Although this distinction was potentially richer than others that became more prominent in strategic debate in the United States, it is not hard to explain Wylie’s limited influence. The concepts were abstract and did not particularly address the preoccupations of the 1960s. It was well into the 1970s before serious debate revived on regular warfare. By then, the classic questions were ripe for reappraisal. Regular warfare was still the area of greatest military expenditure and effort, and new technologies were starting to challenge established doctrine.
The starting point for the revised interest was one of the most elemental and iconic encounters of contemporary warfare. The aerial dogfight combined the hunt and the chase with advanced technology. Colonel John Boyd, an American fighter pilot with experience going back to the Korean War, wrote the definitive manual on the subject. As he did so he hit upon an insight which he developed into a formula of considerable influence. Boyd began with the premise that the U.S. air force had become too preoccupied with speed. This became apparent during the early stages of the air war over Vietnam when apparently obsolete Soviet-built MiGs were prevailing in dogfights because they were more maneuverable. After an intensive analysis of the competing aircraft, Boyd concluded that the key quality was not absolute speed but agility. In a series of moves during the course of a dogfight, the most responsive fighter would be able to get on to the opponent’s tail, ready for the kill.
The OODA Loop
Boyd summed all this up as the “OODA loop.” OODA stands for observation, orientation, decision, action. The sequence started with observation, as data concerning the environment was collected. This was analyzed in the orientation stage, leading to a decision and then to the execution of an action. The loop became more complex as it developed, especially as Boyd came to appreciate the pervasive importance of orientation. It was a loop because the action changed the environment, which required that the process be repeated. Ideally, the progressive improvement of the orientation and the consequential action would result in getting closer to reality. For the fighter pilot, this brought home the importance of getting to the action part of the loop faster than the opponent. Boyd felt the OODA loop applied to any situation in which it was necessary to keep or gain the initiative. The aim was always to disorient the opponent, who would be unable to grasp a situation developing more quickly than anticipated and in unexpected ways and thus paralyzed into indecision.
Eventually books were written to explain, and in some cases apply, Boyd’s theories. He never produced a definitive text of his own. His basic ideas are contained in several hundred slides entitled Discourse on Winning & Losing.8 They formed the basis of briefings given over almost two decades to numerous audiences, including most of the senior figures in the American defense establishment. Their impact was accentuated because they were spread by enthusiastic acolytes who shared Boyd’s commitment to a combination of hard cost-benefit analysis and broad strategic vision, as well as disdain for the bureaucrats and careerists who by definition lacked both. In addition, at least at first sight, the OODA loop had a compelling simplicity and sustained the gathering complexity of Boyd’s theories. After retiring from the air force, the autodidactic Boyd read widely and moved from his engineering background into mathematical theory and on into history and the social sciences.
His later reading reinforced his views about the difficulty of sustaining the initiative. The enemy might be able to move faster than anticipated; observations might result in more uncertainty than clarity. In one remarkable paper he drew on the work of mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg to demonstrate the greater risk of disorientation when attempts were made to fit observations into preconceptions.9 He then used the second law of thermodynamics to argue that closed systems led to increases in entropy, that is, internal confusion and disorder. Boyd was showing that instead of searching for “laws” to match those developed by Newtonian physics, it was now necessary to make sense of new forms of theory which challenged concepts of systems tending to equilibrium and pointed instead to chaos. The basic conclusion was the need “to deny the adversary the possibility of uncovering or discerning patterns that match our activity, or other aspects of reality in the world.”10
Because human beings must cope with a constantly changing reality, it was therefore necessary to challenge rigidities in thought. Then these new thoughts would rigidify in their time and so would need dissolving in turn. The lasting importance of Boyd’s work lay in the focus on disrupting the enemy’s decision-making, encouraging uncertainty and confusion. Under his influence, established notions of command and control were amended to take account of how information was collected, interpreted, and then communicated. By the time he died in 1997, the revolution in information and communication technologies was well underway. Boyd had set the terms for its military exploitation.
