by Robert Coram
It all became even more exasperating when Boyd told the Acolytes that he did not know where he was going with his research and that he deliberately refused to set a goal. He was simply letting it carry him along. The Acolytes reeled when Boyd said his work would link Godel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the second law of thermodynamics.
Godel’s Proof holds that there are certain mathematical statements about a mathematical system that can be true yet cannot be proven or derived from that system. Or, as Boyd put it, the consistency of a system cannot be proven within that system. Heisenberg, a physicist, said it is impossible to simultaneously determine both the position and the velocity of a particle. As Boyd learned at Georgia Tech, the second law says all natural processes create entropy; that is, they go from order to disorder. Philosophers such as Jacob Bronowski sensed relationships among these disparate elements, but no one had ever linked all three, raised them to a higher level, and from them synthesized a new idea.
Boyd might read a paragraph aloud one night and the next night call, voice filled with excitement, to say he had another breakthrough. He would read the same paragraph. The person to whom he was reading could discern no difference. In a pained voice Boyd would say he had changed one word. The Acolytes joked among themselves about Boyd’s “breakthroughs.” Sprey said if Boyd moved a comma he considered it a breakthrough.
“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes or examine its opposites,” Boyd said. He practiced what he preached. He considered every word and every idea from every possible angle, then threw it out for discussion, argued endless hours, restructured his line of thought, and threw it out for discussion again. Creativity was painful and laborious and repetitive and detail-haunted—not just to him, but to a half-dozen people around him. Boyd needed the dialectic of debate. Often he abandoned the entire line of inquiry and went back to the beginning. Burton and Spinney and Sprey began to wonder if Christie was right, if Boyd was putting too fine a point on everything, if he were pushing his ideas into fruitless areas. “How long will this go on?” Burton asked. “At some point you have to finish it.”
“That time will reveal itself,” Boyd said. “I will know. But I am not there yet.”
To complicate matters, Boyd received a small grant from NASA to determine why fighter pilots flew simulators differently than they flew airplanes. His findings accelerated work on “A New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat,” a briefing he had begun researching in 1975. He also revealed, to Sprey’s delight, that he was beginning to work on a briefing he called “Patterns of Conflict,” a survey of ground warfare since the beginning of time. He continued to research and write drafts of his learning theory while he worked on the two new briefings.
It was an extraordinary burst of creativity, especially considering it came from a man who was retired, almost fifty years old, and entering a time of life when many people begin to slow down.
The Acolytes thought it would never end.
But it did. Or at least the intense work on the learning theory did when, on September 3, 1976, Boyd came forth with the eleven-page “Destruction and Creation” paper he had been working on since 1972. With the exception of those few articles for a Fighter Weapons School publication back in the 1950s, it is the only thing Boyd ever wrote.
The hosannas that had accompanied the E-M Theory were absent when Boyd finished “Destruction and Creation.” In fact, considering the years of toil that went into the paper, finishing it was anticlimactic. Boyd simply passed out a few copies.
Burton and Spinney pleaded with Boyd to have the paper published. It would have been relatively easy for Boyd to do so in one of several military magazines. But he never submitted it. One reason is because he did not believe that intellectual works are ever finished; he would revise “Destruction and Creation” for years to come. A second, more speculative reason is that he might have been fearful of the criticism that comes to such works upon publication.
Because Boyd spent more than four years researching and writing and then distilling his work down to eleven pages, the result has a specific gravity approaching that of uranium. It is thick and heavy and ponderous, filled with caveats and qualifiers and arcane references that span theories never before connected. To read “Destruction and Creation” is to fully appreciate the term “heavy sledding.” The most important part of “Destruction and Creation” is Boyd’s elaboration on the idea that a relationship exists between an observer and what is being observed. This idea is not original. One of the oldest questions in philosophy concerns the nature of reality. But Boyd presented a new explanation of how we perceive physical reality.
A half-dozen people can look at the same process or the same event and each might see the process or the event in an entirely different fashion. For a simple example, a crowd streaming into a college football stadium is looked upon one way by a fraternity boy, another way by a television cameraman, another way by a beer distributor, another way by a security officer, and still another way by the college president.
Atop this insight Boyd placed an idea borrowed from Heisenberg: the process of observation changes what is being observed. To continue with the simplified example, people in the crowd, knowing they are being observed by a television cameraman, might wave or shout or begin spontaneous demonstrations. The same crowd, knowing security officers are observing, might become subdued and decorous. Or it might become confrontational. If we are aware that these changes take place we reassess and recalculate our relationship with whatever it is we are observing. In other words, the process not only shapes what is being observed but feedback reshapes the observer’s outlook. The television cameraman searches out people who are not waving. Security officers become more vigilant because they know people in the crowd are disguising their behavior. Thus a cycle begins. And the cycle is repeated again and again.
