Incredible.

truly remarkable analysis. It is often, almost always that agile leadership changes the face of war. It has done so here. Very encouraging for one who has supported the war both in Afghanistan and at home training troops to go to war. Thank you Bill.

Mr. Whittle, another brilliant entry in your overwhelming resume. It has me thinking, exploring, and learning even more, "as we speak."

And a thought that occurs to me, which may get me labled as a "one note canary..." --

How similar, and seemingly closely related, are the approaches of:
1.) OODA, Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
2.)The Scientific Method, Oserve, Form Hypostheses, Test the Hypotheses, Refine the Hyposthoses, and Observe, (repeat all).
3.)The practical application of the skills and dispositions common to honest-to-goodness Critical Thinking thoughout the development of our Western Civilization.

Anyone else see a relationship, here, or is it my prejudices on display?

An excellent read, Sir!

If I could add one thing or perhaps refine one thing, to the concept of SA, its not so much that your making descions faster, though certainly thats part of it, its that true situational awareness is like watching a chess master who know to within a few moves, when checkmate will occur. every choice your opponent in ACM makes LIMITS his further choices, a Fighter pilot can see the entire fight play out in his mind, knows the fight is over before its joined. At that points its simply a question of matching his actions to the path that brings victory.

Good article. A messure of a man's greatness is also reflected in his personal life. We all suffer some shortfalls and Boyd was no exception.

Bill, thanks so much for lifting me out of my new year's funk with this brilliant effort. Even though I disabled my TV years ago, I am not immune to the daily drumbeat of the MSM designed to erode our confidence and destroy the foundational pillars of national greatness. My faith is restored knowing that America still produces the innovators, both intellectual and practical, who seem always to rise to the occaision when we need them. America does it better than anyone else. What a powerful combination is personal liberty and a can-do spirit. America is going to show the world a thing or two yet.

And Paul, yes, I see the relationship. You're not a one note canary. Quite the opposite, you're singing in the choir. What you need to recognize is that the human mind needs certain conditions before it can apprehend the truth through logical analysis. Again, it goes back to the culture war where "truth" is always handed down as a revelation from on high. This tendency by self-appointed elites must be fought with every bit the tenacity on display by our soldiers in Iraq. I suppose I have my own tendencies to preach to the choir. Well, so be it then.

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 01/02/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

For many, MANY links on Boyd, see http://www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm

There's even a PDF of his "Aerial Attack Study" from 1964, which I've never seen anywhere else.

Bravo! Thank you for this delightful work,and for keeping it simple for us non-military types!

Blessings

Elle

Now, that is how you make history, philosophy, and political science readable.

Thank you, Bill.

This essay is far more interesting, informative, and accurate than anything in the mainstream media. Happy New Year!

As usual, a brilliant piece. I shall forward the links to all of my friends - again. :) When are *you* going to run for Congress? Start making an even bigger difference?

Whittle again proves why all must be dropped and his posts read upon their earliest appearance.

Pure insight and profoundly moving.

God Bless our Fighting Men and Women.

Run, Whittle, RUN!

Outstanding, Bill, just outstanding. The service you do with these essays is beyond price.

Keep up the excellent work. We're lucky to have you in the fight.

Exceptional essay, Mr. Whittle. I would make only one quibble. I don't think the Iraqis were remembering our cowardly exit from Vietnam in the years before the surge.

They were remembering the Frist Gulf War and the broken promises that led to near genocide. They were remembering how we betrayed the Kurds and those who wanted to rise up against Hussein.

And they saw how the man who led that retreat into "containment" was promoted to Secretary of State. They saw his undersecretary say that Iran was a perfectly good democracy. They saw how we seemed less than interested in killing Islamists than inviting everyone into their country to choose their government.

Now, things are different. We

This essay is a captivating read as all your essays always are.

However, I disagree with the analysis in a couple of spots. I think the success of the surge has more to do with desperation than hope - the desperation of the tribes potentially being under al Qaeda's thumb forever led the Sunnis to be more cooperative.

Which the leads to the 2nd point. Gen. Petraeus was in the right place at the right time. His ability to make the progress he has would have been hugely impeded had he been given command earlier since al Qaeda had not yet drove the tribes to desperation.

This has a lot in common with your piece on Gettysburg.

BTW the greys have a few tricks up their sleeves as well.

http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2007/12/bussard-fusion-update.html

Brings to mind what Rumsfeld was trying to do with our military, make our troops more agile, lighter, smaller footprint, working with locals in a different way.

Bill,

The slat armour anti-rpg defense goes back to Vietnam and the M113. It is an old trick but an effective one.

Thank you.

Simply, Thank you.

I read this article with great interest. My son-in-law is a fighter pilot. My back ground is manufacturing and quality improvement.It is very eerie how similar the OODP is to what is known as the Shewhart Cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Also eerie is how CRM resmebles how we tried to nvolve the people actualyy doing the work in the decision making. This is a classic case of how quailty improvement principles are universal and can be applied to process improvements. One wise man (Phil Crosby) once said "all work is a process". This is a excellent example. Many good points and lessons in this piece.

A lot of Boyd's ideas (minus the OODA loop) can be found in a book by B.H.L. Hart "Strategy". It was written in the 1920s with additions clear into the 1960s.

It is a text used in all the military academys.

Great stuff, Bill! Many, many thanks.

And perhaps it's just my opinion, but I think your writing is improving. You're staying on message, avoiding digressions, resisting the temptation to be snarky merely for snark's sake... and your essay is much stronger as a result.

So I'm not going to join the chorus asking you to run for Congress. Do so if it's what you want; I wouldn't dream of discouraging you. But right now, I think the most valuable service you can provide us is to write. Keep those ideas coming, keep writing them up the way you do so well, and keep Getting The Word Out.

(The rest of us, in the meantime, can try to get copies of Silent America to our Congressmen.)

The work you're doing desperately needs to be done... and you're turning more heads than you know.

If the day ever comes when Michael Yon and Mike Totten are awarded the Medal of Freedom for their indispensable work -- and I agree completely that they deserve to be in the running -- perhaps there will be a medal available for you too.

with great respect,
Daniel in Brookline

A friend told me about Boyd a couple of months ago and I have been looking forward to reading more about him. Thanks. As to the Desert Storm tactical strategy, I have long recognized that it was pure Pattoneque in its planning and application. Patton strongly advocated pinning the enemy's front with superior firepower and then crashing fast armor through those lines into the vulnerable areas behind the enemy lines and letting them sow havoc and destruction against the non-combat oriented assets there. He called it "grabbing them by the nose and kicking them in the ass" and it worked beautifully in the Iraqi desert. Twice.

Mr Whittle, the effect you have on your readership reminds me of a scene from the classic The Golden Compass, where Iorek takes back his throne. Under the previous leader, who wanted nothing more than to be like a human, the bears were divided, uncertain...but when Iorek overthrows him all traces of human trickery and gaudiness are torn down and the bears know who they are again, and want nothing more than to be bears.

Though you do not defeat any armored bears in single combat, the effect you have is the same; no longer uncertain about my country or its actions, I want nothing more than to be an American. For that, I thank you.

Great post, Bill. I really think that we have turned a corner in Iraq.

under Johnson and Nixon such a bold move was never tried at all.

This does an unwarranted and unjustified disservice to Creighton Abrams. Note that it was the Democrats in Congress who cut and ran out on the South Vietnamese who guaranteed their defeat not the U. S. military.

Good to have you back, Bill. We missed you.

Dear Not a vet,

I thought very long and hard about discussing Abrams. On balance I believe you are right: it is a disservice. I will make a change immediately.

Thanks.

Another excellent piece. I do wonder though how agile the DoD could really be, given that so much of their spending is so heavily affected by pork ("we need X bases in this county, we need Y jobs building super-mega-fighter in my state"). One does dream though.

And with the WGA strike, any chance of more? :)

While I'm not at all opposed to seeing military pay raises, I would point out that under the Bush administration, consistently healthy pay raises have reduced the military-civilian pay gap from over 13% in 1999 to just under 4% today.

I would also claim that part of the reason for clinging to the initial unsuccessful strategy was due to the hammering the administration was taking from the left, forcing the administration to minimize exposure to our troops and to rush the handover process.

While I'm not at all opposed to seeing military pay raises

should read, "to seeing additional military pay raises."

In addition to discussing Abrams, you might want to examine the Democratic Congress's decision to cut off aid to the RVN. As our school's now teach, America's history is full of shameful, self-serving, and callous acts. I think this decision ranks in the top three, exceeded only by the Dred Scott decision and the Trail of Tears. It might actually top these, if sheer body count is the criteria.

Thanks Bill.
The contradictions and evil in this life can be overcome only by countering it with it's opposite, which is what eject is all about. I pity those who wont know that Hope Swells.
To all my fellow ejectians...well done. And those who are not yet, but come here anyway. Stop and listen and contrast. Some one inside is trying to tell you something

Hope Swells

Breath wades the shallows
Emotions swarm about
Like vultures waiting...uncertain
Swathed in fog dimmed sunlight
On a black frosted tree limb
above the flooding currents of life
...Hope swells

Stroked by happy, successful dreams
Held close to our cheeks purring
in rhythm with the swaying trees
A surround of chains and armor keep
Impervious to the dark unknown,
and fear will never know
...Hope swells

The scarlet sky may never bless our eyes
Tinting us and the green hills orange
Nattering avian may never bless our ears
With silence masking song
The touch of a mothers lips, warm to our skin
May never soothe our hearts
...but Hope swells

The flesh may hang on
Like roadside memorials
Striking squarely our mortality
Realizing that soon, too soon, we’ll be gone
Calling to question our beliefs
Of what lies beyond the fog
Where hope swells

I think that the quote “quantity has a quality all its own.” is more usually attributed to Stalin (regarding Soviet tanks which were not as good as the German panzers.) Of course Stalin was not worried about the tankers who rode them.

But on the gripping hand, Petraeus (and Boyd) show that "quality has a quantity all its own".

Keep it up.
Geoff

Bill,

Great to have you posting another essay. I'll hold most of my fire until I can re-read it. Coram's book is a good one. So is this website.

However. I have two nits to pick.

1. Submarine warfare is not deer hunting, especially when the 'deer' is another submarine. I once met this fighter pilot at RAND who said submariners and fighter pilots are cut from similar cloth (link is to order page for a free reprint from RAND, as I haven't seen it on line recently). Imagine a dogfight that lasts a week solid, or longer, with fog and no radar, and E-M coming into play when the weapons launch and even then differently than for a Sidewinder. Go ye and learn something about us bubbleheads and you'll see why sub COs by nature are as confident as fighter jocks but somewhat differently. You might also want to look at the World War Two issues with the Mark 14 torpedo, which will both raise your opinion of Swede Momsen and make you apoplectic about the Bureau of Ordnance.

2. Be careful not to take the wrong lessons from Boyd and the acolytes, just like we should also be careful not to hew too close later on to the attentions of the acolytes around Petraeus over at SWJ who actually did the hard skull sweat to enable the surge. Even considering the fact that the guys who wrote the book also get credit for the surge strategy, the greater point is still germane. If air-to-air is the only goal for purchasing an airplane, you get some different results than if national security is your goal. Neptunus Lex did some studying about this after the fact and came to an unsettling conclusion: don't forget everything else. (Although he still sees the need for air-to-air specific platforms). Also, OODA is more than a loop; it's a big ol' briefing; one possible way to beat an opponent is by having your OODA loop so slow that the other guy fibrillates strategically. Jeane Kirkpatrick shows how the PLO won this way over decades, by slowly changing the game to fit their desires. The guys making splodetdope children's shows know this; that's why they're teaching the kids to grow up takfiri.

Excellent article. It would be great if other blogs carried references to this incredible article on our military.

Crap, Geoff, it was Stalin.

Looks like I misoverestimated my memory abilities.

Fixed. Thanks.

My only real concern with this piece is your out-of-hand dismissal of the "light footprint" strategy as Bush taking three years to execute OODA. It was during this time, when America was largely withdrawn from the streets, that the Iraqis got a taste of how AQ and the insurgents would run things. That seems to have played a key factor in the surge of the past few months.

IMHO it's quite possible that the surge would not have worked earlier; thus Bush's plan may not have been "go in, wait three years, execute OODA." Instead, in this line of thought, it was him executing OOD constantly to determine whether it was time to implement a surge-like strategy or not.

Then again, even if it's true that the light footprint helped by acquainting common Iraq with the horrors of AQ, that doesn't mean it was deliberately planned. I just wanted to point out that it's not quite as one-shade-black as you make it out to be in your essay.

Bill, every time I read one of your analyses/essays, I'm convinced that all who do so should be paying for the privilege.

Tell me where we can make a donation on your recommendation.

Another fine essay sir!

As in most conflicts, the tactics are readily observable; the strategies often take years to decipher. When our “small footprint” occupation was implemented, I thought it might be based on lessons learned from Viet Nam – to minimize native dependency on our forces, and get the Iraqis “stood up” as soon as possible. As time went on, I began to wonder if we wanted Al Queda to mass in Iraq so we could both learn their tactics/networks and kill them en masse (flypaper strategy). Later, I wondered if part of the strategy was to dangle the threat of regional Persian/Shia ascendancy before the Sunnis to gain regional political leverage, or perhaps even to throw the region into internecine warfare ala Richelieu. Finally, I began to wonder if we wanted Al Queda to fill the power vacuum all along and let them demonstrate their predictable brutality. In this way the Iraqis would be forced to choose sides and unify politically, rather than remain a cobbled group of disparate sects and tribes that has historically fostered either brutal tyranny or Islamofascism.

Or perhaps we simply misjudged the initial number of troops needed, and finally made the right adjustments…

It may be years until we know for certain.

Thanks for this wonderful analysis.

The video with our combat troops and the Iraqi children brought tears to my eyes, especially as it dawned on me that many of them were born after March, 2003.

Jamie Irons

Outstanding essay Bill, just outstanding.
May 2008 be a wonderful year for you.

Not taking anything away from Gen. Patraeus who has has a phenomenal success, but he basically adopted the Marine strategy of living in the area that was being controlled rather than returning to base. Getting the Army to adopt Marine doctrine was no mean feat.

On the neeed for more troops after the fall of Baghdad, we would have fallen into same trap as in Vietnam, had we done so. More troops using failed tactics don't win wars. There, we never held territory, we didn't protect the village chiefs who cooperated with us. Where we controlled areas by day, the VC would slit their throats or string them up at night. As much as many supported the government, life is always more important then freedom.

The real story on winning the war is what has happened in the USA. In the Vietnam conflict the major media controlled all reporting. They were successful in creating a defeat. Now they can't. The new media, be they the internet, talk radio, FNC or a handful of conservative newspapers has provided a powerful counterweight to those who preach defeat.

"When are *you* going to run for Congress?"

I respectfully disagree. I don't want Bill in Congress. I want him teaching history at the university that my son attends.

Hell, I would enroll as a Non-Degree student and sit next to my son in the lecture hall.

Incredibly fascinating analysis and article, every single bit of it, not one word out of place.

Gosh, I hate to be the one to flip on the lights while all this heavy petting is going on, especially since I really enjoyed the first part of this essay. Yet it is hardly a view of "The Big Picture," which mentions nothing about our failure still to get the Iraqis to move even an inch towards any sort of national reconciliation. This is, after all, the chief aim of the surge, and the metric by which it will ultimately be judged.

But, no--for Bill, the big picture is the same old, same old: the perfidious MSM & the ignoble Democrats. All that eloquence wasted in part 2, because he offers no analysis, really, regarding the diplomatic agility required to bring intractable sides together, and to raise our battered reputation in the world. Just ignore the media--except a select few whose biases are well-known--and vote for Republicans; then all will be well.

This despite the fact that while Yon & Totten do fine and important work, for the most part, their perspectives are no more clear, pure or valid than any number of other media outlets. Right now, most all of the media are straight-reporting the changes going on in Iraq, just as back when the insurgency began they were reporting that as well (and incidentally, people like Totten, Bill & the Administration were disparaging them for that, too). The same goes for the media reports last year of an incipient civil war, denied again by the Administration and others, which along with a new Democratic Congress finally forced the Administration’s hand, and more than anything else led to the surge being implemented in the first place.

It’s jarringly incongruous for Bill to advocate stripping the veneer from airline captains and butt-covering generals, and yet to see nothing wrong with demanding that the media and the political opposition—many of whom were correct about the folly of this war--put a sock in it. As if George W. Bush, of all people, were possessed of some sort of unique infallibility.

If Fingerspitzengefuhl is an appropriate theme for Part 1 of his essay, Dolchstosslegende is even more so for Part 2.

Very good. I have studied Boyd and your association to IRAQ is spot on.
It is all about information warfare. The light footprint we used until the Surge may have been a stategy or bueracratic stagnation; either way the EFFECT seems to have been that the IRAQI people got fed up with the insurgents and wanted something different. At best the news media in this country is so shallow and incompetant to cover sucess in IRAQ but would rather headline Britny and OJ; at worst they are actively trying to hide the facts from the American Public. Preception is reality. Always remember that the TV network with largest WORLD WIDE viewership is...MTV; any questions why America is preceived as the great SATAN. Only the American soldier has been able to change that in IRAQ; one day and one person at a time.

Actually, that trick with the wire mesh around the armored vehicle dates back even further than Vietnam. I've seen pictures of tanks with wire mesh (sometimes even bed-springs) taken during the Battle of Berlin.

"except a select few whose biases are well-known--and vote for Republicans; then all will be well."

Nice strawman, asshole.

WHere does Bill advocate voting for Republicans?

Granted he points out the ineptitude, cowardice, and hucksterism of the Dems, which any thinking human would be remiss in failing to observe, but he is critical of the administration as well.

Typical so-called "liberal"

Let me guess- your an "activist"? Obama or Edwards?

Dolf,

You must get a different MSM than me.

Happy New Year to me.

Thanks Bill. A nice way to kick off 2008.

Dolf, really...it's okay.

I know any sign of success for America is something that must be very, very hard on you. And surely those children interacting with those soldiers in the second video would have been much better off shot in the back of the head and buried with their teddy bears along with the thousands we found when we arrived there in 2003, because after all, the important thing is that Dolf Fenster knows folly when he sees it.

I will certainly stop the same old same old about the perfidious MSM & the ignoble Democrats the very instant they cease behaving in a perfidious and ignoble fashion. Saying I mention this quite a lot is not, I notice, not the same as you proving why they do not deserve every grain of it.

Until that time, let's just be men about this, shall we Dolf? You believe the action in Iraq is folly and you want it to fail. I believe it is noble and want it to succeed. Fair enough, I guess.

As Jamie Irons pointed out a few posts above, (and which I certainly did not realize until he did so) those kids in the video are the first generation of free Iraqi children...well...ever.

It's obvious that you think that's not worth more than having to endure some snark from French cinema critics, obviously, so let's just concude we have a different set of values and leave it at that.

History will judge us both, and I am prepared to stand my case based on the expressions of those free children. You, of course, who have known nothing but freedom will still call it folly whenever it needs to be fought for, because that's who you are.

I do feel sorry for you. I can't fully imagine what it must be like to feel as you do, but it doesn't look like a fun or happy place to be.

Certainly your last comment will stand. But I'm not going to let you hijack this thread the way I have seen it done since I started this venture. If you feel this is unfair, then by all means be sure to check out BLOGGER. It's free. You can write all the defeatist posts you'd like. You just can't do it here.

(BTW - bonus points for the 'heavy petting' reference. It's rare to find liberals who can resist 14 year old sexualizations, and as usual you do not disappoint. It confirms a theory I have, which may bear more thinking about in the future.)

The logic of Dolf:

For political gain, the Dems call for full retreat in Iraq at a time when doing so would result in mass blood shed (oh those humanists!!!).....

Bush/Petraeus do the precise OPPOSITE of what the Dem clowns are promoting, increasing troop levels with enormous, epic,, brilliant success

And in the mind of mental midgets like Dolf- the credit goes to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid! The true "priest warriors" of our time!!!! See? Liberal (ill)logic at work!

It makes even better sense if you read Imperial Grunts and The Pentagon's New Map

"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," So said Senate majority leader April 20, 2007. The man has had considerable difficulty speaking the last few months, what with his mouth filled with his own shoe leather.

Right now, most all of the media are straight-reporting the changes going on in Iraq, just as back when the insurgency began they were reporting that as well.

Lileks is right: we have two incongruent, non-intersecting data streams running through this country. That is SO not how so many of us remember it.

But there you are.

Bill, you've hit another one out of the park. Any idea on how we can use OODA to get out ahead of the MSM and cause them to impale themselves on their own swords?

Bill, thank you for yet another informative an inspiring essay. Do NOT waste your time running for office. Keep writing.

"It’s jarringly incongruous for Bill to advocate stripping the veneer from airline captains and butt-covering generals, and yet to see nothing wrong with demanding that the media and the political opposition—many of whom were correct about the folly of this war--put a sock in it. As if George W. Bush, of all people, were possessed of some sort of unique infallibility."

I didn't see that anywhere. And the folly of this war is a laughable phrase for anyone with an ounce of historical perspective, for it is hard to imagine accomplishing so much as it seems we might for so few causualties sustained and inflicted collaterally by our soldiers.

Nevermind that though, no one says you can't criticize what has happened, though whether you should is of course up for debate. Rather, you--or rather that oh so loyal oppositiion that is so very oppressed you can hardly hear anything else--should stop trying to lose now that we are undeniably winning by a wide and remarkable margin.

That is all. You can go to your "Bush is stoopid" club and criticize the illegal (ha) and immoral (ha!!) war all you want, but please stop trying to turn liberty into wide-scale massacre.

(cut my name short there, sorry)

Gosh, I didn't even have to exercise restraint. Fun.

It's spectacular how few words are needed to reveal the vast chasm between the left and this Republic.

Sheer, raw, brilliance.

May I add: I have for five years now compared Bush's decision to go to Bahgdad to Chamberlain's decision to fix bayonets and charge down Little Round Top in July of 1863.

Namely, in both cases the decision was rather easy for the commander. He could not retreat, and he could not stay put. Ergo, forward it was. In 2003, evacuation from Saudi would have been an immense victory for Saddam and Osama simultaneously. Out of the question. And staying put is what gave us 9-11.

So forward it was. No other option out there.

Of course, detractors look at me like I have two heads at this point, but I stand by it.

So it is interesting to see you say "When the calls for defeat and dishonor were at their loudest.... we simply just hung on and gave them not a retreat but a charge."

Perhaps our Commander in Chief was just so "dumb" and "un-nuanced", that he, like J.L. Chamberlain, simply saw no other option but forward with fixed bayonets.

