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

schemas. Gell-Mann developed the idea that organisms adapt across different time scales.The evolution of new and varied schemata is the most fundamental form of adaptation, andit is precisely that form which Boyd considers the most vital for military organizations forconsistent success. Orientation patterns define what we observe, and what meaning weassign to what we observe. This can be an individual activity, but the notion of assigningmeaning to it also has relevance in social contexts. Boyd even warns against monochromaticviews and argues that command organizations should consist of people with different framesof reference, thereby ensuring a variety of interpretations of one observation. Truth isdialogical, in postmodern terms; it arises from people in discourse. Assigning meaning toevents, phenomena or objects is not just an individual process. It becomes problematical andvery important when people want to communicate. Meaning is to a large extent the outcomeof a social activity. And Boyd points to the importance for military organizations of creatinga common system of meaning.As a model for post-modern strategy the value of the OODA loop and thearguments Boyd makes using it, lies in pointing towards the non-traditional tools for creatingcombat power and non-traditional targets in an enemy system. Language, doctrine, beliefsystems, experience, culture, symbols, schemata, dataflows, knowledge about itself and itsopponent, perception, organizational ability to learning, the capability to change practices, allpositioned in the temporal dimension, are at least as valuable as technology, weapons,numbers of soldiers in defining combat effectiveness.The discourse on the shape of warfare in the postmodern age, affected by theinformation revolution reflects these postmodern themes, revolving around the importanceof knowledge, about situational awareness, about exploiting information superiority andadopting network organization structures because of the inherent flexibility of sucharrangements. Postmodern warfare aims to enlarge the already inherent uncertainty ofknowledge in the enemy camp. Postmodern strategy for war and peace aims to create,magnify and exploit mismatches between the environment and the opponent’s perception ofthe environment. It aims to create a favorable impression of one’s own image duringpeacetime. In war it aims to disrupt cohesion, and to create superior situational awarenessand blanket an opponent’s environment with menacing yet ambiguous fluid attacks, strikesand movements from all directions. Its project is a way of warfare distinctly not resemblingmodern era industrial style attrition type warfare. Many of the features of the RMA debate inthe nineties and the preferred shape of future armed forces in the postmodern era thus notincidentally echo arguments and propositions developed by Boyd. There is clearly aconceptual linkage between Boyd, postmodernism, and postmodern warfare.In a recently published textbook on strategy in the contemporary world LawrenceFreedman acknowledged that ‘the practical strategist is (perhaps unwittingly) something of aconstructivist’ 135 . In light of the above analysis concluding that Boyd may be considered thefirst post-modern strategist is as warranted as it is beneficial in understanding Boyd. Itexplains Boyd’s ideas from yet another angle, while demonstrating the continuing relevanceand influence of Boyd’s work. Moreover, and importantly, it allows positioning Boyd withinthe larger academic currents in social theory, IR theory and security studies.135 John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, Colin Gray, Strategy in the Contemporary World, Oxford, 2002,p.338.314