Patterns of Conflict
| The works of |
| Works of John Boyd |
|---|
OODA WIKI Edition
Quantico Transcription
That’s what you turn to, so you can pull them apart, produce, and do this. Okay? I’ll let you read this chart, then I want to talk to this one, this is important, the implications behind this. You all want to understand in a tactical sense, these multi-dimensional interactions suggest a spontaneous, synthetic/creative, and flowing rather than a step-by-step, analytical/logical, and discrete move/countermove game.
And of course the two dashed statements below that are related. In other words, what I’m saying, without that, if you don’t get the fingerspitzengefühl, you get all these goddamn procedures and checklists, these complicated plans, well what is it going to do, [makes raspberry sound] just grinds you down, slows you down, slow as molasses in January. So put it another way.
Complexity—I don’t care whether it’s technical, organizational, operational—that causes commanders to be captured by their own internal dynamics or interactions, hence they cannot adapt to rapidly changing external, or as a matter of fact even internal circumstances.
On the other hand, war is complicated. So you’re going to have, you’re going to tend to have complexity, how do you get around that? Because remember, you want to have the variety and rapidity, so how do you get around it? That’s what we’ve been talking about now, for two days. And this is the third day.
How did I say get around that? Come on, you know the answer, you just won’t feed it to me. I told you about the fighter pilots doing all that. You take groups of people, have them work together, and throw them against a whole bunch of different situations. And pretty soon it becomes part of them. In other words, that’s the fingerspitzengefühl they build up. And with the fingerspitzengefühl, once you have that, in a sense then things don’t look so complicated.
You know a basketball game, to the uninitiated, the way all that stuff happens it looks complicated, but the guys in there, Christ, they’re blowing everything, do you understand what I’m saying? Same thing. And it can be done. We know it can be done, the Germans did it with some of their commanders and troops.
Audience: I think a real good example of that is that everybody here is familiar with is Pegasus Bridge, where Howard went in and they practiced over and over and over again every night, night after night after night. Attacking this bridge and knocking out the Germans that were there, and so they could almost do it in their sleep. And when they actually—
Boyd: They didn’t even have to think about it.
Audience: That’s right.
Boyd: Because it was in their subconscious.
Audience: It was a piece of cake, once they— they just knew what to do.
Boyd: No matter how the other guy adjusted, they were on top of it, they just keep getting on top of it. You’ve experienced that, do you ever notice when you’re— some days when you’re in some kind of a sport, with a lot of complicated, and all of a sudden, everything seems to gel, no matter— in fact, you ever notice when you’re good at something, everything else seems like it’s in slow motion.
Did you ever get that feeling? I used to get it when I fly the fighter, everything was really good, everything else just seemed very slow to me, and you’re just carving that son of a bitch up, going after the other guy, whipsawing in here, and I’ve heard ground troops say the same thing. It’s just that, Guderian said that, get that feel, that fingerspitzengefühl, and you’ve got everything, you just know it, and you’re adjusted. Balck, same way, he kept saying you gotta have that fingerspitzengefühl, all the time.
And that’s what we’re talking about here. In a strategic sense, these interactions suggest we need a variety of possibilities, so the other guy can’t get wise, rapidly implement, and why? Ability to have these and generate many different possibilities, and permits one to repeatedly generate those mismatches. You want to get mismatch on top of mismatch on top of mismatch. In other words, you really want to screw up his image of the world. Or give him multiple images of the world. Because what does that do? Doubt, uncertainty, paralyzes his counteractions, et cetera.
And if you don’t have a variety of possibilities, you give him the opportunity to read into what you’re doing, which means then you’re not going to do too good, in fact you’re going to get your head handed to you. So that’s why you’ve got to have variety, rapidity, harmony, initiative, you see what I’m saying? All plays together.
Audience: Sir, you said one thing, you have to have the feel all the time.
Boyd: Well, sometimes you may be surprised.
Audience: If you lose it, hopefully you—
Boyd: But you want to get it back.
Audience: Come back, yes sir.
Boyd: And there’s another thing I hate, and we talked about it in the car today coming back. I’ve heard people say I’ll never be surprised. I just start laughing, that’s horseshit. Because now they have a perfect image of the world, and never going to be surprised. You’re going to get surprised, you’d like to minimize it. What you want to do is set yourself up so when you’re surprised, you can adjust to it, and get back on top. You’re going to get surprised, you can’t say you’re not going to be. That’s a horseshit argument. The question is, can you cope with it? And if you’ve learned how to do all these different things, you start gathering yourself together to try to get back and you may have some problems. But you gather yourself together and get back on top of it.
Audience: I guess your example you use about the basketball team, you have to fight to say time out, time out.
Boyd: Yeah.
Audience: Be patient enough to work through it.
Boyd: That’s right.
Audience: It’s hard too.
Boyd: But I heard guys say, you know, I’ve heard it, I say get the hell out of here, that’s bullshit. [30:00] In other words, you’re God, you’re a perfect human being. That’s baloney. Have you ever heard guys say that they’re not going to get surprised, they’re going to set themselves up so they are never going to be surprised, huh? I know some of you have heard it, I can’t believe you haven’t. I’ve heard people say it and I just laugh. Now if you want to say we want to set ourselves up so we’re not surprised all the time, you want to diminish the possibility of it, that’s a different thing. But nevertheless, you’ve got to be expecting, when you get a surprise you’re going to get on top of it.