And with similar results, it would seem.

History is indeed made by such men.

Dicentra:

Don't you see? You and I are communicating directly. I have no idea who you are or where you live, but like the others who take time to leave a comment here, you are being heard. If I didn't know you people were out there I would never write I word. After all, I get to hear this stuff in my head all day. (It sounds exactly like Charlie Brown's teacher on the old holiday cartoon specials.)

This two-way communication is doing precisely what you hope for: getting inside the MSM loop. I made an improvement to the essay based on Not a Vet's comments within a few minutes of getting the feedback. Agility!

The fact that you can see that Army captain kidding those Iraqi kids is because, finally, we have a chance to determine for ourselves what to decide on information that is circumventing the editorial policies of our intellectual and moral betters at CBS News and the New York Times.

It's just a flat-out miracle. I'm proud and honored to be a small part of it, and you should be too.

=)

Freedom rules!

Dolf!

So glad you showed up. Another perspective is always appreciated. So let's look at your critique point-by-point.

(A) National reconciliation. In a society as tribal and complex as Iraq, what makes you (or anyone) think they can affect a program to force Iraqis to the table? The plan, as in Afghanistan, is to provide the necessary security to allow the locals to work it out for themselves. And if you believe that people (despite monumental stupidity) will recognize self-interest, well then the plan might actually work.

(B) I did not see the words "perfidious MSM" or "ignoble Democrat" anywhere in the post. So where did that come from?

(C) Yon's perspective is not clear. Umm? I'll trust the insight of someone who knows the smell of real carnage any day. Ideology fades real fast in the face of death . . . and rotting corpses.

Dolf,
Just a small point.
"...our failure still to get the Iraqis to move even an inch towards any sort of national reconciliation..."
Government cannot evolve from the top down. It just doesn't work that way. The soldiers in the Revolutionary War weren't fighting for America, they were fighting for their state, their county, their hometown. Government grows from the house, to the block, to the neighborhood, to the city, to the state, to the country. That's the way it's always been. We were foolish to believe that we could change that in Iraq.

That's the brilliance of the Petraeus strategy.

In any true sense, we were not a "Union" until after the Civil War. Four Score and Seven years after we became a "nation"

Dolf seems to get around the blogs on a regular basis. Google his name and see for yourself. The same un-earned superior, smug attitude that most liberals have. I notice that he has disappeared since he made his comment, but then, cockroaches always run when the lights are turned on.

Bill, once again, an outstanding article. It will be forwarded to many, many people. Please consider running for office.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

I always enjoy the reaction when someone new gets exposed to Boyd and the OODA loop. Thanks!

BTW, of all the services the OODA loop is probably most widely embraced now by the Marines.

Speaking of Marines, I just read Hard Corps, by a marine winner of the Navy Cross, Martinez. Not that I needed new respect for the bad-assery of our Marines, but that'll do it. :)

Great work (again.) I just finished reading Dick Couch's Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior. It's a great read and shows that in SF training the principle of constant adaptation is alive and well.
Americans have always innovated; I remember seeing a statement from a former Soviet officer to the effect that Americans were hard to wargame since "you don't even follow your own doctrine."

But there's sure a lot of tension between a big institution and big multiyear procurement contracts and the kind of flexibility you're writing about.

Thank you for this awesome article. I have never visited your site before (I linked from LGF), but I will definitely be back.

Your analysis is right on the money. It is not only brilliantly descriptive, but prescriptive for a whole host of real life applications, particularly where leadership is needed.

As someone who seriously studies texts on medieval swordsmanship, I'll mention the odd fact that throwing down your sword to attack was a well established tactic in which you move in for a lock, throw, neck snap, or other such move, equivalent to switching from missiles to guns because a long weapon can be a hinderance when you go in close.

My other comment is that in some of the medieval and early Renaissance texts I see a practical knowledge of the effects of the OODA loop and time gained and lost move by move. One manual says to start out with your most unexpected attack - but to only carry it out for three or so moves. If you're not winning by then you should fly back out (break the engagement and reset the OODA clock) because if you're not winning then you are probably losing.

A much later English rapier manual (circa 1620) refers to delivering attacks that "discombobulate" your opponent and leave him in confusion and disorder.

Given the emphasis the period masters put on tactical innovation, the use of techniques unknown to your opponents, and the inevitability of those techniques eventually failing as new counters are developed, my assumption is that period swordsmanship made explicit principles of time, distance, perception, misdirection (always rated highly), and execution speed (action) - what to do if you're inside your opponent's reaction speed and what to do if your not, that many of the great generals Boyd studied may have been analogizing the complexities of their large battles to their more intimate and "gut" knowledge of hand-to-hand combat.

Along with the knowledge of actual swordsmanship, some of this ability may have been lost when we changed over to firepower battles in the gunpowder age.

Seeing Bill had posted a new essay made me abandon my night's appointment of watching the Fiesta Bowl. Thanks, Bill; this Sooner fan didn't need to watch that mess.

The TV is still on, though, and ironically enough, an "Army Strong" commercial came on, and it begs the question: with the talent that is clearly behind the wonderful commercials produced for the U.S. Armed Forces, why haven't we seen the montaged images of our troops and Iraqi children in commercials?

If multimedia communications aimed at the American people is a major piece of the modern battleground (which, as Bill points out, it clearly is), then why don't the Armed Forces fight there as well?? People handwring over the winning of the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi (and let's not forget Afghani) people in particular, and Middle East Muslims in general, but merely take for granted the "hearts and minds" of the folks here. Yes, that should be a given, but as the disheartening slideshows over at zombietime and the slants of the MSM illustrate, such isn't the case. And because there are large enough collections of citizens who "think" like this, correspondingly large enough groups of elected officials feel empowered to behave likewise . . . only their actions bring serious consequences.

Rather than simply advertising to buttress recruitment, the Military should be producing . . . propaganda. Gasp! There once was a time when the artists in Hollywood took care of showing the people just how great and courageous the American GI's were, but those days are long gone. So what's wrong with a little self-promotion? Why doesn't the Military run ads in the homes of the constituents of the Reids, Pelosis, Murthas, et al? Forget talking about how effective and strong the U.S. Soldier is; show the American public how flippin' good the American Soldier is, and be not ashamed in doing so.

Oh, and Bill: thanks for so richly educating your readers on these wonderful little niches of history and aerospace experience from which larger life lessons can be found. Beyond the big ideas, this reader loves learning about topics like Forty-Second Boyd -- topics I never knew existed.

Brilliant as always, Bill. You provide much food for thought. It's great to see your posts here again.

Well, Lance, this Gator fan had a bad day yesterday so I can relate.

Here's what I propose: Meyer stays as Florida Head Coach. Spurrier comes back from South Carolina as Offensive Coordinator and Stoops returns from Oklahoma as Defensive Coordinator.

I think these Fightin' Gamesoonators would kick ass!

Mr. Whittle,
This is riveting stuff, and Paul A. adds another level (one that I am working on myself). I have a question though. It is manifest that OODA is brilliance itself as tactical doctrine but there must be a hierarchical level that implements it as part of a strategy.

Take the mid nineteenth century cavalry for example. I have read some about the Civil War History and my observation has been that often set-piece battles were transformed by relatively new innovations like artillery and the more rapidly reloaded percussion cap rifle into hideous slaughters full of command blunders, fouled communication and miscalculations. Many of those battles were won not by the best original strategy but by the side whose general made the second-to-last mistake and had men who could stand up to the hell of battle at the right time. Some of the best examples of OODA in that era came from the cavalry where the likes of G.A. Custer, Nathan B. Forrest and Jeb Magruder were very good at getting “inside the opposition’s loop”. On notable occasions, though, all of them eventually got badly out of position and were responsible for various disasters. Magruder at Gettysburg ran into a beehive but that was nothing compared to Little Big Horn where Custer, who was so good at harassing warriors encumbered by the primitive nature of their culture and the burden of moving (and provisioning!) their entire civilization with them on the march.

Chap hits close to my question too- It goes like this: How do you integrate the instantaneous advantage of the small OODA victories into a bigger victory for civilization? How do we turn the feel-good pictures in your videos into a swing of momentum away from Saudi funded, Iranian patronized Jihad for the World-wide Caliphate? Do we have to invade all of them?
Best,
YBM

For us old flight deck guys, it is keep your head on a swivel and anticipate the worst that can happen.
Seat of dungaree trousers, skivvies and skin chewed up one fine spring day in 1974. Head was not on a swivel and the jet blast from an A-7 sent me down the deck on my hind quarters. Cleaned up by the "Docs" and new duds and back on the "Roof". It was my job. (Apologies to Mike Rowe) or maybe not. Send Mike to sea on a Nimitz Class Carrier.

Dolf - your point about Yon & Totten not having any better perspective than the drive-bys is patently absurd. ONLY these two can claim the combat perspective they have. Nobody outside the military has the hands-on, eyewitness, experience on the ground. Not one soul.

They are also extremely careful to not extrapolate their experience into broader applications. I would be interested to learn if there are more than five facts they got wrong between them in all the hot zones they were in.

BW - could you please say if you exempt Rumsfeld (even a little)from your chastening of the behavior of the political class? Was it not the very sclerotic Pentagon and congressional staffs that sought to obfuscate? I'd genuinely appreciate a further thought or two from you on this.

Finally, the reason as to why the political class, as a whole, behave as ostriches, is that the vast middle who decides elections are intentionally ignorant. They are first denied a proper public education, and they then choose to avoid the pain of learning hard truths.

Pogo was correct. The enemy really is us. Your piece may be a glimmer of hope, but it seems to me we are an empire in irrevocable decline.

God bless you.

Brilliant essay. Again. All I can say is....

Amen!

Bill:

I'd love to respond to you and some of the other commenters, but am reticent to make the effort only to have you remove the comment. I'll be nicer, I promise, though I believe my initial critique was mostly substantive.

I'll check back tomorrow.

Is the blogosphere a zero-sum game? Once again, I find myself without remotely adequate words, because Bill has taken them all. ;-) Bravo, and thank you!

You might want to consider how you come across here to people who don't already agree with you on everything. Through my eyes it looks like this:

Mr. Fenster mentions that he thinks there are some major problems with our nation's Iraq strategy that remain unaddressed. In response, he is called an asshole and a cockroach. Several other commenters have merely assumed that he has some kind of irrational worship of Democrats and hatred of Republicans, instead of addressing his concerns, and Mr. Whittle himself assumes that Mr. Fenster must somehow want our country to fail in Iraq.

I have a hard time seeing how this response will help anyone get closer to the truth, and can't help but think that as gifted a communicator as Mr. Whittle has the ability to do better.

The simple fact is that there are many people in this country -- myself included -- who are skeptical of our nation's ability to achieve lasting success in Iraq. I would very much like to believe that the surge is buying time for a workable political reconciliation, but I simply haven't heard of many facts that suggest our success so far is anything other than a direct effect of our presence, which would dissolve into civil war as soon as we left.

I'm not skeptical because I want those children to die, nor am I skeptical because I'm afraid of being unfashionable. I'm skeptical because I think the facts warrant skepticism.

I doubt you'd respond well if I told you that you're only a war supporter because you like killing foreigners and don't want to seem unpatriotic -- and you'd be right to be angry if I meant those things. They would, after all, be slanderous. Moreover, they are comfortable labels that substitute for a real response to your arguments. It should worry you when you feel comfortable leveling the equivalent charges against the "other side" as your first response.

The price of the smiles of those free children was the deaths of many others -- Iraqi children and adults, and American soldiers. People maimed and burnt half to death. I'm not criticizing our soldiers here; they do their job, and this has been a comparatively clean war, as far as wars go. Rather, we -- as a nation -- are responsible for having made those people pay that price for our war in Iraq. If we end up providing lasting liberty and peace for Iraq, then it will have been worth it. But I'd like to see more signs that we're doing something to bring that about. Is that unpatriotic?

I thought the enemy was the terrorists, not an entire half of our own USA.

Great stuff and much needed in deciding where we should go from here. In the beginning though I would like to add that in the f-86 our pilots were given the top secret "flying tail" that made the plane able to handle the high speeds those jets flew at. The Mig had a traditional tail that became unstable when it went too fast. I know it's not the point of the article but by the end of the war the 86 was a much better jet than the Mig. We Americans should never quit reinventing the wheel. God speed the A-10.

"I thought the enemy was the terrorists, not an entire half of our own USA."

Isn't the proof of that in actions of that half?
The Christian principal of sacrificing ones life for the betterment of the other seems to go unrecognized here.

I should emphasize, I suppose, that I'm not accusing everyone of arguing on bad faith. Rather, I'm just trying to point out that what you're doing looks like piling on. Even the most well-intentioned group of like-minded has to continually work to avoid groupthink.

"actions of that half"

Would you care to elaborate?

We have had half a nation trying to submarine a war that takes them back to the good ol days of Vietnam and antiwar rally de-ja vu
instead of opening their eyes to the reality of post 2001 and a threat that is very real.

So people who, for instance, think that we should have focused our efforts on nuclear non-proliferation, and destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan instead of invading Iraq, are the enemy?! Not just people who disagree with you on the means to achieve the same ends?

The fact that we face new threats doesn't magically give us the ability to accomplish everything that might be helpful in defending against them; if something is impossible then it's impossible, and we might be throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars, and many lives, on a venture with little to no chance of success. And meanwhile, there's a non-trivial chance that nuclear-armed Pakistan might "lose" a nuke or two to Al Qaeda if we play our cards badly enough. We can't occupy every dangerous country in the world at once.

It might be that Iraq was the right choice, and that we are right to maintain our presence there, but these choices have real costs, and weighing the costs somewhat differently doesn't make someone the enemy. At worst, it makes them someone with a bad idea.

BTW, really very few anti-war people went to rallies, etc. Most people on the left know that the "Bush=Hitler" brigade is nuts. They hold their noses when agreeing that the war is a bad idea, just like, for instance, social conservatives wish they didn't have to agree with "Rev." Fred Phelps. Just because bad, stupid, or strange people believe something doesn't mean it's incorrect. (Come to think of it, Stalin believed that snow is white...).

Mr. Whittle,

I greatly enjoyed your essay -- thanks!

One minor quibble: the Presidential Medal of Freedom is awarded to civilians. General Petraeus would deserve a comparable military decoration.

Part 2 was lame, Part 1 was fascinating

Benquo, the acerbic reaction to Dolf Fenster is, like most of the angry posts on this forum, due to frustration at having to explain these points again and again and again to liberal minds that don't seem to get it.

Take, for example, Dolf's assertion that the surge's stated goal of national political reconciliation was not achieved, and that's the metric by which the surge should be judged. You essentially say the same thing when you talk about how you hope the surge can buy time for political reconciliation, but you're not seeing it. For many posters here I'm guessing that'd make the fiftieth time they'll have to explain that since the surge is being judged in the context of the Iraq War, the real metric should not be whether the surge achieved its stated limited goals, but how far it moved the war in Iraq forward. After all, the intent behind trying for national political reconciliation was to move the war in Iraq forward (though if all the politicians in Baghdad broke out in a hugfest tomorrow it probably wouldn't mean a thing to the rest of Iraq; one more reason why that's a bad metric to use). And with the sharp declines in casualties and attacks, along with mass movements like the Anbar Awakening that are achieving from below what poliitical reconciliation was meant to achieve from above, the surge has undeniably lead to a great deal of progress for Iraq. You attempt to dismiss that progress as merely a function of our presence, but it was a good deal more than that and we're frankly tired of hearing liberals deny it. This weariness is what leads to vitriolic posts like TMF's. Now, I don't generally like to fly off the handle like that, especially when it's not accompanied by argumentation (see the discussion under Bill's Self-Defense post), but I understand when people are driven up the wall by having to make the same friggin' points to fifty different people.

Point taken about groupthink, anyway. :)

Benquo,

Putting aside the fact I did not refer to Fenster as either an "asshole or a cockroach," I have to tell you I have to tell you I have had enough of this endless sophistry. Really, I have.

The man stated the war is "folly." All right? Folly. Not that he had doubts about how it is being pressed. Not that he had concerns that needed clarification. Folly. Out of the gate.

He is outraged that I have the audacity to mention that the Democrats called for us to cut and run. Well, sir, they DID, didn't they? Is this not the subject of just about all of the Democratic presidential candidates campaigns? That this war was sold on a lie, is a disaster, and must be abandoned... the only question being how soon? Are Reid, Murtha and Pelosi -- those most vocally calling for the dishonorable actions I mentioned -- are they Republicans, or Democrats?

Does the MSM overwhelmingly favor the war, or oppose it?

We have heard the motivations for this war slandered from day one -- endlessly -- and yet, when we present evidence for why we support this mission, suddenly it is I who am excluding half the country and presenting an unfair case, and it is I who must find some magical way to present my views so that people like Fenster will not find some excuse to take umbrage?

Sir, listen to me: get in touch with your inner adult. I learned a long, long time ago that if I write a post saying Apple pie is delicious the Cherry pie people will respond with the same outraged indignation I see from Fenster. I say get in touch with your inner adult because I absolutely refuse to continue to tip-toe around the fact that Fenster and I have fundamentally opposing positions and that I am not willing to reduce my arguments to oatmeal so as not to offend people like him. He thinks it's folly and I'm being unfair by attacking the people who think like he does. It is a childish and petulant and puerile demand you and he make of me or anyone else to put the defense of one position in such a way that no one diametrically opposed to the position will take umbrage.

The actual fact is the physical war has not touched me, and not Fenster either, I suspect. This is a war of values. And the demand that I have to fight this war and defend our side of the line without hurting anyone across the way is ultimately a reduction of the fundamental, essential flaw in liberal thinking: namely, that all positions can be met by compromise and discussion.

What they really mean is they want to reduce this to an endless rhetorical circle-jerk of sophistry. Problem solved! Well, guess what? There are some values that are irreducible for me and that I am willing to fight for. Likewise, there are values that these Jihadis are willing to fight for as well.

I disagree with -- actually, I hate -- everything they believe in, and I understand and accept that this means they feel the same about me. But unlike Fenster, who wants everything both ways -- they are man enough to face this irreducible conflict and not perpetually whine and cry about how unfair it is. In that way, and that way alone, I respect these people in a way that I will never respect people like Fenster, who's inner insecurity demands that even though they drop all the bombs and fire all the shots they have in their rhetorical arsenal, no one is allowed to shoot back because it might unfairly hurt their little feelings.

And as I have said time and time and time again, I am not willing to provide a platform for people whose rhetoric and values I despise in the name of "fairness." I have worked hard to drive eyeballs to this website. I am not going to hand over that podium to someone whose position I find untenable in the interest of "fairness." I have allowed him the courtesy of stating a position I find repugnant in the interest of intellectual stimulation and basic decency. That is more than I owe him, he who has certainly not gone to to the trouble to gather a large audience of his supporters and allow me to make my case to them.

If you're going to take a position, then take a God-damned position and prepare for a counter-attack. And don't expect me to supply you with the means to make your case for you. If Fenster wants to put his case, let him spend a few years of hard work building his own audience. The fact that he does not do so, but rather is well-known for using other people's platforms to voice his opinions demonstrates his essentially parasitic nature, and I am not the kind of person who feels a great deal of sympathy for the tick I find behind the ear of a dog I love.

First of all, can anyone translate Dolchstosslegende for me? Gee, must I now learn a foreign language to read American posts?

Re. The subject of article. Wow. Some writing must say, altho I got more out of part one. Maybe I need to re-read Two again. I confess to being somewhat lost re. both wars with Iraq. Sir, no offence intended here but our glorious victories against a fourth rate or maybe unrated army are no big deal. Ever since Desert Storm it's all been written about as tho we were up against the German Army of 1940-42. Come on.

It's my understanding that we went there looking for WMD.
Anyone find any? I am not a fan of Saddam by any means but has anybody noticed yet that he did manage to keep a lid on would be suicide bombers in his own country? Maybe that was the only way to do it. A hard fist those ppl understand. Frankly, I don't much care about how many of his own ppl he may have killed. We keep hearing how we liberated Iraq from his rule. Why was his rule any of our business?
I guess my frustration isn't so much that we went there as it is with all the warm and fuzzy reasons. Why not just come right out with it from the get go and say he was a murderous bastard who was also a big threat to us. Period. None of this pussyfooting around trying to get allies (joke, right?) to support us, explaining things to the French who weren't listening anyway ... what's the point of being an atomic power if we never use the damn thing.
If he was that great a threat, we should have simply dropped the big one and moved on to Iran.
Boom. Problem solved and the ppl with us in their sight would think 2wice about messing us about.

Dolf Fenster | January 2, 2008 6:02 PM --

Sir,

With all due respect, I must take issue with the basic premise of the post to which I refer, above. I quote:

"Yet it is hardly a view of "The Big Picture," which mentions nothing about our failure still to get the Iraqis to move even an inch towards any sort of national reconciliation. This is, after all, the chief aim of the surge, and the metric by which it will ultimately be judged." (Emphasis mine).

Perhaps I am mis-informed. Perhaps I am a "nit-picker" unaware or unable to see the "Big Picture." If so, then my bad.

However, if memory serves me correctly, the limited purpose of the surge, per an article from the BBC, here, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6463529.stm was:

"The new "surge" policy is aimed at curbing sectarian and insurgent violence in Baghdad and Anbar province."

The purpose of reducing the violence was/is to provide an environment more conducive to the reconciliation desired by those truly interested in achieving the objective of a self-governing, peaceful Iraq. The reconciliation itself was not, is not, an objective of the surge, per se.

That said, the basic premise of your post falls on its face. You "frame the question" inaccurately, so as to force no other conclusion but your desired outcome. By (not so) deftly re-defining the goal of the "surge," you move the goalposts far from their original position. Further, you expand the question from its initial parameters, and (in effect) warp the essay to serve your purposes.

I don't buy it.

Benquo:

What you seemed to have missed from BW's response was The Fenster's opening salvo that preceded it: "Gosh, I hate to be the one to flip on the lights while all this heavy petting is going on . . ."

In other words, he's the voice of enlightenment come to illuminate the world for us ignorants lost in the darkness, we who are heavily engaged in an intellectual make-out session with each other.

For a wonderful discussion not terribly distant on the pros and cons of calling out the Naked Emperors as such, please visit the comment thread on BW's previous entry here.

And BW: I say no thanks to your offer. I've no problem sending Spurrier back to the Swamp, but Stoops stays, though after the Sooners' last two trips to Glendale, AZ, I wonder if those who truly bleed Crimson and Cream will tire of him soon.

Excellent article, sir!

