The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Way of War. Stephen Robinson. Dunedin, New Zealand: Exisle Publishing, 2021.
Stephen Robinson’s The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Way of War, is an important revisionist work on Boyd’s ideas. While Boyd has his detractors, many find his ideas anywhere from modestly to extremely positive, with the “true believers” arguing that Boyd’s maneuver-warfare theory is not just important but an ideal type to be implemented across the defense establishment. Robinson’s work is a welcome addition to the older and effusive books written about Boyd, including Grant T. Hammond’s The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security (2001) and Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (2002). It is also a useful companion work to Frans P. B. Osinga's Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (2006), although it lacks the detailed insights on Boyd's theory present in Osinga's work. The same is true for its utility as a companion piece for Ian T. Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (2018). Robinson thus gives us another lens—a useful and revisionist one—through which to view Boyd's theory of maneuver warfare and his OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop, among other things. While Robinson does not fully discredit Boyd's thinking, he forces even the most ardent Boyd acolytes to reexamine the substance and utility of Boyd's works.
The crux of Robinson’s argument is that Boyd’s maneuver-warfare theory relied heavily on inaccurate and purposefully dishonest historical writings by German generals and British theorist B. H. Liddell Hart. His detailed and well-supported assertions here are among the strongest in his book and command serious attention. Even more serious, Robinson says, Boyd refused to modify maneuver-warfare theory despite the emergence of clear evidence that the German generals had falsely portrayed the Wehrmacht in a highly positive light, thus misleading Boyd. Ultimately, Robinson notes, the Department of Defense incorporated key aspects of Boyd’s theory into its AirLand Battle doctrine despite its inherent weaknesses, which included too much focus on maneuver and too little on the destruction of the enemy’s forces.[1]
The book is bold and provocative. Its ideas deserve serious consideration across the services—particularly in the Marine Corps, where maneuver warfare was most fully adopted. It is nonetheless paradoxical: strong in many respects but not in others, beautifully balanced in several key arguments but also weaker in others, ultimately reducing the strength of Robinson’s central argument that Boyd was a blind strategist whose theories did much more harm than good in the American military establishment. Specifically, while Robinson addresses specific weaknesses in Boyd’s theory and approach effectively, he misses or ignores its strengths. As will become clear, Robinson’s almost categorically negative assessment appears to leave no room for Boyd’s theory to be useful either as a meta-theory or as a menu of specific insights for military professionals. Similarly, Robinson’s critique of Boyd overlooks several instances where Boyd’s thinking did evolve and where it is useful as a means for grappling with various complexities associated with war. Finally, Robinson occasionally goes too far in trying to discredit Boyd, as with the case of blaming him for William Lind’s Fourth-Generation Warfare theory when there is no clear evidence Boyd played a major role in its dissemination.
Robinson’s strongest writing focuses on the degree to which Boyd accepted and idealized a German form of warfare that never existed—at least not in the way Boyd himself claimed. By contrasting key aspects of maneuver-warfare theory with actual German operations, the author highlights holes in Boyd’s theory. Robinson attacks Boyd’s heavy focus on maneuver, surprise, and tempo, and the paralysis and panic these can instill in an enemy force, noting that in the process Boyd downplays the importance of major battles and derides attrition-based warfare. Robinson then reminds us that German operations were less “maneuverist” than “destructionist.”[2] Beginning with the Frederician quest for decisive battles, continuing with Moltke’s cauldron battles and Schlieffen’s Cannae-inspired battles of annihilation, and culminating with Wehrmacht operations, Germans focused on winning wars quickly by destroying the enemy in battles of encirclement, even if the preliminaries involved many aspects of Boyd’s maneuver-warfare theory.
