Boyd

by Robert Coram

  As with much of Boyd’s work, the building blocks for “Patterns” are mostly well-known ideas. But the synthesis of these ideas produced a reality new to the U.S. military. “Patterns” is one of the most monumental snowmobiles ever constructed, one of the most influential briefings ever to come from a military mind.

  “Patterns” is also an example of how Boyd thought by analogy, a process that Sprey, ever the pragmatist, found extremely unsettling. Reasoning by analogy not only is backward from the way most people think but is dangerous; one misstep, especially in the beginning, and the entire process can go careening off into idiocy. Sprey found it even more unsettling that Boyd was always right.

  One cannot study modern military history without studying the German Army, especially the period from 1806—when Napoléon defeated Frederick and the Prussian armies at the Battle of Jena and Auerstadt—through World War II. After Frederick was defeated, a group of five men set about to rebuild the Prussian Army and to institutionalize military excellence. They called themselves “Reformers.” Scharnhorst and von Clausewitz are the best known of the group, Scharnhorst because of his military brilliance and von Clausewitz because of his book On War.

  William Lind, a tall, roly-poly, ruddy-cheeked civilian who drops historical allusions by the bushel and knows more about warfare than do most people in the Pentagon, was a congressional staffer working for Senator Gary Hart when he heard “Patterns.” Sensing a parallel between Boyd’s intellectual circle and the Prussian military masterminds, Lind dubbed Boyd and his followers “Reformers.”

  As Boyd studied the Blitzkrieg, he found historical references he did not understand, especially in his readings on the tactics of Tank Commander Heinz Guderian and in the book Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein. He had to begin at the beginning, go back to the earliest recorded Greek and Persian battles, and march through history to properly understand the Blitzkrieg. Four areas drew most of his attention: general theories of war, the Blitzkrieg, guerrilla warfare, and the use of deception by great commanders.

  Sun Tzu, a Chinese military theoretician, was thought to have written The Art of War about 400 B.C. Sun Tzu’s ideas about conflict include such themes as deception, speed, fluidity of action, surprise, and shaping the adversary’s perception of the world. Sun Tzu also talked of how a commander should use two thrusts, either of which could attain the objective. But perhaps the most significant element in Sun Tzu is the concept of cheng and ch’i, the orthodox and the unorthodox, the traditional and the unexpected. A simplistic explanation of cheng and ch’i comes from General George Patton, who in World War II said his plan for attacking the Germans was to “hold them by the nose and kick them in the ass.” Holding them by the nose is the cheng. Kicking them in the ass is the ch’i.

  The Art of War became Boyd’s Rosetta stone, the work he returned to again and again. It is the only theoretical book on war that Boyd did not find fundamentally flawed. He eventually owned seven translations, each with long passages underlined and with copious marginalia. The translations of Samuel Griffith and, later, Thomas Cleary were his favorites. He insisted the Acolytes read and reread the book.

  From Sun Tzu, Boyd moved to the campaigns of Alexander the Great around 300 B.C., Hannibal around 200 B.C., Belisarius around 500 A.D., Genghis Khan around 1200 A.D., Tamerlane around 1400 A.D., then Napoléon and von Clausewitz and on through World War I and World War II. He found that the campaigns of many of these great commanders, particularly the Eastern commanders such as Genghis Khan, demonstrated an understanding of Sun Tzu.

  For example, Boyd was fascinated by how a vastly superior Roman Army lost to Hannibal and the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae. In that battle, one of the most famous in military history, Hannibal lost around three thousand men while the Romans lost around seventy thousand. Boyd found many such instances in history, and in these victories by numerically inferior forces he found a common thread: none of the victorious commanders threw their forces head-to-head against enemy forces. They usually did not fight what is known as a “war of attrition.” Rather, they used deception, speed, fluidity of action, and strength against weakness. They used tactics that disoriented and confused—tactics that, in Boyd’s words, caused the enemy “to unravel before the fight.”

  Von Clausewitz is often acknowledged as the greatest of military theoreticians. Rarely has his book been studied as Boyd studied it. As with Sun Tzu, he bought various translations and made copious annotations. For months he compared what von Clausewitz says early in the book with what he says in the middle and at the end. This is laborious work, because von Clausewitz takes a dialectic approach and sometimes seems to argue in favor of polar opposites. Boyd was doing more than reading; he was engaging von Clausewitz in combat. It was his mind against that of von Clausewitz. Boyd called Spinney late one night and said he had a breakthrough. He began reading passages and explaining two crucial differences between von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. First, von Clausewitz wants to bring the enemy to a big “decisive battle,” while Sun Tzu wants to unravel the enemy before a battle. Put another way, von Clausewitz believes wars are decided by set piece battles more than by strategy, deception, and guerrillalike tactics. This means that even if he wins, there is a bloodbath. 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.”