RE: Firepower and the American way of war, I suggest Andrew Krepinevitch's "The Army and Vietnam". Similar theories are found to some extent in Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie".

Mr. Whittle:

Thank you for another fantastic article.

Speaking of applying the OODA loop to media, I'd like to see it applied to education.

Innovations like tuition vouchers, home schooling, online distance learning (both
structured and personal), professional discussion forums and self-publishing text
materials seem very promising.

Best regards, Peter W.

What a profound essay. I liken it to the winds blowing away the fog of confusion and indecision. And it puts the Democratic party and their cadre of self-aggrandizing, self-serving Presidential aspirants in their proper light—they are willing to overtly trample the hopes of millions so that they might be worshipped in the history books.

This ought to be required reading at all of the service officer and NCO academies.

Profoundly inspiring.

Wow. The article was quite interesting as I had never heard of Col. Boyd though I have spend many years studying military history as a hobby. The old saw that history is written by the victors is mostly correct: Losers didn't write any histories because they were mostly dead; their surviving wives and children enslaved and assimilated into the culture of the victor. If you look through most legit history books (not the creamed pap they serve in high school these days) history is the study of men and their wars. Political systems and Policies, innovations, advances in social institutions, cultures all change or grow following the lessons learned in conflicts. I think part of the fallacy in the thinking of people on the Left is a failure to comprehend what men really Are:
That is, aggressive, organized pack animals. Predators. They rather view mankind through the lens of what they think man is, and how man can be "perfected". I'm not sure I am qualified to say exactly what that is. These folks are of the same cloth as those who would sit in debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while the barbarians are knocking down the gates.
Many years from now when our bones are turned to dust our legacy will study this era and I hope, find we were equal to our challenges. If we were not, I expect they won't read much about us at all, except for how ingnominously we went down to defeat.
Oh, and for the poster who grimly stated that America was in irrevocable decline: Buck up, Man!
They have been saying that about us since the days when the Continental Congress refused to pay Washington's soldiers, and he had to talk his officers out of overthrowing the lot of them. Seems like nothing much ever changes in that respect doesn't it?

Bill, I offer my humble approval.
BTW, even your responses to Benquo are approaching essay like effectiveness. Do you spend a lot of time preparing these or are they the result of natural response? They are great.
OODA? If so, it works better than advertised.
Nice job.

Mr. Whittle,

One wonders how Maj. Richard Bong would have responded to the challenge set by Maj. John Boyd. My research indicates Maj. Bong had similar traits and, while he did fly fighters, was also somewhat of a cerebral pilot.

As to your salient comments in re: Swordlessness, excellent points!

It gets interesting, don't it??

Personally, I'm fascinated by these discussions -- among other reasons -- because I'm just the sort Bill was describing in his self-defense piece: I sometimes fail to recognize an empty argument because it's worded eloquently and grammatically. So watching a thorough take-down of such is quite educational for me. Thanks again, Bill!

In re OODA loops: a number of people have commented on the desire to see it applied to education, other industries, and such. That's fine as far as it goes. But there's a fundamental difference when OODA is applied to combat, aerial or otherwise: the decisions must be made in seconds, or fractions thereof... and if you get it wrong, you die. The stakes are higher, in other words, and the timing is about as tight as tight gets.

(Sorry if this seems obvious. But people keep mentioning how OODA might help in a non-deadly environment with all the time in the world to make decisions, which seems a little frivolous to me, compared to the subject at hand. Just my opinion, your mileage may vary.)

Applying OODA to the news cycle, on the other hand, is NOT trivial and may very well be instrumental to our success, in Iraq and elsewhere. And yes, we're doing it -- remember the Bush National Guard forgeries, which Dan Rather brought up just before a Presidential election? That was turned around within hours... and it was bloggers, LGF and Powerline in particular, that did it.

But that was a response to something already out there. We need to find ways to take the initiative in the media war. Mr. Totten and Mr. Yon are doing a great job with that already, by showing us what wartime reporting should be. But we need to get inside the decision loop of the constant antiwar drumbeat.

Bill, please keep us posted on the screenplay you mentioned a while back. And please let us know if we can help.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

Summitridgedrive,

Yes, you are wrong if you think the US went into Iraq over WMD. The issue of WMD was but one of twenty-two separate casus belli as drafted by the US Congress and reinterated further by UN Resolution 1441. Over the period of a decade Saddam had violated every agreement he made with the international community. Resolution 1441 was a final appeal, and a warning, to come clean once and for all on all counts, or face the consequences.

The continued rant by the left on the issue of WMD is simplistic and counter-factual. Even if Saddam had no WMD, he was obliged to prove it before international weapons inspectors. He took every opportunity to block or otherwise subvert that process. President Bush took the only course he could: if you, Saddam, won't satisfy us, then we are obliged to verify for ourselves. The dance over WMD had gone on long enough. It was time for action.

Then from the MSM we get: "Bush lied, people died." It was a deliberate attempt to solidify the anti-war base for the single purpose of putting the Democrats back in power. Completely ignored was the fact that the president, the congress, and various allied governments shared the same faulty intelligence on WMD. But the press opened with a broadside salvo designed to destroy Bush's credibility. And I'm quite frankly tired of presenting this case evertime some ill-informed person brings up WMD. If you want to know the truth, look at the documents for yourself. If you can't accept the truth, then I really can't help you.

I had exactly the same thought on the surge, that it was more about pyschology than numbers.

It reminds me of a story I was told in Civil War History class. They were talking about how there was a familiar fork on the road going northward through virginia. Over and over again, in the Penninsular campaign, Chancellorsville, and so on, afterward, our soldiers (the Union, if there is any confusion on this point) would see this damned fork in the road and head north, toward Washington. So Grant leads the troops south and get his ass kicked a little and the troops are headed north, and here comes that stupid fork again. They had grown to hate that fork. But suddenly their commanders told them to take the other fork, down South again, into Virginia again. It was a powerful, rallying moment to our soldiers to see that, hot damn, this guy Grant was not giving up. He was not giving up.

That's what the surge reminded me of.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
Those words are taken from the declaration of Independence To me they are one of the building blocks of our society. But I have always felt, that until the day when those words have meaning for every person on the planet, they are just words. But words are important. They frame ideas. This small piece of a much larger document does not state that only WHITE AMERICAN LAND OWNERS are created equal. They state that ALL men everywhere are created equal. To me this is the bedrock, the foundation on which this country was built.
What business is it of ours if Saddam kills and tortures his own citizens? What business is it of ours if Hitler marches Millions to their deaths in factory killing machines like auschwitz? If we are really Americans, if we truly believe the words on the paper, if we want America to be the place that our forefathers framed, then it will ALWAYS be our business when one man, or group of MEN oppresses another.
Have we been guilty of this? Yes. Are we still guilty of it? Sadly, Yes. BUT the difference between us and every other nation that does it, TODAY is simply this. It sickens those of us that truly call ourselves Americans. We work tirelessly in our own country to end oppression based on race, color creed, sex, or even sexual orientation. We fail miserably sometimes, and sometimes we succeed beyond our wildest dreams. I don’t like Hillary, But I am THRILLED to see a WOMAN run for the most powerful position in our country and be taken seriously. I do not agree with Obama, on a lot of things but I am THRILLED to see some one who is BLACK running for the most powerful position in our country and be taken seriously.
Why should we go to Iraq? For WMD? To remove a Madman from power who used chemical weapons against his own people, something that even HITLER balked at even after he was losing the war? How about this, lets leave the “politicing” aside for a minute. How about because it needed to be done. I don’t need another reason than that. It needed doing. Why? Because of those 35 worst at the top of this post and the hundreds that follow in that document and our constitution. If those words mean anything, FOR those words to really realy Mean ANYTHING, then they have to apply to all men every where. Why us? If not us, then who?, and if not Now, then when? This is not about us cramming our world view down every ones throat, this is about giving people who litteraly have never in their life had a chance at freedom, a chance.
Wether or not the surge works, wether or not democracy grabs hold is the middle east is NOT the metric that we should judge this war by. Its that the people were at least given the oppurtunity to shape their own destiny. Did we do it for our own selfish ends as a lot of the more cynical among us would suppose? Maybe, I’ll concede the possibility but ultimately to the future generations of Iraqis, it will only matter that we did. How they got the chance to be free in a hundred years will not matter to them. That hopefully, they are able to live out their lives not in fear, or in chains, but will be able to live with the same UNALIENABLE Rights that all of us have enjoyed since our first breath in this country.
So when does it end? When will the war and the strife end? When will it cease to be Americas Job to provide the oppurtunity to the people of the world to be free? When we cease to Be Americans. When the dream that was framed by those words finaly dies. That’s when it ceases to be OUR jobs. Job is the wrong word, it is our blessing, our duty, if I may it is our CALLING to provide this oppurtunity to the world. That’s what it really means to be an American. I for one will never forget that. Nor will I let my children forget. The dream, our calling will not die, Not on my watch. To this end I Pledge, my life, my fortune and my sacred honor.

Did somebody mention WMDs?

You mean them little nasty things that saddam was playing a simple freakin' shell game with?

The shells being all those "castles" he was frantically erecting all over the place. At the expense of of the suffering of his own people.

They're in Syria? Hell no!

They're built right into and under the bloody "castles".

Question: Whats the difference between warehouses and really expensive warehouses?

The next power players to control those warehouses will pull'em out and shove them right up our collective assets!

What's Sadr and Iran doing?
Waiting for us to 'win' this so they can do just that,

And if I'm wrong,I'll take the blame.
I'm just a "Dumb Ass" anyway. AHA-HA HA HA HA- AHA

But what if I'm right?

From time to time someone stands up in the midst of the crowd and says something profound that adds purpose and perspective to the general discourse.

Well, I don't know about
WMD being below the palaces or anything, but facts is facts, SOMEBODY has to enforce law and order on an international scale, or the alternative is chaos. The Barbary pirates, the Vikings, the list goes on and on. Nature abhors a vacuum, and that goes for power and politics just as much as for gases in a container.

In Part 2-- "No one wants foreign troops in their towns or streets. But we have been there long enough for the essential American decency and sincerity to be revealed"

That's what we were doing in those 3 years before the surge that you sneer at in the essay.

"I have worked hard to drive eyeballs to this website."

Then thank WIZBANG for another set of eyeballs this morning.

And congratulations for the appropriate bitch slap to Dolf rather than the expected "can't we just agree to disagree" pablum encouraged by the well mannered Banquo.

My unsolicited and half witted plea is for you to work harder to get your essays a wider audience. Your too good not to be more conspicuous.

Bill,
Great essay!
You are at your best when making a well thought-out and thought-provoking point. Though your occasional tirade-style essays are enjoyable, it's the ones like this that remind me why I come here.
I just have one thing to add: the OODA loop is something we can all use everyday, whether we think so or not. - The act of anticipating what could go wrong before it does, and to how to prepare for it.

Boyd's OODA loop has a lot of philosophical generality. It's also a permutation of a different sequence with like elements, one that begins with decision, leading, the taking of an initiative.

1. Beginnings -- Decision, taking charge, the initiative, etc.
2. Middles -- Carrying out.
3. Ends -- Taking in the effect.
4. Checks -- Digestion (orientation).

I'm not saying that Boyd was even slightly wrong. Permutations are not per se "wrong" at all. They are something at which it's good to develop agility.

Reading Boyd's bio (thank you, Robt. Coram) a year or so ago was also a biggie for me. I have bought several copies to give to others. Another book, "First to Fight," by Victor Krulak, sheds light on an interesting phenomenon: that the doers often know more about doing than the theorizers know. Krulak describes the attitudes of the Marines (God bless 'em!) that have been formed in centuries of doing, which have led to workable insights on waging war with winning as the sine qua non essential goal, yet winning with honor and compassion. I am glad to see that Petraeus will have a look at the next generation of generals - I have more faith in doers than I have in theorizers.

Dougman, that's actually pretty farfetched given that the US military searched Saddam's palaces, and to this day still uses some of them as bases.

The two most resonable possibilities are that the WMD were either dismantled and destroyed or moved out of the country. Moved where? Most likely possibilities include Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Russia.

The WMD are not still in the country. If they were, would could anticipate one of two possibilities. WMD would have been used against US troops, most likely by Sunnis still loyal to Saddam. Or. Someone in the know would have cashed in that knowledge for a large reward. Neither happened. We have to conclude the WMD are no longer in Iraq. Likely as not, our intellligence community won't publish what we do know for reasons of national security. Some things are best left in the dark.

For in the years following the Korean War, with the ascension of Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command and the “Bomber Generals” in control of the Air Force, American fighter planes flew straight in the face of all of the painful experience won in WWII and Korea.

A commentary of mine on just this subject in an SFRP game fanzine site. (I was trying to give a real-world background lesson to some fictional starship designs):

When nuclear weapons (deadfall bombs of 10-20kt yield, weighing about 5 tons) were developed at TL6 (i.e. WW2), the American military fell prey to a quirk of the American character: The tendency to abandon an established working technology to go with a Nifty New Toy - in this case, nukes. With the newly-independent US Air Force the prestige branch of service (and the only one who could wield the new "ultimate weapon" in its Strategic Air Command of heavy bombers), there was a strong push (led by the Air Force) to disband the Army and Navy, as they were obsolete. Since all future wars would be nuclear, there would be no need for an Army or Navy - only an Air Force with heavy bombers to deliver the nukes, interceptor fighters to defend against enemy nuclear bombers, and nukes, nukes, nukes.

(snip)

However, during the same period (TL7, i.e. Vietnam) the Air Force ended up forced by circumstances to provide counterinsurgency close air support again and again against guerrilla light infantry with an inventory of aircraft designed for and optimized around "load a nuke, point the nose towards Moscow, and cut in afterburner."

I would say that some things about the our most current wars following WW II need to be addressed. Korea was the first war we drew a line and said if the enemy makes it across that line he is safe. So they crossed, killed our soldiers and retreated to re-arm with assurances from our political leaders that we would not follow. This is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Hard to win with these constraints but it can be done.

Mr. Whittle:

"Putting aside the fact I did not refer to Fenster as either an "asshole or a cockroach,""

You didn't. TMF and William Blythe did. I didn't mean to accuse any one person of unreasonable conduct on his or her own, and I am sorry if I came across that way. I understand that Mr. Fenster is not a paragon of respect. Rather, I hoped to point out that you have an opportunity to engage real people in real dialogue here, and that you are not welcoming that. Instead, you impute bad motives.

You want me to take a position? I'll take one. I think on the whole, we're right to continue in Iraq. I think the current strategy has a chance at success. And I thank you for shedding some light on the thinking behind our military success there.

But there are other problems in the world, and no amount of brilliant military decisions removes the necessity of our nation's making strategic decisions. We badly need a more effective force in Afghanistan, and we need to be able to deal with Pakistan. We can't afford a strategy that relies on maintaining our current troop levels in Iraq permanently. And for us to leave Iraq in peace requires a political reconciliation there.

Imagine someone barricading the door of a house against an intruder. Someone else in the house says, "What about the window? We should use some of that stuff to block the window." The first person responds, "Whose side are you on? Do you think we should defend this door, or don't you?"

Just because "What about the window?" is an argument against stacking everything behind the door doesn't mean it's the enemy. The window is there whether you like it or not; facts don't care whose side they're on.

Similarly, the political problems in Iraq are still there whether we like it or not, and we have a limited number of tools to fix things, and a political solution is essential to our overall strategy and always has been.

Bill,

Very nice.

OODA, Fingerspitzengefuhl - it's how you win in hand-to-hand, it's how you (and by 'you', I mean 'I') win at chess, it's how you win an arguement.

Get stuck in the rut of your own patterns/movements/talking-points, and you will only prevail until the Law of Averages throws at you the adversary whose 'rut' runs at a right-angle to yours.

It's something I've known & taught for years, but to see it expanded on in such a timely and 'Big-Picture' manner is a beautiful thing.

==============================
OT: I sometimes forget that you 'man-the-monitor' in the early days after publication.

I see the 'Dolfs' and the 'Benquos' and I feel the response-force rising within me, flowing toward my hands and barely checked at the wrist as I grasp for the discipline to read the comments all the way to the end.... then, there you are, and everyone (and by 'everyone' I mean 'me & the voices') have to stand down.

The process is tiring in itself.

Good times, though.

- MuscleDaddy

Whittle's description of the OODA Principle reminds me of a very unpopular someone. I'll likely get some scorn for bringing this up but I'm gonna do it anyway.

Change/transformation is hard, and like Boyd, men who think outside of the traditional box are mocked and maligned. Sometimes right out of a job...

I can't help but wonder what Rumsfeld would've accomplished if the bureaucracy had been as reformed as Whittle hopes for in the future:

Rumsfeld's notion was to do more—and do it faster and deadlier—with less. So he mixed in a larger number of special forces than the Army had originally envisioned, giving the commandos a central role. He shortened the soften-'em-up air war to just a few days instead of the more traditional few weeks. But the final surprise belonged to Franks: he opted to begin the ground war before the air war to preserve tactical surprise. Finally, he forced the Army, Navy and Air Force to do something they had more or less avoided for 50 years: fight together instead of carving up the battlefield and reserving each slice for a different service...

"[Rumsfeld] was the first to realize the shift of power in Washington from the Congress back to the Executive Branch. No one moved so spectacularly, so systematically at a time when everyone else was just confused and scared. Remember: when the plane attacked the Pentagon, Rumsfeld ran toward the accident. He is very perceptive in the midst of chaos. That's when he gets his best results."

So as Iraq came into his sights, Rumsfeld pressed Franks to shrink the invasion force, speed the drive to Baghdad and forget about the more traditional, mile-by-bloody-mile invasion tactics that meant stopping at every step to consolidate the coalition's gains...

When they were done, Rumsfeld and Franks invaded a nation 25 times the size of nearby Kuwait, with roughly half the troops used in 1991—a revolution in the way the U.S. fights wars. Baghdad fell in 21 days, and the U.S. suffered 103 combat fatalities. The plan, according to retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Jay Farrar, "proved to the Army that it can go in lighter and sustain itself longer than it ever imagined."

I wholly agree with Whittle that our recent success in Iraq has less to do with the surge of troops, but more about what we're doing with them. A new theory of war. Exit question: Could Petraeus have accomplished what he did without the new doctrine of warfare that Rumsfeld had pioneered within the bureacracy of the Pentagon?

Unfortunately the American people have, for their eyes and ears, the mainstream media, so the American people are flying largely blind and their collective OODA loop is vulnerable.

Years ago an American expatriate Paul Bowles wrote four novels (including The Sheltering Sky) and many short stories, of which the theme was often that of travelers and tourists, from places like the U.S., in foreign lands -- often Northern Africa -- where they did not understand the dangers. Off their own turf, they moved blindly into their dooms. That was a time when the world was still large. Bowles himself was rather anti-Western and lived in Tangiers. It's funny when it happens to Bugs Bunny, Daffy get him from behind, stars swirl around Bugs's head and he says "Will somebody please get the number of that truck?" Doesn't know what hit him. One of the oldest stories in the book.

Now we are cheek and jowl with those foreign places, effectually interpenetrative with them, amid strange dangers about which few Americans have any conception arising from experience. Many Americans won't get it until it's too late -- "Have heart of darkness, will travel" -- into our living rooms. It doesn't take nuclear physicists or the Manhattan project to build nukes any more, much less a whole culture respectful of Reason -- much contrary to Pakistan's past claims of how its nuclear program would advance the country scientifically. Instead it takes a bunch of engineers and some smart people in charge. And an increasingly theocratic, not scientific, culture in Pakistan itches to get its hands on those nukes. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nukes and ringleader of their illegal sales, is not a nuclear physicist, he is a metallurgist. Americans don't grasp this sort of thing or the meaning of it, and how it will only become easier over time for small groups to get WMD. Missiles? Programmable microchips and GPS. They haven't become child's play but it's not the grand societal achievement that it used to be, because our society already did a lot of the work for them. It seems that only hard experience will teach, so long as the media remain dominated by glamourpusses and the parochial. Americans don't want to hear talk of WMD, since, when the US got into Iraq, Saddam didn't have them in immediately usable form and ready to parade through the streets of Baghdad. He had WMD program elements in place. But the WMD future is an essential part of the reasons for the WOT; the American people's OODA loop is jammed and stuck.

"...and say he was a murderous bastard who was also a big threat to us."

You really think we didn't say that? Hell, I could find Clinton, Gore, and Kerry quotes saying just that. I think most people's problem with this is that they just can't bring themselves to admit that Bush used some strategery and big picture thinking; that when you boil it down is rather straightforward:
Fanatics are trying to kill us.
These fanatics come from the Middle East.
The ME regimes need to change, radically.
The only possible target we can use right now is Saddam.
Luckily he's made it easy for us.

If there was a flaw, it was overselling the reasons.

But there was near universal agreement on the threat. You can look it up. When you do, you'll see it only makes the current political posturing all that more obvious. And odious.

Huh, that's weird. I've been watching the military channel for nearly a year and I've never heard John Boyd mentioned. It would seem like he deserved a little credit for what he did.

And you actually can put tanks in a city. You just have to make sure they're M1 Abrams because almost nothing can punch through their armor.

I love the hardcover edition of "Silent America." The dustcover is really a work of art in itself. The essays still get me choked up. I never loan that edition out; I only loan my paperbacks, which for some reason never come back. Ha.

(This means buy the book, people.)

Thanks for another inspirational essay, Bill. Please do not run for political office. Mark Twain didn't run for office, did he?

Benquo,

Let's Review:

"Gosh, I hate to be the one to flip on the lights while all this heavy petting is going on..."

"But, no--for Bill, the big picture is the same old, same old: the perfidious MSM & the ignoble Democrats."

"Just ignore the media--except a select few whose biases are well-known--and vote for Republicans; then all will be well."

"This despite the fact that while Yon & Totten do fine and important work, for the most part, their perspectives are no more clear, pure or valid than any number of other media outlets." (that one was a jaw-dropper 'Micheal Yon = Stone Phillips'- MD)

"...political opposition—many of whom were correct about the folly of this war"

Now, remind me - which of those were "What about the window? We should use some of that stuff to block the window." - ?

This was a stellar essay on agility of thought/action and its effectiveness compared to entrenched rut-following and self-perpetuating bureaucratic stagnation - not to mention knee-jerk, 'bumper-sticker' political activism.

You came in with your "Terribly disappointed in you old man!" - because Bill didn't treat what amounted to a canned-talking-point-recording as a serious commenter.

Then you want to play the Offended Party when people call you on it? Bad Form.

BTW - TMF didn't call you an 'asshole' - he called Dolf an 'asshole'.

