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

patterns that produced success in military operations and he tries to distill some suggestionsfor future application. Boyd aims to develop and teach ideas with which a commander canimprove his operational art. In particular in Organic Design for Command and Control Boyd staysclose to German Blitz doctrine.In his last briefing of The Green Book -The Strategic Game of ? and ? - he draws severalof his findings in the other briefings together and applies it to the (grand-) strategic level, orrather, Boyd here develops a general strategic principle. He climbs one step higher in thelevel of decision-making. But perhaps more importantly, he climbs to yet another higherlevel of abstraction. In this briefing he aims to formulate in even more general terms whatlies at the heart of a strategic encounter with an opponent. What is the activity that oneshould be engaged in exactly in this “dialectic of wills” as Beaufre calls it 35 ? This briefingcontains a search for what strategy is about, that is what the question marks stand for in thetitle 36 .It is in a sense a similar exercise as the previous two presentations, and he developsquite similar arguments, but now coming from somewhat different angles with a morespecific focus on one specific question. Even more than the other two, this presentation bearthe stamp of his widening frame of reference. Here we hardly see any military history, and allthe more reference to brain research, complexity theory, anthropology and systems theory(in a way the entire presentation forms yet another expose on the nature of open systemsand the need for interaction with the environment). We find here an elaboration in particularon the set of definitions - or rather the list of “to do’s” he developed in Patterns of Conflictabout tactics, grand tactics, strategy and grand strategy. He adds also several themes andarguments from Organic Design (and this makes it imperative to follow Boyd’s order of thepresentations). He also revisits a theme from the essay Destruction and Creation, highlightingagain the importance of the combination of analysis and synthesis as a mode of thinking.But this presentation is not merely a restatement of earlier arguments. It builds uponthem – indeed, without the previous presentations, this one would be quite hard to follow -but then Boyd carries them to their logical abstract and general conclusion and makesprevious themes and arguments more explicit. This presentation is important for it highlightswhat Boyd really considers the essence of strategy and strategic behavior. Moreover, thispresentation makes more evident than Patterns of Conflict the three components of war: themoral, the mental and the physical component.It consists of 59 pages divided in four sections. The first 10 pages dwell on theimportance of obtaining and applying multiple perspectives, and the powers of synthesis.This forms the argument that to understand strategy (as in military strategy in which hisprime audience is most interested in) we need to look beyond familiar categorizations,theories, interpretations, and instead must look at strategic behavior in general. Boyd appliesthis in the second section in which he addresses again the question of the survival. Theanswer comes from a 16 page, broad survey of insights from various sources, derived fromstudies of a variety of organisms. The survey leads to a short ‘condensation to essentialelements’. These generic elements are then put in a ‘strategic context’. This constitutes arepeating rhetorical pas de deux of question and illumination, and climaxes after 30 pages inyet another formulation of ‘the art of success’, one that differs in some important ways fromthe formulation he offered in Patterns of Conflict. Not yet content, Boyd applies the message35 André Beaufre, Introduction to Strategy (London 1965) p. 22.36 Stratregic Game of ? and ?, p.1.244