Boyd was widely read in the scientific literature of the time and picked up easily on developing theories which used simple propositions to explain complex phenomena. From these he drew language and insights to describe the sort of conflicts that interested him. From Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics to Murray Gell-Mann’s complexity theory emerged some core themes about the interaction of parts within systems, adaptation to changing environments, and outcomes that seemed indeterminate but were not beyond explanation. The conclusions for practical strategists that emerged from these theories rarely did justice to the elegance of the originals, and could lead to the suspicion that the main result was to develop more impressive language for matters that were already well understood. Many of the emerging themes were present, for example, in Schelling’s writings. The most important contribution of complexity theory was to underline the importance of considering individual actors as part of complex systems, so that they must always be assessed in relation to their environment, which was adapting to them as they adapted to it. Problems arose with an inability to adapt.
“Chaos theory” explained how systems in which cause and effect were supposedly known, and in which strategic calculations might be assumed to be reliable, could nonetheless turn into disorderly systems marked by apparently random effects. This underlined the point that micro-causes could have unexpected macro-effects, and that initial conditions determined later outcomes, even though the resultant dynamic interactions meant that they could not be predicted. Effects always had causes even though the processes were obscure. One basic conclusion was that mistakes in the short term would be hard to reverse over the long term.11
This challenged the underlying presumption of rationality underpinning bureaucratic organizations and routine planning. Those looking for stability and regularity could find themselves having to cope with the opposite. If effects were uncertain, especially in more complex settings and longer conflicts, how could a responsible strategist think through the consequences of actions. Along with the sociological “laws” of unanticipated consequences and self-fulfilling expectations came the cybernetic concepts of feedback loops and non-linearity. If inputs and outputs were proportional then variables could be plotted along a straight line, as in a linear equation, but with non-linear equations there could be no such plot because the relationships were complex and outcomes would be disproportionate to effects.12
The first thought that might be drawn from this was that all strategy was doomed to failure. The second might be that the process could only truly be managed during its early stages, so the best option was to concentrate on getting the initial advantage. This was fine if the conflict could actually be concluded quickly, but once the early stages were passed situations might be expected to move out of control. There was considerable historical evidence to support this proposition, for example, the failure of the Schlieffen Plan.
Attrition and Maneuver
Boyd’s writings led to the evaluation of strategies in terms of their ability to cause uncertainty and confusion in the enemy’s mind. This could be achieved by undermining the will to fight (“moral warfare”); encouraging distorted perc
eption of reality, by either deception or attacks on means of communication (“mental warfare”); and using the advantages gained to attack war-making capacities so the enemy could not survive (“physical warfare”).13 The prescriptions that flowed from analysis of the first strategy were largely derivative of the post-Napoleonic classics and of Fuller and Liddell Hart.
One of Boyd’s key examples was the 1940 Battle of France, which prompted his “Blitzkrieg vs. Maginot Line mentality.” French decision-making was paralyzed as the Germans worked out how to operate inside their OODA loops.14 One key to German success was the readiness to delegate. Tactical commanders could realize the mission in their own way. This depended on a shared understanding of what needed to be done. Boyd distinguished between attrition warfare, focused on the physical domain and using firepower as a destructive force, and maneuver warfare, focused on the mental domain where the aim was to generate “surprise and shock” by using ambiguity, mobility, and deception. Blitzkrieg could also lead to effects in the moral domain, which Boyd saw as being related to menace and uncertainty.
