Patterns of Conflict Slide 185

Patterns of Conflict

Patterns of Conflict Slide 185

Quantico Transcription

And this is my last chart, and it’s five after nine, getting late. [slide 185] Here’s the central theme, what we’ve been talking about through the whole presentation in a very simplistic way. Now there is a subtlety there, I’m hoping somebody notices. It’s my last chart, the next chart’s just sources. You see it?

Audience: The noble philosophy is not stated. It needs to be the theme, an element of the theme.

Boyd: That’s not what I’m getting.

Audience: But we have to actually construct the noble philosophy.

Boyd: You have to construct that, that’s correct. But apart from that, there’s a point that I’m trying to make here.

Wyly: Well, it’s a destruction and creation value—

Boyd: Go ahead Mike, you’re onto it.

Wyly: —both the positive and the negative.

Boyd: Note what I went through, sometimes I go from the negative to the positive, but in the end, you always want to start with the positive and go to the negative. In other words, you don’t want to start off beating a guy up and then trying to add that, you always want to start on the positive side, and only do this when you have to, whereas before I showed it to you the other way. If you’ve been following my presentation, I invert it, I’m do a lot of inversions all the way through so you look at both sides. I don’t know if you notice that, I construct that one way, and then flip it up and go to the other direction. You should do that in your thinking. Turn your argument around, and then how does it play. You can say ooh, it plays differently.

Audience: Kind of yin and yang—

Boyd: That’s right, so keep flip-flopping your arguments back and forth,

Audience: Destroying the will to resist can occur before the conflict actually begins.

Boyd: Of course.

Audience: And that’s the constructive aspect of it—

Boyd: But you see, here’s the constructive part, here’s the destructive— whereas I showed you in a previous one, remember I showed you destructive first, then the constructive. And see, when I say this, I didn’t say “yet.” In the other one, I had this chart, I said, “yet do it.” This one I said do this, yet be able to, I didn’t say to do it, be able to. Because if you’re not able to, you may get in trouble. So try to play that positive side as much as possible.

Because see then you justify, like we were against Iran, see if we have a noble [unintelligible], they play hard ball, even though we shoot down some airplanes we shouldn’t have done, we don’t look too bad. Which is the point you were trying to make. And that’s sort of the idea we’re talking about here, do you see what I’m saying? And when you get into a guerrilla operation, low intensity operations, that kind of stuff, this moral stuff becomes super important. Otherwise you’d lose the whole nine yards. I mean everybody would turn against you, Christ, it’s all over, like Mike found out. I think we were talking about that last night. You’re going to be in there, you’re going to stay with us, yeah, we’re going to stay here. So then they moved out because the commander ordered them to move out, they slaughtered the people who cooperated with them, they never trusted them again. Could never get anything out of them, right, Mike?

Wyly: That’s right.

Boyd: That was the end of the line, done. So you people can’t just be combat officers and sticking something into somebody, or shooting somebody at them. You’ve got to think in many different ways nowadays. It’s a much more complicated world. Particularly as officers. And otherwise you can go into the thing. I mean not because you’re malicious, because you really didn’t think it through.

Audience: I just want to make sure I get it straight, you can work either side. You can go from constructive to destructive or vice versa.

Boyd: That’s right. But keep in mind when you’re doing it, keep in mind of the situation, whether you have justification. Remember, you want in the end, to have that moral support all over so you can lever your adversary rather than him levering you. And that’s particularly true in a guerrilla, or what we now call “LIC,” “Low Intensity Conflict.”

Audience: You do that, you go from destructive to constructive, isn’t that another way of saying you’re reacting, you are on the reactive as opposed to being proactive—

Boyd: You’re forced to go to the destructive, you’re forced to go to the destructive, in a sense you’re already reacting, that’s exactly right. You’ve got it, you’ve got it. I mean you have no choice. But in any case, if you have to do it, try to get over to the constructive as fast as you can. You still may have to, but try to get it there as quickly as you can, do it.

Audience: But it’s interesting in World War II, when we got into that conflict, I mean we hit them so hard and so fast, destructively, and then came on as the good guys at the end, it’s interesting. The point is that, however this sounds, we won that one with no problem.

Boyd: We were justified. We were justified because of the way Hitler behaved. He was a badass from beginning to end. So we could be bad guys from beginning to end, and relative to him, [45:00] we looked like good guys. Remember it’s a relative situation, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Remember we blew his— you know, we complain because he bombed London and he bombed Rotterdam and all those places, but then he set it up so we could do it him, we said they deserved it. And we took apart Berlin, we took apart Dresden, we should never have bombed Dresden. And of course we’ve been— people are still mad at us today. But at the time it was, well, Hitler deserved it.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you, so we could get away with that, because from a moral viewpoint, he still looked worse than we did. And what you want to do when you’re playing this game, you want to set things up so the other guy, morally, is in the gutter and you’re not. Or at least if you’re in the gutter, he’s in one even below you. Very important. And see, that’s why he was making the point he made. We got away with some stuff that happened at different times, guys would have gotten fired, we would have been in deep trouble.

Audience: You shoot some arrows, blame it on the other guy--

Boyd: Be careful, because then if you do something like that and you play a game like that, and then it surfaces that you did that, then you’re really deep [unintelligible].

Audience: I was suggesting that that may have happened.

Boyd: Oh, okay.

Audience: It’s a dirty play, but it’s the real world.

Boyd: I understand. Okay, so—
[46:31]

[End of Tape 5, Side 2]
[end of “Patterns of Conflict”]