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Top Billing! Inkspots (Jason Fritz) – Antony Beevor’s “The Second World War”: Strategic analysis and myth-busting

In the acknowledgements to his latest history, TheSecond World War, Antony Beevor says that he wrote this comprehensive tome on one of the biggest events in human history because he wanted to fill in the gaps to his own knowledge of the topic. But, he says, “above all it is an attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.” In this, Beevor succeeds where no other historian I have read has. Weighing in at 833 pages (with notes), Beevor deftly describes and analyzes the political and military strategic events, people, and decisions that started, fought, and ended World War II. Potentially more importantly, he debunks one myth after another surrounding this war.

Geographically and politically, the European and Pacific Theaters were fairly cordoned off from each other, outside of the involvement of the United States and the British, but not entirely. Beevor pulls the thread to examine how the Soviet victory at Khalkhin Gol in eastern Mongolia in the summer of 1939 ensured that the Soviets stayed out of the eastern war (Beevor is not, of course, the only historian to make this important point) and how that affected both theaters. As he pulls the thread further, the interactions of east and west, Axis and Allies, become more acute. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have almost no strategic interaction (there are a handful of exceptions), but their actions on three or four fronts each create a strategic graph theory problem of biblical proportions for the Allies. As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank. Beevor is at his best in this work when he examines these interdependencies of these fronts, the Allies’ force structure to address them, and the inter- and intra-national political considerations.  For students of strategy, this alone makes The Second World War worth reading.

Fast Transients –What hath Boyd wrought? 

Or “wrote.” Written.

Boyd is sometime criticized for not having sat down and written Patterns and his other briefings into nice books. They claim that his ideas are hard to fathom just from his briefings.

But Boyd’s framework, although deep and complex, is not esoteric. In addition to “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd produced a continuous stream of writings from August 1976 until January of the year before his death:

Item	Date	Pages	Words	W/P
D&C	9/1976	–	3,900	–
PoC	12/1986	185	21,000	113.5
OD	5/1987	37	3,400	92
SG	6/1987	59	4,700	80
CS	8/1992	38	2,900	76
EOWL	1/1996	4	350	87.5
TOTAL (x. D&C)		323	32,350	100
TOTAL			36,250

“Destruction and Creation” is a special case. Set in 12 pt. Arial and double-spaced, it runs about 15 pages or slightly over 250 words/page. Applying that ratio to the body of Boyd’s post-retirement work equates to a book of some 145 pages.  Which is not long, but not insubstantial, either, about the same length of Cleary’s The Japanese Art of War or the Griffith edition of Sun Tzu, both including the commentaries but without appendices. By comparison, the Sun Tzu text itself typically runs 8,000 – 10,000 words depending on the translator.

Given how long it takes to write a manuscript, not to mention finding a publisher who will promote it, it’s hard to see where Boyd would have found the time. Publishers typically want manuscripts of 80-100,000 words, which produces a 400 page book that can be priced in the $25-30 range (today’s prices). Check out Tom Barnett’s books, for example. Obviously, established authors can get different deals, but Boyd would have been a risk. And it would have been a big risk for Boyd because only a tiny fraction of manuscripts by unknown authors ever get published….

Campaign Reboot – Decision making and Failing at mental modelling 

Ribbonfarm –Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope 

Dart Throwing Chimp – A Chimp’s-Eye View of a Forecasting Experiment and When Is a Forecast Wrong?

Steven Pressfield Online – (Callie Oettinger) Outreach, Part I: The Introduction and (Shawn Coyne) Why It Takes So Long to Publish a Book

Slouching Toward Columbia – Kindly Seeking Mastery?

Dr. Tdaxp – The Rise of the Communists and the Fall of the KMT  

Michigan War Studies Review – Fighting Elites: A History of U.S. Special Forces and The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century 

That’s it.

I wanted to offer my thoughts about Boyd & Beyond 2012, now that the dust has settled and the participants are recovering from two days of intense intellectual engagement by day and partying at night.

First, thanks are in order to those who made Boyd & Beyond 2012 a reality:

To the United States Marine Corps, for use of their facilities at the Command and Staff College, the Expeditionary Warfare School and the Al Gray Research Center.