To his credit, Robinson gives the reader a useful reminder about the importance of examining and assessing source material from all angles. Robinson makes this clear in his excellent critique of Boyd's use of sources but also in his own selective use of source materials. For instance, while Robinson excuses Boyd’s inability to know about the German senior officers’ self-serving motives and distortions of fact, he properly takes Boyd to task—using Boyd’s own statements and argumentation—for refusing to modify his theory even after Hermann Balck, Friedrich von Mellenthin, and other more honest senior German commanders undermined many of Boyd’s assertions about how the Germans fought.[3]
Despite these telling attacks on maneuver-warfare theory, Robinson’s argument does not hold—at least not in the sense of entirely discrediting Boyd’s ideas about the importance of better decision-making, speed of action, and the disruption and dislocation of enemy military forces as means for creating condition conducive to victory. Boyd’s theory explains an ideal type of war and how to wage it. Consequently—and Robinson is correct here—Boyd’s claim that maneuver warfare is the key to military success in all future conflicts is not sustainable given the broad range of conflict types, their great complexity, and their unique contexts. Nonetheless, his theory and many of its key components remain useful for military professionals despite Robinson’s insistence that Boyd’s maneuver-warfare theory is not useful but rather has had harmful effects on the development of American military doctrine and operations.[4]
For instance, Robinson views the OODA Loop as a sound tactical model but not useful beyond that. In fact, it is an excellent explanatory device for understanding initiative and advantage at all levels of war. As Colin Gray notes:
The OODA Loop may appear too humble to merit categorization as a grand theory, but that is what it is. It has an elegant simplicity, an extensive domain of applicability and contains a high quality of insight about strategic essentials, such that its author well merits honourable mention as an outstanding general theorist of strategy.[5]
John Boyd’s OODA Loop (Wikimedia)
This is high praise from an enormously influential scholar who understands the OODA Loop’s value as an approach, tool, and theory for developing new insights and habits of mind from the tactical to the strategic levels of war.
Beyond OODA, and in contradiction of Robinson’s argumentation, there is additional good to be gleaned from Boyd on the question of how he interpreted certain aspects of the preferred German way of war. For example, German warfare as practiced from the Fredericks to the Panzer generals illustrated most of Boyd’s major theoretical approaches. These included achieving victory rapidly by using speed, surprise, and flexibility to disrupt enemy operations and place enemy troops at a disadvantage. Further, nearly all of Boyd’s examples in Patterns of Conflict end with major and often decisive battles, so it is difficult to see how Boyd could have envisioned maneuver warfare as a nearly bloodless endeavor.[6] He simply appears to have focused more heavily on how key aspects of maneuver warfare threw the enemy off balance, slowed his decision cycle, and made him more prone to defeat at lower cost to the attacker. For instance, Boyd argued that disrupting enemy command-and-control and logistics was a central aspect of German warfighting. Even though Boyd was at least partially incorrect here given that such disruption tended to be a bonus of the rapid movement required to produce a successful major battle rather than its aim, his observations are still useful. Robinson would have been more convincing had he spent more time acknowledging and examining these kinds of overlap between Boyd’s theory and historical reality rather than portraying them as near-polar opposites.
The same holds for Robinson’s assertion that Boyd did not understand the difference between the tactical and operational levels of war, far overrating Wehrmacht performance in the latter, because he relied on the German generals’ misleading studies. Robinson instead claims, “The Wehrmacht in reality performed poorly at the operational level,”[7] blaming ineffective German planning, logistics, and intelligence. This takes things a bit too far. While all three had serious weaknesses, they worked well enough until the massive failures of the Russian campaign. In this effort to discredit Boyd’s theory, Robinson ignores the many German tactical and operational successes from 1939 to 1942. Based on widely available and agreed-upon definitions of what a campaign is, the German Army did quite well at the tactical and operational levels until the Russian campaign. The Germans won campaigns in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Their operations were generally sound given the short duration of each campaign. Serious operational failures began in Russia when hubris and overconfidence came together with bad planning, intelligence, and logistics.[8]
Robinson’s arguments, while strong in part, thus fall short because they tend to be categorical, portraying maneuver warfare as an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it theory rather than as one approach among several.[9] Robinson is clearly capable of achieving balance and nuance in his argumentation when he focuses on doing so. For instance, he notes that AirLand Battle was a doctrinal compromise in which Boyd’s maneuver-warfare principles figured prominently but did not predominate.[10] This is an excellent example of the utility of Boyd’s theory within limits, and this kind of nuance would have been a useful tool for structuring the entire book.
