More Books!
Just picked up a few new reads…..
Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Robert Coram, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Boyd ’07, has a new biography of the legendary military visionary and Marine Lt. General Victor “Brute” Krulak, reviewed here by Max Boot and here by Tony Perry (Hat tip to Dr. Chet Richards). Having thumbed a few pages, Krulak appears a complicated man – gifted, dauntless and extremely driven but also possessed of a mean streak, edging at times toward petty cruelty.
Bloodlands I intend to read in a “Hitler-Stalin/Nazi-Soviet Comparison” series along with Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia
CURRENTLY READING:
Human Face of War
After reading approxmately a third of The Human Face of War by Dr. Jim Storr, a retired Lt. Colonel, King’s Regiment and an instructor at the UK Defence Academy, I will say that if you are going to read only one book on modern military thought this year, it should be The Human Face of War. It’s that good.
Aside from a reflexive hostility toward John Boyd’s OODA Loop ( though not, strangely enough, toward the substantive epistemology advocated by Boyd that the diagram represented), Storr’s tome is an epistle of intellectual clarity on military theory that deserves to be widely read.
ADDENDUM:
NDU Press recommends, and I concur, this review of The Human Face of War by Col. Colonel Clinton J. Ancker III. Ancker, like Storr, is an expert on military doctrine, so it is a well-informed review by a professional peer.
November 26th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Great group of books! Zen, you nailed Storr’s position on Boyd and the high quality of The Human Face of War. One attribute of some Boyd followers that has continued to leave me cold is hostility towards those who question his theories. I believe we honor Boyd when we question, as he questioned everything. BRUTE is as good as BOYD; Coram is a national treasure; (btw I got lucky in writing the first review on Amazon).
November 26th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Joint Force Quarterly ran a very positive review of Storr’s book earlier this year that might be of interest: https://digitalndulibrary.ndu.edu/u?/ndupress,40724
November 26th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
NDU,
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Thanks ! Added to post above…
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Scott,
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Totally agree. Had Boyd lived longer he’d have continued progressing, refining his ideas, some of which would have changed. The same holds true for CvC; had he lived another 20 years, On War might have looked quite different in the later chapters. Not every thinker is "frozen in time" with a closed system in mind.
November 26th, 2010 at 10:27 pm
The problem with a lot of critiques of both Boyd and Clausewitz is that most seem to misunderstand their ideas on a basic level. Clausewitz is tarred by BHL for the sins of both Moltkes and Willhelm, Boyd for the misinterpretation of the OODA Loop that many have.
November 27th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Boyd and Clausewitz share the burden of being easily perceived as empty shells into which anyone can stuff their own personal animus. I’m amused as much by Clausewitzians who blame Boyd for NCW or the RMA as by those who follow BLH in dismissing CvC as the Mahdi of Mass. CvC left an incomplete manuscript that has spawned almost as many Clausewi as New Testament studies has spawned historical Jesi. The CvC that emerges is pretty much the CvC the author brought with them to On War. Boyd left, possibly deliberately, a sparse body of works. This means that the Boyd that emerges from his slides and the recollections of his acolytes is sometimes someone other than John Boyd. Pointing out to the Clausewitzians that those who are aligned with Boyd are generally not supporters of NCW or RMA. I would quibble with Boyd’s treatment of Clausewitz, which draws too heavily on BLH, but Boyd did have the Paret-Howard translation so who knows what he thought. It’s unfortunate he didn’t live another ten years. People should turn their fire away from Boyd or Clausewitz and focus it on real threats to national security like BLH and Douhet.
November 27th, 2010 at 2:45 am
Mr. Fouche has quite convinced me that strategic thinking has too many acronyms to its name. ^_~
November 27th, 2010 at 4:50 am
"The problem with a lot of critiques of both Boyd and Clausewitz is that most seem to misunderstand their ideas on a basic level"
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"Boyd and Clausewitz share the burden of being easily perceived as empty shells into which anyone can stuff their own personal animus. I’m amused as much by Clausewitzians who blame Boyd for NCW or the RMA as by those who follow BLH in dismissing CvC as the Mahdi of Mass. CvC left an incomplete manuscript that has spawned almost as many Clausewi as New Testament studies has spawned historical Jesi. The CvC that emerges is pretty much the CvC the author brought with them to On War. Boyd left, possibly deliberately, a sparse body of works. This means that the Boyd that emerges from his slides and the recollections of his acolytes is sometimes someone other than John Boyd"
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I have to agree.