The example was not chosen at random. It played into a major debate then underway on the future of American military policy. The setting of the 1970s was one in which the armed forces of the United States were still licking their Vietnam-imposed wounds and coming to terms with the implications of an all-volunteer army. The generals believed that they could rebuild the army best by focusing on the priority task of securing NATO’s central front. This had the added advantage of returning to the comfort zone of preparations for major war and away from insurgencies. In addition, since the 1960s American policymakers had indicated a wish to reduce dependence on nuclear deterrence, as it involved increasingly incredible threats. In this respect the later stages of Vietnam and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War had indicated that there might be new possibilities, notably technologies that allowed conventional munitions to be delivered with extraordinary precision, offering opportunities to rethink land warfare doctrine. At the same time there were concerns that the European challenge had become greater than before: the Warsaw Pact was presumed to still enjoy substantial numerical superiority but also to have revamped its doctrine and built up its strength while the Americans had been preoccupied with Vietnam.
The resentment of McNamara’s managerialism at the Pentagon still ran deep, and was reflected in much of the critical literature of the time. He was taken to embody the stifling introduction of conformist practices and the risk-averse culture of large corporations into a business that should really honor warrior virtues and cultivate mavericks. This became another version of the romantic lament against bureaucratization and scientific rationality, although the trends in scientific thinking around complexity encouraged the view that it was the rationalists who were now being overtaken. It also challenged a military elite who had bought into the corporatist culture. Desk bound and far from the scenes of actual conflict, they were as proud of their degrees in business administration and economics as they were forgetful of the ways of military strategy.
The first fruits of the army’s post-Vietnam reappraisal of doctrine came with the 1976 publication of Field Manual 100-5: Operations, the army’s main doctrinal manual.15 The manual drew on the lethality of modern weaponry, bringing all forms of firepower—land and air—to bear in a combined arms approach in order to generate an “active defense.” It was a traditional approach, dependent on the most advanced equipment and professional training to produce a force capable of holding lines against a determined offensive and inflicting crippling damage on the enemy until they were so weak they could not cope with a counterattack.
It did not take long before this manual was subjected to a searing critique. This was as much about reforming the whole military establishment as addressing a difficult conundrum about how to think about NATO’s central front. The criticism originated not from within the military establishment but from a group of largely civilian defense specialists, though many had military backgrounds and were influenced by Boyd. To the fore in the attack was William Lind, intensely conservative though he was working as a legislative aide to a democratic senator. Boyd’s dichotomy between attritional and maneuver warfare, using the Maginot Line versus Blitzkrieg analogy, was picked up with some vigor by Lind, who had a keen interest in German fighting methods. In contrast to attrition, which has the objective of killing enemy troops or destroying enemy equipment, the blitzkrieg-based alternative of maneuver would have as its “primary objective” breaking “the spirit and the will of the opposing high command by creating unexpected and unfavorable operational or strategic situations.”16
Within five years the reformers had apparently won the argument, with the adoption of the doctrine of Air Land Battle in 1982 and a revised army field manual. This was intended from the start to set broad principles for any war, not just one in Europe. The battlefield was to be seen in the round, and the critical attributes of successful operations were stressed as “initiative, depth, agility and synchronization.”17 For Field Manual 100-5, maneuver was the dynamic element of combat, allowing the concentration of forces to use surprise, psychological shock, position, and momentum to enable smaller forces to defeat larger ones. It was seen as “the employment of forces through movement supported by fire to achieve a position of advantage” from which they could then destroy or threaten to destroy the enemy. The aim was to move fast, probe defenses, and exploit success, carrying the battle deep into the enemy’s rear.18 The spirit was offensive and in line with Boyd’s determination to get inside the enemy’s OODA loop:
The underlying purpose of every encounter with the enemy is to seize or retain independence of action. To do this we must make decisions and act more quickly than the enemy to disorganize his forces and to keep him off balance.19
By 1986 the Field Manual 90-8 Counterguerrilla Operations, dealing with action directed against armed antigovernment forces, claimed that the “basic concept of Air Land Battle doctrine can be applied to Counterguerrilla operations.”20 In 1989 the Marine Corps issued FMFM-1 which insisted that its doctrine was based on “warfare by maneuver,” which would provide a means to defeat a “physically superior foe” by rendering the enemy “incapable of resisting by shattering his moral and physical cohesion.”21
Operational Art
“Maneuver” displaced “attrition” remarkably quickly. This all took place within a cold-war context, in which the enemy was both well known and substantial, and the problem to be solved was deterring and if necessary resisting aggression across the inner German border. The focus was therefore on a classic great power confrontation between large armies in the center of Europe. It was one which made it possible to draw on the classic texts of military strategy updated for the information age.
