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

tactical, operational, strategic and, the grand strategic level. It applies to regular warfare andguerrilla warfare. As Colin Gray has stated, Boyd’s OODA loop is a grand theory in thesense that the model has an elegant simplicity, an extensive domain of application, andcontains a high quality of insight about strategic essentials 6 .This can be extended to Boyd’s entire work in which he discusses various kinds ofwar and conflicts and attempts to develop recurring patterns of behavior in those conflicts.His theory can with some justification be claimed to apply to all types of warfare. In factBoyd’s work should not be regarded solely as a very valuable study of patterns in humanconflict, although that is the nature of his work he started out with. As we have seen, inparticular during his later period Boyd approached and explained those patterns from a moreabstract point of view and drew parallels between evolution theory, complexity theory andmilitary history. This suggested even more general patterns of the way organisms andorganizations behave when confronted with threats and challenges. He introduces the ‘themefor vitality and growth’, suggesting that Boyd transcends the tactical and operational levels ofwar, connecting different forms of warfare, uncovering hidden similarities, and indeed,transcends the arena of war. This strongly suggests A Discourse is a general theory oforganizations in conflict. A Discourse not only contains suggestions for winning battles, butalso for maintaining organizational fitness, for organizational learning and change.Boyd moved beyond military history and warfare and shifted his focus to a numberof similar, deep, underlying processes that unite various modes of survival and evolution. Heexamines also organizational and species evolution, growth and survival and highlighting theessential similarity of the processes and factors that are at play when such complex adaptivesystems face challenges to their existence. He extends it to economies, societies and even toscience and technology, showing how in these fields too self-correcting processes, thediscovery of novelties, mismatches and anomalies, the continuous interplay of destructionand creation and the dialectic of analysis and synthesis keep the process going. Therefore onecould perhaps better describe A Discourse not as a general theory of war but as a generaltheory of the strategic behavior of complex adaptive systems in adversarial conditions.Beyond rapid OODA loopingIt has thus been demonstrated that the narrow interpretation of Boyd’s work is inaccurateand incomplete. Not only has Boyd addressed a multitude of topics, besides the rapidOODA loop idea, offering new conceptualizations of strategy, and introducing newconcepts for thinking about the interactions at the different levels of war, it is moreover onlyeither in the most abstract and short-hand rendering, or at the tactical level, that the rapidOODA loop idea in its narrow interpretation mirrors Boyd’s work to some extent. And evenat the tactical level Boyd argues for a more comprehensive approach, focussing on theinterplay of actions and threats as they manifest themselves in the physical, moral and mentaldimensions. Instead of a focus on information, he displays a focus on the myriad factors thatproduce the internal cohesion required for a system to survive, and the multi-dimensionalconnections a system needs to maintain with the outside environment.Importantly, this study has shown that the larger theme of Boyd’s work, which isalso embedded within the comprehensive OODA loop graphic, is multidimensionalorganizational adaptation in a dynamic non-linear environment. Moreover, it was shownwhat scientific literature he surveyed, and how that eclectic approach, which was normativeaccording to Boyd for the study of war, offered him new ways to view war and strategic6 Gray, Modern Strategy, p. 91.285