Now, to go back to the beginning, Boyd said there are two ways to manipulate information gleaned from observation: analysis and synthesis. We can analyze whatever process or event we are observing by breaking it down into individual components and interactions. And from this we can make deductions that lead to understanding. Or we can synthesize by taking various sometimes unrelated components and putting them together to form a new whole.
Boyd thought analysis could lead to understanding but not to creativity. Taken to the extreme, he thought analysis was an onanistic activity, gratifying only to the person doing the analyzing. He talked of “paralysis by analysis” and said Washington was a city of ten thousand analysts and no synthesizers. “They know more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing” is how he put it.
Boyd’s favorite example in “Destruction and Creation” was a thought experiment that took his audience through his exegesis on the nature of creativity. It went something like this: “Imagine four separate images. Let’s call them domains. Each domain can be easily understood by looking at its parts and at the relation among the parts.”
Boyd’s four domains were a skier on a slope, a speedboat, a bicycle, and a toy tank. Under “skier” were the various parts: chair lifts, skis, people, mountain, and chalets. He asked listeners to imagine these were all linked by a web of relations, a matrix of intersecting lines. Under “speedboat” were the categories of sun, boat, outboard motor, water skier, and water. Again, all were linked by the intersecting lines. Under “bicycle” were chain, seat, sidewalk, handle bars, child, and wheels. Under “toy tank” were turret, boy, tank treads, green paint, toy store, and cannon.
The separate ingredients make sense when collected under the respective headings. But then Boyd shattered the relationship between the parts and their respective domains. He took the ingredients in the web of relationships and asked listeners to visualize them scattered at random. He called breaking the domains apart a “destructive deduction.” (Today some refer to such a jump as “thinking outside the box.” But Boyd believed the very existence of a box is limiting
. The box must be destroyed before there can be creation.) The deduction was destructive in that the relationship between the parts and the whole was destroyed. Uncertainty and disorder took the place of meaning and order. Boyd’s name for this hodgepodge of disparate elements was a “sea of anarchy.” Then he challenged the audience: “How do we construct order and meaning out of this mess?”
Now Boyd showed how synthesis was the basis of creativity. He asked, “From some of the ingredients in this sea of anarchy, how do we find common qualities and connecting threads to synthesize a new and altogether different domain?” Few people ever found a new way to put them together. Boyd coaxed and wheedled but eventually helped the audience along by emphasizing handle bars, outboard motor, tank treads, and skis.
These, he said, were the ingredients needed to build what he called a “new reality”—a snowmobile.
To make sure the new reality is both viable and relevant, Boyd said it must be continually refined by verifying its internal consistency and by making sure it matches up with reality. But the very process of making sure the reality is relevant causes mismatches between the new observation and the description of that observation. It is here that Godel, Heisenberg, and the second law come into play. The mismatches are inevitable and expected because, as Boyd said, “One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.” This never-ending cycle of mismatches, destruction, and creation is the “natural manifestation of a dialectic engine.” This “engine” is the relationship between the observer and whatever is being observed. The idea that a two-way relationship exists between the observer and the observed, that the process of observation changes what is being observed, and that our awareness of these changes causes us to restructure the relationship is present in subtle and often unseen ways in almost every facet of our lives. It is a vital part of how we cope with our world; it shapes our decisions and actions. 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. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase. Ultimately, as disorder increases, chaos can result. Boyd showed why this is a natural process and why the only alternative is to do a destructive deduction and rebuild one’s mental image to correspond to the new reality.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, and Joseph Schumpeter, an economist, recognized the destructive side of creativity. But Boyd was unique in his explanation of how the process is grounded in fundamentals discovered by Godel and Heisenberg and by entropy.
The dialectic engine, once refined and elevated, was to become the intellectual heart of the new war doctrine so craved by elements within the U.S. military.
Chapter Twenty - Four
OODA Loop
ONCE he completed “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd was a man possessed. It seemed he could hear at some subliminal level the voices of young military officers crying out for change, for a manifesto that would make them victorious in battle. To Boyd, nothing less than America’s national defense hung in the balance. Two more briefings tumbled from him within a month. People began moving into place and events began forming, the end results of which would not be seen for years and then would seem a mosaic of impossible serendipity. The fast transients brief is dated August 4, 1976. It is the application of “Destruction and Creation” to an operational issue—that is, a better and more thorough definition of “maneuverability.” The ability of an aircraft to perform fast transients does two things, one defensive and one offensive: it can force an attacking aircraft out of a favorable firing position, and it can enable a pursuing pilot to gain a favorable firing position. The advantage gained from the fast transient suggests that to win in battle a pilot needs to operate at a faster tempo than his enemy. It suggests that he must stay one or two steps ahead of his adversary; he must operate inside his adversary’s time scale.
