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

found himself in. To Sun Tzu Boyd adds the Blitzkrieg concept which re-combines,according to Boyd, the elements that have historically produced success using the new toolsof this century; the tank, the aircraft and modern communication equipment. To someextent one could also consider his rediscovery of operational art a novelty in his day.The view of Boyd as a “great synthesizer” is however actually not quite valid for itfails to acknowledge genuine novel elements he added to this synthesis. First of all, to hisaudience in the seventies and eighties, Boyd’s insistence on tempo, maneuver, theimportance of the moral, organizing in semi-autonomous units, etc., was novel, and hisrediscovery of the classical strategists timely. Moreover, while Boyd’s ideas do indeedresemble those of classical theorists of the maneuvrists school of strategic thought, Boydtranscends them in a number of ways, delving deeper into the essence of victory underlyingvarious schools of thought.Moreover, although the presentation Patterns of Conflict initially does suggest thatBoyd had been merely looking for confirmation of his hunch about the general validity ofthe rapid OODA loop idea, his study was not so selective, nor pre-conceived, and althoughBoyd did favor the maneuvrist style of combat when he discusses conventional warfare (apreference which is understandable in light of his environment), when he shifted hisattention to the essence of strategy, he sees the maneuvrist style of warfare just as one ofthree possible “categories of conflict”.His work incorporates and integrates different strategic theories. In an abstractsense, Boyd regards them as alternative modes of behavior, and the theories as orientationpatterns. He regards strategic theories and strategic concepts, like doctrines, as part of therepertoire of a strategist’s orientation pattern, integrating them in the cognitive dimensionand in the discovery of fundamental similarities when he strips the theories to their bareessentials and expresses them in systems-theoretical/neo-Darwinist terms. In particular afterhis general overview of military history the synthetic character of his work becomesprevalent. Boyd’s genius lies in recognizing the similarity in the principle factors andprocesses that produced success in the different categories of conflict. This integrativefeature of Boyd’s work is a remarkable performance and strength of his work. This feature isrelated to the following important contribution of Boyd.Science and strategic theory: uncertainty and adaptabilityA very important novelty in Boyd’s work lies in his entire approach to the study of militaryhistory, operational art and strategic theory, as chapters 4 and 5 have demonstrated. Hemarried military history with science, building his theory around the epistemological debatesof the 1960s and 1970s, informed by Gödel, Heisenberg, Popper, Kuhn, Piaget, and Polanyi,which highlighted the unavoidable feature of uncertainty in any system of thought (as well asthe limits of the Newtonian paradigm). It also offered him the themes of the combination ofanalysis-synthesis as well as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy. He was thefirst strategist to introduce the epistemological debates of the sixties and seventies intostrategic thought and to see the value and consequences of these debates for strategy, leadingstrategic thought away from the Newtonian, mechanistic, reductionist and deterministicapproach.Cybernetics and Systems theory offered him the concept of feedback, the distinctionbetween open and closed systems, the importance of interactions and relations, and the needfor a holistic approach. The cognitive revolution emanating from these developmentsshowed him the role of schemata formed by genetics, culture and experience. Chaos theoryhighlighted non-linear behavior. These ideas returned in various guises in evolution theory282