Which leads me to believe that you're taking on extra Offense for effect, or one-or-the-other of you is a sock-puppet.

Either way - bad form.

- MuscleDaddy

Bill,
Kudos on bringing John Boyd to this community. I read about the OODA loop a couple years ago and remember thinking that you would be one of the best to explain it.

As a very junior staff officer in the 2nd Marine Division back in the ‘eighties, I had the privilege of hearing Col Boyd lecture several times and to participate in some extremely fascinating free-wheeling discussions that he guided, as part of General Al Gray’s push for the Marine Corps to adopt the principles of what was then termed “Maneuver Warfare”. The concept of the OODA Loop was a deceptively easy one to grasp – the trick was in being able to internalize and implement it at the institutional level. Nevertheless, after encountering quite a lot of inertia (and downright hostility), the Marine Corps performed a major sea change in how we looked at and prosecuted warfare. The results paid remarkable dividends. It was not so much that Boyd’s ideas were new; his real contribution was in distilling, articulating, and remorselessly pushing those ideas on anyone who would listen, and on a lot of people who at first wouldn’t listen at all. John Boyd didn’t do it all alone, but he played a major role in reshaping the way the modern United States Military fights its wars at the operational level. He was truly a rare individual who was not afraid to challenge, question, browbeat and cajole us into thinking and acting in a different operational framework. And in doing so, he saved a lot of lives.

Another excellent read, Sir. I've tried to learn to execute 'swordlessness' in my business affairs. Priceless.

I'll be glad to see our military returning home so they can join in the execution of our government's practices. The lessons they've learned in Iraq will transform this country. No electioneering required.

Thank You Bill
Thank You

Another great article... I'm always happy to drive what few eyeballs I have influence with towards your site. Thanks Bill.

MuscleDaddy: You can't play chess using OODA principals, unless you aren't waiting for your opponent to make a move (interesting idea, that). It's impossible to get inside your opponent's action loop in a turn based game!

Chuck,

A few nights ago I had dinner with some new friends of mine. I learned that my friend's wife was working in Manhattan on Sept. 11th. She looked out her window and saw the first jet flying low and then hit the WTC.

I remember thinking, God, here's a person that saw that with her own eyes. I wish I had seen it with my one eyes.

I find myself feeling the exact same way in response to your post. I very, very much wish I could have seen that famous Boyd briefing.

Anything at all that you can elaborate on -- especially any observations you may have on Boyd's manner and personality -- would be deeply appreiated by me and I'm sure by many others.

To me this is almost -- almost! -- as good as seeing a post from a guy who begins with "As a junior staff oficer in the Union Army I saw President Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address..."

More! Everything and anything you've got!

...there have never been soldiers like the ones we have deployed today. Never.

These men and women have been asked not only to be warriors, but also policemen, judges, marriage counselors, businessmen, administrators, referees, bodyguards, traffic cops, teachers and ambassadors. They deserve the very best that we as a nation can provide. That means not only material and spiritual support. It means they deserve the best leadership this country can possibly deliver.

Thank you for pointing that out, Bill. I am not military, but living in San Diego I know many who have had lives disrupted to be deployed.

This site does something to my brain...it enlightens me to the fact that I am smart enough to understand and grasp the concepts and actually enjoy the discourse that follows each brilliant essay...

...at the same time I have never felt so dumb in my life because I cannot articulate a response to any of it.

I appreciate the opportunity to be the tag along. Now can I get anyone anything from the store?

BTW, speaking of chess:

The most amazing analysis of Chess I ever heard was given by famed military genius Zapp Brannigan, who cut to the heart of the issue when he said:

"The most important key to success in chess is to never let your opponent see your pieces."

That's Boyd-level analysis.

Sir,

I retired nearly a year ago and spend quite a bit of time reading off of the internet. I also read a number of magazines each month as well as 30 or so books a year. I read the book on Boyd several years ago, right after it came out. I have NEVER read an article written as well as this one!! It is brilliant!!

I have a few questions, if you don't mind me asking them. 1.)What is your day job?? What do you do for a living?? 2.)How often do you write articles similar to this one?? 3.)How can I insure that I see all of your work, do you have a web site??

In closing, wonderful job on an intersting subject.

Regards,

Norman Bair

Mmm. I think Benquo has been nicely polite and did raise one point we should always be conscious of- the need to keep this place from becoming a mere echo chamber.

That said, defending an obvious bad-faith attacker will always raise eyebrows, and not in an impressed way. He has since largely ceased to do so, but we have already hashed over why some people really don't deserve a respectful ear and why dismissing them is actually necessary to preserving civil dialogue. As Stephen Dutch once pointed out, if you become too zealous in defending the rights of the obnoxious, you wind up securing not the freedom of everybody, but the freedom of the obnoxious- because their behavior drains and drowns the civil to the point where it's simply not worth it to keep participating anymore.

Whenever you go anywhere knowing you represent the dissenting opinion, you'd best go with your Internet Armor on, a level head, and a charitable heart. I always walk into places and threads where I know my opinion is the minority expecting to catch some flames I don't deserve, because the people there have probably heard a million completely stupid (and profoundly disrespectful) positions superficially resembling mine. Perhaps it is not the ideal, but as a practical reality the burden is on me to prove I come bearing reasoned and civil dissent, not on them to assume it automatically- especially if I opened by defending some basic principle someone completely obnoxious might have been (badly) defending.

Still want to talk about the pros and cons of involvement in Iraq? I can do that, but wounded tones about being the minority don't really impress me. We're all the minority someplace; it has no bearing on whether or not we're right. (Well. I can until tomorrow morning, when I'm going out of town for awhile, but there are plenty here who would be better at it anyway.)

Bill,

I'll be glad to give you some of my impressions of Col Boyd and his lecture -- I'm on the clock right now, but I'll try to flesh out some memories when I get a chance tonight.

My absolute first impression was "Who is this old fart, and why have we been dragged here to listen to him?" Then he started talking . . .

@ chris keith
I think you just ended this discussion but no one was listening except Bruce Hamilton and myself. Chris your statement is the true American one, the one our men and women have been dieing for. There is nothing left to be said except, I stand with you brother.

Chris Sez:

"MuscleDaddy: You can't play chess using OODA principals, unless you aren't waiting for your opponent to make a move (interesting idea, that). It's impossible to get inside your opponent's action loop in a turn based game!"

Of course not, but you can get inside your opponents' decision loop.

* Ignore the classic 'moves' and 'gambits',

* Walk out your opponents' possible individual piece movements & decide on your responses to each, (I usually go about 15 out)

* Determine your offensive movements based on each scenario.

* Do not hesitate to throw out your other 14 options and rebuild from scratch each time.

At this point, your 'strategy' is completely fluid - only your goal remains constant.

This is especially effective against the classically-trained players, as you are also building their frustration by seeming to move without rhyme-or-reason.

One of my favorite opponents has been known to say:
"You won because you play to the edges and I play for the center"
- my response was always:
"No, I won because I played to the edges 'when' you played to the center. I just refused to meet you where you were going"

It's not a 'movement set' in the classic sense, because it's designed to fall apart with each move - but with a sort of 'predetermined fluidity' (if that's not either too oxymoronic... or, you know, the regular kind...)

In a sense, not entirely unlike what Bill just said about Brannigan - my pieces were already all over the board, he just couldn't see them yet.

- MuscleDaddy

Brilliant essay Mr. Whittle!

I must say that I was anticipating your OODA post with a bit of trepidation. I have studied fighter aircraft and tactics for most of my life. I was slightly familiar with Boyd and thought that perhaps you might be giving him too much credit for original thinking. What you have shown however is that it was not only his thoughts but his perseverance in seeing them adapted and utilised that was paramount. That was his great achievement. Thank you for giving me a clearer view of the big picture.

On the subject of media. I'm quite sure that you may have thought of this before, but in case you have not, allow me to put forth a modest proposal. Why not combine your vision of Ejectia with your talents in media production? You have said that you want to reach a larger audience than can be done with an essay. Why not start producing news content? It seems to me that you have a great number of talented writers at your disposal. A fair number of historians. An equally respectable number of savvy professionals who I am sure would love to contribute. Can this not be parlayed into an actual news organization? You know more about this stuff than I do, but have you thought about it?

I have an interesting historical background on OODA that I would like to share. I have recently finished reading "The Blond Knight of Germany, a Biography of...Erich Hartmann" by Raymond F. Toliver and Trevor J. Constable.
Hartmann was credited with 352 air to air victories on the Russian front in WWII. The highest scoring ace ever. From page 54 of that book:

"Soon Erich had fully developed the tactics of air fighting from which he would never subsequently depart. The magical four steps were: "See-Decide-Attack-Reverse, or Coffe Break."
In lay terms, spot the enemy, decide if he can be attacked and surprised, attack him and break away immediately after striking; or if he spots you before you strike, take a "coffee break"-wait-pull off the enemy and don't get into a turning battle with a foe who knows you are there. The rigid observance of this tactical sequence carried Erich Hartmann to the top."

Interestingly, Hartmann rejoined the Bundesluftwaffe after ten years in a Russian POW camp. He came to the U.S and lectured at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1961. He then trained in Jet fighters in Texas before returning to Germany. I wonder if he ever met with Boyd?

Lastly. Regarding Dolf's comment on the "Dolchstosselegende". The word refers to the "Stab in the back" myth of World War I. It was the conspiracy tale of it's day. It held that the German Army was never defeated on the field, but was undermined by "political" forces on the home front, which caused it's collapse. The myth was used by Hitler to undermine his political foes. I suppose that Dolf is equating it to the Democratic betrayal of our S.E. Asian endeavour, but in that instance it was, sadly, not a myth but a reality.

Lastly; I agree with you that it is a complete waste of time debating so-called "Moderates" who parrot left wing talking points and add nothing new or original to the topic at hand. Please unleash your Inner Balrog whenever you see fit to do so. I'm lovin' it!

Thanks again Bill for the Best New Years Present Ever.
~Svin

A fascinating essay, because it makes me want to read more, as the best essays will.

I think one of the problems is the general middlebrow-ness of our intellectual culture. Excellence and eloquence are scarce able to be percieved, much less valued. As in the schoolyard, E&E; earns you not respect but envy and contempt. But if I pursue this line of thought I will 'gin to sound like a scene from the Revenge of the Nerds cutting-room floor.

Mark,

I was listening, I just couldn't think of anything to say that didn't sound like "Me too!".

I'll just have to shamelessly steal your line.

Chris Keith,
There is nothing left to be said except, I stand with you brother.

- MuscleDaddy

god, I love America. I want America to win...

Benquo:

I don't think Fenster was asking about the window. He began his post with a sneer about heavy petting in the dark, and positioned himself as the enlightened sort who could turn on the lights literally.

Forget asshole or roach, the technical term for him is "troll". He posted deliberately to annoy the fans who enjoyed Mr. Whittle's essay.

In reading the troll's post, I see no evidence that he has any idea what kind of mental effort was required by Whittle to integrate the ideas that he did to write his essay. The troll, of course, doesn't care.

Whittle obviously does, and so do a number of us who read it and thought "wow, this is great that someone put int his effort, wrote an essay, and I can read it!"

Mr. Whittle: Thank you!

MuscleDaddy, I don't think anyone's been unfair to me (and I'm not sure anyone's been unfair to Mr. Fenster either). What I'm saying is this: if you don't make an active effort to understand the arguments of those who disagree with you, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. This is the case whether or not those who disagree with you "deserve" to be listened to. It's not about being fair to them; it's about being fair to yourself.

LabRat, you're right to point out the necessity of "Internet Armor," and maybe my echo-chamber-dar is too sensitive. But I've seen some very bright liberal bloggers cut themselves off from learning something from the likes of Mr. Whittle by assuming that he's just a knee-jerk militarist homophobe (which he is not). They are not helped in this regard by their dozens of like-minded commenters.

At any rate, it would probably be more helpful for me to voice my own concerns about the topic at hand than to dwell on Mr. Fenster.

It seems to me that any coherent intellectual defense of America's presence in Iraq is going to have to answer a few challenges:

1) The resource cost. The Iraq occupation uses up valuable military and intelligence resources, and our nation's intellectual energy, that thus is not being used to deal with other problems. Afghanistan/Pakistan is one of these other problem areas. Iran is another. Handling Iraq itself better will at best slightly reduce this cost. So far, the surge has increased it.

(I'm aware of complementary effects like the Libya/ A. Q. Khan effect. I'm just not convinced that we wouldn't have gotten better results tackling those problems more directly.)

2) The hostility cost. Anything that goes wrong after our involvement will be blamed on us, rightly or wrongly. It might not be fair, but terrorists never are. We can't afford to ignore the fact that our actions -- even if they are ultimately right actions -- may, in the short term, create more terrorists.

More importantly, though, we have created an international dynamic in which foreign countries are more likely to worry about checking American power than they were before, and less likely to worry about, for instance, a nuclear Iran. Once again, fair or not, this is a real cost of our actions in Iraq, and makes it harder to get European cooperation in checking Iran's nuclear ambitions.

3) Information asymmetry. Simply because we're the 400-pound gorilla in the room, everyone else is watching us more closely than we're watching them. More foreigners speak English than the other way around. They can manipulate us more successfully than we can manipulate them. I think this justifies some skepticism as to our ability to affect countries with political cultures very different from our own in any ways other than the simplest (i.e. either attack them, or defend them). How likely are we, really, to accomplish complex goals like installing a functioning liberal democracy? As I understand it, the whole neoconservative project of democratizing the middle east depends on our ability to do just that: to affect the political situation in far subtler ways than we've ever been able to do reliably.

(As far as I know, a Japan-like total reconstruction just isn't in the cards, so I don't think that counterexample applies. If anyone thinks that such a thing is politically possible, I'd be interested in hearing about that.)

Good to see you again, Bill. More, regularly, please (c:

OTOH, you could interpret #3 as a reason FOR a prolonged physical presence, as it allows someone like Gen. Petraeus and the other soldiers under his command to OBSERVE in ways that are otherwise impossible, and thus respond more intelligently than we've been able to in the past. So I can see how something like the OODA loop could apply. (At the very least, we seem to have out-maneuvered Al Qaeda In Iraq.)

Ah, good. There is meat on the bone of contention. :)

But I've seen some very bright liberal bloggers cut themselves off from learning something from the likes of Mr. Whittle by assuming that he's just a knee-jerk militarist homophobe (which he is not). They are not helped in this regard by their dozens of like-minded commenters.

True, but seeking out other points of view is the responsibility of the individual, not the responsibility of the provider. Some providers do go out of their way to provide as friendly and neutral a platform to the "other side" as possible, but that's neither Bill's aim nor his strength- what he specializes in is high-test, rationally-backed rhetoric that speak to the values he holds highest and resonates with those who share it. It's not his (or his commenters', though some of us do try) goal to make sure this is a totally lib-friendly cocktail party. "You Are Not Alone" captures his major goal pretty well.

Personally, there are several places I go to hear the other side's point of view, and most of my friends are somewhat to a lot more liberal than I am. I come to this place to hang with those of like mind- and indulge in a little sabre fencing with those "outsiders" brave enough to come in anyway.

Being bright is never enough- you also need intellectual bravery as well as curiosity. As for giving other ideas a hearing whether the loudmouth deserves it or not, there's really no point if you've already heard and refuted the same talking points a hundred times before; that's not considering a new idea, it's being exhausted by one you know to be bad. Why do it so quickly? I know birders that can reliably identify the species of a flock of songbirds that are only flying silhouettes, by their flocking patterns and flight patterns. Spend enough time doing something and you don't need a field guide and an intensive examination every time when you run across a common species.

1) The resource cost. The Iraq occupation uses up valuable military and intelligence resources, and our nation's intellectual energy, that thus is not being used to deal with other problems. Afghanistan/Pakistan is one of these other problem areas. Iran is another. Handling Iraq itself better will at best slightly reduce this cost. So far, the surge has increased it.

My response to this would be first that different problems do best with different solutions, and second that dealing with Hussein's regime was in and of itself an immediate problem. We were spending fifty billion a year on ineffective "containment" of Saddam's incessant sabre-rattling and general threats; Hussein was the only Middle Eastern leader willing to confront us militarily. Using a direct military response on the most willing military threat strikes me as a very appropriate way to deal with that problem. As P.J. O'Rourke put it in the days before the surge, "Iraq is a mess, but it's a mess with a message: don't mess with us." Dictators like Ahmadinejad pay attention to messages like that: it may make us bleed dearly to have to deal with Iran the way we are in Iraq, but it wouldn't matter to him, because the part of war that we're really, really efficient at is taking down regimes. Nation-building is what consumes most of the time, the resources, and the willpower at home. From the point of view of the regime tyrant, it doesn't matter to him because he's dead or jailed by the point we're arguing about how to clean up the mess.

You may not be convinced that this was the best use of resources- and you may be right, history will be the final arbiter some years hence- but choosing the biggest and loudest threat, the one that was still coasting on the glory of having taken on the American military and yet stayed in power- strikes me as a good choice. I'm not convinced that more military muscle in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or elsewhere would be the best use of resources in those cases.

More importantly, though, we have created an international dynamic in which foreign countries are more likely to worry about checking American power than they were before, and less likely to worry about, for instance, a nuclear Iran. Once again, fair or not, this is a real cost of our actions in Iraq, and makes it harder to get European cooperation in checking Iran's nuclear ambitions.

It's been hard to get effective European cooperation to do anything, especially anything military, for decades. I'm not sure this is a direct consequence of the Iraq war so much as it is a manifestation of a problem that's existed since the end of the Cold War and perhaps its beginning as well.

When the Soviet Union fell, we remained as the only superpower. Other nations are going to want to check our power for that reason alone, no matter what we do.

As for creating more terrorists in the short run, the only way to stem terrorism in the long run is to demonstrate it to be an ineffective tactic. The only way to do that is to make sure terrorists rarely or never get results for their demands.

How likely are we, really, to accomplish complex goals like installing a functioning liberal democracy? As I understand it, the whole neoconservative project of democratizing the middle east depends on our ability to do just that: to affect the political situation in far subtler ways than we've ever been able to do reliably.

(As far as I know, a Japan-like total reconstruction just isn't in the cards, so I don't think that counterexample applies. If anyone thinks that such a thing is politically possible, I'd be interested in hearing about that.

Well, for starters, by taking steps smaller than "achieve liberal democracy". What do we really, really want from Iraq? We want it to be stable, we want it to not be a satellite state of a hostile power, and we'd really like it if it weren't hostile to us. And if we could have a friendly state that would allow us to have military bases in the region- say, much friendlier than Saudi Arabia- that would be just groovy. We can probably achieve all of these while still falling short of the kind of state that Americans would recognize as a real liberal democracy, and we should not call it failure if we don't achieve that ultimate goal immediately or even at all, because we'll have achieved a much bigger success than what we started with in the Baath regime.

If you want a model of how liberal democracy might be achieved, I suggest you not look at Japan, but rather at South Korea. It took them six republics after we defended the region and (sort of) created the country to achieve real liberal democracy- but it was done.

Mark & Muscledaddy,
thanks for a while there I was afraid No one had read my post, or were so caught up with arguing with the trolls, that they missed the point. In "my most desperate hours" when I feel as If I am the last sane person on the planet, its good to come here and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I do have "brothers in Arms" out there in the darkness, who think as I do, who Love this country as much as I do. Somedays comming here is the only thing that gives me hope, that we will turn it around. thanks.

Benquo,

1. The cost of the war in Iraq is nominal compared to wars of the past. During WWII, 50% of GDP was poured into the war effort. I have to check the figures for Vietnam, but if memory serves it was something under 10% of GDP. Today our military spending represents only 4% of GDP, an all time low.

2. Your worries about the hostility factor are misplaced. Statesmen make decisions based on national self-interest. When you see anti-Americanism abroad, it's because a foreign government finds it useful to turn up the volume on the propaganda machine. Usually to distract the local population from domestic problems. Hostility is learned. Nothing America does, or does not do, is going to stop the hatred preached in the madrassas.

3. How likely are we to affect political change in other countries? I for one believe that violence and tyranny are universally loathed, and freedom and prosperity universally welcome by any sane population. A case like Gaza might be the exception, but generational hatred is a learned experience that generally ends with self-immolation.

BTW, Iraq is awash in petro-dollars with oil at $100/barrel. I think we can look forward to a rather fast recovery without pouring US dollars into the reconstruction.

If you can break away from the MSM for your news, you'll find that things in Iraq are improving in dramatic ways. Of course, defeatists will never, can never, admit it because it runs contrary to the so-called "narrative."

Essay???
This isn't an essay, it's a Masterpiece.

Mr. Whittle, you Sir have captured everything that thousands, hell, millions of American Patriots have been trying to express for five years now.
And you have done so in such a way that anyone with any doubt whatsoever should now have an understanding that is crystal clear as to what we as a nation are trying to accomplish.

And that is, to fight back and win against the evil in the world and to preserve not only our freedom, but the freedom of people around the globe.

To the Hanoi Janes' and Sean Penns' in our country i say "Get the Hell out of the way, because real men and women have work to do"

MikeB
Gathering of Eagles

God Bless the Troops
God Bless America

Late to the party as usual.
Thanks for the sermon. Very well said.

I don't know why, but I feel compelled to do this:

I'm in ur decision loop, Fingerspitzen ur gefuhlen!

Benquo:

"Rather, we -- as a nation -- are responsible for having made those people pay that price for our war in Iraq."

Just as I -- as a person -- would "be responsible" for having broken a child's arm while saving his life. True in some sense, but nonetheless a curious perspective.

"But I'd like to see more signs that we're doing something to bring that about."

It's your choice where you look. If you're not seeing such signs but many others claim they are -- well, there are either of two conclusions you could easily draw. Personally, I don't think those many others are delusional but that choice is up to you.

"I thought the enemy was the terrorists, not an entire half of our own USA."

Curious condemnation. Best of luck with that viewpoint.

Benquo:

"Most people on the left know that the "Bush=Hitler" brigade is nuts."

Difficult to reconcile with this... Perhaps you can help?

Leading members of the "Bush=Hitler" brigade still empowered by "most people on the left"; else they'd have been voted, or hounded, out of their positions -- for being nuts:

Former Vice President Al Gore, October 5, 2005
U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, longest serving Democrat Senator, October 17, 2003
U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota), July 15, 2007
Keith Olberman, MSNBC news anchor, supported by MSNBC, September 5, 2006

Bill-

Another thought provoking essay.

Linked it from Your Daily Paine.

