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The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Dr. Grant T. Hammond

The Mind of War went on to my “must read” list after attending the Boyd 07 Conference at Quantico, where I heard Dr. Frans Osinga deliver a keynote presentation on the theories of Colonel John Boyd, based on Osinga’s exhaustive study of Boyd’s personal papers, which culminated first in a PhD dissertation and then later was published as Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. Col. Osinga credits Boyd associate Dr. Grant Hammond and The Mind of War with introducing him to the ideas of John Boyd and inspiring him in his own intellectual journey as a student to try to understand and explain Boyd’s strategic theories.

Unlike Osinga or Robert Coram, author of the celebrated biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Hammond enjoyed the advantage of having had a personal and intellectual relationship with Col. Boyd, one that Hammond called “Transforming”. This gives Hammond’s shorter biography insights into how Boyd’s mind worked that Coram and Osinga miss (or more properly, could not have known), including  the “perverse glee” Boyd felt in discovering and exploring the Darwinian mismatch between perception and unfolding reality. While Robert Coram wrote about the demanding aspect that collaborators sometimes felt when dealing with the relentlessly autodidactic John Boyd, who could call at any time of the day or night and talk for hours, Hammond was actually on the receiving end of this treatment for six years:

“Let me illustrate by going through my notes of three telephone calls in the space of a single week in november 1995….He went through differences in his work,the portion that dealt with static or fixed data (energy manuverability) and that dealt with potential….He prefers potentialities. He then proceeded to review his latest reading. In rather short order, I was instructed to read Konrad Lorenz’s Behind The Mirror, Ernst Mayer’s The Growth of Biological Thought, Gerard Radnitsky and W.W Bartley’s edited collection entitled Evolutionary Epistemology (focus on particularly on Karl Popper’s essay and that of Donald T. Campbell) and Stuart A. Kauffman’s The Origins of Order.

….From biology to chaos, future defense scenarios to information war, Sun Tzu and Musashi to the Ames Spy Case, genetic algorithms to how one thinks and learns, airbase security and police to the Japanese art of war, evolutionary epistemology and the growth of biological thought – to Boyd, they are all clearly interrelated.” [ 184-186]

Note that Hammond’s description of just three phone calls with John Boyd ran over three pages of text and the above excerpt reveals only a fraction of the concepts and source material discussed. From Hammond’s The Mind of War the reader gains a good appreciation of how Boyd’s analogically oriented, synthesizing, pattern recognizing, fluidly connective mind worked in practice with a personality or character that could make Boyd competitive, confrontational, admirable, brusque, antagonizing or heroic at different turns.

The Mind of War also puts Boyd’s role in the “military reform movement” into greater clarity and sheds more light on Boyd’s retirement years of declining personal health, intellectual epiphanies, and partial rehabilitation with the Air Force brass that continued to nevertheless inflict slights and insults on the rebel who had repeatedly “bucked the system. While The Mind of War is primarily an intellectual biography of John Boyd, the human dimension is far from absent in Hammond’s writing.

For the serious student of modern strategy or aficianados of Col. John Boyd, Grant Hammond’s The Mind of War is a must read book. It forms a necessary bridge between Robert Coram’s classic style, popular, biography and Osinga’s strictly military-academic treatise on Boydian strategic theory. The Mind of War helps the reader better comprehend either book while remaining a great and highly informative work in it’s own right. Strongly recommended.

P.W. Singer at TED

Remember to check out the Wired for War Symposium at CTLab Review!

