Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

of the scientific and cultural Zeitgeist. Boyd was riding a wave in science and translating it andapplying it to the military realm, and he was leading in this effort.Boyd was most likely the first military theorist to note the significance of thisemerging paradigm for understanding war and strategy. Two editors recognize in Boyd inretrospect a “nonlinearist”. They assert however that in the context of the time andvocabulary, this realization could only be implicit 181 . The previous chapters however haveindicated that, based on the literature Boyd studied from the early 1970s till the time of hisdeath, on the examples he included in his work, on the remarks by several experts who knewBoyd on a personal basis and on Boyd’s own assertion, the conclusion is warranted thatBoyd explicitly employed the Prigoginian perspective when he developed his work, inparticular in the presentations he developed after Patterns of Conflict.Boyd’s metaphorsThe second implication of Boyd’s avid and varied reading frenzy lies in the metaphors theseworks provided. Boyd hints at this in the assertion:the key statements of these presentations, the OODA Loop Sketch and related insightsrepresent an evolving, open-ended, far-from-equilibrium process of self-organization,emergence and natural selection 182 .The large extent to which Boyd incorporated concepts, illustrations, analogies and metaphorsfrom science into his work has become quite evident by now. Thus, when studying Boyd’swork, indeed, one must pay due regard for the perspectives he employed. His thinkingmatured and his presentations evolved against the background of remarkable and widelydiscussed scientific developments. The impact of science on Boyd is not only obvious, butalso fundamental for Boyd’s views on strategy and military theory, as it is for understandingBoyd properly. Boyd’s knowledge of concepts and ideas outside of the traditional field ofmilitary history and strategic studies contributed to his perception of patterns in history andthe parallels in processes of adaptation in several arena’s; the biological, the military, thesciences.It provided him with novel conceptual lenses to approach and explain militaryconflict. Reading literature from a variety of disciplines provided him with disparate pieces ofinformation which he would over time connect. He could interpolate among and betweenthese bits of information and create sweeping insights. Habitually thinking by analogy, theseintuitive leaps were frequent and allowed Boyd to paint broad-brushed understandings ofcomplex issues that others could only grasp in pieces 183 . Science provided him with novelmetaphors, analogies and illustrations that appear throughout A Discourse and that provided adominant lens through which Boyd viewed war. Theoretical physics, thermodynamics,systems theory, evolution theory and neuro-physiology, etc, provided examples, insights andillustrations.To understand Boyd’s work it is essential to appreciate the metaphors embedded inhis work, metaphors he used both to examine war and strategic behavior, to bolster hispropositions and to illustrate and explain them. There is great merit in developing and usingmetaphors to improve understanding of complex and perhaps yet unknown phenomena. AsRobert Shaw noted, ‘you don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you181 Davis and Czerwinski, (1997), electronic version, Preface, p.1.182 Boyd, The Essence of Winning and Losing, p.4; and Hammond, p.191.183 Hammond, p. 12; Coram, p.330.169