Patterns of Conflict
| The works of |
| Works of John Boyd |
|---|
OODA WIKI Edition
Quantico Transcription
And they have a schwerpunkt at all levels, from the theater all the way down. Theater, army group, army, corps, division, regiment, schwerpunkt inside schwerpunkt inside schwerpunkt inside schwerpunkt, or focus of main effort, or point of main effort. The main effort.
Maneuver of all arms and supporting elements are focused to exploit opportunities and maintain tempo of operations. Initiative of many subordinates is harmonized within superior intent. So if they know what the schwerpunkt is, in that sense then, implicitly each guy is cooperating with all the other people. You see what I’m saying?
Now there’s a danger. I notice in some of the Marine documents, you say you designate a unit as being the schwerpunkt or focus of effort. You may do that. You may not. Let me show you where that might not play.
You want to be very careful with that. Let’s take, for example, when the Germans decided to go through the Ardennes. I’m talking about 1940, not 1945, 1944, when they hit us in December. In 1940, when they went through the Ardennes, initially before that, they were going to have their main effort up north, you know, somewhat follow the Schlieffen Plan. Then as a result of Manstein getting to Hitler, [25:00] they shifted the schwerpunkt down to the southern sector. Why did they do that? Anybody?
Audience: Because there was no resistance there.
Boyd: Okay. So the schwerpunkt wasn’t set because the unit was set, because that sector would give them a weakness they could exploit. So the schwerpunkt was set in that sector, and once it’s set there, the units then are part of that schwerpunkt.
So don’t just designate a unit. You want to look at the sector you’re looking at. And you say, okay. This is the area I want to do it because they’re weak here. And then those units become the schwerpunkt to go through there. Because otherwise, you’re only internally focused. You’ve got to be focused outward, not inward.
Audience: Could you say that again, sir?
Boyd: Okay. I’ll say it again. In 1940, so you get the whole idea— and they made a mistake later on. I’m going to show you the difference between the two. That’s why I’m drawing this distinction right now.
We’re talking about 1940. And if you people haven't read it, I’ll explain it to you. There was a big argument in the German Army where the so-called main effort— in fact, most of them thought, until Manstein intervened, that they were going to have their main effort come out of the lowlands, Holland and Belgium, and sweep around almost like the Schlieffen Plan out of World War I, the same kind of idea.
And Manstein looked at that. He was very gifted. He said, that’s bullshit. So then he got together with Guderian and wanted to know, he said we know the French are kind of weak here. Can we get those goddamn panzers through the Ardennes? Guderian looked, said of course we can. So then he drew up the whole plan for going through the Ardennes, and make that the main effort.
So the main effort, or the schwerpunkt was set not by the unit but by what? By the area where the other guy wasn’t going to be. And then, since it’s set there, of course, those units become the schwerpunkt, and all the support goes in there, the main support.
And the northern effort then became a cheng for the chi coming out of the south there. Well, it wasn’t really the south. It was through the center there. It was just on the northern side of the Maginot Line.
Audience: It may just be semantically that I’m confused, but I don’t see that that’s any different than what we’ve previously talked about. In my opinion, in my mind, the focus of effort or main effort or whatever you want to call it, the focus of effort is directed at a critical enemy vulnerability. What you just—
Boyd: Maybe not. Maybe not. We had that argument last night. Maybe you might— if it’s a critical vulnerability, he may defend it. Then it’s going strength against strength. You don’t want to do it. Remember, we went through this argument.
Audience: Okay. I’ll buy that.
Boyd: We’ve gone through this. You’ve got to be very careful with that.
Audience: Using the concept of multiple thrusts, though—
Boyd: What you want to do is get him— you want to expose his vulnerability. You want to go through the weaknesses so you can expose those and get to him.
Audience: I understand that. Using the idea of the multiple thrusts, you may not pick your point of main effort—
Boyd: Say that again. I was going to do that next. Say it loud.
Audience: Using the principle of multiple thrusts, you may not pick the point of main effort until you’ve actually made contact with the enemy and identified the weakness.
Boyd: Wait a minute. Maybe. You’re on the right track. But who’s going to be the main effort? You’ve got five or ten thrusts going. You’re going to pick one and everybody— say it.
Audience: Everybody can be your point of main effort.
Boyd: That’s right. So focus of effort, and they’re all part of the main effort.
Audience: The point of main effort can be not having one.
Boyd: But it’s that area, and they’re all part of the focus of main effort. That’s why I say you’ve got to be careful. Designate one unit and all the other guys, you only get one to a thrust, because if you start at theater level and say okay, your army group’s the main effort. And then inside that army group, that army’s the main effort. Then you go down and you say, okay, the corps or division in front of you got the squads of main effort. Then you got one guy out there that’s the main effort for the whole goddamn thing, from army group all the way down. That’s bullshit.