Robinson could have used similar nuance in his analysis of the 1991 Gulf War, but he instead overemphasized the ways in which it was not a case of maneuver warfare while downplaying the aspects of maneuver-warfare theory present within plans and operations.[11] His lack of attention to airpower as a key condition-setting asset is a case in point. During the forty-three-day conflict, air assets were active the entire time, preparing the battlespace for and then supporting the four-day ground operation. Airpower is a war-of-movement asset par excellence which, when enemy air defenses are down, avoids adversary strengths, attacks weaknesses, produces friction and disruption, inflicts serious attrition, and thus serves as a crucial member of a combined-arms team. Robinson’s point that Desert Storm ultimately looked like AirLand Battle might have elicited more thought about what “AirLand Battle” really was and specifically how and to what degree Boyd’s ideas contributed to its development—a point Robinson himself acknowledges earlier in his book.[12]
There are similar problems with Robinson’s analysis of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He portrays General Tommy Franks as a maneuver-warfare disciple who could not see past the initial battle or anticipate an insurgency.[13] Both appear to be true, but Franks’ failings were not the result of Boyd’s teachings. In fact, only his more successful moments—the rapid defeat of a weak Iraqi military and occupation of Iraq in three weeks—relied on Boyd’s ideas. The major failure occurred among policymakers, who insisted the war would be short, Iraqis would welcome western-style democracy, and Iraq would become a key U.S. ally.[14]
Finally, Robinson’s attack on Fourth-Generation Warfare, while effective, again posits Boyd’s guilt even though the concept matured after the latter’s death and without his participation.[15] Robinson does this through Boyd’s acolyte William Lind, who pushed the idea of Fourth-Generation Warfare on senior leadership, in the process obscuring the much older and more complex realities of insurgency.[16] One such reality is that most insurgencies and other wars are attritional even if those who start them plan for short ones.[17] Boyd came to understand this even if Lind did not. In his later Patterns of Conflict briefings, Boyd warned that insurgents would always try to engage in long wars of attrition. He did not qualify this statement other than to note that if the population had real grievances, and the government did not address them, the insurgents would indeed force a long war and likely succeed. Perhaps Boyd did recognize some of his own theory’s limits—or at least came to do so over time as his thinking evolved. Boyd’s followers—and especially Lind—took their own misunderstandings of Boyd’s theory (at least in its later iterations) too far and pushed its implications too hard into their preferred templates. To the degree that Boyd failed to correct or contradict them, he bears some portion of the blame, but that is as far as one should try to take such an issue.[18]
With the foregoing critiques in mind, everyone with an interest in Boyd’s theories should take Robinson’s arguments seriously. Boyd would have expected no less. Boyd was not a trained military historian, and as Robinson highlights, this created problems and inconsistencies in his maneuver-warfare theory. However, parts of the theory, used carefully and contextually, remain useful. And even though Boyd refused to modify many of his own views in spite of new evidence, violating his own principle of destruction and creation (analysis and synthesis of new ideas and insights to produce iteratively better understanding), his call for constant learning and improvement is nonetheless worth heeding. Boyd was a theorist with blind spots. We all suffer from those. However, Boyd was not a blind theorist or strategist. His ideas, while imperfect, remain useful for increasing our understanding of armed conflict.
Rob Ehlers is a retired Air Force intelligence officer and now mentors advanced analysis and planning courses for the Department of Defense. He is the author of Targeting the Third Reich: Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns and The Mediterranean Air War: Airpower and Allied Victory in World War II, both from the University Press of Kansas. Rob earned his doctorate in military history from The Ohio State University in 2005.
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Notes:
[1] Stephen Robinson, The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Way of War (Dunedin, New Zealand: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd, 2021), chapters 3-6.
[2] Robinson, pp. 134-140.
[3] Robinson, pp. 19-20, 180-183.