To Colonel Stan Coerr, USMC – the  principal organizer of the Boyd & Beyond Conferences.  It is Colonel Coerr’s hard work during the year that makes these events possible.

To Major Marcus Mainz, USMC – whose dynamic style helped facilitate a very tight schedule of speakers and kept everyone well fed at lunch.

To J. Scott Shipman – my co-blogger, friend and the official host (with his lovely wife Kristen) of the annual Boyd & Beyond Party, where the conversation continued into the night ( they were also my most hospitable hosts as well).

To the archivists and staff of the Al Gray Research Center who made our examination of Colonel John Boyd’s private papers, briefs and personal library enjoyable and informative.

To the folks from Adaptive Leader, who provided the coffee, water and snacks, of which I had too much 🙂

And finally to Gahlord Dewald for creating a much  better home for the conference’s twitter archive.

Now on to the conference itself……

Everyone had their favorite presenters and the number of questions often exceeded the time available, but we could loosely group featured individuals into clusters based on their role at the conference:

THEORISTS:  Dr. Chet Richards, Dr. Venkat Rao, Dr. Terry Barnhart, Michael Moore, Matt Lungren

WARRIORS: Brigadier General Stacy Clardy, USMC, Captain Paul Tremblay, Gunnery Sergeant Nick Galvan and Damien O’Connell ( my apologies to Nick and Damien as I entered the case study after it had already begun and did not catch the intros, Nick might be a Master Gunnery Sergeant and I do not know Damien’s rank at all)

SCHOLARS:  Dr. Katya Drozdova, Adam Elkus, Mike Miller

PRACTITIONERS: Greg Wilcox, Marshall Wallace, Pete Turner, Mike Grice, Gahlord Dewald, Chris Cox, Tom Hayden, William McNulty, Jonathan Brown

MASTERS of CEREMONIES: Colonel Stan Coerr, Major Marcus Mainz, Colonel G.I. Wilson

SPECIAL GUEST: Mary Ellen Boyd, daughter of Colonel John Boyd 

Some of the highlights from my perspective:

Chet Richards was in the keynote speaker role, as befitting his status as the authorized briefer of Colonel Boyd’s work. Chet spoke for an hour on the intellectual evolution of John Boyd’s ideas, based on this paper ” John Boyd, the Conceptual Spiral and the Meaning of Life“ available for download at Fast Transients.  I also recommend Chet’s essay “ The Origins of John Boyd’s A Discourse on Winning and Losing”  in this slim volume and perusing the DNI archive at DNIPOGO.

I took the most notes on Chet’s lecture of any of the talks and was highly intrigued by what he termed “Boyd’s wonderful trinity”, the relationship of “Insight, Imagination and Initiative”, partly because it relates directly to a major research project I am currently undertaking at work; also, the application of Boyd’s “Theme for Vitality and Growth” being intended to scale from individuals to grand strategy and beyond (literally, the “theme” overarches grand strategy as a particularly attractive distillation of the civilizational narrative, at least as I interpret Boyd).

Dr. Venkatesh Rao, who has the excellent blog Ribbonfarm and the even better book Tempo, spoke on mental models, stating that “mental models are like addictions” and that situations or arguments that validated our mental models was akin to “an addict getting a hit”. Venkat shared lessons learned regarding common mental models, advising “training opponents using their unconscious model”; that the best strategy was not “faster [tempo] vs. getting inside [their Loop], but both” that we should get inside and then accelerate our tempo; that we should strive for “low tempo with richer moves that are natural to the system” which will beat a high tempo of artificial moves.

In both instances of Chet Richards and Venkat Rao, I felt the stringent ban on powerpoint maintained by Boyd & Beyond was something of a handicap to their excellent talks. While I fully understand and sympathize with the reluctance of military personnel who are bombarded daily with endless streams of junk powerpoint garbage to see more shape and arrow slideware at a conference, it would have been very helpful for the audience to have seen, for example, the figures from Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral that Chet was analyzing.

While I am familiar with Boyd’s briefs, 1) I don’t have them memorized and I can only imagine that  2) the first time participants would have benefited from the visual to an even greater degree.  Likewise, Venkat could have used a slide for his mental models and lessons rather than the too small whiteboard on a tripod. Some moderation and common sense in enforcing “no powerpoint” should be considered in light of the nature of the presentation (particularly since John Boyd became well known from….well….briefing….with slides!).