  Spinney sleepily muttered something about von Clausewitz’s work being more than one hundred years old and that it was never completed and—. “Doesn’t matter,” Boyd shouted. “I got the fucker now. I got him by the balls.”

  Boyd said the strategies and bloodbaths of World War I were the natural consequence of both the von Clausewitzian battle philosophy and the inability of generals to adapt new tactics to nineteenth-century technology: line abreast, mass against mass, and linear defenses against machine guns and quick-firing artillery. The bankrupt nature of that doctrine was demonstrated on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when the British suffered sixty thousand casualties. After more than three years of this meat-grinder form of war, the Germans began engagements with a brief artillery barrage with smoke and gas obscuring their intentions, then sent in special infantry teams. These small groups looked for gaps in the defense and advanced along many paths. They did not hit strong points but instead went around them, pressing on, always going forward and not worrying about their flanks. They were like water going downhill, bypassing obstacles, always moving, probing, and then, when they found an opening, pouring through, pressing deeper and deeper. (These tactics ultimately failed because German leadership did not have faith in them, nor did they have the communication and logistics to make the tactics a decisive form of combat. Also, because the Germans lost the war, the Allies failed to understand the significance of the new infiltration tactics. Then, between wars, the new German Army expanded the concept enormously.)

  In World War II German forces used the same tactics, but this time with massive tank forces. Journalists called it the “Blitzkrieg.” The Germans bypassed enemy strong points—such as the Maginot Line—and, with the use of airplanes and radio communications, punched through enemy weaknesses following the path of least resistance, driving deep into the enemy’s rear, cutting lines of communication, disrupting movement, and paralyzing the enemy’s command and control system. They moved so fast the enemy simply could not understand what was happening and became unglued. Hitler took Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France with about two hundred thousand casualties. The Allies had about three point five million losses, almost three million of whom were prisoners.

  Boyd, borrowing from Sun Tzu, said the best commander is the one who wins while avoiding battle.
The intent is to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse of the adversary by generating confusion, disorder, panic, and chaos. Boyd said war is organic and compared his technique to clipping the nerves, muscles, and tendons of an enemy, thus reducing him to jelly.

  As Boyd studied German tactics, words such as Schwerpunkt and Fingerspitzengefuhl became everyday expressions. Neither translates well. Schwerpunkt means the main focus of effort. On a deeper reading it is the underlying goal, the glue that holds together various units. Fingerspitzengefuhl means a fingertip feel. Again, the fuller meaning applies to a leader’s instinctive and intuitive sense of what is going on or what is needed in a battle or, for that matter, in any conflict.

  All these small stitches, and hundreds of others, made up the tapestry that became “Patterns of Conflict.”

  The briefing begins with what was to become Boyd’s most famous—and least understood—legacy: the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, or O-O-D-A Loop. Today, anyone can hook up to an Internet browser, type “OODA Loop,” and find more than one thousand references. The phrase has become a buzz word in the military and among business consultants who preach a time-based strategy. But few of those who speak so glibly about the OODA Loop have a true understanding of what it means and what it can do. (Boyd preferred “O-O-D-A Loop” but soon gave up and accepted “OODA” because most people wrote it that way.)

  For a time, Boyd and Spinney were reluctant to fully explain the OODA Loop; it was far too dangerous. If someone truly understands how to create menace and uncertainty and mistrust, then how to exploit and magnify the presence of these disconcerting elements, the Loop can be vicious, a terribly destructive force, virtually unstoppable in causing panic and confusion and—Boyd’s phrase is best—“unraveling the competition.” This is true whether the Loop is applied in combat, in competitive business practices, in sports, or in personal relationships. The most amazing aspect of the OODA Loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.

  The OODA Loop is often seen as a simple one-dimensional cycle, where one observes what the enemy is doing, becomes oriented to the enemy action, makes a decision, and then takes an action. This “dumbing down” of a highly complex concept is especially prevalent in the military, where only the explicit part of the Loop is understood. The military believes speed is the most important element of the cycle, that whoever can go through the cycle the fastest will prevail. It is true that speed is crucial, but not the speed of simply cycling through the Loop. By simplifying the cycle in this way, the military can make computer models. But 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.

  Before Boyd came along, others had proposed primitive versions of an OODA Loop. 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.