Also check out How to Maintain America’s Strategic Advantage co-authored by my twitteramigo Zach Tumin of Harvard’s Leadership for a Network World (LNW) Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

John Robb is testified today before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capability on Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities. John put up a PDF of his testimony at Global Guerillas, here is a snippet but you should read John’s text in full:

MY TESTIMONY

….Against this dark picture, a combination of assault by a global economic system running amok and organic insurgency by superempowered small groups, there are few hard and fast recommendations I can provide. It’s complex. However, it is clear:

• We will need to become more efficient. Force structure will shrink. Most of the major weapons systems we currently maintain will become too expensive to maintain, particularly given their limited utility against the emerging threat. Current efforts from the F-22 and the Future Combat System appear to be particularly out of step with the evolving environment. Smaller and more efficient systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination systems built on open platforms (as in a Intranet) that alloworganic growth in complexity make much more sense.
• We should focus on the local. In almost all of these future conflicts, our ability to manage local conditions is paramount. Soldiers should be trained to operate in uncertain environments (the work of Don Vandergriff is important here) so they can deal with local chaos. Packages of technologies and methodologies should be developed to enable communities in distressed areas to become resilient – as in, they are able to produce the food, energy, defense, water, etc. they need to prosper without reference to a dysfunction regional or national situation. Finally, we need to get build systematic methods formanaging large numbers of militias that are nominally allied with us (like Anbar Awakening, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, etc.). Even a simple conversion of a commercial “customer relationship management” system would provide better institutional memory and oversight than we currently have.
• We need to get better at thinking about military theory. Military theory is rapidly evolving due to globalization. It’s amazing to me that the structures and organizations tasked with this role don’t provide this. We are likely in the same situation as we wereprior to WW2, where innovative thinking by JFC Fuller and Liddell Hart on armored warfare didn’t find a home in allied militaries, but was read feverishly by innovators in the German army like Guderian and Manstein. Unfortunately, in the current environment, most of the best thinking on military theory is now only tangentially associated with the DoD (worse, it’s done, as in my situation, on a part time basis).

A classy move on John’s part to take the time during his testimony highlight Don Vandergriff’s program of adaptive leadership ( another guy whom Congress should be hearing from)!

 Chairman Ike Skelton (D -Mo), judging by his impressive reading list in military affairs, is a Member of Congress who would seem to be keen to hear what John had to say. I’m very pleased to see Congress drawing upon the insights of strategic thinkers like John Robb and Tom Barnett, instead of the usual parade of niche specialists from the Beltway tanks.

The Armed Forces Journal on the economic decline of America.

The author makes too many assumptions regarding China’s resiliency.  The opacity of China’s hybrid, mercantilist-driven, political economy makes estimates of it’s true strengths and weaknesses difficult. We know how many treasury bills China has bought from us but not the real extent of hidden debt, underemployment or inflation. China’s leadership did not vastly increase the size of it’s paramilitary forces in the past decade because they were confident that it would all be smooth sailing ahead.

ADDENDUM:

Chinese premier takes on politics 2.0

Nothing that the scientist in this article has to say about counterterrorism strategy would be regarded as news in this general area of the blogosphere but it is interesting that a marine biologist came up with conclusions similar to those of leading defense thinkers.

Take A Darwinian Approach To A Dangerous World: Ecologist Preaches ‘Natural’ Security For Homeland Defense

….Sagarin, an ecologist who’s normally more concerned with the urchins and starfish in tide pools, got to thinking about these things as a Congressional science fellow less than a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He saw Washington building an expensive new shell, erecting large barriers around buildings and posting guards and cameras in every doorway.

“Everything was about more guards, more guns, and more gates,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘If I’m an adaptive organism, how would I cope with this?'”

….In nature, a threat is dealt with in several ways. There’s collectivism, where one meerkat sounds the alarm about an approaching hawk, or camouflage, where the ptarmigan hides in plain sight. There’s redundancy, like our wisdom teeth, or unpredictable behavior, like the puffer fish’s sudden, spiky pop.

Under the unyielding pressure of 3.5 billion years of evolution, the variety of defenses is beyond counting. But they all have a few features in common. A top-down, build-a-wall, broadcast-your-status approach “is exactly the opposite of what organisms do,” Sagarin says.

An immune system, for example, is not run by a central authority. It relies on a distributed network of autonomous agents that sense trouble on the local level and respond, adapting to the threat and signaling for backup without awaiting orders from HQ.