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Part of this stems from "oft-cited but seldom read" syndrome of dealing in secondhand understandings. There’s a strain of highly influential authors – CvC, de Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Kant, Thucydides, Marx, Newton, Plato, Locke, Smith etc. etc. – who are quoted and talked about far more often than they are read firsthand. Misunderstandings that are "good enough" to give the curious some comprehension of important concepts, which can be communicated concisely, tend to beat out in the marketplace of ideas more accurate interpretations that are ponderous, obtusely expressed or belabored. 19th century German philosophers, except maybe Nieztsche and Marx in his more comedic efforts at political journalism, are turgid prose even in translation.
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Secondly, some of them are not easy to understand firsthand either; there’s a lot of room for honest disagreement and unintentional error ( granted that there’s far too much dishonest distortion also going on as ppl bend arguments to fit agendas). Boyd read every word of On War but Frans Osinga believed Boyd’s assessment of Clausewitz to have been flawed. Both Boyd and Clausewitz were in the *process* of articulating subtle, dynamic and seemingly paradoxical aspects of strategy and war, neither finished, each were highly critical of contemporaries in a way that colored their thought, and left behind a mass of papers, scrawled marginalia and (in Boyd’s case) old-fashioned briefing slides. My impression is that either man would have been unhappy if they knew their work was being regarded as dogma.
November 27th, 2010 at 5:59 am
Scott, It is not surprising to me at all that folks who knew Boyd or have really studied his work are more likely than not to be hostile about the criticism. This book, Mark recommends is perfect case in point. In the first few pages it is stated that Storr takes issue with the fact that anything significant could be taken from aerial combat and then on page 12, Storr takes aim at the OODA loop – the "loop" as a loop itself, not Boyd’s actual representation. Supposedly a very smart experienced man has apparently not looked very deeply, and why would that be? In my experience, it’s not even as Adam says that the critics misunderstand, it’s more that they simply don’t go beyond the most cursory of elements before dismissing. Someone point me to it but I’ve read a significant amount in regard to Boyd’s work and don’t recall ever seeing a real critical review of Destruction and Creation. It’s all "fighter pilot" suff or loop-de-loop. Names to remain out of this, but I’ve read some supposedly pretty smart folks write "well nobody thinks /makes decision that way (OODA), Boyd adds nothing." Really? Well as a fighter pilot, the first time I read his work, it made perfect sense to me, the fighter-on-fighter seemed an excellent example, and Oh, I was working at the time in the command control world and the Naval Electronic System Cmd (eventually SPAWAR) technical director Dr. Joel Lawson had published a paper on C2 which for all intents and purposes was OODA – a feedback loop for command and control. He and Boyd had arrived at the same process independently one coming from "men fight wars" the other from :"C2 is a feedback process of man and machine." Lawson was very well respected in his world, so…?
OBTW, I’ve always been somewhat puzzled and amused at how quickly even Boyd’s followers dismiss the aerial dual model. There is much richness there. For example, rather than an F-86 on an offensive fighter sweep above the Yalu, consider an A-7 Ironhand mission (Surface to Air Missile Suppresion) over North Vietnam, attacked by MiG 21s. (the A-7’s performance is significantly less than that of the MiG). I won’t belabor but this is not the quick conversion to a kill of Boyd’s example where O-O-D-A are essentially stacked on top of each other time wise, rather survival of the A-7 pilot and completion of his mission to protect the strike group (i.e., survival of a number of planes), turns into a more spread out O-O-D-A process, in which working to gain proper orientation is crucial to the necessary "decision to action."
November 27th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Do you look at T. Kunikov’s Reviews?http://kunikovsreviews.blogspot.com/I like his site. He focuses on the Soviet Union and the 1941-45 war in particular.He did not like Bloodlands:http://kunikovsreviews.blogspot.com/2010/10/bloodlands-by-timothy-snyder.html
Possibly worth a glance before you march too far into the vast interior of the book.
November 27th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
"The CvC that emerges is pretty much the CvC the author brought with them to On War. "
That is precisely what I tried to avoid with the Clausewitz Roundtable.
Total success is impossible, of course. Clausewitz is in the very air we breathe, if we pay attention to military history and military affairs.
