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“Discourse on Winning and Losing” Lecturer: Col. John R. Boyd (Ret)

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“Discourse on Winning and Losing” Lecturer: Col. John R. Boyd (Ret) “Discourse on Winning and Losing” Lecturer: Col. John R. Boyd (ret) Place: USMC Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University, MCB Quantico, VA Date: 25 April / 2 May / 3 May, 1989 Transcribed by: Maj Ian Brown, 25 March 2015 – 11 January 2017, utilizing “Express Scribe Transcription Software,” distributed by NCH Software (applied the following audio enhancements built into the software: “background noise reduction” and “extra volume boost”). Additional transcription assistance from Same Day Transcriptions, Inc. Time stamps, indicated by [15:00], are inserted every five minutes. Notes: 1) Aside from Colonel Michael Wyly, the transcriber could not identify by name or branch of service any of the audience members (no class roster is included in the archived material). Individual speakers are identified by the name “audience.” Based on audience interaction with Boyd over the course of the three days recorded, the transcriber estimates an audience size of approximately ten members. 2) The transcriber has included brief explanatory footnotes for various people and books Boyd cited throughout the presentation. The most recent versions of the books cited are included, to aid those interested in further reading. [Begin Tape 1, Side 1] John Boyd: You have your own copy. Can you all read it? If you can’t, pass the other copy around. It’s kind of close here. What we can do— Why don’t we get smart. Michael Wyly:1 Do you want to move it back? [unintelligible] Boyd: No, that’s alright. That’s fine— I think that’s good right there. [Cross talk] Did you get a pointer there, Mike? Wyly: He’s getting one— 1 At the time this brief was presented, Colonel Michael Wyly was a staff member of the Marine Corps University at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. Wyly was a key member of the maneuver warfare movement within the Marine Corps during the 1980s. He wrote many articles on the subject in the Marine Corps Gazette, the Corps’ professional journal. His passion for the subject came from his experiences during the Vietnam War as an infantry platoon commander. Prior the creation of the Marine Corps University by General Al Grey, Wyly had lectured about maneuver warfare at the Amphibious Warfare School in Quantico, where he became familiar with Boyd’s work through William Lind, and often invited Boyd to lecture. William Lind was a civilian military reformer who also wrote extensively on maneuver warfare and was a friend of Boyd’s. Wyly’s lecture notes on maneuver warfare were included by Lind in the Maneuver Warfare Handbook. See William S. Lind, Maneuver Warfare Handbook (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985). 1 Boyd: Okay, has everybody read the abstract?2 What’d you get out of it? The most important paragraph is the second paragraph. Excuse me, the last paragraph. The last paragraph on the second page is the most important paragraph. Because that’s what this all what we’re going to be talking about today is all about. Let me tell you something, preliminary before I get into the presentation. You know, some people like to be regarded as being an analyst. They think that’s a term of endearment. I treat it as a personal insult if somebody calls me an analyst. A personal insult. If you’ve read the last paragraph, I’ve showed there are two things you have to be able to do: analyze and synthesize. Analysis and synthesis. And if you can do that in many different areas, tactics, strategies, goals, unifying theme, you can run businesses, you can do any goddamn thing you want. And so when a person calls you an analyst, you’re really only a half-wit. You only got half. Idiot. So there’s two things that I don’t like being called, one an analyst, and the other is an expert. Because an expert means he knows everything and can’t learn anything new. He’s rigid. And boy, if you’re an analytical expert, you’re really in deep trouble. So some of you people may feel a little bit uncomfortable with my presentation, because I don’t start out with an executive summary. And then after, we say, “here it is,” now we’re going to pack in only that data that supports it and summarily reject everything else. That’s how we get ourselves into problems. [title slide] We’re going to go through this whole presentation— “Patterns of Conflict”—going back in history that I’ve laid out here in the outline we’re going to go through. And we’re going to pull things apart, put them back together, pull things apart, put them back together all the way through. Now why in hell are we going to do that for? Should drive you batty. The very simple reason, and what you’re trying to find out if we’re going to talk about conflict, you want to reach back, you want to find out those things we call the “invariants,” the constancies, or what the physicists like to call the symmetries. Where you can look at things from different points of view, and you keep seeing the same thing popping out. Example: let’s assume you people here in this room—and it’s an idiotic example but it makes my point—were taught all your life, or you only had the opportunity to see pyramids from the side. Only from the side. You’d go through life thinking pyramids are triangles. Now let’s say we got another group, different from our group here, and they only got to see pyramids from the top. They’d think there were rectangles with intersecting diagonals. A square. So now let’s say this group then interacts with the other group, and they start talking about pyramids, and say “these guys are goddamn idiots.” And it’s you he’s talking about and he thinks you’re an idiot. But you’re both talking about the same thing from what? A different point of view. You’re both correct, partially. But from a different point of view. 2 Boyd is referring to a two-page abstract he wrote for his Discourse on Winning and Losing. The Discourse was a collection the briefing slides from several of Boyd’s presentations, which were assembled and bound in a “Green Book” due to Col. Wyly’s efforts. The Discourse included the essay “Destruction and Creation,” and the briefs “Patterns of Conflict,” “Organic Design for Command and Control,” “The Strategic Game of ? and ?” and “Revelation.” 2 And so what you want to do is, you want to examine these things from these different angles or points of view, and find those things that tend to keep holding up. You’ve got a goddamn gem that you find. They’re hard to find. You’ve got a gem, an invariant, a constancy, what the physicists call symmetry. Symmetry is the ability to find those same things that hold up, that don’t change when you look at it from different points of view. Any physicists in here, anybody study physics? Ever heard that term symmetry? Well I ask you, what’s pure or perfect symmetry? Give me an object, an example of perfect symmetry, where you examine from different points of view, a physical object. Doesn’t change no matter how matter you examine it. Audience: Sir, a sphere? Boyd: That’s right a sphere. Not a circle, a circle you don’t [unintelligible]. [05:00] A sphere, no matter how you examine it from different angles, perfect symmetry. Unfortunately that’s a physical object; now we’re going to look at moral, mental, and physical. When you go off the physical, you start looking at mental, it gets a little bit more difficult. So we’re going to go through, and basically we’re trying to find those invariants. We’re going to go from Sun Tzu to the present, what kind of things still hold together? And that’s why you don’t just take Sun Tzu and say “kkkkkkk,” template him today, you’re going to do that, or you take Clausewitz and you’re going to template him today, or Jomini or who else [unintelligible] you’re going to make a horrible mistake if you do that. But there are certain things they said that still hold true, if we uncover them. The answer is there. And you’re going to see how that’s done. So we’re not going to start with the answer. We’re going to start with a confusing bunch of goddamn data and we’re going to try to pull it together. We’re going to do both. Breakdown, which is the analysis, pulling it back together with synthesis, pull that apart, breakdown, bring it back together and pull it apart, always feeding in more and more stuff and rejecting more and more stuff as we go along. To find those things that hold true, whether in the past, today, and also in the future. For those people that study Clausewitz, think that we’re just going to use Clausewitz as the lens filter to look at the problem, you’re going to make a horrible mistake. It’s a disaster. Because all you’ve told me is your thinking hasn’t proceeded beyond 1832, and a lot of things have happened since 1832. [unintelligible] So I can’t overemphasize it. Now I want to talk about one other thing before I hop into the presentation. One thing I want to point out, and I’m going to make it again and again.
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