The focus is starting to shift from the military problem to the civil problem. After all, it's quite true the the ultimate solution here must be in the halls of government; the government of Iraq must be able to secure the country and command the confidence and the allegiance of it's people for it to become truly independent and strong. A military solution is necessary for this, but not sufficient.

What I see, though, is that the government is inching towards this goal. The key is, what's the government?

Look at the model of the U.S. We don't have One Big Government. We have various levels of government, with various levels of sovereignty. There are a lot of functions that are the responsibility of State and municipal governments (like evacuating N.O. when a hurricane comes). Pointing to the Baghdad government and saying "It's not doing the job, so government is failing in Iraq" requires one to buy off on the governmental model favored by the Left, where One Big Government runs everything.

But the U.S. was founded on the idea that the more local a governmental function is, the more responsive to the people it is. And this is the model being implemented in Iraq. By working with and funding local government, we are getting groups of people to work together and govern themselves for the common good. This will travel up the levels of government. I think what's needed right now in the Baghdad government is a new election, to sweep out some of the office holders and let the rest know that the locals are getting impatient and that they need to get their act together.

The U.S. was founded on the idea that we don't necessarily WANT the big central government to work well. God knows that the people of Iraq know the dangers of a highly centralized efficient government. Let's see a year or two of increasingly functional local governments and security forces. I think the central government will get in line then.

Bill,

I'm an Air Force Academy Grad and have been an AF pilot for 19 years (Active Duty and Reserves) and this is the FIRST I've ever heard of Boyd. Granted, I've always flown transports, but I'm curious as to when his writings/thoughts started filtering through the PME community.

I ordered the book. Thanks for a great essay, Bill.

A hearty and hale *THANK YOU!*...speaking for one whose voice was silenced 41 years ago, Clayton Charles "Chuck" Kemp:

http://www.virtualwall.org/dk/KempCC01a.htm

Keep clear the path ahead.

Firstly I'd like to say excellent post as usual. It brings to mind a few things I've thought about.
After the recent successes of the surge I've seen a number of posts on different blogs with the setiment
'why didn't they do this from the start?' and I detect a bit of that in this post as well.

Now I fully admit that I'm no soldier, and all I know of Iraq comes from news reports, both msm and blog.
It is my belief that as we look back on the war in Iraq we will discover that there were at least three separate
insurgencies active.

The first insurgency would be the remains of Iraq's army, bolstered most likely by some of those who
benefitted from Saddam's rule. Their primary goal would have been to return their group to power and a necessary
requirement for that to happen is to get the coalition to leave. Based on past history, Somalia and Vietnam
specifically, a reasonable strategy would be to kill as many American troops as possible. The old 'Americans have
no stomach for a real fight'. The classic tactic here is small group ambush style tactics, as well as targetting
collaberators to keep the Americans cut off from local help. The best defense is essentially to fort up and venture
out only in large supported patrols. The only way to get at the Americans then is either to attack the heavily defended
patrols, or the even more heavily defended bases. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the American military has
learned how to make our soldiers very hard targets to attack.

I think we actually did beat this first group fairly early on and that the worsening situation in 2006 is a result of
the actions of the other 2 insurgencies.

The second insurgency would be the Shiite militias, and the third is Al Queda. My guess is that both share the same
primary goal, the defeat of American forces. When it became clear that we couldn't be 'Vietnamed' out of Iraq. The tactics
became inciting a civil war between Shiite and Sunni populations. This is where I believe the OODA loop needed to be used.
Suddenly the primary target shifted from American and Coalition forces to the Iraqi population itself. Suddenly tactics that worked
well against the first type of insurgency actually ended up helping the second and third types since it gave them mostly free
reign outside our bases. Its scary to think how close this actually came to working. We talk now about how Al Queda
dug their own grave with their treatment of Iraqis but had we actually pulled out in 2007 they'd have had a major victory.
I don't think they really care what would have happened in Iraq after we left. The Shiites and Iran certainly do since
they either live there or right next door, but a pullout would be in their interests too. As the majority and the
ones with the most foreign backing I don't think it would have been very hard for a Shiite regiem to take over.

The basic point is that its dangerous to define any specific tactic as the 'right' one for the entire war
or to believe that because something works now it would have worked back at the start.

Posted by: RonF | January 3, 2008 2:41 PM --
I think these are excellent points you raise. Thank you, Sir!

Posted by: MikeBSuffolk | January 3, 2008 2:04 PM --
I can only add an AMEN!, and sincerely.

Posted by: chris keith | January 3, 2008 1:32 PM --
Please allow me to add my thanks, and welcome you, Sir! You are NOT alone.

Posted by: LabRat | January 3, 2008 1:27 PM --
Quite well said, LabRat! Thank You!

Posted by: MuscleDaddy | January 3, 2008 12:25 PM --
MD, you capture the essence of chess in terms of OODA most eloquently, indeed. To think OODA principles do not apply to chess is unfathomable to this brain. Thank you!

So many others --
Gawd, I LOVE this place! Thank you for taking the time to comment!

Nice.

If you are as good a pilot as you are a writer Ill bet you could have waxed Boyd's tail.

When the calls for defeat and dishonor were at their loudest – sad to say a not unwarranted street rep we had made for ourselves – somehow, somehow we simply just hung on and gave them not a retreat but a charge.

Somehow? No somehow about it. This turnaround happened because Bush kept faith with these people when the whole world told him to run away. It's easy enough to blame Bush for a million things. But he deserves credit for this, and it's a credit worth a couple thousand mistakes.

I meant to say, Bush kept faith with these people AND WITH HIS TROOPS.

"Brannigan's Law is like Brannigan's love: hard and fast" - Zapp Brannigan

Excellent article!

Ah, good old 40 Second Boyd; he's perpetuated a fraud on the US Aviation design community for the last 40 years; causing us to believe in the cult of manouverability at low altitudes.

In an exercise recently, a B-52 outmanouvered a F-16; and stayed on the F-16's tail, despite attempts by the F-16 driver to shake him.

How is this even possible? The B-52 was flying in the cold, thin air above 40,000+ feet; where low aspect, low wing area wings like those found on the F-16 are at a disadvantage; and big high aspect wings like the B-52 are at an advantage.

Using the classical lift equations found here:

The Classical Lift Equation
Link to Lifting Line Equation

Plugging in the speed of 600 MPH; and an altitude of oh, 50,000 feet along with the aspect numbers, and an angle of attack of 10 degrees; gives us the following numbers:

The F-16's wing will generate 29,323 lbs of lift; or a lift to weight ratio of 1.10
The B-52's wing will generate 500,832 lbs of lift; or a lift to weight ratio of 1.41

If the F-16 driver wants to have the same lift-weight ratio of the B-52; then he'll have to do a 12.8 degree AOA.

BUT; when the BUFF driver adopts a 12.8 AOA; he'll get a lift/weight ratio of 1.8! Meaning the more manouvering the B-52 does; the further the F-16 falls behind.

When you look at it this way; a lot of "obsolete" platforms like the F-106 aren't as obsolete.

The F-106A has a 2.07 aspect wing with an area of 698 square feet; and combat weight of 38,700 lbs.

This gives it a lift/weight ratio of 1.41 at 10 degrees; and 1.81 at 12.8 degrees...

There are stories of F-106 drivers outmanouvering just about everyone and smoking them with their internal gun; even F-16s at meetups...

So in conclusion....we completely overreacted to Vietnam and all of our post-Vietnam fighters like the F-16 and F-18 (F-15 design was begun in 68-69) were optimized for absurdly low altitude knifefights of the like that were encountered over North Vietnam...and which we'll never encounter again. What a stupid 40 year detour we took.

Looking at the F-22; it's got a whopping 840 square foot wing; and an aspect ratio of 2.36; which combined with it's higher cruise speed via supercruise; means it can generate absurd lift....and the pilot has a partial pressure suit; which enables it to operate in altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet comfortably...which probably explains how it can outfight anything it's come up against; even F-16s, because to bag a F-16, you have to see him, due to Stealth; and so you have to climb up high, to 50,000+ feet to get a gun or sidewinder kill; and up there; the F-22 can outturn your more "nimble" F-16.

LabRat:

Spend enough time doing something and you don't need a field guide and an intensive examination every time when you run across a common species.
Fair enough, as far as any claims of dismissiveness. I still think some commenters' calling him a cockroach, an asshole, and an America-hater was a bit much. But maybe you know something I don't.

[D]ealing with Hussein's regime was in and of itself an immediate problem. We were spending fifty billion a year on ineffective "containment" of Saddam's incessant sabre-rattling and general threats;
We've spent more yearly on the invasion, occupation, and reconstruction.

Dictators like Ahmadinejad pay attention to messages like that: it may make us bleed dearly to have to deal with Iran the way we are in Iraq, but it wouldn't matter to him, because the part of war that we're really, really efficient at is taking down regimes. [...] From the point of view of the regime tyrant, it doesn't matter to him because he's dead or jailed by the point we're arguing about how to clean up the mess.
Ahmadinejad isn't really any more a dictator than his "reformist" predecessor Khatami. I could say that the mullahs hold the real power, but the fact is that we don't really know what the dynamics are in Iran.

We're sending badly mixed signals to Iran anyway. For instance, while insisting that they abandon their nuclear research as a precondition to negotiations, the US is actively funding terrorist and other rebel groups inside Iran. Now, that latter strategy might have made sense back when we didn't need or want Iran's cooperation. But now we're demanding that Iran get rid of its nuclear weapons, and threatening military action if they don't cooperate. I think the better outcome is if they give it up voluntarily. If we're going to offer any serious carrots, cutting off our attempts to destabilize the country ought to at least be an option. In fairness, our Iran policy is a mess independently of anything going on in Iraq. But I think it's a good illustration of my point #3 that we're really bad at manipulating other countries, and I don't think it's obvious that invading and continuing to occupy Iraq has made Iran more, rather than less, likely to cooperate with us.

I'm not convinced that more military muscle in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or elsewhere would be the best use of resources in those cases.
From what I understand, we are suffering from a sparsity of soldiers in Afghanistan. But more importantly, that country is suffering from a lack of attention on our part.

Other nations are going to want to check our power for that reason alone, no matter what we do.
Well, when we have tens of thousands of troops, armor, artillery, air power, etc. in the country next door, I suspect other nations are a bit more understanding of Iran's desire for a nuclear deterrent than they might otherwise be.

What do we really, really want from Iraq? We want it to be stable, we want it to not be a satellite state of a hostile power, and we'd really like it if it weren't hostile to us. And if we could have a friendly state that would allow us to have military bases in the region- say, much friendlier than Saudi Arabia- that would be just groovy. We can probably achieve all of these while still falling short of the kind of state that Americans would recognize as a real liberal democracy, and we should not call it failure if we don't achieve that ultimate goal immediately or even at all, because we'll have achieved a much bigger success than what we started with in the Baath regime.
Well, in order to achieve those goals, we may end up turning Iraq into a satellite state of ours. If that's our goal, then fine, but there are more efficient ways to achieve a bunch of puppet states than pretending to install democracies. And I'm pretty sure that resentment at our support of corrupt but cooperative regimes is a major factor in sympathy with anti-American terrorism. (If I recall correctly, the President basically said this in his pre-Iraq War SOTU address.)

NB: I'm not accusing anyone of deliberately setting out to make Iraq a puppet state, just suggesting that we may be forcing ourselves into that particular corner.

Mr. Paules:

I for one believe that violence and tyranny are universally loathed, and freedom and prosperity universally welcome by any sane population.
Liberty is not a natural state people revert to when tyrants are removed. The institutions and incentives necessary to create and sustain free societies don't just happen; they have to be built. They take decades (at least) of work. The surge is a step in the right direction, but until Iraqis see themselves as owing their loyalty to Iraq rather than tribe, ideology, and religion, there is no stable equilibrium of a peaceful and free Iraq.

Hobbes makes the argument far better than I think I can, so I'm not terribly eager to elaborate in my own words right now.

Fair enough, as far as any claims of dismissiveness. I still think some commenters' calling him a cockroach, an asshole, and an America-hater was a bit much. But maybe you know something I don't.

Nothing more than I've been hanging around here since 2003 and I know just how long and through how many jerks frustrations have had time to build. You'll note I wasn't one of those people- I don't do it, and if asked to I wouldn't condone it either, but I do understand it, and my level of distaste is minor enough that I merely decline to participate rather than chastising them.

We've spent more yearly on the invasion, occupation, and reconstruction.

There's a difference between an investment of time and effort in something that may yield eventual payoffs (and cease costing) and continuing a "containment" strategy that is only barely working indefinitely. It's much like buying a property you fix up versus renting a rathole.

Ahmadinejad isn't really any more a dictator than his "reformist" predecessor Khatami. I could say that the mullahs hold the real power, but the fact is that we don't really know what the dynamics are in Iran.

Point taken, but I think my original point still stands: no matter who's a dictator and who's really in power, if they provoke us into a shooting war, the people in power aren't going to be in power anymore, or maybe even alive.

In fairness, our Iran policy is a mess independently of anything going on in Iraq. But I think it's a good illustration of my point #3 that we're really bad at manipulating other countries, and I don't think it's obvious that invading and continuing to occupy Iraq has made Iran more, rather than less, likely to cooperate with us.

The only time any country can be manipulated into cooperating with us is when we have something to offer that they really want enough to deal in good faith. (As opposed to taking the carrot and sending us the middle finger, as North Korea did with the heating oil for stopping their nuclear program arrangements.) Right now, almost all of Iran's interests- in developing their own nuclear program, in expanding their power in the region now that we've removed one of the major players- are directly counter to US interests. You can't change that by offering any amount of carrots unless one of the carrots is to cede a big chunk of control of the region to them.

The point of reminding the power players in places like Iran isn't to get them to cooperate with us, it's to make them decide it's not in their best interests to push us too far- a la Qadaffi's about-face. You can only achieve a cooperative compromise when that's what both players want most. Iran hasn't seen an opportunity to expand their power, territory, and influence equal to this one in decades.

From what I understand, we are suffering from a sparsity of soldiers in Afghanistan. But more importantly, that country is suffering from a lack of attention on our part.

I'm not sure I can argue with this one, and don't want to try, so I'll concede this point. Afghanistan might benefit from more boots on the ground and would benefit from greater attention. Of course, I would see the solution to this as giving maximum support to the surge and other efforts in Iraq to make it so we don't HAVE to pour as much manpower and attention into it.

Well, when we have tens of thousands of troops, armor, artillery, air power, etc. in the country next door, I suspect other nations are a bit more understanding of Iran's desire for a nuclear deterrent than they might otherwise be.

You speak as though other nations formed their foreign policies primarily through empathy. They do not. Foreign policy (including our own) is formed almost entirely through evaluation of power balances, economic incentives, and national interest. Iran has a recent historical habit of trying to gain concessions from all Western powers- not just the US- through kidnapping and other delightful hijinks; the prospect of a nuclear Iran, especially one that has been so vocal about wanting to wipe Tel Aviv off the map, is not a comforting one for any power that does not want to see the region destabilized (and access to Middle Eastern oil therefore jeopardized). Being cordial to Iran and rhetorically hostile to Israel may keep the oil flowing, but that doesn't mean other powers want to see Iran kick the region into chaos.

I'm not accusing anyone of deliberately setting out to make Iraq a puppet state, just suggesting that we may be forcing ourselves into that particular corner.

Well, that is where you went immediately with the idea. The reason I suggested looking at South Korea is that it wasn't a US satellite or puppet state- the various strongmen that governed after we left as the country made its slow crawl to true democracy were Korean strongmen. They were more or less friendly to us because they relied on us for protection from the North Koreans, but they weren't puppet regimes either.

The US had nearly fifty years of experience with supporting local strongmen during the Cold War, and that kind of realpolitik is now largely discredited as a rational foreign policy, because it doesn't work very well at all. It's expensive, prone to sudden very hostile revolutions, and the strongmen have a tendency not to stay bought.

The surge is a step in the right direction, but until Iraqis see themselves as owing their loyalty to Iraq rather than tribe, ideology, and religion, there is no stable equilibrium of a peaceful and free Iraq.

I agree with this, which is why I used a model state which experienced slow progress.

On the other hand, adversity in the face of multiple hostile elements surrounding you sometimes has a way of hastening that. There was no reason for the American colonies to have anything to do with each other after the Revolutionary War other than mutual defense and commerce. Americans didn't really start thinking of themselves as a true nation until much later.

I started reading just as the dog started barking outside. Its about 3 degrees, pretty damn cold, and the beast wanted in. He had to wait until I finished. I thank you Bill. "Rudy", does not.

LabRat:
There's a difference between an investment of time and effort in something that may yield eventual payoffs (and cease costing) and continuing a "containment" strategy that is only barely working indefinitely. It's much like buying a property you fix up versus renting a rathole.

If it's going to take ten or twenty years or more, then how much of what we do is really improving the situation? It sounds like we might just be sticking around until something good happens so we can take credit and leave. How do we know this is a better outcome than would have come out of a containment strategy? How do we even begin to estimate this?

You speak as though other nations formed their foreign policies primarily through empathy. They do not

Even if the Iraq war turns out well in the end, in the meantime it's destabilized a strategically important region. A country like Russia, when faced with Iran's attempts to research nuclear technology, might either think A) "Nuclear proliferation is bad, and could further destabilizt the Middle East; let's help the US effort to prevent this", or B) "A nuclear deterrent might actually prevent the US from invading another random country in an unstable oil-critical region -- Great!". I don't know how much of the choice is affected by our actions, and I know that Iraq alone isn't the only factor, but all else equal, I think it's better if the Russians pick narrative A.

The US had nearly fifty years of experience with supporting local strongmen during the Cold War, and that kind of realpolitik is now largely discredited as a rational foreign policy, because it doesn't work very well at all. It's expensive, prone to sudden very hostile revolutions, and the strongmen have a tendency not to stay bought.

And yet, somehow, we keep doing it anyway. Or do you read our Pakistan policy differently? I see a US political establishment so terrified of the possibility of a semi-Islamic Pakistani state that we're willing to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship. (Though recent events may prefigure a change in that policy.) We also supported the attempted anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela. Chavez had and retains popular support there.

Now our current policy differs substantively from a policy of installing military dictators on purpose -- it's more well-intentioned now, for instance, but less intellectually honest -- but it has many of the same problems.

While ordinarily I'd stick around and argue this until the sun exploded, I've got to finish packing and go to bed early so we can beat the snowstorm out of town.

One of you other gents care to pick up my ball? Unless Benquo wants to wait until next Tuesday...

What a mighty microwave generation are we. Sayeth Benquo:

If it's going to take ten or twenty years or more, then how much of what we do is really improving the situation?

Really? We're trying to create a political change on the revolutionary order of Capernicus' sun-centered universe in which liberal democracy is supposed to grow in the stony ground of medieval authoritarianism, and the complaint is twenty years is too long? Good gosh, does nobody learn American history anymore?

Our forefathers -- brilliant and noble men, themselves riding on the cutting edge of Western Civ's Enlightenment, itself standing on the shoulders of the Renaissance, which, in turn, carried the DNA of the ancient Romans and Greeks -- the best efforts of these giants of liberal (old school liberalism) political thought resulted in timeless words, for sure, but a nation? A successful exercise in "nation-building"? Hardly. Not by today's metrics, as exemplified by Benquo, for it was EIGHTY YEARS LATER when the land was plunging into the chasms of civil war.

Yet, these Iraqis -- those slow, dimwitted, culturally-incapable Iraqis, so sayeth our moral bettors behind closed doors -- these Iraqis are struggling with the concepts of free thinking, association, and power restrained, and they have had over four years now to get it right. Sheesh. Clearly, they're incapable, or we're incapable of making it happen, right?

What a short-sighted and historically silly seat of judgment from which to view the efforts of the U.S. Military and the Iraqi people.

Benquo: Funny that you're using Venezuela as a comparison. Twice as many people were killed in Venezuela in the last three months as were killed in Iraq during the same period. Of course, Iraq's numbers are incomplete, but we have no reason to assume Chavez is telling us about every death either so I view the numbers as equally suspicious. Just a funny little coincidence I happened to see over at The Belmont Club.

Regarding your Russia example: Since Russia has a big supply of oil itself, it's more likely it has an interest in destabilizing other oil-producing regions, passively if not actively. Supply and demand. Meanwhile, it also has lots of financial ties with various corrupt nations in the ME, including Iran and Saddam's Iraq, and it's looking for more influence in the region as part of a power game. So either the ME is destabilized, in which case we're occupied, oil prices soar, and Russia gloats; or Russia gains a large amount of influence in the ME and gloats. We're trying to take option 3.

Benquo,
"it's destabilized a strategically important region"
Yes, that was the point. Stable jihad is not a condition we want to encourage. The mid-east is stewing in it's own juices and the steam from that pot is aimed at us. (thus spake the king of bad metaphors)
I'm confused.

We shouldn't support autocratic regimes
but
we should do nothing to overthrow them.

We should focus our efforts on Iran and Afghanistan
but
ten years is too long to stay in Iraq.

We still have troops in South Korea, 60 years on. I guess that was a failure as well?

I guess my question is...
What would you do? Allow the swamp to fester, or apply the DDT?

"What a short-sighted and historically silly seat of judgment from which to view the efforts of the U.S. Military and the Iraqi people."

What he said.

I, too, just discovered Mr. Whittle thanks to Hugh Hewitt's website. I must say the analysis was excellent and the discussion just as good. Nice to find a site where the discussion is civil and not the usual personal attacks (with one exception). I will be back. And for the record, I have a son in the Army who returned to Iraq in December for his third tour. I fully support our efforts there.

This is my first visit to ejectejecteject.
What a GREAT article.
I've forwarded this piece to several friends and I'll be watching and reading this site for a long, long time....

Mr. Salyers:
Really? We're trying to create a political change on the revolutionary order of Capernicus' sun-centered universe in which liberal democracy is supposed to grow in the stony ground of medieval authoritarianism, and the complaint is twenty years is too long? Good gosh, does nobody learn American history anymore?

Political change is not a science. Not the way we're doing it, anyway. If we were putting in 20 or even 80 years' work for a certain result, that would be one thing. But by the very nature of the strategy we've adopted, enough randomness remains to make it basically impossible to predict what the situation will be in 20 years, with or without our presence in Iraq. You just can't conjure up a Copernican-magnitude revolution whenever you want one, unless you're willing to forcibly impose in on a culture over a period of decades. I see what we are attempting in Iraq as a complete change in the political culture more akin to the French revolution than to our own. The French revolution was ultimately successful, but was fantastically bloody and took a long time to show anything like results. (And then Napoleon restored monarchy to France.) We've done it to other countries before, but it required complete domination of Japan for decades, following the nuking of two major cities and the subsequent humiliation of their emperor. I doubt we have the stomach for such a strategy in Iraq, and even if we did, I'm not sure it would be morally justifiable to kill that many people so that the survivors' grandchildren could live in freedom.