But trying to see the man’s thought afresh, by reading it all without recourse to outside sources, was, I think, worth doing.
November 28th, 2010 at 5:27 am
Hi Ed,
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Storr has the OODA Loop wrong. Fundamentally, he seems to view it like this:
While OODA was definitely frequently briefed this way secondhand in military circles for a period of time, that’s not where Boyd ended up in his thinking about OODA. It’s not just "faster" or limited to a rigid sequence.
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Hi Lex,
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I think Mr. Kunikov needs to look at the secret protocols and the diplomatic record more closely. He writes here:
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"The introduction sets the stage for the rest of the book. Snyder claims the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were "allies" in the period between 1939 and 1941, at which point the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. This is akin to claiming the Germans were allies of Poland after they signed a non-aggression pact, the Poles and Soviets were allies after they signed a non-aggression pact, and the same can be argued for the Soviet Union and Japan due to their non-aggression pact. Considering that during the invasion of Poland the Red Army regularly issued orders to curb episodes of combat/violence between Red Army forces and the Wehrmacht, and the role Germany played in supplying Finland during the Winter War, this assertion is not based on factual evidence or reality "
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Umm, no. The USSR and the Third Reich had a much more extensive economic and political relationship, albeit some of it secret, as a result of the Non-aggression Pact than Germany had with Poland ( one of Hitler’s earlier diplomatic coups) or the Soviet Union did with Japan. The Soviets fed the Nazi War machine with billions of dollars worth of vital raw materials in deals that Stalin considered so important politically that he personally reviewed and signed off on the negotiating positions (He also sent one of his trusted NKVD henchmen, the murderous sycophant Dekanazov, to Berlin as Soviet ambassador).The Germans shared -albeit grudgingly – military technology with the Soviets and the two sides traded expatriate undesirables to be liquidated in respective concentration camp systems. Molotov and Hitler discussed F2F the USSR joining the war against Great Britain and a Soviet thrust into India.
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The Soviets and Nazis were allies.
November 28th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Zen-
I think you are misreading Storr.
Dismissing his critique of the OODA as "reflexive hostility" avoids confronting the serious issues he raises. First off, Storr’s book is about modern warfare, not really about a general theory of war or even strategic theory (although he uses both). So his view is a direct rival to 4GW and sons. Second, his rejection of the OODA loop can not be so easily dismissed as you have indicated. He points out that the OODA loop does not really describe how pilot aces operate, since their biographies "show almost no trace of iterative behaviour in combat . . . their effectiveness centres on rapid, decisive decision and action. It is based on superlative, largely intuitive, situational awareness . . . Thus Lind’s concept of the OODA Loop does not adequately describe the observed fact for the activity under study – fighter combat – let alone any extrapolation from them." (pp 13-14)
So if the original observation is flawed, how can the theory drawn from it not be flawed as well?
My own view, which is not as harsh as Storr’s, sees the OODA Loop applicable at the tactical level but highly restrictive at the operational and essentially a model of friction at the strategic.
November 28th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
seydlitz89-.I haven’t read Storr’s book (I keep waiting for it to reach an affordable price) so I will shallowly quibble with this excerpt: "show almost no trace of iterative behaviour in combat . . . their effectiveness centres on rapid, decisive decision and action. It is based on superlative, largely intuitive, situational awareness". .There are two loops in Boyd’s final OODA loop, an Observation -> Orientation -> Action loop and the full Observation -> Orientation -> Decision -> Action loop. One is the more common "superlative, largely intuitive, situational awareness" or what is usually referred to as the Automatic System or System 1. The full OODA loop is the equivalent of the Reflective System or System 