Tom's Foreword to The John Boyd Roundtable

The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War

I've spent roughly two decades trying to move the military back closer to society, believing that the Cold War, during which military thought had become myopically fixated on nuclear strategy, had unduly isolated the military mind from messy, real-world applications and their associated dynamics, all of which had grown vastly more complex in the meantime. Not surprisingly, when the Cold War ended and our military peered unblinkingly into that teeming global landscape, it recoiled in the direction of familiar memes and sought desperately to fence off its responsibilities from that of the non-uniformed universe—i.e., the Powell Doctrine. But that effort proved fruitless and frustrating, both operationally and conceptually. Military officers found themselves delving deeply into the literature of business and technology, searching for Rosetta Stones that would reveal crosscutting connections.

The far harder row to hoe, however, was to re-examine military strategy itself to better contextualize it within the wider world. Until 9/11 arrived, this was a lonely and unappreciated pursuit—almost esoteric. But with that fateful day, and the complex wars/postwars spawned, such efforts took on new urgency. Translating some “new economy” management paradigm wouldn't be enough; we needed to rebuild our understanding of conflict from the bottom up, mapping out all relevant networks and their dynamics. Codification of that new understanding would come in the form of new/updated doctrine, a process that now proceeds apace—at least among the ground forces. But just as important would be the conceptual bridge-building to the non-military world, because, as each new doctrinal publication points out, what the military learns most in these recent operations is not what it must seek to control in terms of outcomes and effects, but that which it cannot possibly hope to control.

To truly think in grand strategic terms is hard because, in order to communicate concepts to the universe of relevant players, one needs a sort of “middleware” language able to traverse domains far and beyond the most obvious one of warfare. As America heads deeper into this age of globalization—a global order fundamentally of our creating—our need for such bridging lexicons skyrockets. In a networked age, everything connects to everything else, so most of what constitutes strategic thinking nowadays is really just the arbitraging of solid thinking regarding the dynamics of competition, leveraging the surplus of conceptual understanding in one realm to raise such understanding in others. That may sound like there's “nothing new under the sun,” but more to the point, it admits that in today's still “unflat” world, the sun shines more brightly in certain locations and more dimly in others.

Today's military community must be able to speak in many tongues. It needs clear understanding of its own creeds and catechisms while simultaneously achieving a sort of operational non-denominationalism that will transform jointness into a serious “unity of effort” encompassing the rest of government, allies, host nations, and the private sector beyond. It needs, in short, a level of self-awareness never before achieved (e.g., this is what we do, how we do it, and how it links up to everything else), and a universal translator through which such descriptions can be transmitted to other communities.

This book of essays, based loosely upon an online roundtable discussion conducted by the authors concerning Frans Osinga's brilliant book, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, builds upon Osinga's effort to explain and expand Boyd's efforts to create such strategic metalanguage, meaning a language that can be used to embed or contextualize strategic concepts among disparate domains. Boyd's legacy, as substantial as it is, survives only through such grammatical extensions, further pattern recognitions, and the like. Like any good gospel, his words are made living by means of social networks, so the fact that these essays emanated from bloggers engaged in online discussions is entirely appropriate to both Boyd's content and his ultimate aims.

Comments

[Jarrod Myrick]

Very interesting. Congratulations gentlemen.

[David Emery]

In this era of 'publish on demand', why is the original Osinga book so d**nded expensive?! (If the author got half of the $120 asking price that would be some comfort/justification, but it's still way to expensive for Joe Average Reader...)