Even though it was the superiority of the YF-16 over the YF-17 that precipitated his research, Boyd went back to his beginnings for the brief—to Korea, where the F-86 achieved such a stunning kill ratio against the MiG-15, a superior aircraft in energy-maneuverability terms. He used additional examples: Germany’s Blitzkrieg attack against France in 1940 and the Israelis’ lightning-fast raid at Entebbe Airport to free hostages seized by Uganda. 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. Generating a rapidly changing environment—that is, engaging in activity that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy—inhibits the adversary’s ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.
The briefing revealed that the central theme of Boyd’s work—a time-based theory of conflict—was beginning to take form. And it marked a significant transition in Boyd’s work with its references to the Blitzkrieg and the Entebbe raid; he was becoming interested in ground warfare.
A month after the fast-transients briefing, Boyd was ready with the first version of his “Patterns of Conflict” briefing. He was to give it hundreds of times in coming years, so many times that it became known as “Patterns” or simply as the “brief.” “Patterns” was a work in progress that would evolve until more than a decade later, when the slides were finally put together in a booklet. Boyd designated the first version “Warp I” (after the references to “warp speed” in Star Trek, a favorite television program of his children). Modifications within a warp were referred to as “wicker.” (Wicker is a bureaucratic term that means “weaving” or “patching together.”) Boyd first wrote the contents of each slide on a legal pad, then had them typed. He saved changes and additions until he reached a critical mass, then retyped the entire brief and gave it a new warp designation. The brief went through a dizzying nomenclature that changed almost weekly. By December 8, he was at “Warp VI, Wicker 2.” By September 16, 1977, he was at “Warp X.” In October 1977, he changed the title: “Warp XI” was “Patterns of Conflict: Cheng, Ch’i, and Schwerpunkt.” By “Warp XII” he was back to “Patterns of Conflict.” After “Warp XII,” he stopped using the “warp” and “wicker” designations and used only “Patterns of Conflict.” Each new version was dated and signed with his bold, sprawling signature. He did not keep every version and often called Burton to ask something such as “How did I say this in ‘Warp Six, Wicker Three’?” or “What was the wording for this part in ‘Warp Nine’?” Burton kept almost every version and, as far as can be determined, is the only person to do so; it is a stack of papers about two feet tall. In the beginning Boyd took an hour to deliver “Patterns.” A decade later, when Boyd put all his work into a collection titled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing,” he took about fourteen hours—two days—to deliver it.
The nature of Boyd’s briefings changed radically after he became a civilian. He went from being one of the best briefers in the Air Force, a man known for his spare and elegant slides and his brilliant presentation, to a man whose slides were jumbled, dense with bullets, and packed with long sentences. They remained ambiguous because Boyd still believed ambiguity created opportunities for unexpected richness. Some briefs are self-contained; one can look at the slides and receive the full measure of the brief. That was no longer so with Boyd’s; his briefs were virtually impenetrable without an explanation. Boyd also became uncompromising—some would say arbitrary, perhaps even arrogant—about delivering his briefing. A person’s available time did not matter. If someone wanted to hear the briefing, they had to hear it all. That was
okay when the briefing was about an hour in length. But as it grew to six hours, Boyd often was asked for a condensation. “Full brief or no brief” was his response. And he would not let anyone see a copy of the slides or the executive summary until after they heard the brief.
Even though Boyd was a civilian, he spent a lot of time in the TacAir office at the Pentagon. Sprey was there one day and overheard part of a conversation in which Boyd said, “I’d be glad to give him the brief. It takes six hours.” The person on the other end obviously wanted a much shorter version. “The brief takes six hours,” Boyd repeated. Sprey saw Boyd’s face tightening and then heard him say, “Since your boss is so pressed for time, here’s an idea that will save him a lot of time: how about no brief?” He slammed the phone down, turned to Sprey, and said, “That was the exec for the CNO.” And that was how the chief of naval operations did not hear Boyd’s briefing. After the same thing happened with the Army chief of staff, the chief’s executive officer, a full colonel, marched to Christie’s office in a state of high dudgeon and demanded that Christie order Boyd to give a one-hour brief to the CSA. The colonel was flabbergasted when Christie said Boyd was a civilian whom he could not order around.
Several things did not change. Boyd’s method of research remained as it always had been. He stayed up much of the night reading book after book. The final source list for “Patterns” numbered 323. And Boyd’s phone calls to the Acolytes continued. The breadth and depth of subjects covered was nothing short of phenomenal. Boyd dove into the history of warfare as few men ever have. To outsiders his course of study seemed rambling and disconnected. It seemed to lack focus, but only until they heard the briefing.