Audience: Well, aren’t you really saying—
Boyd: You see what I’m saying? I took it to a logical extreme, obviously, to show you that it doesn’t work that way.
Audience: The key to that, it seems to me, is the adaptability on your line; in other words, don’t be so rigid you can’t change your main effort as the real battle unfolds.
Boyd: Well, no. But we’re just saying as a starting point. We haven't even talked about shifting. We want to shift it later on, we know. We’re just saying okay, we’ve set the operation up. We’re talking about the Ardennes, 1940.
We haven't done any operation yet. We’re just saying, okay, where are we going to allocate on the first day, regardless of whether we shift it the next day. All we’re talking about is how are we going to allocate. What’s going to be the big— this unit’s the main effort because we like the guy or something? Fuck, he goes off? No.
What you’re going to do is, you’re going to look at the front there and say look, they have a weakness here. We can exploit that weakness. Therefore, the main effort is going to be set because a weakness exists here, and then those units become part of that main effort because of the situation you’re going against.
It’s set primarily by your enemy being weak, not by your own forces. In other words, it’s an outward orientation, not an inward orientation even though the schwerpunkt itself is inward. Am I making my point?
Audience: [unintelligible] definition of focus of effort is— by sector and area. Is that different between this and main attack—
Boyd: Well, you might sometimes— you already know it’s weak all over. You may just say, okay. We’ll just designate this unit. I just don’t want you— you want a recipe. I’m trying to talk you out of a recipe. You may sometimes set it by unit. You may set it by sector. Understand, I use that as an example.
Audience: My question is—
Boyd: But in every case, when you set that thing, the thing I’m trying to tell you, in a sense it’s going against the guy’s weakness. So that sort of sets it, if you have a sort of philosophy going strength against weakness. It’s how you’re going to set that main effort. Go ahead.
Audience: What’s the difference between focus of effort and main attack?
Boyd: Oh, same thing. People use things— the Germans use “point of main effort.” They talk about— we call it “focus of main effort.” Now the Marines like to call— I think it’s a better word, “focus of effort” or “focus of efforts.” We’re all saying the same thing.
Wyly: [30:00] But that “main attack” word is one where we have to be careful— Boyd: You have to be careful.
[Cross talking]
Wyly: I mean, you talk about terms having a lot of baggage, see. And that’s the term the Marine Corps was using.
Boyd: No, the one thing bad about main attack, Mike’s onto something, if it’s a main attack, how do you handle it from a defensive viewpoint?
Wyly: Exactly.
Boyd: See schwerpunkt can also be defensive.
Wyly: And also, that’s the term the Marine Corps was using way before we even had this “focus of effort” concept, and so it tends to be kind of shallow. I mean, if you’re thinking of “main attack” the way it used to be in our old FMFM’s, I’d say forget it.
[multiple audience members begin rapid exchanges with each other]
Audience: I can understand that. But the College, the teaching is quite different [unintelligible].
Audience: Focus of effort, you all in the College, you’re going to get FMFM–1 more—
Boyd: And it’s “focus of effort.”
Audience: No more “main attack”—
Audience: It’s “focus of effort.” FMFM–1, if we’d had it when the year started, we’d have saved an awful lot of agonizing discussions, which we saw. So “focus of effort” encompasses
[unintelligible].
Boyd: But you’re going to hear people still want to use the word German schwerpunkt. That’s all right. Fine. They’re talking about “focus of effort” or “main effort” or “focus of main effort” or— and I tend to like the word “focus of efforts” better, because what I want to do with effort, guys think well, we only want one thrust. I want the multiple thrusts. So it’s “focus of efforts,” so you have multiple thrusts. So you can pull the guy apart. You’ll see that in a few moments.
But don’t worry about it. What I’m trying to do is, don’t think of it as a recipe. That’s what I’m trying to get you out of. It’s not always going to be— it’s only because we designate this unit.
I’m trying to get you out of that. You may do it that way, but there’s these other ways.
The key thing is, what you’re really thing to do is unwind your adversary. You’re assigning it internally, but it’s so you can exploit your strength against his weakness. It might be because of the terrain situation. It might be because of the way they’ve set their units. There’d be a number of reasons why you’re going to do that.
You see what I’m getting at? Okay. And that’s all I’m trying to tell you. I don’t want to take it any— don’t— what I’m trying to do, and you may hate my guts for it, is I don’t want you to have a rigid recipe. Because if you start getting rigid recipes, then the guy’s going to find out what that is. You would in a sense become predictable, and he’s going to pull your pants down.
He may not know it in the beginning, but after you do it a couple times, hey, I’m getting the picture. So then he’ll play it against you. He’ll use it against you. Go ahead.
