BOOK - The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy and War
by mark | 9/24/2008 09:47:00 PM

Jeremy was kind enough to invite me to engage in a brief burst of self-promotion at Progressive Historians, which I readily accepted. :)
Through the aegis of Nimble Books, I had the opportunity to work with a sizable group of professional military analysts, historians, bloggers and writers to produce The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War. The book was loosely based upon an online symposium at Chicago Boyz blog that discussed Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd , a very impressive ( and at times quite technical) work of strategic studies history by Colonel Frans Osinga of the Netherlands Royal Air Force. What emerged from the conversion from blog to book is a concise primer on the ideas of the late military strategist and Pentagon dissident, Colonel John Boyd.
Briefly, who was Colonel Boyd ?

Colonel Boyd was virtually unknown to the general public until the publication of Robert Coram’s recent biography, which I read initially because the claims for Boyd’s importance seemed to border on the fantastic. Boyd, however, walked that talk. Formally a fighter pilot and an engineer, Boyd was a brilliant and abrasively eccentric autodidact. Known variously as “40 second Boyd”, ” the Mad Major” and ” Ghengis John” to his contemporaries, Colonel Boyd racked up a staggering list of professional accomplishments:

122 Combat sorties in the Korean War

Command of USAF base in Thailand during the Vietnam War

Original USAF “Top Gun”

Author of the official USAF Aerial Attack Study

Creator of the E-M Theory (which led to the design of the F-16 and F-18)

Creator of the OODA Loop

Cognitive theorist for a ” dialectical engine” of learning in his paper, Destruction and Creation

Inspiration for the development of USMC ” Maneuver Warfare” doctrine

A foremost authority on the lessons learned from 2400 years of military history, distilled in two mega-briefs entitled Patterns of Conflict and A Discourse on Winning and Losing

A major inspiration for the later development of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) theory and to a lesser extent, influenced concepts such as Network-centric Warfare (NCW) among others.

A leader of the "military reform movement" that challenged Pentagon spending priorities, excessive budget size, seedy relationships with defense contractors, dysfunctional weapons systems and rigged testing systems.

A key influence on the war plan of the first Gulf War in 1991. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, USMC General Charles C. Krulak wrote: "The Iraqi Army collapsed morally and intellectually under the onslaught of American and Coalition forces. John Boyd was an architect of that victory as surely as if he’d commanded a fighter wing or a manuever division in the desert”.

Ironically, Boyd died in 1997 not only in relative obscurity but as a virtual pariah to the U.S. Air Force he served for decades, where he remains persona non grata to the senior brass to this day. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently invoked Boyd's memory in a high profile speech, in part, to drive home his deep dissatisfaction with the leadership of the Air Force ( juxtaposed with his firing of the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff). A second irony, Boyd, at least judging by the public stance taken by all of his closest collaborators, would have been aghast at the second Iraq War - though he probably would have also admired how Petraeus managed to arrest the downward strategic spiral.

Colonel Boyd's reputation and ideas were introduced to the general public by Robert Coram and Grant Hammond but it fell to Frans Osinga to undertake a meticulous reconstruction of Boyd's evolution as a strategic thinker by systematically digesting Boyd's personal papers, copious briefing slides and voluminous collection of books, all of which were heavily marked up with furiously scrawled marginalia and dealt as with physics, mathematics, cybernetics and philosophy as much as they did military history. Dr. Osinga's prodigious tome, Science Strategy and War is a tour de force of 20th century intellectual history as well as an exposition of Boyd's strategic thought.

The online symposium on Science, Strategy and War included Colonel Osinga and attracted the attention of the publisher of Nimble Books, W.F. Zimmerman, who wanted to re-cast the discussion as a collection of essays. The authors included Dr. Chet Richards ( an associate and collaborator on the mathematical aspects of Boyd's theories), Daniel Abbott, Shane Deichman, Frank Hoffman, Adam Elkus, "Lexington Green", Thomas Wade and Dr. Frans Osinga, who contributed several essays. Dr. Thomas Barnett sets the intellectual tone in the foreword after which the authors brought a wide range of professional perspectives to bear - cognitive psychology, military history, physics, strategy, journalism and, of course, blogging - in a series of articles that tried to explain the essence and dimensions of John Boyd’s contribution to strategic thought. Hopefully, we made things clearer or easier to a reader approaching the subject for the first time.

A brief comment regarding Nimble Books: Progressive Historians has many academic and "popular" historians and writers in their readership and on the roster - I'd like to point out that Nimble is a wonderful publisher for first-time or experienced niche authors. The level of personal attention is high and the working relationship is very collegial, which might be the right venue for those with eminently publishable monographs banging their heads against the wall of the slower moving academic press. I give them my highest recommendation.



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On Historians and Others....
by mark | 6/22/2008 09:42:00 PM
Previously, Jeremy Young, our primus inter pares, called for a symposium on the question of what is a historian:


The argument we're (not quite) having here -- and to which Adam
Hochschild in Historically Speaking makes another important
contribution -- concerns a series of rich and timeless questions: what exactly is a historian? Should the term be applied only to those who possess doctoral degrees and publishing histories, or are historians a more broad and multifaceted group? Is everyone a historian, as Carl Becker famously argued? And assuming we can define the "wheat" and the "chaff," what separates the two? What does the "trained" historian have to offer that the "amateur" does not, or vice versa?

Good questions all. Let me start with what historians are not.