In the “Rise of the Marines” section, Brigadier General Clardy gave a forceful brief on his COIN operations in Anbar during the start of the “Anbar Awakening” that was covered by AOL Defense News:

QUANTICO, Va: Even though the administration’s strategic guidance swears off “large-scale, prolonged stability operations” while emphasizing air and naval forces, the lessons that ground troops learned in Afghanistan and Iraq will remain vitally relevant, both because we will still do stability operations in the future and because those skills apply to other kinds of conflicts as well, declared a senior advisor to the Marine Corps Commandant.

“We’re going to do more of this in the future, not necessarily less,” said Brig. Gen. H. Stacy Clardy, the Marines’ operations director. After 10 years of war, he said, “we’ve changed what we consider to be our core competencies.” Alongside the traditional Marine skills in attack, defense, and amphibious operations, “we’ve included now, as [has] the Army, stability operations.”

“It’d be nice to be able to say we’re going to go in, do the job, and get out,” said Clardy. “In reality, it may not work out that way.”

Even when future Marines can achieve their objective quickly — for example, a “non-combatant evacuation” (NEO) to get US diplomats and tourists out of a danger zone — they will still benefit from an appreciation of foreign cultures and the ability to interact with non-US civilians, officials, and security forces. So, said Clardy, the Marine Corps must give its troops “the tools to engage with populations, even if only for a limited period of time.”

Clardy was speaking at a conference at Marine Corps University, the hub of the service’s professional military education system, centered on the teachings of the late Col. John Boyd. Boyd was an Air Force fighter pilot whose research into Korean War dogfights led him to deemphasize high technology as a decisive factor. Instead Boyd ascribed fundamental importance to the human factors of how opposing combatants struggle to out-think each other, with victory going neither to the strong nor to the swift but to the most mentally agile. A fiery and confrontational prophet little honored in his own service, “Genghis John” had a lasting influence on the Marine Corps, and lately a Boyd-like fascination with human factors is rising also in the Army.

“Without what John Boyd proposed and what the Marine Corps absorbed,” said Clardy, “I’m not convinced we would have been successful in Iraq at all.”

Clardy and other attendees at the conference argued that Boyd’s emphasis on human factors — mind over matter, people over technology, skillful maneuver over raw power — holds true not just in a “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency campaign but even in no-holds-barred combat. After all, said Clardy, for a Marine or Army squad in Afghanistan that must defend its base, patrol, and react to ambushes, “the world for you on a daily basis looks a lot like any conventional op.”…..

In response to a question from me, General Clardy stated that a polycentric, decentralized, insurgency like the one in Iraq was tactically easier but a more difficult problem on a strategic level. The general was followed by Captain Paul Tremblay whose talk ended in his riveting account of how he and Bravo Company turned a feared Taliban ambush site into a shooting gallery for the Marines by using blitzkrieg tactics, killing 41 armed Taliban, routing the insurgents and pacifying the area.

A special mention should be made of the trip to the Al Gray Research Center which houses the papers and books of Col. John Boyd. Earlier, Colonel GI Wilson, had entertained us with the backstory of how the USMC, under the aegis of Lt. General Paul Van Riper, really acquired the Boyd collection for Quantico, with the added bonus of sticking it to the US Air Force. Mary Ellen Boyd also spoke movingly of that time, when her father was dying of cancer, when the Marines arrived at her parents small condo and carefully photographed and removed years of research, notes, briefing papers and books.

The archivist discussed the transfer, organization and presentation of the collection, John Boyd’s exhaustive marginalia and notations ( Boyd’s heavily marked up copy of On War was on display, which I picked up and perused) and the contents of the briefing files and papers. We dug in to all of these. The Al Gray Center, it must be said, is much larger than the Boyd archive and is a first rate facility with a professional staff ready to assist scholars and students in their research of military history. It is a must see if you visit Quantico.

