Foreword
Tom Barnett posted up on his foreword to The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War
…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….
Read the rest here.
Barnett and Boyd shared a teaching modality, “the brief”. Here’s a head to head comparison:
Colonel John Boyd:
Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett:
September 26th, 2008 at 3:32 am
If you click through to YouTube, off to the right are several more segments of the Boyd brief.
September 26th, 2008 at 8:40 am
It would be nice if there was an entire Boyd brief available. I asked Chet Richards about this on his blog and he told me that none were ever saved.
September 27th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
It boggles my mind that there is no recording anywhere of Boyd giving his presentation (any of them). Did he have some sort of rule against it? The Youtube video here is a great example. It appears Boyd just finished the formal part of the brief and this is just the Q and A. Did they only turn the camera on -after-? Did somebody tape an episode of Matlock over the first part by accident? That makes no sense to me!
Has anybody actually gone to the trouble of contacting the places where Boyd briefed and asked if there is any video of him speaking? I remember when camcorders where everywhere and people taped everything just because they could! You can’t tell me some tech geek didn’t do it.
September 28th, 2008 at 6:10 am
"You know what progress is? Confusion at a higher level." 1st time I’m hearin’ the legendary "Genghis John" speakin’. This is great! When was this recorded on tape? Never knew it was on Youtube. Not enough profane though, this is queer.
September 28th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I’m not aware of any rule against it – there are sections of various talks floating on youtube – Slapout of the SWC found this audio set on the conceptual spiral:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_fjaqAiOmc
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Why there was no brief preserved in it’s entirety ? Perhaps the length. Perhaps the lack of interest on the part of Boyd himself to review for presentation atmospherics or record past stages of his evolution as a thinker. Or maybe it’s sitting in a videocam on a garage shelf somewhere.
September 28th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
The original online source.
http://homepage.mac.com/ace354/Boyd/iMovieTheater39.html (more videos to click around up top)
http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/wa/default?user=ace354&templatefn=FileSharing27.html&xmlfn=TKDocument.27.xml&sitefn=RootSite.xml&aff=consumer&cty=US&lang=en
(interview transcripts)