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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.

 I would like to say “thanks” to whomever is associated with the Royal Norwegian Navy that placed a bulk order for copies of The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War through The Norwegian Library House. Much appreciated!

Dr. Chet Richards –Certain to Win

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

James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly recently posted on Colonel John Boyd ( Hat tip to Fred Zimmerman) and I missed it in the pre-Holiday chaos:

First in a series of year end pensees: grand strategy

Could end up being a very brief series, but here is one to start:

As my wife and I near our third consecutive Christmas/New Year stretch outside the United States, mainly we feel lucky for all that we’ve been able to see and do and experience in China and its environs.

But of course there are costs. And while I wouldn’t exactly put this at the top of the list of things we regret missing out on (compared, say, with seeing our families and friends etc), I am in fact sorry not to have been around for the last few installments of the John Boyd Conferences, where people interested in Boyd’s theories of competition gather to apply them to topics ranging from financial meltdowns to handling Iraq. Much more about Boyd via links you can find here, here (second item), here,  here, and here, for starters.

Read the rest here.

Dr. Chet Richards is (semi) liveblogging Boyd ’08  At the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Tight working group this year, featuring John Robb as the keynote speaker and Robert Paterson as a driving force behind the Boyd 2008 conference and master of ceremonies.

I could not make it out this year unfortunately, but Chet has updates !:

Sun Tzu is Alive and Well

Sun Tzu in Charlottetown

Live from Boyd 2008

Boyd 2008: Community resources

Robb on resilience

John Robb is on

Boyd 2008 Has Started

Other Links:

Robert Paterson – Boyd 2008 Conference Dec 6-7 Making sense of “Interesting Times” The Agenda 

Global Dashboard – The Boyd Conference 2008

Official Website:

The Boyd 2008 Conference