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Books like this are written so rigorously that any review of them which does not attempt a summary of their ideas seems to indicate a lack of understanding on the reader’s part. I suppose this is the type of prose you’d expect out of a Math Ph.D. who lectures at military academies.

Because I don’t want to come across as a complete airhead, I’ll bite the summary muffin. Fighter pilot John Boyd came up with a revolutionary theory of warfare, the OODA loop, which was (in some sense) to Sun Tzu what Einstein was to Newton. Observe your environment, Orient yourself with analysis and contextualization, Decide on a plan or course of action, Act on the decision; this is the fundamental cycle of warfare and, under the game of war (which is decidedly not like chess), the side with faster OODA has a significant strategic edge that can render traditionally legible differentiation metrics (larger infantry, greater firepower) practically irrelevant.

The question then becomes: How does one accelerate OODA loops? By building organizational competence, for which Boyd uses the German Blitzkrieg as prototype. There are four components: Einheit, ¹ó¾±²Ô²µ±ð°ù²õ±è¾±³Ù³ú±ð²Ô²µ±ð´Úü³ó±ô, Auftragstaktik, and Schwerpunkt. Now I could simply quote Richardsâ€� definitions on page 61, but this, again, would hint at indigestion, so I’ll give it my own try. Einheit is mutual trust, which is built by, among other things, going through experiences together (like frat house hazing) and being on the same ideological page, agreeing with the project or campaign vision; as one, as many. ¹ó¾±²Ô²µ±ð°ù²õ±è¾±³Ù³ú±ð²Ô²µ±ð´Úü³ó±ô is basically what psychologists call tacit knowledge, which is a sort of non-codified expertise developed through sustained experience; a violinist can teach you the principles of bridge movement, but she will never be able to transmit her “fingertip feeling,â€� can never instruct her student into producing her particular timbre. Auftragstaktik, the concept of the mission, is best defined in terms of its negation: micromanagement. An effective leader sets directives of whose subroutines he trusts his assigned subordinates to manage; he does not waste his (and their) time trying to manage the subroutines himself. Steve Jobs (Aaron Sorkin): “Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.â€� Schwerpunkt is the center of gravity, which you can change with by shifting your weight around. Sting like a butterfly, float like a bee! Adaptation is the name of the game, not running sunk costs into the ground.

Better organizational competence means faster OODA loops, faster OODA enables blitzkrieg, “lightning war,� which disorients opponents by messing their models up. You become an unmappable territory—and then you win. Sounds nice. But the other half of the theory is to assume your opponents are just as smart as you, so having a fast OODA loop is no good in itself; it must be faster relative to your opponent’s; the greater the speed difference, the more compounded your strategic edge.

Why should you care about any of this? Well, consider this. The world is a confusing place—more confusing than ever. The winners aren’t so much those who understand it better, but those who are in control of creating the confusion—the so-to-speak fog of war—and thus understand the extent of which it is theirs. Exempli gratia: short piece of fiction, written by one of Putin’s personal advisors (and which everyone should read), is basically an analog for contemporary Russian political philosophy. By understanding the mechanics of confusion, you can better Orient yourself to the psychic barrage of societal forces constantly eroding our sense of agency. What follows from this I’ll leave you to develop.

An unexpected learning, perhaps the most practical for me personally, regarded the extensibility of metaphors; Richards specifically points out, for example, the futility of transposing the Toyota Production System onto non-manufacturing industries, the myriad ways war—and war strategy—isn’t remotely like chess (popular comparison though it is), the differences between competition in business and competition in warfare and the subsequent (non)applicability of OODA loops in each scenario. As a poet I enjoy comparing everything to everything else, so it’s good for me to collect boxes inside of which to think.

Favorite Quotes
“Another reason economies are impossible to model involves the messy presence of human beings. Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics: Normal rules do not apply to them.� [p.45]

“[W]inning requires more than the promise of survival. It must offer an idea of such power and appeal that people will, at times, neglect their other responsibilities and work nights and weekends and extend trips to make it happen.� [p.75]

“Strategy, then, includes selecting the view of the future we want, creating devices to harmonize all the plans and actions designed to achieve that future, and on relatively rare occasions, shifting to an alternate future.� [p.83]

“For many years, Germany has built ¹ó¾±²Ô²µ±ð°ù²õ±è¾±³Ù³ú±ð²Ô²µ±ð´Úü³ó±ô through an extensive apprenticeship program that involves practically everybody from baker to banker. On the blue collar side, the program culminates in the creation of a final sample product, a true ‘masterpiece.’â€� [p.112]

On Auftragstaktik: “[Robert] Noyce wanted [his employees] to keep internalizing the company’s goals and to provide their own motivations, just as they had during the start-up phase. If they did that, they would have the capacity to make their own decisions.� [p.119] (cf. my other book review)

“If you achieved a 97% chance of winning a fight, which would be spectacular against people who train just as hard as you do, your odds of surviving 25 fights is less than 50%. Musashi won 60 duels, so clearly he was not thinking of taking that kind of risk. He wanted no risk at all.� [p.154]

“Studies of innovation reveal that practically everything new consists of bits and pieces of other concepts, often from fields that appeared to be unrelated, that somebody had the genius to reassemble to form something new and exciting.� [p.159]

“The most accurate indicator that you are starting to do maneuver conflict is that long established tradeoffs get broken. For example, in the TPS, it was the tradeoff between quality and cost (older systems could improve quality only by more inspections or more expensive components, both of which increased costs). In maneuver warfare, it was primarily the trade between control from the top and initiative from the bottom (in earlier forms of warfare, more control meant less initiative).� [p.169]

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Minus the star because, all in all, it wasn’t that engaging.