By contrast, the American project was fundamentally conservative; the founding fathers made use of existing institutions and preserved already-recognized rights and a preexisting way of life. At the time of the American revolution, we barely fought off the British even with the assistance of the French army. Immediately after the revolution, the USA had a government with nominal sovereignty, and the ability to improve its own political situation. By 1812, we were a rapidly growing country with a functioning constitution, with the resources to fight the British empire to a standstill on our own.

Math_Mage:

Yes, Hugo Chavez has done bad things to Venezuela. Likewise, I am sure that the Communists we opposed by means of dictator proxies during the cold war would also have done bad things. I'm not arguing the merits of the "he's a bastard, but at least he's our bastard" approach to foreign policy; I'm just pointing out that we haven't completely abandoned that policy, so it's not crazy to imagine that we'd ultimately resort to it in Iraq.

daddyquatro:
Yes, that was the point. Stable jihad is not a condition we want to encourage.

I assume your reasons go beyond what you've stated explicitly, otherwise you're suffering from the "must be done" fallacy:
Something must be done.
X is something.
Therefore X must be done.
Changing the status quo isn't necessarily changing it for the better. Rather, even if it ultimately reduces terrorism, destabilizing the middle east increases the risk that everything could go wrong right now. That's a real cost of the Iraq war, and would sure as heck be a cost of military action against Iran. People might die later if we do nothing. People will definitely die if we start killing more people. Incidentally, I hope you notice that your line of reasoning isn't a strong justification for remaining in Iraq right now, while mine (that we should be EXTREMELY reluctant to destabilize the region) is.

We shouldn't support autocratic regimes but we should do nothing to overthrow them.
Actually, sometimes we should support autocratic regimes despite the human cost, and sometimes we should overthrow them, again despite the human cost. And sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action. There's no easy rule to tell which is right, but it doesn't help to assume that a certain result is feasible before evaluating the likely effects of our different possible actions.

We should focus our efforts on Iran and Afghanistan but ten years is too long to stay in Iraq.
No contradiction there. What we need to more of in Afghanistan/Pakistan -- fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- primarily consists of killing people and blowing stuff up. We are really really good at killing people and blowing stuff up. Our long term goal in Iraq, on the other hand, seems to require manipulating foreigners' politics. We are really really bad at manipulating foreigners' politics. I suggest we tackle the most solvable parts of the problem first, and leave the problems that might go away if we do nothing anyway for later. In other words, apply our force where it is most effective.

Oh, and we succeeded in Korea at our strategic military objective, which was to contain the Communist empire. All we had to do to win was not lose; the point was to draw a line outside of which Communist aggression was not permitted. If that's all we'd wanted to achieve militarily in Iraq, we could have succeeded spectacularly -- and swordlessly, I might add -- by just staying home. From what I understand, we have some additional, non-military policy goals that haven't been accomplished yet.

Sorry for the multiple posting, but I should emphasize that by "all we had to do was not lose," I don't mean that to "not lose" was easy or a trivial accomplishment for our armed forces. What I mean is that it was possible for our military to achieve that goal without the cooperation of the North Koreans. Our goals in Iraq require the cooperation of the Iraqis.

MWP
You're reply was very reasonable and filled with logical thought, but that's just what I'm getting at.

When you apply Chess rules to the game of street corner Shells you're going to come up empty every time.
When did Logic adhere to a Lunatic such as saddam?

If he were the reasonable type, he would have gotten out with his wealth and family when he had his final warning.If his stockpile was still in his country, he would have been stuck there. Hoping that the UN and world opinion crying "Illegal War" would drive us out before anything would be found.

I will only observe that Benquo now seems to be arguing the "anti" position on everything we've done so far, but I'm not really seeing any real strategy or tactics for doing something in the other direction. There's a word for folks whose primary response to everything is "I don't know the right answer, but that's not it!"

A few historical notes.

The German officer schools in the thirties were putting a high emphasis on speed of decision. While British learning officers were given thirty minutes for coming with solution to a tactical exercise the German ones were given two minutes. This not only led to German officers being more used to thinking fast than their opponents but it insured that the slow thinkers were weeeded out. This made, that at small unit level, the Germans enjoyed a crucial lead in the OODA loop over their opponents and is not a small factor in why Germans usually won unless they were severely outnumbered and outgunned. As as side note the German instructors were aware that sometime those speedy decsisions were unaccurate and led to bloody failures but they believed that those failures would be more than compensated by the many victories gained through speed. So in way we can say the German had discovered the OODA loop without knowing it.

Second: The reason the Sabre was so successful in Korea is that for one side it gave better visibility (the Sabre pilot saw his opponent first) and because while the Mig turned tighter the Sabre had higher rate of roll and could shift between left and right turns much faster. So if Sabre had a Mig on her six then provided she didn't turn for long in same direction but instead kept constntly inverting the sense of her turn the Sabre would quickly revert the tables. So we can say teh Sabre observed (better visibility) and acted first.

Finally, as an illustration of the difference made by using aplne's strong points: After Vietnam the Nady introduced the Top Gun program designed study teh weak points of enemy planes and train pilots in exploiting them to the hilt.
In 1972 when American planes were sent again to operate over Vietnam to stop a comunist offensive the Air Force found it was getting a mere 1 on 1 kill ratio, the Navy who was flying the same planes (F4s) but on navalized, ie lower performance versions, got akill ration of 13 that is thirteen to one.

Wow, wow, WOW!!!!

Just discovered your site via JustOneMinute. Thank you for your wonderful article.

Words like "fluidity" and "intelligent force" came to mind.

And I'm thoroughly enjoying the great commenters.

I'm a novice at chess, MuscleDaddy, but I love it so, that when I'm alone, I play both sides, fully intending each side to win, which is quite something, when you know the other side's plans - so it becomes effective spontaneity and great fun!

PS - I've even invented a secondary game for the slain pieces, which then involves very interesting moves on the board, like deliberately getting one's own piece killed so it can complete a mission in the secondary game off the board :)

PPS - AQ may be getting an inkling of the power of the American soldier beyond death.

Living in a far-too-blue (for me) state, it was very enervating last night to see a local newscast which included a sound bite from a local National Guard officer who will be leading local ANG soldiers back to Iraq next week (after training down in Texas). He stated that after having served in Iraq, returnees would not be senbt again unless they volunteered ... and fully half of the contingent are volunteers going back for another tour.
While it is rare to see such information in the MSM sphere, it is gratifying to continue to see that the Left is loud, but the right is proud.
Mr. Whittle ... as usual, an essay to file and re-read!

You'll all forgive me for not joining the battle against the 'window' and his fellows/follows. I do enough of that in person ... and have yet to see a single candlepower increase in the light of reason from those defeatists.

Dougman,

Saddam was not insane. He was a monster with a cold and calculating eye toward what it took to rule through terror. He couldn't make the right decisions in the end because he lacked the facts. Who in his inner circle was going to risk a bullet in the head for delivering bad news? Thus do you hear the inane Baghdad Bob proclaiming victory even as American bombs explode in the distance. Saddam's close advisors told the dictator what he wanted to hear even as they prepared to abandon ship. Such is the fate of a dictator who rules by fear. Saddam simply didn't have the facts, or he would have made a contingency plan for escape. As it was he was left on his own which is why he eventually turned up hiding in a spider hole.

So where are the WMD today? Somebody knows. Even if Saddam had everyone shot who participated in the destruction and/or transfer of these weapons, there must be survivors. History will reveal the answer in time. My guess is that our intel guys know, but they're not talking, not yet at least, not until the documents are declassified. It will be one helluva read when that book is written, but we need patience. But if you want to entertain some speculation . . .

I would say that whatever residual weapons were still servicable are today in Russia. Russian transport aircraft were very busy in and out of Iraq just prior to invasion. Delivering supplies? Maybe. Or maybe removing incriminating evidence. It's just a guess.

"The fact that you can see that Army captain kidding those Iraqi kids is because, finally, we have a chance to determine for ourselves what to decide on information that is circumventing the editorial policies of our intellectual and moral betters at CBS News and the New York Times."

Bill, the only problem with that is that in the warm-body democracy we are becoming, where you don't have to be a citizen to vote*, you and the rest of the blogosphere are reaching 5% of the voters, and the Left dominated MSM, education system, and government bureaucracy have the other 95%.

Until we can take that huge megaphone away, we're not getting anywhere.

*there are too many instances to link of illegals voting in our election, and every time proof of citizenship is required, the Democrat Party ensures it is discarded. There's a reason Leftists prefer the court system.

BR,

I really like that 'secondary board' idea - going to have to try that!

SDN,

I just said that very thing to Fred(!)'s campaign manager in an email this morning - what is best will never be known unless we can force the MSM to share the information with the unwashed masses
(Read: Those people who can't be bothered to find out for themselves, instead trusting "the voices" from the idiot box to tell them what to think)

Mr. Paules,

Whatever happened to Baghdad Bob? I used to love that guy, always going on about how "the walls would run red with American blood" - even after his video statements had to be taped outside, because his media building had a big hole in it.

The last one I remember was BB standing on his hill, saying "The Americans will never enter Baghdad" - just as an Abrams rolled past behind him.

Good Times.

- MuscleDaddy

Mark
Delivering supplies? Maybe. Or maybe removing incriminating evidence.

Maybe both.
To entertain some more speculation, maybe they only removed what couldn't be hidden.

Time will tell,but in whose tongue? I would rather it come from our intelligence rather than a horrible awakening.

As I read some more on Boyd on the internet, perusing the links at this site,
http://www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm

the following question came to my mind:

Given that, in any OODA loop, whether at the scale of individual combat, or the scale of unit maneuvers, or larger, it seems apparent that "perception is reality" in the Observe phase of the Loop.

That said, and given that the point of "getting inside the adversary's OODA Loop" is to alter his perception, so as to reduce the effectiveness and timeliness of his Orientation, and hence the utility of his Action,

What is the U.S. Military, or anyone else for that matter, doing to get inside the OODA Loop of AQ or the MSM and win the Information Battle, or in earlier times, the "propoganda war?" Why is You-Tube so effectively used by jihadists and not (apparently) countered, why is the MSM allowed to continue to be so detrimental to our efforts? (And I am not advocating abridgement of Freedom of the press by asking the question). Thoughts? Cyber War is real.

Go thou all of you and read the Book that Whittle mentions. It's the book that introduced me to Boyd and his work about a year ago. Then there is this leeeeetle book about Boyd and his work that was written by an academic, and focuses on Boyd's applications to, um, academia; that was book number two for me ("The Mind of War"). The book I'm reading *now* is a frickin' thick one about the politics of the creation of the F/A-18. To tell that story one has to tell the stories of the creation of the A-10, F-15, and F-16, and YF-17, as well as the stories of the so-called "Military Reform Movement" of the late '70s/early '80s. (The book: "The Pentagon Paradox.")

The F-16 was the first airplane in DECADES to cost *less* than its predecessor, the F-15. It will likely hold that distinction for another hundred years or so. Cost of a *single* F-22: $130 million or so.

Lots of commenters have said they've never heard of Boyd. One reason is that Boyd is a non-person within the Air Force to this very day. He dared to buck the system, and he won. So in death, they have buried him deep, deep, deep.

BUT.

He is a hero within the Marine Corps. This is due to the OODA loop and his military warfighting theories of course. There is a huge Boyd display at the Marine Corps museum.

The consumate airplane driver, perhaps the best fighter pilot *ever*, "20 Second" Boyd was *never* given a ride in the two planes he essentially designed -- the F-15 and the F-16. (He usually waxed others fannies within 20, not 40, seconds.) Even Katie Couric's gotten such a ride. *sigh*

My Dad probably knew Boyd. I was born at Nellis AFB in 1955 and we only left in 1961; these were the years Boyd was at Nellis. Dad was in charge of aircraft maintenance, so they *have* to have known each other. Alas, my Dad's dead and I can't ask him. Ditto my Mom. And I missed my chance to meet Boyd and work with him here in D.C. where I've lived since 1989, as I *didn't know about him.* Damn.

The F-16 was the first airplane in DECADES to cost *less* than its predecessor, the F-15.

Not this stupid canard again.

The F-16A/B models were nearly completely useless in anything except clear weather visual range dogfighting; they carried a very poor radar set. That's why it cost so much less.

The Russian MiG pilots it would have gone against in a Cold War Gone Hot situation would have simply volleyed long range air to air missiles at F-16As from beyond visual range and outside the F-16A's radar range, and then cleaned up the survivors with their guns/ATOLLS.

It was the F-16C/D models which added a radar worth anything, and made it into more than just a clear weather day fighter. Of course, the Boydists, Speyists, and Cult of Manouverability people decried the new radar; which added weight to their "perfect" F-16A, and made it turn slower.

The F-18 Hornet is another vastly overrated plane. As a replacement for the old A-7 Corsairs and F-4 Phantoms still flying off USN decks in the early 80s; it was a good plane; but was vastly limited by it's limited range. Here's an interesting fact; the F/A-18 production models had the SAME fuel fraction as the YF-17 prototype; which meant that for all but short range air to air missions defending the Carrier; F-18s had to take off with several hardpoints near-permanently devoted to drop tanks to extend their range (this also means less ordnance can be carried). The Super Hornet is what the F-18 should have been from the beginning; a much bigger and longer ranged aircraft.

One reason is that Boyd is a non-person within the Air Force to this very day. He dared to buck the system, and he won. So in death, they have buried him deep, deep, deep.

Or perhaps his theories aren't what they've been built up to be?

Energy-Manouverability Theory: Great if you ever have to fight Vietnam all over again; a war in which you have beyond visual range missiles; but due to restrictive rules of engagement, you have to visually identify the target before you can shoot at him; which of course gives the advantage to the lighter, guns/ATOLL only MiGs; and not the bigger, heavier US aircraft with large radars and equally long ranged missiles.

OODA Loop: He managed to turn one of Nathan Bedford Forrest's simple dictums: "Get there the furstest with the mostest", and Stonewall Jacksons' maxim into a two hour long seminar with lots of slides. In short, he found a career in inflating a simple dictum into very long briefings, which was a useful post-military career as a consultant.

Manouver Warfare/OODA: Sure; you can outmanouver the enemy on the battlefield. Just like the Confederates did to the Union, and the Germans did to the Russians. Guess who still won? All warfare comes down to attritional warfare, or in another one of Nathan Bedford Forrest's dictums: "War means fighting and fighting means killing."

Mr. Crierie,

Let's start back with your compelling F-16 vs. B-52 engagement, which you cut and pasted into the LGF comment section under the name "Sheppard."

First, which sock puppet am I talking to: Sheppard, or Crierie?

Second, regarding the B-52 v F-16 dogfight:

Assuming your anecdotal, unsubstantiated stories are absolutely correct -- then all the enemy has to do to defeat an F-16 fighter is to send a bomber after it and using charm or perhaps saucy insults somehow lure the Falcon to 60,000 ft. -- being sure to get the F-16 pilot to cross his heart and hope to die not use missiles or guns until they get there. Then, after the enemy bomber pilot has reached this altitude, the only thing left to do is persuade the F-16 pilot to let him get behind him, where the B-52's better wing allows him to out turn the F-16. Of course, the BUFF's roll rate is on the order of a few days, so no maneuvering is allowed...just the turning fight.

Wow! You are a tactical genius!! BOYD HAS NOTHING ON YOUR STUNNING INSIGHTS.

For a person with such a lerge a large chip on your shoulder regarding John Boyd, one would think you would have made some modest effort to actually -- you know -- understand him.

I'm willing -- reluctantly -- to gve you the benefit of the doubt regarding the B-52 / F-16 turning fight at 60k. That example proves as eloquently as is humanly possible that you understand precisely nothing about Boyd's point, namely, the superior aircraft is one that can most quickly get itself into the speed and altitude where it has the advantage. The F-16 -- at any altitude -- has at least a 300 knot speed advantage over the B-52, and a climb rate that also somewhat lop-sided. You tell me who would get to pick where and how that fight takes place.

Like all sophistry, your point only holds in a microscopicallly thin hypothetical that you then try to leverage into a real-world point. You say the F-16 pilot couldn't shake the B-52? Really? Did he try a Split-S to 25,000? Did the BUFF try that as well? Do you have documentation of this event? Or is this entire thing made from whole cloth to prove how smart you are?

Because frankly, it's not working.

only slightly off-topic:
Bill, here's a freebie--if you could get a script based on this story made, it'd sell a billion tickets!
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/01/operation-pup-2.html

"I've forwarded this piece to several friends and I'll be watching and reading this site for a long, long time....

Posted by: Miss Antipodes"

Alas, Miss Antipodes, the posts are few and far between. But rejoice, because there's ARCHIVES!

My father was in the Air Force and spent a number of years in the Reserves afterwards. As I am not in the military myself, I don't know quite how it works but he was employed with a chain of command after retiring from active duty and was still called whatever rank he was. At any rate, in came the new boss, some colonel that everybody was scared to contradict, and he put out this plan that my father immediately saw wouldn't work. (My father was an engineer and very good at dissecting processes; I don't know if the plan in question was primarily economic or repair oriented.)

So my father went to the boss and told him, very completely, why the plan wouldn't work, even though everybody around him was scared of the guy. And for years afterward, the colonel would introduce him as "the [flunky] who chewed me out."

However, the important part of this little interaction is that it is the reason my father got sent to the Pentagon once a year or thereabouts to explain funding or procedural issues. The colonel was a very important man, but by no means a stupid one. He knew he'd found somebody who was not only capable of spotting flaws in a plan, but of explaining clearly how they were flaws. And both of these qualities were found in someone who wasn't afraid of flat-out contradicting a superior.

I love my dad. And though my husband is very much not like my father, he is like him in the qualities described above. There is no reason to compromise in the pursuit of excellence. If one can excel, one should, no matter which muckety-muck says that it is fine to settle for second-best.

As someone who has studied war for some time, I consider Boyd to be the most important military commentator since Clausewitz. This is particularly true, I think, when it comes to Information Warfare. I have some suspicions that in this latter area, Sun Tzu and Boyd are more reliable signposts than Clausewitz.

Two things which strike me with great force:

1) The Chinese military heritage is, of course, rooted in Sun Tzu -- does this mean China is uniquely advantaged in information warfare?

2) The number of people either in the military or studying it, who have never heard of John Boyd. It is like being a scholar of organ music, and never having heard of J.S. Bach!

Dougman - there IS some evidence that Saddam cleared out at least some of his WMD stockpiles before we invaded.

All indications are that the poison gas that was to be used in this foiled attack came from Syria, which is where most of the trucks that left Iraq just before the war began went to.

I'm also of the opinion that we found a bunch of what was at least supposed to be part of those stockpiles. It's just that they didn't rise to the standards that we would take for granted in the U.S., so they were labeled as "insecticides", rather than WMDs. From what I remember of those finds, they came up with (at a rough guesstimate) enough "insecticides" for at least 10 countries the size of Iraq. And all of them seemed to be sitting in bunkers, rather than plain warehouses... Rather strange, huh?

Thanks for the artical, it was well worth the time it took to read it.

This is for Monster

Benquo:

No, of course politics is not a science. The point of the Copernicus reference wasn't to imply that it is. Rather, it was an example of something that completely revolutionized something else irrevocably. I guess I could've cited Lawrence Taylor's revolutionizing the role of the outside linebacker position, but then politics isn't a game, either.

the founding fathers made use of existing institutions and preserved already-recognized rights and a preexisting way of life.

This is precisely why your (and the Left's) impatience with the pace of political progress in Iraq is so utterly stupefying. You're absolutely right: the American Founders enjoyed the benefit of a running headstart, and not just in using the "existing institutions." Their entire way of thinking, inherited through the ages from as far back as the Athenian Academy, was the software that made those institutions viable. Yet, with all that wind in their sails, the clay of the American Experiment really hadn't set until after Appomattox . . . long after. But, with the Iraqis, who enjoy none of these benefits, apparently 5-10 years is too long.

And yet, you say "If we were putting in 20 or even 80 years' work for a certain result, that would be one thing." If after less than five years, impatient pessimism rules the day, why should we believe that you would support a long-term mission spanning decades?

We've done it to other countries before, but it required complete domination of Japan for decades, following the nuking of two major cities and the subsequent humiliation of their emperor. I doubt we have the stomach for such a strategy in Iraq, and even if we did, I'm not sure it would be morally justifiable to kill that many people so that the survivors' grandchildren could live in freedom.

As argued by Victor Davis Hanson in his post 9/11 essays contained in "An Autumn of War," Japan re-invented itself after WWII because it was more than just defeated -- it was demoralized in every way on every level. Debate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 50 years' worth of 20/20 hindsight all you want, but there's no denying that they forced the entire society to reckon with the wages of their chosen course.

The situation in Iraq is not different at all. The dynamics are still the same, only it's not us that is introducing the populace to the bitter wages. Al Qaeda is doing that far more vividly than we ever could, and Gen. Petraeus is capitalizing on that.

Mr Crierie,

I will have to take issue with your example of the Russian/German aspect of WW II

Many of the Russian field commanders knew that the only way to beat the Germans was to strip them of their ability to move, and then counter with massive frontal assaults.

The success of this is self-evident of the OODA loop. By taking away the German's strength, mobility, and then counter-attacking the stalled units put the Russians ahead in the decision making loop.

Marshall Zhukov made this abundantly clear in his memoir. Who IMO was an equally brilliant commander.

Regards

First, which sock puppet am I talking to: Sheppard, or Crierie?

Actually, Sheppard isn't a sockpuppet; it's my very first online "nickname" that I used way back when on Usenet. I've started to switch over to using my real name on some boards; but I still am known by "MKSheppard" on many boards as holdovers; which sort of makes it easy for people to find me after many years; and across multiple boards.

Assuming your anecdotal, unsubstantiated stories are absolutely correct -- then all the enemy has to do to defeat an F-16 fighter is to send a bomber after it and using charm or perhaps saucy insults somehow lure the Falcon to 60,000 ft.

I'm afraid you just don't understand. The bomber is already cruising at 60,000 feet. The interceptor has to start from at worst; sea level, or 20,000 feet and climb to reach the bomber's altitude. Remember, the B-52 has had up to 21 hours to climb to bombing altitude; and is now substantially lighter than it was when it took off due to burning off about half of it's fuel load.

being sure to get the F-16 pilot to cross his heart and hope to die not use missiles or guns until they get there.

