Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History)

122 Good short descriptions are provided by Hallion, op. cit., pp. 72–82; Lambeth, op. cit., pp. 83–91; and Richard M. Swain, ‘Filling the Void: The Operational Art and the US Army’, in B.J.C. McKercher and Michael A. Hennessy, The Operational Art, Developments in the Theories of War, Westport: Preager, 1996. For a very detailed account see Naveh, op. cit., Chapters 7 and 8.

123 Lambeth, op. cit., p. 91; and General William Richardson, ‘FM 100–5, The AirLand Battle in 1986’, Military Review, March 1986, pp. 4–11 (Richardson was the commander of the organization responsible for the publication of the new doctrine).

124 Naveh, op. cit., pp. 252–6.

125 Burton, op. cit., pp. 43–4.

126 Ibid., p. 51.

127 Department of Defense, Field Manual 100–5, Operations, Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1982, Section 2–1. Boyd, however, never accepted the principle of synchronization.

128 Hallion, op. cit., pp. 77–8.

129 Naveh, op. cit., p. 252.

130 Steven Metz, ‘The Next Twist of the RMA’, Parameters, Autumn 2000, p. 40.

131 Burton, op. cit., p. 44.

 

3 Science: Boyd’s fountain

1 Grant T. Hammond, The Mind of War, John Boyd and American Security, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001, p. 118.

2 Robert Coram, Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Boston: Little Brown & Company, 2002, p. 271.

3 Hammond, Burton and Corum make frequent references to Boyd’s obsessive study and his frequent late-night phone calls. See for instance Coram, op. cit., pp. 319–20 and Hammond, op. cit., pp. 180–6, and James Burton, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993, p. 44.

4 Peter Faber, in John Olson, Asymmetric Warfare, Oslo: Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy Press, 2002, p. 58.

5 Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty, The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Phoenix Press, 2000, Chapter 33.

6 Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, New York: The Free Press, 1999. See also Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York, Vintage Books, 1994, Chapter 14 in particular.

7 Watson, op. cit., pp. 595–6.

8 His list of personal papers includes, for instance, Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Report on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Signet, 1972; as well as Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974; and Jan Tinbergen, Rio: Reshaping the International Order: A Report to the Club of Rome, New York: Signet, 1977.

9 Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into The Human Prospect, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974, p. 13. Heilbroner also touches upon the Rome Report. Jeremy Rifkin’s work, Entropy, A New World View, New York: The Viking Press, 1980, is another book in this vein and also appears in Boyd’s list of personal papers. This book popularized Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s book The Entropy Laws and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, a book central to Boyd’s essay.

10 This influence should not be underestimated. Robert Persig’s book was a bestseller in Boyd’s time and a manifestation of the sense of crisis of the rational (western) mode of thinking. The character, Phaedrus, sees the social crisis of the ‘most tumultuous decade of this century’ as the result of western reductionist and analytical mindset which has lost sight of the elements of quality and wholeness. It contains extensive sections of dialogue and critique on western philosophers from Aristotle, to Hume, Kant and Hegel up to Henry Poincaré, who noted already in the nineteenth century the relevance of the act of observation and selecting facts for observation in the scientific enterprise, thus negating the existence of objectivity. The book that offers the way out for Phaedrus is the ancient Chinese book the Tao I Ching of Lao Tzu, a book also on Boyd’s list of personal papers.

11 Watson, op. cit., p. 618.

12 Ibid.

13 Monod’s book too is on Boyd’s list. Interestingly, Monod’s book includes the idea that living things, as isolated, self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate against entropy, an idea included in Boyd’s work.

14 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, New York: Norton & Company, 1997, pp. 43–7.

15 See Fred Hoyle’s, Encounter with the Future, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968; and his The New Face of Science, New York: The World Publishing Company, 1971.

16 Derek Gjertsen, Science and Philosophy, Past and Present, London, Penguin Books, 1989, p. 6.

17 Paul Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11th printing, 1997, p. 3.

18 In his copy of Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, that deals with split brains, Boyd recognizes his own brain at work in a section dealing with the working of the minds of geniuses such as Einstein and Mozart.