The practitioners and scholars also gave some stimulating talks:

Marshall Wallace, a Quaker humanitarian NGO activist and Director of the Do No Harm Project. While a pacifist is seemingly an odd choice at a conference devoted to a military strategist, Marshall’s themes and ideas regarding decision dynamics in conflict zones were very warmly received by the audience and recognized as being strongly congruent as he illustrated how aid and aid workers, blindly inserted, can aggravate or extend conflicts ( an idea partly explored in The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts).

Wiliam McNulty, the co-founder of Team Rubicon gave a very inspiring talk about reintegrating veterans through “first-in” humanitarian missions to remote areas of current conflict zones, getting there long before the less nimble but heavyweight NGO’s can take over.

Pete Turner, a co-author of 29 Articles with 75 months of deployment in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan, in various capacities for the DoD and USG, gave a rapid-fire talk on transition operations being a different breed of animal from COIN. stressing “cultural acuity” and aggressively building up the role of the host nation partner. “Wasta is for the host nation [official]” Turner stated ” If you can’t talk transition, you can’t do COIN”. Turner dismissed our current efforts at cultural awareness and language programs as “Disneyland training” – a point that was strongly seconded (if not more robustly) by a later speaker, former intelligence officer and CORDS program official Tom Hayden, who compared American COIN efforts in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Dr. Katya Drozdova: The former Hoover Institution Fellow gave a provocative talk about partitioning Afghanistan along ethnosectarian lines – or at least moving from a strong central government to a looser federation with autonomy for major Afghan demographic groups.

Gahlord Dewald, a social media expert and strategist, spoke on the theme of “dreadful efficiency” :

….Dreadful efficiency occurs whenever the path of energy or interest or attention is so straight and so clear that there is no room for the survival of anything else. It’s like the difference between a city water main and a stream. The water main may pass thousands of gallons of water for years before any significant life takes hold in the pipes. The stream would be supporting life within days.

Chris Cox, a British political consultant did an excellent analysis of strategic political dynamics – including recent American political history – something that I think rattled some of the audience members, much to my amusement. If I was ever running for political office, I’d hire Chris in a heartbeat.

Adam Elkus gave one of the best talks of the conference, on par with Chet Richards and Venkat Rao’s in terms of depth, speaking on “OODA and Robotic Weapons“. Leading with “The metaphor is not Terminator but Starcraft”, Elkus held the audience’s rapt attention as he dismantled a great deal of popular rubbish regarding drones and pointed to the larger, strategic implications of the deployment of autonomous systems within the larger operational context. I first met Adam at the Boyd Conference in 2007 and it has been a pleasure watching him mature into a first rate scholar and thinker on defense issues.

Afterwards, we closed Boyd & Beyond 2012 by enjoying great food and adult beverages at Scott Shipman’s. A wonderful time being had by all.

See you in 2013!

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Creating a Lean R&D System, by Terry Barnhart

Friend of this blog, and friend, Terry Barnhart’s new book is available on Amazon. Terry is one of the leading thinkers among those who admire John Boyd’s work.

Terry has spoken at the last three Boyd and Beyond events, and much of the substance of those talks are reflected in this book. I’ve read most of it, and believe it will have wide applicability outside the “lean” community. His sections on the use of A3’s (the subject of his talks at B&B this year) for problem identification/solution and rapid learning have potential at the personal and the organizational level. At the core, Terry is advocating a culture of innovation and providing tools he has proven in practice.

Recommended.

A version is cross posted at To Be or To Do.

[ by Charles Cameron — on play, games, vertigo and koan — technically this is a ludibrium, a jeu, a jest — a dervish whirl for the mind ]
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I’m joining the conversation Jane McGonigal is leading over on Big Questions Online — our topic is How Might Video Games Be Good for Us? — and she came up with a gem of a quote from Huizinga‘s Homo Ludens which pointed me to two other quotes that are part of the collection I keep in mind, one from Wittgenstein, the other from Roger Caillois.

**

I’ve strung them together here because the way the mind hops and skips from one idea to the next in this series enchants me:

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There’s more to those three quotes taken together, along with the leaps between them, than there is in keeping them apart. They have, what was it Wittgenstein said? — a family resemblance. They belong together. You could start with the third quote, in fact, and then hop to the first and second, and the effect would be much the same, you could make a ring of them.

**

They spiral so closely in on one another, indeed, as to induce ilynx, vertigo. Let’s keep on spinning.