Once again, you really don't understand. The B-52 is not defenseless. It carries a quite powerful electronic warfare suite. The MiG-25 didn't carry a 600 kilowatt radar because the Soviets had an inefficient electronics industry -- it carried it to burn through enemy offensive jamming. The F-16; being a lightweight fighter, can't carry as big and as powerful a radar, as a dedicated heavy interceptor such as the F-14.

Then, after the enemy bomber pilot has reached this altitude, the only thing left to do is persuade the F-16 pilot to let him get behind him, where the B-52's better wing allows him to out turn the F-16. Of course, the BUFF's roll rate is on the order of a few days, so no maneuvering is allowed...just the turning fight.

That high; you can't yank the fighter around like you can down low at 25,000~ feet; there just isn't the lift or thrust for it (up at 50,000 feet; the F100 engine of the F-16 only produces about 5,584 pounds of thrust, even with afterburning); so the F-16 pilot doesn't have a lot of leeway for mistakes or errors. The B-52 pilot does; and he can exploit it to the fullest.

This is nothing new anyway; I suggest you look up the old B-36 Peacemaker; there is a documented story in "Convair B-36: A Comprehensive History of America's "Big Stick" of a B-36 getting onto an F-86's tail and doggedly staying on it, despite the F-86 pilot's increasingly frantic efforts to escape; along with nice stories of fighters of the day stalling out as they tried to intercept the B-36 at it's phenomal (for the late 1940s, early 1950s) altitude of 40,000+ feet.

There are also other documented stories out there, of MiG-15s and such trying to intercept and shoot down RB-47 Stratojets near Leningrad during overflights; while the MiGs could get up to the Stratojet's 40,000~ foot height; the simple act of firing their cannons slowed their airspeed enough that they stalled out; enabling the RB-47 to escape with only a few holes in it.

Wow! You are a tactical genius!! BOYD HAS NOTHING ON YOUR STUNNING INSIGHTS.

For a person with such a lerge a large chip on your shoulder regarding John Boyd, one would think you would have made some modest effort to actually -- you know -- understand him.

So that's your rebuttal to my concise summary of Mr Boyd's theories?

And I do understand John Boyd and the people who hung around him; especially Pierre Sprey; one of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia" comrades. You can see Mr Sprey's rantings here:

Link to 1~ MB PDF by Spey comparing 25 years of fighters

In it, Sprey basically says that we should not be buying F-22s; but basically something the size of the F-5 Freedom Fighter. There's just one problem - something the size of the F-5 can't carry the fuel, radar, and electronics needed for today's multi-role missions.

That example proves as eloquently as is humanly possible that you understand precisely nothing about Boyd's point, namely, the superior aircraft is one that can most quickly get itself into the speed and altitude where it has the advantage.

Funny then, how aircraft with 200 MPH speed advantages over the B-36 (early F-86s) found B-36s utter swine to intercept at altitude.

The F-16 -- at any altitude -- has at least a 300 knot speed advantage over the B-52, and a climb rate that also somewhat lop-sided. You tell me who would get to pick where and how that fight takes place.

Once again, you don't understand. The F-16's "best maximum speed" occurs at around 40,000 feet. Once above that altitude, speed falls off because the poor engine can't generate as much thrust from the cold, thin air up there.

Meanwhile, B-52s have executed bombing missions from 60,000+ feet, and at speeds of 600 MPH plus.

As for picking the spot where the fight takes place; the bomber crew has it hands down; they have up to 21 hours to climb to whichever altitude they please; while the F-16 has at best an hour or two on internal fuel before it has to break off and go find a tanker.

Like all sophistry, your point only holds in a microscopicallly thin hypothetical that you then try to leverage into a real-world point.

Actually, that IS the real world point. From the first time since the USAF pitted a stripped down B-29 flying high against P-80s, P-47s, F-84s, and P-51s (hint, the B-29 won); the greatest problem the USAF has faced is devising an effective defense against fast, high-flying bombers. As soon as the USAF finally got an effective counter against B-36 class targets with their F-86D Sabre Dogs (guided missiles and afterburning to get up to that altitude and fight); SAC introduced the first of the B-52s, which flew ever faster and ever higher; rendering the -86Ds useless.

Likewise, when the USAF finally got it's "ultimate interceptors"; the F-106 Delta Darts capable of taking on a B-52 at altitude, with nuclear tipped missiles and a big wing to fight up high, SAC had introduced the B-58; which flew even higher and faster, at supersonic speeds for up to 2 hours straight.

Most likely, if John Boyd hadn't managed to find people interested in his theories; we would have Mach 3 cruising F-15s built by North American Rockwell (the mach 3 requirement was deleted in favor of more manouverability by the fighter mafia); and the B-52s would be easy meat. However, since we reallocated fighter design towards low altitude knifefights; we completely abdicated the high altitude arena for twenty years.

However, there are signs of life; the F-22's engines use a lot of technology derived from the old J93s used by the B-70 and F-108, and the F-22's pilot's suit is a partial pressure suit, which means he can comfortably fight at extremely high altitudes. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the F-22's victories have come because the pilot zoomed into an area flying very high and fast, clubbed some baby seals flying lower than him, and then zoomed away.

You say the F-16 pilot couldn't shake the B-52? Really? Did he try a Split-S to 25,000? Did the BUFF try that as well?

If the F-16 pilot split essed down to 25k while the B-52 stayed at 60k; then the B-52 won the fight. The F-16 driver now has to fight his way back up to 60k, and by the time that happens, the B-52 will be much closer to it's target. In the air defense job; you have to stop the bomber before it drops it's bombs on a target; not after.

Do you have documentation of this event?

I was told of this by word of mouth via Stuart Slade; a defense analyst I know and am friends with. This event occured at Red Flag. The story is also very well known within the B-52 community.

By the way, there's also an B-52 aircraft commander out there who was known for calling two gun kills (with the tail gun) on F-15s; this occured back in the 1970s/early 80s when the -15 and -16 were still new.

No, of course politics is not a science. The point of the Copernicus reference wasn't to imply that it is.
I just meant that politics, not being a science, can't promise certain results outside of a very narrow range of circumstances. I wasn't confused by your Copernicus comment in the way you thought I was.

Yet, with all that wind in their sails, the clay of the American Experiment really hadn't set until after Appomattox . . . long after.
The American revolution was already vindicated, in my opinion, by what came before that. I contend that the 80-year mark is simply too far off to serve as a meaningful standard for success or failure. It's not about impatience; it's that predictions that far off are meaningless. You'd be better off trying to predict the exact weather two months from today. The only thing we can measure or discern clearly is whether, in the short term, we're moving in a productive direction. The only reliable way to produce good long-term political results is with repeated incremental improvements.

What we seem to be doing now is keeping a lid on the potential civil war in Iraq while training and arming both sides.

As argued by Victor Davis Hanson in his post 9/11 essays contained in "An Autumn of War," Japan re-invented itself after WWII because it was more than just defeated -- it was demoralized in every way on every level. Debate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 50 years' worth of 20/20 hindsight all you want, but there's no denying that they forced the entire society to reckon with the wages of their chosen course.

The situation in Iraq is not different at all. The dynamics are still the same, only it's not us that is introducing the populace to the bitter wages. Al Qaeda is doing that far more vividly than we ever could, and Gen. Petraeus is capitalizing on that.

I think we agree about Japan. Could you say a little more about how you thing the Iraq situation is similar? Because I don't see anything happening to them on the level of losing two major cities and the surrender of the emperor. The Sunnis seem to have reconsidered their cooperation with Al Qaeda, but it looks like we're just another tribe there, albeit a very powerful one. The Anbar Awakening is very different from Japan's unconditional surrender.

If you're going to take a position, then take a God-damned position and prepare for a counter-attack.

I linked over at my place, with sparse commentary. You probably want to read this profile of the Mad Major by Chuck Spinney, if you won't read any of my own stuff.

What can I say? I finished your piece and didn't weep,I SOBBED for the loss of our dignity piece by piece as traitorous pansies have snatched our morality to potentiate an easier time of fulfilling their insane and self indulgent policies. I have mourned our great loss
and perhaps made the same connection you did when I picked up Fighter Pilot...
years ago at the bookstore and read it in six hours, getting ejected at closing time thinking why don't we do everything this way? My Friend, Ed Cutler, was cut from the same cloth as Boyd, even flying 100's in Libya, and working at the Pentagon, costing him a chance at the star that took too long for John to win. Maverick may imitate John's flat plate F-100 but he would have been Steakless at Nellis had he tried it with 40 second John.

Two points
1) the mesh on the tanks goes back to WWII. German shape charges depended on heat, not explosive force, to pentrate the sherman armor. The mesh forced the panzerfaust to explode at a distance and dissipated the heat. Someone in the armor corp has read their history.
2) I just read a very good biography (Blood and Thunder) of Kit Carson. He was famous as a scout and indian fighter and on several occasions carried battles where he was outnumbered by up to 40:1. His descriptions of each battle were very similiar, "identified the enemy and engaged him" being the most common phrase in his dictated autobiography. In otherwords he found immediate action to be the most important weapon in offense. He had two notable setbacks, both occurred because the cavalry officer whom he was leading delayed in acting, thus losing the element of surprise and allowing the indians to take up defensive positions (and in one case kill the hostages Carson was seeking). Seems like Carson, through either intuition or lucky experience learned the same lesson Boyd did. Carson learned this at a time when most European battles were fought like chess games, with the sides drawn up in predictable lines and moved in slow, close order formations, so Carson's insight was even more of a leap than Boyd because it was so foreign to the white mindset of the time.

Benquo,

The comparison that matters most between post-war Japan and Iraq is that the people of both nations realized (are realizing in the case of Iraq)that America really is magnanimous in victory. We are not conquering monsters come to rape, loot, and pillage. It's both an outrage and a pity that so many in the MSM continue to slander our men and women in uniform. The so-called "narrative" of the left is contrived, deceitful, and malicious. How ironic that the supposedly enlightened left is so full of hatred.

The truth about our occupation of Japan is that MacArthur was loved by the Japanese as a father figure. The attitude by Iraqis toward America is changing, has changed fundamentally, because a far greater truth has been forged person-to-person between ordinary Iraqis and American servicemen. They have learned to trust us. You want to help? Adopt a soldier in Iraq and every month send a package. Be sure to include some bite-sized candies for the kids. The seeds of goodwill will bear remarkable fruit in time.

As for the national politics of Iraq, well, it's a dirty business. It always will be, too, because that's the nature of politics. Yeah, we can sit back and complain about it, but to what end? All wars eventually end with some kind of peace. We can only hope that Iraq does as well as South Africa or El Salvador. That would be enough. The glass now is at least half full. So, Benquo, you with us or not?

Peace.

To Ryan Crierie, I just wanted to say 3 quick things (well, they started out quick, anyway)...

(1) Aside from a couple of what I thought were unnecessarily "bitter" opening statements (like saying that Boyd "perpetrated a FRAUD on the design community," calling it a "CULT of low altitude maneuverability," and using phrases like "not that stupid canard again") -- all of which tend to sour your listeners to your actual points, and make their responses angrier than you perhaps thought was warranted -- I thought your overall issues were intriguing and well expressed. I will ALWAYS listen to a contrary point of view that's based on data, documented history, and precedent, something that is all too rare among the more typical counter-posters here.

(2) Although I took your points regarding Boyd's fallability and imperfections (even though most of them were mentioned and acknowledged in Bill's essay, and even though nothing you mentioned qualified Boyd as corrupt or stupid, which words like "fraud" and "cult" imply), even if I accepted your conclusion that he (and his "cult") were just flat WRONG (which I don't), I don't really understand the hostility you expressed in making that point. To me, that's like calling Copernicus and his paradigm-shifting theories a "fraud," and those that begrudgingly bent to their new perspectives a "cult," just because later revelations showed that his models weren't perfect -- that the planetary orbits weren't perfectly circular (lordy, I hope I got the right Old World scientist -- I always get them crossed in my head).

Granted, even if Boyd's ideas only addressed Vietnam-style dogfighting issues (and from everything I've read, they addressed a whole lot more than that), those were still the issues that he was TRYING to address. And address them they did! Say what you will about the disadvantages of Boyd's fighter tactics against high-flying high-speed bombers, but that doesn't change the fact that those tactics work splendidly in air-to-air dogfighting -- which is the fighter's primary milieu -- where conditions are more or less equal, and the opponents are looking for whatever advantages they can find.

And with that in mind, (3) in re-reading the details in your follow-up comments (which were educational -- as well as less antagonistic -- I thought), I never saw the issue of fighters vs. FIGHTERS even addressed. It was all "F-16s vs. bombers," as if the ONLY application for a small, nimble and fast combat aircraft is to intercept incoming high-altitude bombers... and therefore, because in that one range the F-15s through -18s fall far short of perfection (something which I admittedly did not know, but enjoyed learning), and because the LATEST high-tech super-fighter (the F-22) is capable of outperforming those 25-year-old aircraft, they are therefore just clunkers and flying garbage, and they were right from the beginning. Their conception was a complete fraud, and the efforts to push them into service a grave injustice to the defense of this nation. That's what I read in those comments.

So, I'm curious -- in the arena for which fighter aircraft are primarily intended (air-to-air combat, and air-to-ground interdiction), in which their airborne opponents are predominantly of similar design-purpose (i.e; other fighters, which also have a hard time dealing with high-altitude high-speed bombers, but are very effective in fighter-to-fighter combat), how do these outrageous and overblown abominations really stack up? Considering their predecessors and their lethal shortcomings, wasn't the Boyd-inspired "next generation" a significant improvement? I honestly want to know what you and your defense analyst friend have to say about THAT side of the equation.

I was in the Air Force for 12 years, and worked and talked with a lot of fighter pilots in that time. And in all that dialogue about fighter tactics and comparative technological advantages and disadvantages, I only once heard them talk about engaging high-altitude bombers... and in that instance, it was shrugged off as a job for missiles, whether air- or ground-launched. Granted, they never mentioned their own aircraft's shortcomings in such an engagement, but I took that as a sign that it wasn't a design-intention for them. Their primary role was air superiority -- dominance in the air over a field of battle -- not climbing to an altitude where their engines ceased to function, just to do something that a missile could do far more safely and effectively.

So... well... point taken about the fighter vs. bomber thingy, I guess. I'm just not sure I get how that disproves any of Boyd's theories. Even if the Confederates and the Wehrmacht had used the exact same "OODA" principles before (with great effectiveness) but then lost their respectives wars (due to reasons completely unrelated to the effectiveness of those battle tactics), what does that have to do with the importance of Boyd's contributions? The principles are still sound, the changes have all been for the better, in all applications yet tested, so what's the real beef here?

I don't know. But I'm curious to find out.

GHS

GHS

It's always a pleasure to see your Greatness on these pages.
Always.
Take all the paragraphs you need.

I Agape the Ape.

...i enjoyed your editorial immensely but I couldn't help notice your contradiction of statement:

"Jesus Christ, but that must have gotten someone’s attention. Yes, the Surge is working. But I believe it is not a surge of boots that is doing the work so much as it is a surge of hope."

------

Note be, the very name you cursed is the very name that gives true hope.

Mr. Crierie,

I see from you elaboration the nub of the problem.

You have chosen to compare fighters with interceptors.

Seriously, sir, for a man with some obvious knowledge of this issue, why would you chose to do that?

Fighters and Interceptors have fundamentally different missions, as presumably you know.

The job of the fighter is to own the airspace over the battlefield to allow Supply, Interdiction and Close Air Support missions.

The role of the interceptor is to intercept. It is to fly high and fast and destroy incoming strategic bombers with missile fire.

Boyd's thoughts -- what you refer to as the "cult of manouverability" applied to fighters -- as you should well know. From the beginning you have tried to discredit these ideas by picking the flight regimes where fighters are not intended to be flown. You could have made your point even stronger by raising the fight a few hundred thousand feet and compared the performance of the F-16 to various satellites.

The missions that a fighter is designed for -- air supremacy to protect Supply, Interdiction and Close Air Support -- is not a high altitude mission. Again, you must know this.

Further, you must know that the interceptor mission -- the aircraft design you seem so enamored with -- is essentially an obsolete mission. What used to the called the "High, Fast Sanctuary" -- that is, the 60,000 ft flight regime which is the only place your argment makes sense -- is no longer a sanctuary and has not been since the sixties when SAM's elimated that refuge.

As you must know.

You must also know that enemy air threats have, for at least forty years now, not been strategic bombers but low-level fighter-bombers targeting our ground forces and enemy fighters that seek to deny us the control of the battlespace.

Disparaging Boyd's fighter design theories by comparing them to the designs for interceptors is sophistry. You might just as easily condemn "the cult of manouverabilty" when designing transports or Jumbo Jets or Cessna Skyhawks for that matter.

None of those aircraft are fighter arcraft. That is not their mission.

You know this.

So, your point is..? What? Boyd's a fraud?

This is what I call a "raft issue." People can argue whether or not Cuba ia a workers paradise or a socialist hellhole till they're blue in the face, but which way are the rafts going?

In FIGHTER AIRCRAFT the pre-Boyd Kill ratio seems to be between 1:1 and 2:1. This, ironically, shows me you have the argument precisely backward, because the fighters I mentioned in the essay were too "interceptor-y" to survive in the proper regime of the fighter.

Pre-Boyd: 2:1
Post-Boyd: 105:0

That's a lot of rafts.

Mr Creerie

1) You said that without Boyd we could have fighters able to Mach 3 sustained performance. Let me remind you that the heat buildup on the SR71 was enough to cause a conventional fuel to catch fore and that is why the SR-71 used special one

2) You talk about F16 low aspect wings and high aspect ones being better at altitude. THen can you explain me at why at ltitude the thin winged Spitfire beat both the Typhoon (who at sea level was much faster than the Spit) and the Hurricane (who had the same engine?

3) The F16 was not designed for engaging B52s or Bears at high altitude but fighter bombers attacking troops at low altitude and beating the crap out of the fighters escorting them. Let the high altitude bombers for the F15s and missiles.

4) F16s block A and B were useless and Russian-built fighters would have slaughtered them with their missiles? Then can you explain me the 40 to 0 got by Israeli M16s? I am sure you can.

5) The B29 is supposed to have outperformed not only Mustands but jets? Excuse me but I never heard that Me109F or FW190A had any problem to catch up with B17s or B24s even when they were on their return trip. Admittedly the B29 had higher performnce than the B24 but so did the late Mustangs respective to FW190A and I will not even mention jets.

Oops! I stand corrected, Ryan. You DID talk about fighter vs. fighter combat.

For instance, you said, "There are stories of F-106 drivers outmanouvering just about everyone and smoking them with their internal gun; even F-16s at meetups..." And I've heard stories about A-10s out-maneuvering F-15s (if I recall, there was even an instance during Gulf War I in which an A-10 shot down a MIG-29), I've seen an F-16 make 4 complete circles in the time it took an F-15 to make 3 (and an F-106 to make 1), and I listened to 106 jockeys bitch incessantly about what an unmaneuverable piece of crap they were flying. I also read where Chuck Yaeger -- in flight-tests comparing our F-86s to a captured MIG-15 -- waxed every single pilot that came up against him, regardless of which aircraft they put either pilot into. His tactics and his "SA" won him the battles no matter what he was flying or who he was flying against. The point is, "stories" are generally only told and retold when they're out of the ordinary, and not the norm. So knowing that under some unusual circumstances, an F-106 managed to wax an F-16 in a maneuvering contest, only tells me that somebody managed to find a chink in the armor... and that chink might just as easily have been the quality of the pilots, for all I know.

You also said, "So in conclusion....we completely overreacted to Vietnam and all of our post-Vietnam fighters like the F-16 and F-18 (F-15 design was begun in 68-69) were optimized for absurdly low altitude knifefights of the like that were encountered over North Vietnam...and which we'll never encounter again. What a stupid 40 year detour we took." To which I must ask, what "knifefights" -- at ANY altitude -- have we lost as a result of this misguided "optimization?" What other kinds of knifefights ARE there? And just what exactly did that "stupid 40 year detour" cost us? Are we behind some power curve somewhere? Have our success ratios done anything other than climb? And what do you mean when you say "we'll never encounter [those kinds of dogfighting conditions] again?" Those are the only kinds of dogfighting conditions we'll EVER encounter. There isn't another kind. Intercepting high-flying bombers isn't dogfighting.

You then said, "It was the F-16C/D models which added a radar worth anything, and made it into more than just a clear weather day fighter. Of course, the Boydists, Speyists, and Cult of Manouverability people decried the new radar; which added weight to their "perfect" F-16A, and made it turn slower." And you make that sound "wrong!" Of course they decried the additional weight! The F-16 was SUPPOSED to be a close-range knifefighter, not a multi-role do-all uber-craft like the F-15 became despite Boyd's resistance. And in that role, it was unbeatable at the time. So OF COURSE the Boyd and Sprey "cultists" fought that perversion of their design -- when you want an aircraft that can flit around the volley of over-the-horizons missiles coming in, then engage, out-turn, out-climb, and just generally pick apart the enemy aircraft that get close enough to actually engage in dogfighting, you want the F-16. One of Boyd's centermost principles was GETTING AWAY from creating multi-role behemoths, that can barely lumber into the sky and perform marginally in a multitude of ways, versus creating specialized weapon platforms that can each do what they do INCREDIBLY WELL... like Sprey's A-10. That's the whole point! So saying that because the F-16 lacked the hardpoints and radar to do everything in all conditions (at the time) somehow makes it a bad idea -- or that only the more recent variants (that possess technologies and materials that didn't exist in Boyd's time) are worthy of mention because they can do more now than the A-types -- that's like saying Boyd was all wrong because things weren't perfect in the first draft. It's also saying that any natural and inevitable improvements from later advances only proves that the original idea was pure crap. And none of that is true.

In that same vein, you also said, "The F-18 Hornet is another vastly overrated plane... F-18s had to take off with several hardpoints near-permanently devoted to drop tanks to extend their range (this also means less ordnance can be carried)..." -- imagine that! A small, nimble (and did I mention SMALL?) aircraft, designed to fly off microscopic "airfields" out at sea and carry its ordinance long distances to inland targets, needed, by design, to carry extra fuel on a couple of its hardpoints. Of course, so has EVERY carrier-based fighter EVER designed, but that's not the issue is it? The modern fighter should be able to do all, defeat all, outfly all, do it stealthily and without secondary support, right? The exact mindset that Boyd was trying to defeat. Oh, and by the way, your vaunted B-52 can't deliver a full bombload to its targets either without mid-air refueling... it has a choice: full fuel, or full load of bombs, but never both. It can't lift BOTH off the ground. So they usually take off with a quarter-tank of fuel, and hit a tanker enroute. But you continued with, "The Super Hornet is what the F-18 should have been from the beginning; a much bigger and longer ranged aircraft." Which is like saying, "the modern Ford Mustang is what the original '65 model should have been; a bigger, smoother, better-fuel-mileage, easier maintenance, small-family cruiser." You're right. Time to evolve and improve DOES make a better aircraft.