Historians are not theorists, though they may entertain certain theories in the course of interpreting an event they do not begin with answers as does a theorist but with questions. Questions they try to answer with research and evidence because history, while not a science, is an empirical discipline. Historians are not poets, they do not aim to create sweeping, romantic, myths, though like anyone else, historians admire mythic ideals but their task is to reveal where reality may have fallen short. Historians are not social scientists, though they sometimes borrow their tools; nor are they economists constructing abstract models hoping to predict events. A historian who tries to predict what will happen based upon the past is engaging in futurism, a very different and more difficult art.

None of this is meant to disparage political scientists, poets, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, authors of historical fiction or futurists. They all do worthy and interesting things, it's just that their work cannot properly be called "history". A historian is someone who tries to cogently explain what really happened, based upon the best evidence available; amateur or professional status matters less than skill, persistence and intellectual integrity in pursuing this task.


Historians have a varied set of skills. They are researchers, at times, detectives. They must consume and accurately recall vast amounts of historigraphical literature. Historians must think analytically foremost but also intuitively and sometimes, toward a synthesis. They must communicate clearly with the spoken and written word; and they must be teachers, literally in a classroom or in the larger sense of writing history to educate society. Few historians excel equally well at all of these different aspects but most good historians are strong or even exemplary in many of them.

In regard to the respective virtues of professional vs. "amateur" or "popular" historians ( many popular historians are or were also academics - Howard Zinn, Stephen Ambrose, Niall Ferguson and so on) it is important to recognize that they write for different audiences. Popular or amateur historians write for the intelligent reading public while academic historians write primarily for other academic historians. This is not a slam on profesional scholars but a recognition of differences in scope, scale and level of historical knowledge between the two groups of readers.

The public is not well prepared to handle or comment upon historical monographs of an esoteric or technical nature, only other specialists can do that. Nor are historians who have spent most of their career in a very rarefied subfield - say researching currency fluctuations in the Spanish Netherlands during the early modern period or Women's social status in the Caribbean during the late Colonial era - well positioned to write a panoramic history of Western civilization, of the history of technology or similarly big picture subjects desired by the layman who wants to "read some history". At least not without a major time investment.

The relationship between academic and popular/amateur historians is an interdependent one; the former are usually creating the monographic bricks with which the latter build their sweeping and entertaining literary edifices while popular historians "hook" readers into studying history more deeply - perhaps deeply enough to become a professional historian! One is not "better" than the other, simply different with distinct objectives.

The door of history is open to anyone - you simply need to walk through it.

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The Virtues and Vices of Historians as Public Intellectuals
by mark | 6/10/2008 11:23:00 PM
Jeremy's post on the political commentary of Princeton historian Sean Wilentz caught my attention with this argument:

There is nothing in this statement that prohibits historians from making mistakes in public. There is nothing that says they shouldn't be partisan, or even that they shouldn't lose their objectivity and engage in "sloppy political forecasting." And there is nothing that says they have to be right.What it does suggest is that historians' opinions on the questions of the day are more than just opinions. They are opinions backed up by knowledge, by information and analytical skills that are not available to the average person. And it suggests that historians have not only a right, but a duty to publish these historically-informed opinions in a public place, where they can enlighten and edify lay readers.

I will second Jeremy's call for historians to take a more active role as public intellectuals and shapers of policy and opinion. I will also offer a gentle caution because historians, even as we clearly see the analytical shortcomings of journalists, political scientists, economists and others, have blind spots of our own.





Historians have a great deal to offer as analysts because of their command of informational context and practiced experience evaluating the credibility of new evidence within their disciplinary subfields. Ideally, historians approach a question with skepticism and attempt to explain causation within an accurate context by working backwards toward the point of origin. “Primary source” documents are privileged as evidence by which historians mean certain kinds of documents, preferably government records and memoranda, alongside private papers, These are scrutinized with great care and are supplemented by authoritative secondary material that helps the historian understand the primary sources within the accurate context of the time rather than anachronistically.

Again, ideally, these discrete facts and clues are then reinterpreted by the historian in the form of a comprehensible narrative that does not deviate from the evidentiary trail and clearly separates fact from speculation. Historians not only attack the evidence analytically - breaking down and deconstructing specific events - they also synthesize and construct analogies to elucidate larger, general, patterns of human conduct and it is here that historians are most often helpful to policy makers or in educating the general public.

Ironically, this is also where we as historians are most apt to go astray.

As a profession, historians develop a methodological outlook that can make us prone to particular distortions of perception. The first is our obvious preference for the authority of the written word which means we tend to focus on an evidentiary trail that is a) far more incomplete than we tend to realize and b) less reliable than we would like to imagine.

Of the records we use, we give greater weight to official documents than did the bureaucrats, statesmen and various officials who wrote them at the time with different motivations, not least of which could be to say as little as possible or to advance the career of the author. Some bureaucracies are less than meticulous as institutional record keepers and some regimes lie with Orwellian abandon or attempt to bury records forever behind secrecy laws.

Then there is the problem of what risk theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the " silent evidence" of the larger picture that does not attract our attention. For example, for decades, historians discounted the veracity of oral tradition until recently discovering that this method of communication could often be more reliable than the official record. Artifacts other than written documents such as art, physical spaces, machinery and personal effects tell powerful stories of their own. Alternatives not taken were often avoided for important but unrecorded reasons that drove the choices that people and groups did make but these are not always readily discernable. Statesmen seldom - Richard Nixon excepted - record their most revealing thoughts. It is all too easy for historians, in other words, to mistake what we know for the general parameters of what is important to know.

By all means, historians should be robust participants in public debate and can be confident that their knowledge and analytical skills are a useful contribution. But some humility is also in order; our methodological tools have their limitations.



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