2. http://books.google.com/books?id=7wMuF4A4XF8C&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=%22system+1%22+taleb&source=bl&ots=yqnpyR6V-X&sig=l65B_sMHrg0NWAuBpxMmrKhxOmE&hl=en&ei=Ma7yTOSFLo24sAOVhrGbDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=falseOnly the second, reflective OODA loop would be considered truly iterative. The first, automatic OOA loop only reflects iterative outcomes if the iterative outputs of the full OODA loop rehabituate it as such..Storr’s pointing out that biographies of pilot aces don’t seem to describe experiences that correspond to the OODA loop seems silly since Boyd happened to be a pilot ace himself and his ideas translated into successful (and affordable!) fighter designs and training routines. It strains credulity that the OODA loop somehow didn’t corresponded to his own experience as a pilot, trainer, and designer or that of his peers that he interfaced with over the course of a 24 year career as an Air Force officer. Storr’s argument would make more sense if Boyd had been some sort of deskbound Henry Halleck type but that was plainly not the case..The OODA loop as a general model can apply to the strategy, especially in cases where the political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels were all contained in a single solitary brain. It would be amusing to overhear a dialog between the various parts of Frederick the Great’s brain as he contemplated their interaction. I suppose time spent at Rossbach, Leuthen, or Hochkirch involved some elements of observation, orientation, decision, or action but, then again, Frederick was a curious figure..The contention that followers of Douhet and Liddell-Hart make that a single blow (a "magic bullet" as they called it during the Kennedy Assassination) can cause what James Kiras calls "strategic paralysis" is wrong. Strategic paralysis, if such an exotic creature actually exists, is so fleeting as to be useless as a strategic goal. Inasmuch as Boyd’s ideas are part of this school (and many of them are), Boyd’s strategic ideas are flawed. The examples he cites in his briefings, such as Case Yellow or Barbarossa, or Desert Storm, a plan it is said that Boyd had great influence in formulating, are only examples of operational paralysis at best. The strategic effects in those cases were fleeting and not exploited. In no wise did they rise to strategic paralysis. .Boyd’s ideas of increasing entropy in an enemy, cutting it off from outside input to make it a closed system incapable of exporting its gathering internal disorder and encouraging the formation of multiple competing centers of gravity, have merit if decoupled from the magic bulletry Boyd inherited from Liddell Hart. Such effects are better produced through strategic attrition, both moral and physical, as James Kiras pointed out in his monograph.
November 28th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Joseph-
I don’t think Boyd qualifies as "a pilot ace". Storr, we, are talking about combat fighter pilot aces from which the original concept was derived, right?
It’s the "combat" part where Storr has ya’ll over a barrel on this one. Go at him . . . do your best.
From a strategic perspective, I don’t really have a dog in this fight.
November 28th, 2010 at 11:15 pm
seydlitz89-Storr’s implied claim that Boyd’s OODA loop is erroneous because Boyd’s own combat experience was limited is the direct equivalent of accusing Clausewitz of knowing nothing about command because he spent most of his career as a staff officer. Like Eisenhower and Marshall, higher strategic need kept Clausewitz and Boyd in a training or staff role instead of a combat role. Both Clausewitz and Boyd made substantial professional contributions to their respective institutions and none of their contemporaries seems to have condemned them for their work within their assigned circle of professional competence. Boyd and Clausewitz both drew the ire of many of their superiors by advocating military reform but those superiors have been forgotten while those who supported them like Gniesenau or Krulak have enduring reputations for competence. Boyd and Clausewitz’s ideas stand or fall on their own and the excerpt from Storr you cited seems like so much counting of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
November 28th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Joseph-
How does attacking Clausewitz help Boyd?
You don’t really address Storr’s argument, and funny that since he is simply reminding you of yours. The OODA loop was based on Boyd’s assumption explaining US combat fighter pilot effectiveness during the Korea War, right? If Boyd was not an ace himself, then we are talking about at most professional speculation . . . or have a missed something? Storr argues effectively that ace effectiveness can be explained differently and does so.
