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

134 Alan Beyerchen, ‘Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War’, International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992), pp. 55–90. This section is a very concise summary.

135 Pat Pentland, Center of Gravity Analysis and Chaos Theory, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, April 1993. Interestingly, he also incorporates Boyd’s OODA loop, acknowledging that this model and the essay, although developed in the 1970s, anticipated many of tenets of chaos theory, and is consistent with it.

136 Ibid., p. 25.

137 Ibid., p. 17.

138 Ibid., p. 31.

139 Ibid., pp. 11–12.

140 Ibid., pp. 34–6.

141 The literature on military applications of chaos and complexity theory has burgeoned in the 1990s. To illustrate this, an inventory of articles dealing with non-linearity and military affairs drawn up by the US National Defense University in 1999 listed 144 entries. Available at: www.clausewitz.com (accessed 10 July 1999). For some accessible papers see for instance Glenn E. James, Chaos Theory, The Essentials for Military Applications, Newport: Naval War College Press, 1996; Linda Beckerman, ‘The Non-linear Dynamics of War’, online. Available at: www.belisarius.com/ modern_business_strategy/beckerman/non_linear.htm (accessed 27 April 1999). This article, though technical, is often referred to. She regards attrition style warfare as a linear process and, interestingly, refers to Boyd’s OODA loop as a model which captures the dynamics of non-linear systems; and Jason B. Tanner, Walter E. Lavrinovich and Scott R. Hall: ‘Looking at Warfare Through a New Lens’, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 82, No.. 9 (September 1998), pp. 59–61; David S. Alberts and Thomas Czerwinski, Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, Washington, D.C.: National Defence University Press, 1998; and Thomas J. Czerwinski, Coping with the Bounds, Speculations on Nonlinearity in Military Affairs, Washington, D.C.: National Defence University Press, 1999. For a recent study relating Clausewitz to chaos see Stephen J. Cimbala, Clausewitz and Chaos, Friction in War and Military Policy, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001, in particular Chapters 1 and 7.

142 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

143 James Burton, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993, pp. 46–7.

144 Boyd, Strategic Game of ? and ?, p. 12.

145 Hammond, op. cit., p. 15.

146 Boyd, A Discourse, Abstract, p. 2.

147 Alberts and Czerwinski (1998), op. cit., Preface, p. 1.

148 Boyd, The Essence of Winning and Losing, p. 5;

149 Hammond, op. cit., p. 12; Coram, op. cit., p. 330.

150 On the merit of metaphors see for instance Morgan, op. cit., Chapter 11. The first three metaphors I mention here are directly from this book, Chapters 3, 4 and 8.

 

5 Core arguments

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

2 Grant T. Hammond, ‘The Essential Boyd’, unpublished paper. Online. Available at: www.belisarius.com (Accessed 4 June 2000), p. 8.

3 In the essay Boyd frequently inserts a number that refers to the number of a book listed in the bibliography attached to Destruction and Creation, and indicates the source for a particular insight. For clarity, here both the number and the works referred to are given. The entire bibliography can be found in Annex A. The sources Boyd refers to here are books number 11: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process; and 13: Robert Heilbronner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect.

4 Ibid.

5 Here Boyd refers to sources 28: Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being; and 24: Alex F. Osborne, Applied Imagination.

6 Boyd refers to Osborne again.

7 Again Boyd refers to Polanyi.

8 Here Boyd refers to sources 14 and 15: two works of Werner Heisenberg: Physics and Philosophy, and Across the Frontiers.

9 Boyd refers to source 27: Jean Piaget, Structuralism; as well as to both works of Heisenberg listed above.

10 Besides the two works of Heisenberg, Boyd here refers to source 19: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

11 This description of the dynamics of normal science Boyd derived from Kuhn.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Boyd refers to sources 12: Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of the Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, pages 3–38, ‘The Undecidable’; and 23: Ernest Nagel and James Newman, Gödel’s Proof.

16 Boyd derived this insight from sources 29: Jagjit Singh, Great Ideas of Modern Mathematics; and 27: Jean Piaget, Structuralism.

17 Ibid.

18 Boyd refers to source 14 again (Heisenberg (1962)); and source 9: George Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics.

19 Gamow is referred to again.

20 Here Boyd refers to source 3: Spencer Brown: Laws of Form.

21 Gamow.

22 Heisenberg (1962).

23 Brown.

24 For this introduction to thermodynamics Boyd consulted Georgescu-Roegen and source 20: David Layzer, ‘The Arrow of Time’, an article in Scientific American of December 1975.

25 Layzer is referred to as the source.