Audience: Sir, I see a flaw in this, then. The Germans said they want to teach their officers to think the same way. They train them the same way, and more importantly, to think the same way. And there’s an element of prediction—
Boyd: There’s a danger. You lay it out. You’re going onto something. Go ahead.
Audience: What bothers me is, I’m trained the same way my boss is. I’m trained to think the same way my boss is. The reason he can just say, “okay, my intent is,” and I can take the ball and run with it, is because he knows that I’m going to come to the same damn conclusion on how to carry out—
Boyd: Oh, no, no. Not necessarily.
Audience: Probably.
Boyd: No, no, no. No, no, no.
[Cross talking]
Boyd: If you hear my Organic Design for Command and Control, when you train your people, if you train across a narrow repertoire, then you’ll tend to do it the same way he does. But if you have a wide repertoire, there’s different combinations you can use. And so when you try to build this common mindset, it’s across a large variety of different situations.
And so even though you have one “how” in mind, he may have a different “how” in mind. But you’re still under the same framework.
Audience: Well, I’m limited by my assets and by what I’ve got available to do the job with. Boyd: So what? I don’t care if we have limited assets. There’s still more than one way to skin a cat.
Audience: Not to me.
Boyd: If you don't think— then what you’ve got, you’ve got a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Audience: What I’m thinking is that—
Audience: Some can save time though, sir. There’s many ways to skin a cat, but some can save time is—
Boyd: I understand that.
Audience: And if speed is most important—
[Cross talking]
Boyd: See, now you’re looking for an optimum solution. We couldn’t even get an optimum solution when— I was laying out the equations for goddamn trying to optimize airplane designs, and we couldn’t do it. And you’re going to do it with human beings. That’s even tougher. Audience: But I’m saying there may be a hundred different ways to do it, but there may be one or two or three—
Boyd: There might be a few in there that are better than the others. I agree. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to do it exactly like he’s going to do it.
Wyly: In fact, it doesn’t mean that at all. I mean, we’re saying look for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Now I might find a totally different weakness than you see. I might be able to find one that you would never perceive. Or you might be able to see one that I never would because we think differently. We’re two different people.
Boyd: That’s right.
Wyly: But we’re both going to be looking for those weaknesses. That’s the one thing our common commander knows.
Boyd: See, you might see a, because your orientation, because you said it, you may see a physical weakness on a guy. You understand what I’m saying? So you’re going to allocate, and you’re going to set up your focus of effort or your schwerpunkt, whatever you want to call it, against that.
Whereas, what Mike’s saying, he may see, well, the way these guys have behaved before in battle, even though they’ve got a lot of troops, they’re weak units. And in that sense, it’s a morale problem, so you’re going to direct it against it because he knows they’re going to crumble. So he might set it differently than you would. You see what I’m saying?
[Cross talking]
Boyd: You’re orienting differently.
Wyly: One of the best examples to study this is in the British Navy, but the Royal Navy is— I mean, they practice this in their own way. If you take a look at Cape St. Vincent and Nelson’s
action, it was totally the last thing his commander, Jervis, ever would’ve thought of to do. But yet, it accomplished exactly what Jervis wanted to accomplish. Nelson pulls out of the fleet formation and bottles up the whole Spanish and French fleet, and they win. [35:00] Jervis never would’ve dreamed of that.
Boyd: In fact, what did Nelson say about his people? They were so understood, he called them a “band of brothers.” Same thing.
[Cross talking]
Boyd: Same idea, “band of brothers.” You see what I’m getting at then? Don’t try to make it too recipe. If you get it too recipe, then you start, a little bit too predictable. That’s why I’m trying to deliberately set in excursions here. But as long as you have the same feeling, you’ll build up that fingerspitzengefühl. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Okay.
So you see the way I’ve laid that out then. So it’s a unifying concept or unifying medium to work together, you understand. Go ahead.
Audience: I understand your thought process, and you talk about your medium through which subordinate initiative is implicitly connected to superior intent. Training can do all this, whatever. But when you have a specific mission at the tactical level, how do you do it? Do you do that with a five-paragraph order, and within there you put “in order to” so everyone realizes what the intent is, and then you leave them to do it? So are you talking about—
Boyd: Or you might not even have a— why do you have to have a written order? Who says you have to have a written order? I didn’t say you had to have one.
Audience: I did.
Boyd: I don’t need a written order. In fact, the Germans operated verbal orders only. Why do you have to have a written order? Who said?
Audience: Because every map-ex[1] we’ve done here, you get ten different people going in ten different directions. And if you don’t give them some guidance, it ain’t going to get done.
Audience: That’s a reflection on the way you think.
Boyd: But I’m saying you don’t have to have a written order.