November 29th, 2010 at 1:24 am
seydlitz89-You introduced a flawed citation into this thread that, taken in the isolated context you presented it in, strikes for the central jugular of Boyd’s ideas without actually hitting anything. Your particular framing of Storr’s quote implies that John Boyd, a man who served for 24 years in uniform (even if it was in the United States Air Force) is the military theory equivalent of a chicken hawk. The implication of the dog you brought to this fight is that a man who flew combat missions over Korea but never saw combat apparently learned nothing more about his chosen profession that what he picked up from the equivalent of bar chatter. Somehow the Air Force not only managed to put this man in a role where he presumed to teach other men, true warriors all, aerial combat but then proceeded to promote him and even let him design combat aircraft. Now I’m perfectly able to believe (and frequently do) that the Air Force is a criminally incompetent organization but something tells me that they wouldn’t put a man, even one who, heaven forbid, had never heard a MiG fire a shot in anger, in a combat training position who wasn’t competent at at least a semblance of that effort. Moreover, I’ve never heard any complaints from his peers or those he trained, many of whom were veterans of aerial combat and many of whom later went on to fly actual combat missions over Vietnam that Boyd was a poser or that what he taught them was of no value or nearly got them killed. I don’t see many F-15s or F-16s falling from the sky because the charming whirring of North Korean bullets failed to provide him with the crucial Fingersptizengefühl that only live ammunition can provide.Should we throw the other Chicken Hawks of Military Theory overboard because they never heard the sound of gunfire? Vegetius? Mahan? Corbett? Mackinder? Spykman? Brodie? Handel? Does the absence of a magic sprinkling of combat experience make the strategic insights of the combat non-participant null and void? Does the fact that Fuller, Douhet, and Liddell Hart came under actual enemy fire validate their ideas? Does the fact that they saw multitudes of lions led by donkeys marched to their deaths on the Western and Italian fronts justify their critique of Clausewitz as the Mahdi of Mass?Storr’s scholarly review of biographical literature for a single monograph fails to trump the demonstrated and practical application of Boyd’s ideas to American aerial combat and fighter design over the last 40 years. The OODA loop is an accurate outgrowth and reflection of one man’s professional experience. Even then, the OODA loop was never the keystone of Boyd’s thought. It’s only the centerpiece of Boyd’s thought to those that need a 15 second soundbite or a 15 second strawman.There are alternative and I’m sure valid explanations for superior aerial combat tactics. That doesn’t invalidate the OODA as one possible model among many for successful aerial combat or even other areas of application like operations and strategy. Boyd is not the sole source of wisdom for modeling aerial combat but that does not mean he is not among the sources of wisdom.Finally, In what way have I attacked Clausewitz? By pointing out that he made valuable contributions to the Prussian Army despite only being a staff officer? By pointing out that he was a competent professional? By pointing out that strategy often requires that some men serve in a supporting role and not as combat leaders? By pointing out that Clausewitz ran afoul of his superiors because of his dedication to military reform? By pointing out that his supporters were men of distinction like Scharnhorst or Gniesenau? By pointing out certain similarities between Clausewitz’s career and that of John Boyd?Heaven forbid.I presented one example of a mindless attack on Clausewitz as an example of the folly of mindless attacks on Boyd. I can take your question and turn it around: how does attacking Boyd help Clausewitz? The broad dismissal of Boyd you have postulated elsewhere seems to blame many of our current military imbroglios on Boyd or perhaps the malign black cloud he left behind. This seems little different to me from Liddell Hart blaming the casualties suffered during World War I on a Prussian who’d been dead for 84 years. These broad brush attacks on Boyd serve no better purpose than the broad brush attacks the generations of war crowd (who admittedly are Boydians) and others make on Clausewitz.
November 29th, 2010 at 1:40 am
[…] More Formatting Preservation November 28, 2010 Another thread from over at ?Zenpundit? rescued from the dreaded Zenpundit HTML filter and preserved for posterity in its original […]
November 29th, 2010 at 2:13 am
Hi seydlitz89,
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I have not finished Storr’s book yet nor read his argument in its entirety. So far, his criticism of OODA interspersed in the text does not correspond to my understanding of the concept. I doubt that Chet Richards, who knows this subject firsthand, would agree with the characterization either, but he can speak for himself. When I am done, I will review it here and I will tackle the OODA dispute in detail, although, I would not want that single point to overshadow the rest of what Storr had to say.
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Boyd was not an "ace" but he was a combat pilot in the Korean war. His mission role then was not likely to produce "ace" status in a pilot except by chance, much the same way that there are positions on a football team that, while contributing to the team’s performance, are unlikely to result in the player scoring a touchdown. After the war he wrote the official tactical aerial combat manual for the USAF and was the best top gun flight instructor of his era. This would indicate a high level of skill as a combat pilot and comprehension of the variables of aerial combat (and probably a prodigious number of flight hours above that of an "average" USAF fighter pilot but I am not sure there).
November 29th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Zen-
Very balanced response. You understand my view, but let me add some points for your readers . . .
Hey, I just intended to point out Storr’s initial argument which covers several of pages (11-13). I think I have covered the gist of his first point – which is more critical of Lind and hardly mentions Boyd btw. The "ace" thing seems to be the "center of gravity" of this point of his, so if you counter that . . .
