{"id":3069,"date":"2009-04-05T17:52:51","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T17:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3069"},"modified":"2009-04-05T22:27:02","modified_gmt":"2009-04-05T22:27:02","slug":"book-review-the-mind-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3069","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Mind of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0by Dr.<\/strong> Grant T. Hammond<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong> went on to my “must read” list after attending the Boyd 07 Conference<\/strong> at Quantico, where I heard Dr. Frans Osinga<\/strong> deliver a keynote presentation on the theories of Colonel John Boyd<\/a><\/strong>, based on\u00a0Osinga’s exhaustive study of Boyd’s personal papers,\u00a0which culminated first in a PhD dissertation and then later was published as Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Col. Osinga credits Boyd associate\u00a0Dr. Grant Hammond<\/strong> and The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong> with introducing him to the ideas of John Boyd and inspiring him in his own intellectual journey as a student\u00a0to try to\u00a0understand and explain Boyd’s strategic theories.<\/p>\n

Unlike Osinga or Robert Coram<\/strong>, author of the celebrated biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, 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\u00a0biography insights into how Boyd’s mind worked\u00a0that Coram and Osinga miss (or more properly, could not have known), including\u00a0 the “perverse glee” Boyd felt in discovering and exploring the Darwinian mismatch between perception and unfolding reality. While Robert Coram wrote about the\u00a0demanding\u00a0aspect 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:<\/p>\n

“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<\/a>, Ernst Mayer’s The Growth of Biological Thought<\/a>, Gerard Radnitsky and W.W Bartley’s edited collection entitled Evolutionary Epistemology<\/a>\u00a0(focus on particularly on Karl Popper’s essay and that of Donald T. Campbell) and Stuart A. Kauffman’s The Origins of Order<\/a>.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

….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.”<\/strong> [ 184-186]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0a fraction of the concepts and source material discussed. From Hammond’s The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0the reader\u00a0gains a good\u00a0appreciation of how Boyd’s analogically oriented, synthesizing, pattern recognizing, fluidly connective\u00a0mind worked in practice with a personality or character that could\u00a0make Boyd\u00a0competitive, confrontational, admirable, brusque, antagonizing or heroic at different turns.<\/p>\n

The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

For the serious student of modern strategy or aficianados of Col. John Boyd, Grant Hammond’s The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong> is a must read book. It forms a necessary bridge between Robert Coram’s classic style, popular,\u00a0biography and Osinga’s strictly military-academic treatise on Boydian strategic theory. The Mind of War<\/em><\/strong> helps the reader better\u00a0comprehend either book while remaining a great and highly informative work in it’s own right. Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security\u00a0by 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\u00a0Osinga’s exhaustive study of Boyd’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,556,228,133,402,304,78,336,338,462,39,127,530,31,13,18,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-air-force","category-biography","category-book","category-boyd-2007","category-defense","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-john-boyd","category-metacognition","category-military","category-strategy","category-strategy-and-war","category-synthesis","category-theory","category-war","category-warriors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}