Contents
Introduction
1 – Opening up the Triad
2 – The OODA Loop
3 – Toward a More Expansive Loop
4 – A Debt to Master Sun
5 – Cautionary Conclusion: ‘A Vision So Noble’
Notes and Sources
Copyright - Author
The Mad Major
About this Monograph
I wrote this essay as a late-blooming graduate student in War Studies at King's College London. No sooner was it finished than I began to wonder how John Boyd's theories could be applied to the war in which the United States and its NATO allies then found themselves, against Osama bin Laden and like-minded Islamicists. I spent a year at this task, including a fruitful week working with the Boyd Papers at the U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia.
I've now incorporated that thesis, along with this essay and another one, into a small book, A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror, available both in paperback (74 pages) and as an e-book. I really think you should turn to that publication instead of this one. Blue skies! – Dan Ford
When Sun-tzu Met Clausewitz
THE OODA LOOP AND THE INVASION OF IRAQ
Daniel Ford
Warbird Books 2014
Introduction
FOR THREE YEARS, I had the privilege of studying at King's College London via the internet. Half my classmates were field-grade officers in the British Army, with the rest about equally divided between officers in other militaries (including the US Navy) and civilians around the world from Singapore to New Hampshire. Our subject was War in the Modern World, with my final year and a half given over to the problems of insurgency and how to defeat it, if indeed that be possible.
I wrote this ‘long essay’ – what Americans would call a research paper – in the spring of 2009 in an effort to reconcile two military theorists: Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) and John Boyd (1927-1997). Of all the books and papers assigned to us – more reading than I could possibly have imagined – their words were the ones that spoke most clearly to me. (The amount of rubbish that has been written and spoken on the subject of military strategy has to be read to be believed.) Even before I finished