Also, Storr – and I include myself here – are talking about theory, not attacking people. Terms are important and characterizing Boyd as a "pilot ace" (as Joseph did) when the subject is MiG kill ratios and explanations for them only weakens your side’s argument. Questioning the applicability/utility of the OODA is not a personal attack on John Boyd, but critical analysis of an element of theory which has become widely spread and used doctrinally (in an unquestioning and confusing way according to Storr). Storr is going after the basis of Lind’s application of Boydian theory which is a legitimate critique.
Bringing Clausewitz, Mahan, Douhet and uncle Bob into this discussion only clouds the issue. I think we already have enough of that, so . . . part of your argument is that people like Storr don’t understand the OODA loop. Clausewitzians have been arguing for generations that their critics "just didn’t get it". Have we been very successful in explaining Clausewitz in such a way that they could? Not likely. So where does the problem lie?
Finally, a few words on the nature of strategic theory and "legacy". 4GW and Clausewitzians look at war/warfare in very different ways, essentially through "different lenses". From a Clausewitzian perspective, 4GW isn’t strategic theory, but doctrinal speculation or strategic doctrine. Frans Osinga’s attempt to prove otherwise is not very convincing, from this view. But I for one make a distinction between Boyd’s ideas – which imo can be part of a larger Clausewitzian framework – and 4GW which cannot. That John Boyd was a great pilot, a great instructor, a significant air warfare theorist and fighter aircraft designer are not in question, rather what is is the claim that he somehow "changed the art of war" as in his theories as "the national treasure" Robert Coram puts it. This view of the "greatest military thinker since Sun Tzu" invites a lot of critique, and I would think such input from people such as Storr (and myself at a different level) would be welcome since there seems to be so little of it.
Among Boydians I see much celebration of all things Boyd, claims of having "out-Boyded" each other, but little questioning as to what his legacy has become, especially any negative effects of this supposedly "changed art of war". Ideas are powerful things and they do effect policy. With our recent national history of strategic failure I would think reflection and critique necessary.
November 29th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
seydlitz89 -I largely agree with your critique. John Boyd is not the greatest military thinker since Sun Tzu. He’s not even the greatest American military thinker of the 20th century. 4GW is useless line noise. Lind and associated ilk have voted themselves off the island.I primarily object to a tendency among some to move from a state of relative neutrality on Boyd to using him as a proxy for Lind. The particular example I have in mind in Colin S. Gray, who went from a measured and I think accurate estimate of Boyd’s place among military thinkers in Modern Strategy c.1999 to a somewhat unhinged attack in Another Bloody Century 5 years later. This would be relatively harmless except you see Gray’s distortion of Boyd seeping into the works of his students like James Kiras. This weakens their theses. Inasmuch as your citation from Storr is representative of Storr’s work, it seems more of the same.
December 5th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
On Krulak:
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Read the "first pages" on Amazon. How he transformed himself, and what he denied in his history, reminded me, oddly, of an Anglo-Indian actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood – Merle Oberon.
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She denied her ancestory for years, even after it would have been okay to admit her Anglo-Indian heritage and she would not pay a price for it. Sad to read about that kind of stuff.
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– Madhu
December 20th, 2010 at 5:37 am
[…] Recent outbreaks in the ongoing Cold War between advocates of Maj.Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, KPB and advocates of Col. John Boyd, USAF (ret) coincided with other outbreaks between supporters of Sun Wu and Clausewitz. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that all such outbreaks would vanish into the maw of the Dread Zenpundit Comment Filter (DZCF), the same vortex that swallows <p>, <br />, and other innocent HTML tags, never to be seen again. Yet, if these debates must rage until every tag destroyed by the DZCF is paid for by yet another tag marking up yet another piece of rhetorical excess, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” […]
December 20th, 2010 at 5:44 am
[…] Recent outbreaks in the ongoing Cold War between advocates of Maj.Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, KPB and advocates of Col. John Boyd, USAF (ret) coincided with other outbreaks between supporters of Sun Wu and Clausewitz. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that all such outbreaks would vanish into the maw of the Dread Zenpundit Comment Filter (DZCF), the same vortex that swallows <p>, <br / >, and other innocent HTML tags, never to be seen again. Yet, if these debates must rage until every tag destroyed by the DZCF is paid for by yet another tag marking up yet another piece of rhetorical excess, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” […]