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

(d) Boyd was aware of this shift;(e) He made this new paradigm central in his work;(f) He considered this paradigm as the appropriate way to approach the study of war.Indeed, it can be considered his hidden fountain. His interest in science came in part fromhis study in Georgia Tech University and his work on fighter design. EM theory led him toit, as described before. Another factor making him study various fields of science was moreof an introvert nature. Since 1972 he had been working on Destruction and Creation. He hadbeen pondering for some time before 1972 about thinking processes and how they can betaught to others. He was trying to understand the nature of creativity. His path breakingwork on EM theory made him aware that apparently his thought process somehow workeddifferently than others’, how else could such a simple theory as EM theory not have beenconceived by someone else before his discovery?On October 15 1972 he wrote from his base in Thailand to his wife that ‘I may beon the trail of a theory of learning quite different and - it appear now more powerful thanmethods or theories currently in use’. Learning for him was synonymous for the process ofcreativity. Without any premeditated overall design or goal, he read every available book inthe base library on philosophy and physics and math and economics and science and Taoismand half a dozen other disciplines, according to Coram 2 . It laid the foundation for whatwould become the major focus of his life.His research brought him to formulate the creative and unique synthesis of threeinsights. Boyd saw the ideas of Gödel, Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,which he had encountered at Georgia Tech, as keys to how to think, how to competesuccessfully, and how to adapt and survive. Taken together these three notions support theidea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of a conceptwith observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch 3 . These ideas forces one torecognize that uncertainty, imprecision and mismatches are fundamental parts of reality.Mathematics, the second law of thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, earlyinterests, form the philosophical cornerstone of A Discourse. Although in A Discourse thisessay comes last, as a basis of thought it came first for Boyd 4 . But starting with this difficultand abstract essay would have turned most people off, so he left it at the end of A Discourse.He may have been right, for these concepts are not the materiel that soldiers digest normally,as will become evident below.The impact of science, in the broad sense of the word, on the development ofBoyd’s ideas is thus obvious already in the first part of A Discourse. From there on, during thelatter twenty years of his life, the period in which A Discourse was developed, Boyd delveddeeper and probed more widely and connected more completely insights from a variety ofdisciplines to improve his understanding of thinking, strategy, and time. He would call hisfriends and disciples sometimes in the middle of the night to discuss the latest piece he hadread which could be the work of the German philosopher Hegel, Gödel, Piaget, Skinner,Polanyi, a book on quantum physics, history or social science 5 . This impression is reinforcedby the list of books read by Boyd on political theory, philosophy, new age, mathematics andscience, according to the archive that the US Marine Corps University maintains on Boyd.2 Coram, p.271.3 Ibid, p.120.4 Hammond, p.119.5 Both Hammond, Burton and Corum make frequent references on Boyd's obsessive study and hisfrequent late night phone calls. See for instance Coram, pp.319-20 and Hammond, pp. 180-86, andBurton, p.44.79