[4] Robinson ends his introductory chapter with the following statement on page 20: “Boyd is essentially a blind strategist, in the dark and cut off from the light of genuine historical inquiry, forever trapped in the feedback loop of his closed system.” Further, Robinson refers to Boyd’s theory as “disinformation.” In short, Robinson says Boyd has nothing to offer and that he was in effect lying to his audiences, as the use of the word “disinformation” indicates. Boyd’s ideas were clearly imperfect, and he was stubborn—often to the point of being obdurate—in his defense of them. However, based on long experience with Boyd’s theory and having seen the clear applicability of many of his ideas to analysis, planning, and operations at all levels of conflict, the reviewer must disagree. Throwing out Boyd’s ideas in their entirety while calling him mendacious is excessive and puts the reader immediately on alert for additional instances where Robinson’s arguments lack nuance and accuracy. There are in fact several such instances, as will become clear throughout this review. While many of Robinson’s points are telling and accurate, others are not.
[5] Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 91.
[6] Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, December 1986, Tapes 1 and 2,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahsu2zVrydA&list=PLrRNmiSnQlT1xtCZhxil9ruqNq2h_w0p0&index=2.
[7] Robinson, p. 190.
[8] There are hundreds of works detailing German operational successes from 1939 to 1942. See the opening chapters of Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge: MA: Belknap Press, 2000) for a concise look at how the Germans succeeded so well at the operational level early in the war, despite a number of clear shortcomings in their overall performance. See also Robert Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005), chapters 7 and 8.
[9] Note once again the categorical statement Robinson makes at the end of his introductory chapter: “Boyd is essentially a blind strategist, in the dark and cut off from the light of genuine historical inquiry, forever trapped in the feedback loop of his closed system.” Further, as previously noted, Robinson calls Boyd’s theory “disinformation.”
[10] Robinson, pp. 54-55.
[11] Robinson, pp. 250-254. There is a discordant note in Robinson’s assessment of maneuver-warfare doctrine and its role in AirLand Battle doctrine. On pp. 54-55, he acknowledges that AirLand Battle was a combination of maneuver warfare, destruction, and synchronization. While acknowledging that Schwarzkopf employed AirLand Battle during Desert Storm, he claims the maneuver-warfare aspects were absent. This was not true of the forty-three day air offensive. Aircraft had wide latitude in attacking a range of targets, degrading Iraqi logistical and operational capacities to maximize the effectiveness of the ground offensive. This “maneuverist” and generally effective process is documented in hundreds of sources, including the Gulf War Airpower Survey (1994), Airpower in the Gulf War: Evaluating the Claims (1994), Psychological Effects of U.S. Air Operations in Four Wars (1996), and “Toward a More Nuanced View of Airpower and Operation Desert Storm” (2021). The better Iraqi divisions were still able to fight even after the pounding they took from the air, but a combination of far superior Coalition ground forces, the myriad effects of sustained aerial bombardment, and their own inferior training and equipment undermined their operational effectiveness. Synchronization ruled the ground offensive, maneuver characterized the air offensive, while both ground and air efforts were heavily “destructionist.” Robinson misses this in his analysis.
[12] Robinson, pp 54-55.
[13] Robinson, pp. 279-282.
[14] There are many works that take this position. See, for instance, Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006).
[15] Robinson, 287-290.
[16] For a more nuanced and effective counter to Lind’s ideas about Fourth-Generation Warfare, see Antulio Echevarria, Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2005).
[17] The recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are cases in point. Senior political and military leaders did not anticipate or plan for insurgencies in either case, nor did they appear to give any thought to what attritional warfare would look like, or how it might undermine public and allied support for the wars. See for instance Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco, for the Iraq experience, and Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) for the Afghanistan experience.
[18] Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, December 1986, 14:00 – 15:20, Tape 1 Side 2,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahsu2zVrydA&list=PLrRNmiSnQlT1xtCZhxil9ruqNq2h_w0p0&index=2. Robinson uses the 1978 version, but Boyd’s evolving thoughts about insurgency and counterinsurgency extend well beyond that, as the 1986 video makes clear.