Audience: I’m not saying you have to take the entire recipe—
[Cross talking]
Boyd: Not only that, in the U.S. Army, you ever hear of “Tiger” John Woods— “Tiger” Jack Woods, 4th Armored Division? Considered one of the best under Patton. He was the best armored division. One division, operating on a front 500 miles wide, and cleaning the clocks of the Germans.
You know how he gave his orders? He flew in his goddamn little Piper Cub and had the guy land. He’d go out and talk to the guy and say, you know what to do? Fine. Then he said, I got to hurry. I got to get to the other guy. So he’s going all over the front, just talking to them. No written orders. The other guys are sitting back there, they’re fucking— he’s succeeding, pushing forward.
[Cross talking]
Boyd: They said, Christ, you’re 500 miles, he said, forget it. Keep going, tiger. He unraveled the whole German front. Patton couldn’t believe it. In fact, Patton— he disobeyed Patton’s order. Patton says, you’ve got to loop here. He said, that’s not the way the war is. Fuck it. We’re going that way. And Patton was going to fire him.
He got to him. He said, look, goddamn it, the name of the game is to get Germany out of the war and going back to the coast. We’re looking at England. He wanted to loop around. He says, bullshit. We’re going to go right and pull them apart. And Patton looked at him. He said, you’re right. Go ahead. [audience laughter]
But he had the guts. He had the confidence to do what had to be done. He was our best armored commander during World War II. You go out to Fort Knox, Christ, they think he’s a god, or wherever it is they’ve got their Armored Center.
They called him “the Professor,” as a matter of fact. “Professor” John Woods, because he was smart. He could think. There’s a book out on him called Tiger Jack.[2] And you know what he was? He was fired. And he didn’t serve in North Africa.
His first combat assignment was after the Normandy operation. He got there late and he was their best commander. He didn’t invade. He didn’t land at Normandy. And then he got canned around Metz, because he wanted to use maneuver warfare, and they wanted to slug it out. So he got fired. He lasted about six months, and Christ, was the best armored commander they ever had. Go ahead.
Audience: So he achieved what the Germans tried to do through their training, all the— taking guys from the—
Boyd: Wait a minute.
Audience: —the age of pups and training them to—
Boyd: But he trained his people that way. They said oh, he was a stickler.
Audience: In a matter of months or a year.
Boyd: Oh, he worked his people, worked them all the time in the States.
[Crosstalk]
Boyd: I don’t know how much time he did it, but he did it.
Audience: So maybe we don't need all this training over years and years and years.
Boyd: Don’t say that. It’s like a spear into my heart.
Audience: That was my intent, sir. [audience laughter]
Boyd: Yeah, if you have all the training, which becomes like a choreographed ballet, it’s no n good. You’ve got to take variety and do it. You change things and all and you’ve got to teach different people. Sometimes what we do, we get in training, it’s just drill after drill, the same old thing. Well, now everybody’s rigid. They can’t think. They’re doing the same thing. And that’s why I say you’ve got to always keep introducing variety in your trends.
And if you don’t do it, you’re going to have a narrow repertoire and the other guy’s got a wider repertoire. He’s going to clean you out. It’s like a wide angle lens working— I mean, a wideband going against a narrowband. You know, communications.
You know what I’m talking about? Wide band communication versus narrow band. A wide band can work on narrow band but not the other way. At least all of the bands. So you want to wide band that son of a bitch.
He’s only got a piece of it and you’ve got all of the pieces. Or more of the pieces. You don’t have all, never. But you’ll have more pieces than he’s got, and you can pull him down rather than him pulling you apart.
Audience: We’ve been talking about this since last night. What we think we’re saying is there’s three levels of argument. One is a concept [unintelligible] you operate on. This is it, maneuver warfare, with all it entails. And then there’s the repeated ability to execute it or apply it so you develop your repertoire. [40:00] You’ve done it so many times in map exercises and CPXs[3] and
when you can, full blown field exercises. But when the time comes, you’ve got a repertoire that doesn’t have one or two answers.
Boyd: That’s right.
Audience: But the key is, and we’re struggling with it, is how do you get the tools like a five-paragraph order or whatever it is, and make those tools simple enough— we don’t concentrate— how much time do we spend on staff actions? We focus on procedures. But what we should be doing is understanding the concepts, and practicing them with our limited tools. But that’s easy to say, how we get there’s tough.
Audience: Oh, I think we do that. But I’m just saying if you have something that’s written, it’s going to preclude having to ask a lot of questions that are naturally going to arise when someone says go from point A to B.
Boyd: I don’t mind you having a simple order, a written order. I’m not against that.
[Cross talking]
Boyd: You don’t just have to have a written order. I can do it in verbal orders. The Germans—why do you want verbal orders? I’m getting ahead of myself. You’re pushing me. I’m going to answer your question. I’ll get into that in a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself. Because I want to talk to that.
Okay?