  Understanding the OODA Loop is difficult. First, even though it is called a loop, it is not. A drawing of the Loop shows thirty arrows connecting the various ingredients, which means hundreds of possible “loops” can be derived. 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. These human differences make the Loop unpredictable. In addition, the orientation phase is a nonlinear feedback system, which, by its very nature, means this is a pathway into the unknown. The unpredictability is crucial to the success of the OODA Loop.

  Only three arrows are on the main axis, and these are what most see when they look at the Observe > Orient > Decide > Act cycle. But this linear understanding and its common result—an attempt to use the Loop mechanically—is not at all what Boyd had in mind.

  Even Boyd’s Acolytes do not always agree on what Boyd meant with the OODA Loop. Understanding it can be helped by studying the illustration (see insert). Note that Boyd includes the “Implicit Guidance & Control” from “Orientation” with both “Observations” and “Action.” 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. It is this adaptability that gives the OODA Loop its awesome power. Understanding the OODA Loop enables a commander to compress time—that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use this temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most-effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. 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. The enemy falls farther and farther behind in making relevant decisions. It hastens the unraveling process.

  The OODA Loop briefing contains 185 slides. Early in the briefing the slide “Impressions” gives the frame of reference for what is to come. Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

  After marching through the great battles of history, Boyd dwells a moment on T. E. Lawrence, who talks of how a commander must “arrange the mind” of the enemy.

  Another important slide shows how the Blitzkrieg—or maneuver conflict—is the perfect tactical application of the OODA Loop. Boyd asks: How does a commander harmonize the numerous individual thrusts of a Blitzkrieg attack and maintain the cohesion of his larger effort? The answer is that the Blitzkrieg is far more than the lightning thrusts that most people think of when they hear the term; rather it was all about high operational tempo and the rapid exploitation of opportunity. In a Blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his Schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize and hold a certain hill; instead they are given “mission orders.” This means that they understand their commander’s overall intent and they know their job is to do whatever is necessary to fulfill that intent. The subordinate and the commander share a common outlook. They trust each other, and this trust is the glue that holds the apparently formless effort together. Trust emphasizes implicit over explicit communications. Trust is the unifying concept. This gives the subordinate great freedom of action. Trust is an example of a moral force that helps bind groups together in what Boyd called an “organic whole.”

  Boyd, like Sun Tzu and Napoléon, believed in attacking with “moral conflict”—that is, using actions that increase menace, uncertainty, and mistrust in the enemy while increasing initiative, adaptability, and harmony within friendly forces. As an example of the moral game played right, Boyd told how the appearance of a few Mongol horsemen often was enough to collapse resistance in the enemy and cause chaos and panic. Guerrilla leaders had to master moral conflict to ensure the support of civilians as they engaged larger and better-funded government forces.

  The mental and moral aspects of maneuver conflict do not sit well with
most military minds, particularly those who use a managerial approach or those who prefer the slugfest of attrition warfare. They don’t like the mental agility, the intellectual innovation, the placing trust in subordinates. They don’t like the rapidly changing, free-form tactics of probing for weak spots rather than concentrating more fire-power on selected targets. Why tiptoe through the tulips, the conventional mind asks, when war is blood and guts?

  The question would never be asked by a commander with a true understanding of the OODA Loop and its deadly power.

  Boyd showed that maneuver tactics brought victory. To attack the mind of the opponent, to unravel the commander before a battle even begins, is the essence of fighting smart.

  But most modern commanders have serious problems with maneuver tactics and, by extension, the OODA Loop. The experience of General George Patton in World War II is a good example. Patton was the American general most feared by the Germans. He out-blitzed those who made the Blitzkrieg famous. His tanks rolled across Europe and into Germany and could have punched through to Berlin in a matter of days. In fact, the German high command thought the war was over. But Eisenhower did not understand this kind of conflict and, at the very moment of victory—egged on by jealous and conventional British officers—he grew afraid for Patton’s flanks and supply lines and ordered Patton to stop. The Germans were amazed at the respite. One school of thought says that Eisenhower’s timidity cost another six months of war and a million additional lives.

  A crucial part of the OODA Loop—or “Boyd Cycle,” as it has come to be known—is that once the process begins, it must not slow. It must continue and it must accelerate. Success is the greatest trap for the novice who properly implements the OODA Loop. He is so amazed at what he has done that he pauses and looks around and waits for reinforcements. But this is the time to exploit the confusion and to press on. Patton knew this intuitively. He ignored his flanks and kept his armored spear pointed at the heart of the enemy.