Edward Luttwak, a Romanian-born polymath with an unerring eye for a controversial argument, synthesized the various strands of critical thinking around U.S. military policy with a series of articles and books. He challenged the Department of Defense’s bloated command structures and fascination with weapons procurement at the expense of strategic thought.22 Military strategy, he argued, required different ways of thinking than did normal civilian life. The interaction of opposing forces meant that war was a realm “pervaded by a paradoxical logic of its own, standing against the ordinary linear logic by which we live in other spheres of life.” This normal logic was violated by “inducing the coming together and even the reversal of opposites.” As a result, paradoxical conduct tended to be rewarded while straightforwardly logical action was confounded, “yielding results ironical if not lethally self-damaging.”23 Those who understood how to manage the large civilian bureaucracies presiding over the armed forces could not, therefore, grasp strategy because it involved a quite different way of thinking. They would look for standardized solutions, failing to understand how much easier this made the enemy’s task. Luttwak also acknowledged that even if national leaders somehow acquired this paradoxical turn of mind they might not dare display it les
t they alarm their constituents and colleagues. Any deviation from the “commonsensical conventions of the time and place” would risk a “loss of authority.”24 The linear planning model, which Robert McNamara had taken to the Pentagon, was flawed precisely because it could not anticipate everything and so was likely to produce perverse outcomes. This led Luttwak into arguing, in effect, for confusion or at least against attempted coherence, for “only policies that are seemingly contradictory can circumvent the self-defeating effect of the paradoxical logic.” Luttwak overdid this point: war did not require a different logic, just a recognition of a different context, one in which it would make perfect sense to follow a different path to one followed in peace.25
Luttwak focused attention on the importance of what he identified as the “operational level.” This had been neglected, and with it the classical traditions of European war. Jomini, Liddell Hart, and John Boyd had referred to this level as one for grand tactics. Jomini described these as “the maneuvering of an army upon the battle-field, and the different formation of troops for attack.” Luttwak believed that the operational level was the critical sphere for generalship and for that reason deplored its absence in contemporary American military thought. It was there that “schemes of warfare such as blitzkrieg or defense in depth evolve or are exploited.” Americans had neglected this because of their dependence on an “attrition style of war.”26
The idea of an operational level of war as a politics-free zone where commanders could demonstrate their mastery of managing large forces over wide areas in a series of complex engagements with the enemy was an inheritance from von Moltke. It was given added salience because of its prominence in Soviet military thought. From the formation of the Soviet Union, its military leadership had been engaged in theoretical debates about the operational level as an intermediate stage between tactics and strategy, and which way they should turn when faced with the choice between decisive annihilation or more defensive attrition. In the build-up to the Second World War, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s reflections on the impact of motorization and airpower had led him to come out firmly in favor of mass, mechanized forces able to conduct deep operations in a war of annihilation. His opponents were castigated not only for poor strategy but for poor theory, which was much more dangerous. This helped seal the fate of many in Stalin’s purges, although it did not spare Tukhachevsky a similar fate. After the war, the initial Soviet focus had been on the impact of thermonuclear weapons, which led to a reduced conventional army, but by the late 1960s the numbers were rising again. Reflecting the view that the best chance of victory was early in a war, before American reserves could get across the Atlantic to Europe, the general staff stressed the importance of being able to mount maneuvers deep in NATO territory with minimal prior mobilization, maximum surprise, and combined forces. This tradition, as reflected in the military doctrines of the Warsaw Pact, was another reason for NATO countries, led by the United States, to get on the same wavelength.27
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