To my mind, the master of vertigo in our times is Jorge Luis Borges, who uses the word “vertiginous” at least four times in his fictions — my favorite arriving in his story The Circular Ruins, where he writes:

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.

Blam! — is there anything more vertiginous than paradox, enigma, koan, mystery?

**

In perspective, there’s the vanishing point. In service to others, there’s forgetfulness of self.

**

While we’re on the subject of play, I have a confession to make. Several times on this blog and elsewhere, I have cited the art historian Edgar Wind as saying that Ficino’s motto was “studiossime ludere” and that he translated it “play most assiduously” — Marsilio Ficino being the intellectual hub of Renaissance Florence under the Medici. When I was putting together my initial post to Jane McGonigal for her Big Questions discussion, I wanted to use that quote, but couldn’t quite find it in the source I thought it came from. Well, I’ve been doing some checking since then, and Wind does quote something very similar in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance — but the phrase is “studiosissime ludere”, and what he writes is this —

Serio ludere was a Socratic maxim of Cusanus, Ficino, Pico, Calcagnini — not to mention Bocchi, who introduced the very phrase into the title of his Symbolicae quaestiones: ‘quas serio ludebat’.[1]

which he then footnotes thus (translation coming up shortly):

[1.] cf. Ficino, In parmeniden (Prooemium), Opera, p. 1137: ‘Pythagorae, Socratisque et Platonis mos erat, ubique divina mysteria figuris involucrisque obtegere, … iocari serio, et studiosissime ludere.’

Then there’s Ioan Couliano, another great scholar of Renaisssance thought — and a victim of Ceausescu‘s secret police — in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, translates for us (pp. 37-38):

Pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyphics, emblems and impresae were wonderfully suited to the playful spirit of Florentine Platonism, to the mysterious and “mystifying” quality Ficino believed it had. “Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato had the habit of hiding all divine mysteries behind the veil of figurative language to protect their wisdom modestly from the Sophist’s boastfulness, of joking seriously and playing assiduously, iocari serio et studiosissime ludere.” [34] That famous turn of phrase of Ficino’s — translation of a remark by Xenophon concerning the Socratic method — depicts, at bottom, the quintessence of every phantasmic process, whether it be Eros, the Art of Memory, magic, or alchemy — the ludus puerorum, preeminently a game for children. What, indeed, are we doing in any of the above if not playing with phantasms, trying to keep up with their game, which the benevolent unconscious sets up for us? Now, it is not easy to play a game whose rules are not known ahead of time. We must apply ourselves seriously, assiduously, to try and understand and learn them so that the disclosures made to us may not remain unanswered by us.

Couliano footnotes the quote thus:

[34.] Proem. in Platonis Parmenidem (Opera, II, p. 1137). This is simply the Latin translation of an expression Xenophon had used to designate the Socratic method (paizein spoude). On the custom of the “serious games” of Ficino and his contemporaries, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance 3d ed. (Oxford, 1980), pp. 236-38.

**

Okay, I was trying to check a Latin tag that I’d obviously been quoting from memory, and things just kept on spinning — and weaving — together.

So where are we now? We’re talking of “playing with phantasms, trying to keep up with their game” (Couliano) — and thus back at that Borges quote, too, with its “incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed”…

Which is us.

I mean, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

**

Okay. Practical matters. To go along with Witty Wittgenstein and the others on my recommended reading list, here’s an image of McGonigal’s dissertation and book:

The dissertation is available here as a .pdf: the book is available here on Amazon.

The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper

Influential ABC News Senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper has a new book coming out in November entitled The Outpost, about the battle of Outpost Keating in 2009 that the Taliban lost but inflicted high casualties on American troops and led to an ignominious withdrawal. Tapper’s PR folks have sent me an advance review copy, and at first glance, the book uncomfortably reminded me of Sebastian Junger’s WAR.

Sure enough, the site of Combat Outpost Keating in Nuristan is compared by Tapper to Junger’s deadly Korengal valley by page 6.  The xenophobic and remote Nuristanis were the last Afghans to convert to Islam, only by force, in the 1890’s. Their distant kin, the Kalash, are polytheists still.  Great place for an American outpost.

Looks like a gripping story. Will review in the near future.