is a limit on our ability to observe reality with accuracy and thus small errors produce ever widening mismatches over time. (see Butterfly effect)
Second Law of Thermodynamics: The entropy/chaos of any closed system is always increasing and thus the nature of any given system is continuously changing. Furthermore, whatever actions we take to influence the system will contribute to this chaos and will have unintended consequences.

From this, Boyd concluded that to maintain an accurate or effective grasp of reality one must undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with the environment. Boyd then expanded Darwin's Theory of Evolution suggesting that natural selection applies not only in biological but also in social contexts (such as the survival of nations during war or businesses in free market competition). Integrating these two concepts, he stated that the decision cycle was the central mechanism of adaptation (in a social context) and that creating a quicker decision cycle would provide a tremendous advantage over an enemy in war.

Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent organisms and organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. Boyd breaks this cycle down to four interrelated and overlapping processes:

Observation: the collection of data from the senses
Orientation: the synthesis of data into the current mental perspective
Decision: the derivation of a course of action from the current mental perspective
Action: the physical playing-out of decisions

The decision cycle is thus also known as the OODA loop. Boyd emphasized that this Decision cycle was the central mechanism enabling adaptation (apart from natural selection) and was therefore critical to survival.

Boyd theorized that large organizations such as corporations, governments, or militaries possessed a hierarchy of OODA loops at tactical, grand-tactical (operational art), and strategic levels, and that the most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective driven orders rather than method driven orders to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual commanders at each level. He argued that such a structure would create a flexible "organic whole" that would be quicker to adapt to rapidly changing situation. He noted however that any such highly decentralized organization would necessitate a high degree of mutual trust and a common outlook that came from prior shared experiences.

It is also important to note that Boyd divided warfare into three distinct elements:

Moral Warfare: the destruction of the enemy's will to win, via alienation from allies (or potential allies) and internal fragmentation. Ideally resulting in the "dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole [organization] to exist."
Mental Warfare: the distortion of the enemy's perception of reality through disinformation, ambiguous postering, severing of communication/information infrastructure.
Physical Warfare: the destruction of the enemy's physical being such as weapons, people, and logistics.

References

Lind, William S. Maneuver Warfare Handbook. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985. ISBN 086531862X. Based on John Boyd's theories.