And then this one: "Energy-Manouverability Theory: Great if you ever have to fight Vietnam all over again..." -- you mean one-on-one dogfighting below 50,000 feet? Yeh, we do and WILL have to keep fighting that way over and over again -- "...a war in which you have beyond visual range missiles..." -- there were no over-the-horizon missiles in use in Vietnam -- "...but due to restrictive rules of engagement, you have to visually identify the target before you can shoot at him..." -- sounds like a good range to use an F-16 in -- "...which of course gives the advantage to the lighter, guns/ATOLL only MiGs..." -- huh? Lighter than F-16s? -- "...and not the bigger, heavier US aircraft with large radars and equally long ranged missiles." -- so you're now saying the advantage does NOT go to the bigger, heavier, large-radar, long-range-missile-equipped aircraft? I'm confused.

You said, "OODA Loop: He managed to turn one of Nathan Bedford Forrest's simple dictums: "Get there the furstest with the mostest", and Stonewall Jacksons' maxim into a two hour long seminar with lots of slides." Sure! First of all, that's what the hidebound technology- and tradition-lovers in the military heirarchy NEEDED to see in order to get the message in their own language. And secondly, as mentioned in the book and Bill's essay, Boyd did in fact LEARN FROM HISTORY! Would you prefer he ignored it and perpetuated the mindset that was already costing us pilots and ground troops so dearly?

I already talked about the relevance of the Confederates and Wehrmacht analogies, so I won't repeat that here.

And finally, this: "However, since we reallocated fighter design towards low altitude knifefights; we completely abdicated the high altitude arena for twenty years." Abdicated to who? (or is it "whom?") Who's been dominating the "high-altitude dogfighting arena" all this time? Those bombers?

I don't know, man. It all sounds like an "agenda" on your part -- gotta' make a contrary point, so we drag out everything we can possibly think about that relates to it, and make it ALL sound bad.

Then again, I could be wrong...

GHS

What happened to Iraq's WMD?
Read Gen. Georges Sada's book
"Saddam's Secrets. pg 252-262.
Gen. Sada was Saddam's Air vice marshal. He describes how Saddam used the flood in Zeyzoun Syria on June 4th 2002 as a cover. Saddam used Boeing 747s & 727s stripped of seating etc & transported "tons of chemicals,armaments and other paraphernalia into Syria under the cover of a mission of mercy" Sada claims ther were 56 sorties flown using commercial aircraft.

Renee,

Thanks for the info on WMD. Assuming we can trust Sada, this might explain the disappearance of said weapons. I'll bet there's enough expertise amongst the readership here to approximate the size of that weapons cache based on the lift capacity of 56 passenger jets. An analysis by weight and volume would be interesting.

It would also be interesting to know what the Israelis have to say about the issue. I can recall from Gulf War One when Saddam started lobbing SCUD's into Israel. I was sobbing as I watched the footage, convinced that if Saddam had unleashed one gas shell, it would mean the start of Armegeddon. As I understand it, the US leaned on Israel pretty hard not to retaliate. Credit our military with a contingency plan that turned out to be vital. We had a ship waiting just outside Haifa harbor loaded with batteries of Patriot missiles. As I understand it, we had those missiles up and running on the Golan within a day of the first SCUD attack.

I would also like to know how fast WMD's degrade. (Anyone?) All munitions have a natural life span before they must be decommissioned. Given that the evacution must have been fast and sloppy, a lot of that stuff probably arrived unusable. We can only hope the Syrians are aware that a WMD attack on Israel would mean retaliation on a nation busting scale. The whole theater of operations remains a very dangerous neighborhood.

Full disclosure - I have been a Boyd disciple for almost 15 years...

The thing Boyd discovered was that when you build an organization, which includes its stuff, its people, its training and its doctrine (DOTMLPF in pentagon-speak) - you have to make sure it is optimized for the right measures of success. Pre-Boyd that measure was "speed" post Boyd that measure was energy agility. That's not the only thing of course, as Bill pointed out the F-16 is cheap. (I recently read another paper that talked about how the British Supermarine Spitfire being a significantly cheaper aircraft to build than the Me109 (with rectangular vs elliptical wings), albeit only slightly inferior as a fighter, enabled the British to prevail in WWII skies)

If you hold people to the wrong criteria, they will make a million little decisions along the way that will make an overall worse system. The at doesn't mean they are dedicated and talented - it means that the leadership is asking for the wrong thing.

Take NASA, some of the best minds in the world, but they have had a lousy track record ever SINCE Apollo 11...

Example the space shuttle: it's the best technical way to execute the worst operational way to go into space (but the ONLY one possible in the 1960's when we started working towards Apollo) maintained in a way inconsistent with its CONOPS- with all the predictable cost and safety performance thereof...

For all that Rumsfeld has accomplished in the field, his nomination hearing focused on acquisition. That's where I have been the last 12 years or so, and he had quietly tried many changes there as well. Since that's where the big money is, his waves there are probably what really got him canned. Consequently, not all of those changes have gotten where they need to be.

The acquisition community realized that life cycle costs for the crews were much higher than the up front cost of development and instituted a program to address it. However, the first successes were driven by the surface navy, which was trying to optimize manning levels - I work in unmanned aircraft, so high manning levels are not really an issue for us, but now we're stuck with the same tools and procedures and mindset as the surface navy used.

My experience with the USMC was in the 1990's, when I was a instructor for expeditionary warfare prior to Kosovo. They have long realized the utility of Boyds way of thinking. They continually align themselves according to a NEW paradigm that thinking gives them (not the same E-M one he came up with for aircraft of course, but using the OODA concept) - it is why they have enjoyed so much success. Conversely, the Army of the 1990's in many ways inadequately prepared (due to budget cuts) for our "next" war with the Werhmacht (i.e Clinton gave the generals a lot of latitude within the money he did give them, and they asked for what they knew). They have since adopted many of these ideas in the field in OIF (now looking a lot more USMC like), to the THEIR credit and eventual success. (The Navy, God bless her, was in many ways designed to buy ships to fight our next commerce war against the British - but thats always been true)

If you really understand Boyd, you get that its less about the resources you have then the rules you apply for using them.

Look at American education - liberals decry we don't spend enough, but as a line item, we spend some 15-20% of the entire economic output of the country on "education". Conservatives sometimes bash the teachers, and while some are bad, most are at least good. What does truly and deeply suck is the rules we have established for how those resources get allocated and how they get used once they are there. Without fixing that underlying systemic problem, no more money, or better teachers, or more teacher accountability, will accomplish much of anything.

Just like Boyd learned, that if speed alone isn't what you need, just adding speed isn't going to help.

For those who DO see the merits inherent in LtCol Boyd- I highly recommend spending some time on his old website, "belisarius.com".

I had read/heard of the movement of Saddam's WMD to Syria, specifically the Bekaa Valley area, a few years ago. Transport was supposedly both by truck overland and by air, but I was unsure whether the provenance was strong enough. Apparently not, because even at that time, and following publication of the book mentioned, the MSM and "left side" pooh-poohed the assertions. Oh well...

On the topic of Mr. Boyd, I went to the link provided by Chap, and read the essay on the Mad Major by Col. Frank Spinney. A fine read on the topic, which led me back from the fighter pilot issues to what I believe to be the main reason Col. Boyd is remembered, and both loved and reviled...

It especially reinforced, by descibing his "Genghis John" period, why he should be credited for his contribution to the success of the "surge." His departure from attrition warfare, and advocacy of maneuver warfare has been so respected by the U.S. Marine Corps that they "will dedicate a section of their library at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, to a collection of his unpublished papers and research materials." (From that article, copyrighted by the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, and found here -- http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c199.htm ).

All fascinating stuff, and depending on where you come down on the Rumsfeld Reformed Military controversy, one might well love/hate the guy. But he was, by any measure, from all that I read a man of great integrity, honor, and service. Explore his admonition "to be, or to do" sometime. Great stuff!

Benquo:

Could you say a little more about how you thing the Iraq situation is similar? Because I don't see anything happening to them on the level of losing two major cities and the surrender of the emperor. The Sunnis seem to have reconsidered their cooperation with Al Qaeda, but it looks like we're just another tribe there, albeit a very powerful one. The Anbar Awakening is very different from Japan's unconditional surrender.

"[L]osing two major cities and the surrender of the emperor" weren't the effects, but rather the causes, and "Japan's unconditional [military] surrender" wasn't the end, but the beginning. Those things led the Japanese people -- the society as a whole -- to disavow the course of imperialism.

The same effects are being seen in Iraq despite the difference in causes. In place of a couple of incinerated urban centers, Iraq has violence on a much smaller, but more gruesome scale, thanks to Al Qaeda. And just as Emperor Hirohito wasn't the problem, but Japaneses Imperialism was, so, too, Saddam wasn't the problem. Rather, he was the current emblem of the real problem for Iraq in particular, and the Middle East at large: Islamic Authoritarianism.

And THAT is where the situations are tellingly similar. Through Gen. Petraeus' new strategy, we are leveraging the violence of Al Qaeda being suffered by the population into the same lesson the Japanese learned through their suffering: seeking power through oppression and domination sucks, especially when America has had her fill of it. The best option, whether you live in 1940's Japan or 2000's Iraq, is to reinvent your society into one that respects the freedom of its own people.

As for political predictions, this much history has made clear: societies that are democratic and founded upon the freedom of its own people do not, as a rule, make a habit of invading or threatening its neighbors.

Mr Whittle:

Thanks for the continuation of your excellent essays. It's good to see you back in good form and at the top of your game.

I'm looking forward to the next in line.

I was surprised in reading Bill's excellent essay that he did not use one of Patton's famous quotes "A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week".

That one seems to fit perfectly with some of the concepts being discussed. Seems like several of the great Cav-type officers had similar thoughts. Maybe it's the manuver emphasis?

Great essay Bill!

Allow me to comment on the B-52 debate.

I'm afraid you just don't understand. The bomber is already cruising at 60,000 feet. The interceptor has to start from at worst; sea level, or 20,000 feet and climb to reach the bomber's altitude. Remember, the B-52 has had up to 21 hours to climb to bombing altitude; and is now substantially lighter than it was when it took off due to burning off about half of it's fuel load.

Does Boeing know what you're doing to their bomber? You've got it flying above its service ceiling and cruising at mach 0.91. A real B-52 won't do 600 mph even at 45,000 feet, but of course we're talking the hypothetical B-52/U-2 hybrid with the +4 Boots of Subsonic Speeding.

Once again, you really don't understand. The B-52 is not defenseless. It carries a quite powerful electronic warfare suite. The MiG-25 didn't carry a 600 kilowatt radar because the Soviets had an inefficient electronics industry -- it carried it to burn through enemy offensive jamming. The F-16; being a lightweight fighter, can't carry as big and as powerful a radar, as a dedicated heavy interceptor such as the F-14.

The Mig-25's radar, and the Mig-25, were designed to go against the B-71 Valkyrie. Against the B-52 the Soviets fielded Mig-17's, Mig-19's, and Mig-21's. But anyway, given the B-52's electronic warfare suite and impressive high altitude performance SAC decided that to survice the B-52 should hug the tree tops and hope the Russians don't notice it. It's sad that someone wasn't there to tell them that their fears were misplaced and that the B-52 was the ultimate high-altitude dogfighter, as long as they're not stupidly burdened with things like fuel and bombs.

Anyway, I'm off to ponder why a modern single-engine fighter would be trying to dock with a B-52, as opposed to intercepting it, but to keep it interesting I'll posit that both aircraft have lost an engine.

Benquo:

Political change is not a science. Not the way we're doing it, anyway.

Red herring. Picking a poor defenseless strawman to knock down. Not very nice.

If we were putting in 20 or even 80 years' work for a certain result, that would be one thing.

2nd Red herring.

But by the very nature of the strategy we've adopted, enough randomness remains to make it basically impossible to predict what the situation will be in 20 years, with or without our presence in Iraq.

3rd Red herring.

You just can't conjure up a Copernican-magnitude revolution whenever you want one, unless you're willing to forcibly impose in on a culture over a period of decades.

4th Red herring. Another poor defenseless strawman. For shame.

I see what we are attempting in Iraq as a complete change in the political culture more akin to the French revolution than to our own.

Interesting opinion, but to be persuasive it would have needed some evidence to back up what is "seen". Lacking that it's just so much hot air -- a 5th Red herring.

The French revolution was ultimately successful, but was fantastically bloody and took a long time to show anything like results.

A pseudo-history lesson with weasel-words: "ultimately successful", "a long time to show anything like results". Yet a 6th Red herring.

(And then Napoleon restored monarchy to France.)

If we assume this parenthetical is pertinent, then the "long time" becomes less than ten years; that is, the length of time before Napoleon staged his coup d'etat. How much less than ten for the "revolution" to be "ultimately successful": eight? or even six years? Of course, the assumption of pertinence goes against the above earlier statement of "putting in" a time of "20 or even 80 years". Hence, it seems more likely that this is just a flourish on the previous Red herring and not something that was carefully thought out.

We've done it to other countries before,

A nice acknowledgement that we have, or at least had, the knowhow.

but it required complete domination of Japan for decades

A mixing of time served with time required, and no evidence advanced. Possibly another Red herring, but it seems more likely a mere confusion of the two.

following the nuking of two major cities

Wherein the actual targets were military, but perhaps the point was to distract from the military aspects of the two operations.

and the subsequent humiliation of their emperor.

Hard to avoid given that Japan was forced to *not* win. After all, the japanese emperor was a deity and how can a god lose without losing face. Then again, he wasn't tried and executed for his ordering the murder of American POWs, so humiliation was the best deal he could get.

I doubt we have the stomach for such a strategy in Iraq

This naturally means the "stomach for"...

1) "complete domination" of Iraq "for decades"

2) nuking "two major cities"

3) "the subsequent humiliation of their emperor".

Well, we are doing well without "complete domination" currently. The "nuking" is yet another Red herring. And, the previous tyrant (albeit not quite an emperor) was captured and handed over to the duly elected Iraqi government -- and is no longer in a position to be humiliated by anyone. Of course, perhaps the "humiliation" is supposed to be of the Iraqi people, themselves -- one cannot tell.

So, as to "stomach for" -- this is either yet another Red herring, or merely an ill-thought out comparison.

and even if we did, I'm not sure it would be morally justifiable to kill that many people so that the survivors' grandchildren could live in freedom.

To sum up: Iraq? The task is too ill-understood to attempt. And we're doing it wrong. It will take far too long to accomplish. And we may fail anyway. And we fundamentally can't tell if we'll be successful. We don't know how. And the task is far too herculean. And we don't have the will. And it will take too long even if we do have the will. And we don't understand the problem. And the cost will be too great to bear. And we'll need to kill a great many innocents to do it. And we'll need to humiliate... something. And some can't tell if it would be moral to do. And don't forget the killing of a great many innocents to do it.

So, what are we to take away from the thesis under analysis... Perhaps the best choice is to stop reading so closely -- it seems it was not intended to be made sense of, but rather it seems to be more important to "get in touch with" the emotive content of the thesis -- with its "feelings".

And that may be difficult for someone who pays attention to the details. :)

Bill, This is the best writing I have ever seen describing OODA. I am a SWAT sniper/ sniper instructor. I will be sending my students to your blog to read it to understand it.

Often I'm asked how do I get a shot off so fast when things turn bad. I can only tell non-snipers I was ready. When teaching new snipers, I tell them that usually they will have hours of waiting while the negotiators work, but the flip side of that is that they will have hours of watching the scene from the best view point while all that is going on. I tell them to observe.Not just to report what's going on, but to watch how the threat behaves. I tell them to orient -- how far are they from a building, a tree, a walk-way, and other marks.Range them. Check out obstacles and move around them if neccessary. Then they must decide. While waiting, think about the various holds for elevation and windage they would have to use if the threat was at various positions in front of them. They must decide ahead of time where the cross-hairs going to have to be if called on. If conditions change (wind picks up or dies) go through it again and again.
Now, if the moment comes to do what Command calls to do -- ACT!! It's not the range with a "ready on the right" and "ready on the left" and "ready on the firing line". It's "green light" and pull the trigger. The opportunity for a good shot will be from a half-second to two seconds, so there is no time for processing all the information, as if it was new to them at that time, to make a decision.

So in short, OODA applies there too. Again, great points made.

On the other hand, makes one sort of wonder if the Pentagon's highest levels understand. Reading about the termination of Steve Coughlin's contract at the behest of Hasham Islam and Gordon England, I wonder if the Pentagon really wants to
observe, orient, or even decide on the nature of the Jihadist threat. Can't act right if the other three elements aren't there first.

Too bad the fighters understand it, but their bosses don't.

tomax7
"...the very name you cursed..."

Forgive me for interrupting and possibly sticking my nose where it doesn't belong.
What name did Bill curse?

Oe, I so love the company of men -- especially when they're talking about such interesting things!

My childhood heroes were the first guerrilla fighters, De Wet, De La Rey, Louis Botha -- the Boere (my farmer forefathers), who gave those Brits a licking. Commandos on horseback, rifles slung over the shoulder, with naught but dried biscuits to dip into strong, black coffee and biltong (deer meat jerky) made by their farmwives, until the British burnt the farms and put the women and children into concentration camps. But it was the men's brilliant strategies that fascinated me so and how bravely they put it into action. Having few resources, "a boer maak n plan." Because the Boere didn't have enough manpower to guard the British prisoners they took, they had to strip them and send them "kaalgat" (barebottom) off into the semi-desert -- that at least kept the Brits off the battlefield for a while.

(MuscleDaddy - my secondary Chess board idea is still evolving. One scenario could be a Crusaders' setting; e.g., a white knight could go on a mission into a black castle to find out what a Moorish Dervish (Bishop)is planning, and the Lone White Knight, successfully completing his mission, could re-enter the main board. And then I've thought the pawns, usually considered male in chess, could turn into either nuns in need of rescue or black belly dancers in need of taming :) And a slain Queen could shapeshift, like the Joker in a Rummy game. I always have this urge to move a Queen like a Knight when I'm playing chess. Oh, oh, and all sorts of interesting alliances could be made in the secondary arena - a Black Queen and a White Knight, which would really make for some interesting events when they return to the main board!)

Please don't mind my little distraction here, please continue, guys. Just consider I'm a boeremeisie who brought you some nice, warm vetkoekies with butter and honey, in between your conversation.

Here's a picture of vetkoek - but imagine them warm, with butter and honey dripping down your fingers as you eat them. And check out the koeksisters -- they're even better on a rainy afternoon.

Here :)

Ooops, better link, here. Vetkoek, last one on the page.

qwer,
On small quibble.
"...the tyrant, but given that he is currently at room temperature..."
I believe Saddam is now... whatever the temp is 6' under the ground in Tikrit.

BR,
I think your secondary chess board is having entirely too much fun.
"...a Black Queen and a White Knight..."????
But thanks for the vetkoekies with butter and honey. They were delish!

I would very much like to see what happens when OODA is an integral part of American business strategy. It would be a Very Good Thing if the guys running General Motors or Ford could get inside the foreign automakers' decision loop. Heck, Michigan might not be the economic basket-case it is today.

Mmm, everything on that page looks Delicious!
I'm stuck at work for another 4 & 1/2 hours with nothing to nibble on but peanuts.
Drat!

I read Crierie at 6 A.M. and was alternately baffled and incensed. Too young to remember the B-50 (Alt B-29); I relied on Ed's reminiscences
and was rapt listening to his war stories. Ed flew Sac, fighters, and mahogany all his life. His life was dedicated to the Air Corps, and by extension all of us at home. His craft was knitting the blanket of Freedom that warms and protects us all.

I was so fortunate to have known my Friend Ed Cutler who graduated from WestPoint in 1943 and Flew everything from the -29 to -52 to F-100
and all century series platforms. He knew Joe Walker and Yeager,(who flies
out of O-17, my home airfield). All I can say is that at 61, I've been flying
35 years and when I talked to Ed, I felt like an eight year old talking to Joe Dimaggio or Will Rogers. I learned about most of the types Crierie was pontificating about and frankly his tech-savvy was off the wall. I didn't think anyone would waste the time
answering a poseur's post, and I won't, except to say that his guff didn't jive with my experience, first-hand or otherwise. Ed passed this year, and I was honored to speak at his memorial. Hangar talk is one thing, but arguing for the sake of arguing (especially with challenged understanding of the topic) is laughable. Boyd was an unusual and perhaps
eccentric sort who had a sad life in many ways, as some genius trailblazers do, but his data and dedication are INARGUABLE. Your writing is
likewise a genius' gift, and I am honored you allow all to post here. I cherish my friendships with all my AAF and AF buddies and extrapolating the patriotism and heroics of these fine men into useful tactics for our current challenges only makes me prouder to be an American.

I'd like to send a copy of Col. Cutler's book to you, How? (The Texas Doll)

(I promise I fly better than I type.)

>>I would very much like to see what happens when OODA is an integral part of American business strategy.

It is, in some quarters, by another name.

OODA is an excellent tool for fighting, but not always the best for making logistical decisions.

"All business is war, all war is logistics, and all logistics is resource allocation."

-gwa.45

A consequence of OODA-esque orientation to business is that decisions will be made on incomplete information.

A consequence of decision making on incomplete information is decreasing quality of the decisions.

Therefore, one of the major concerns is dialing in the quality/agility tradeoff, because a rapid series of mostly bad decisions made on 51% information is a really fast way to auger a company into the ground.

Management of the biz takes place in ooda-esque cycles that are in part limited by the organizations ability to implement the Act part of the loop. Atop the whole thing is a layer of "meta management", that is assessing the tradeoffs and traction against events in the market.

Ryan, one factor you conveniently overlook in your adulation for the F-22, and denigration of the earlier fighters, is that the 22 is designed as a totally unstable airframe. The plane is not airworthy without total computer control. Comparing it to fighters designed prior to these advances is akin to a Bearcat pilot thumbing his nose at the pilot of a Flying Tigers vintage P-40. Different generations of design. Both do the same thing, but capabilities are inherently different.
You also ignore the reality of bomber designs over the past 30-40 years. The B-70 was canceled due to the perceived ability of SAM and AAM to knock down high flying bombers. Everyone switched to flying real low to avoid the large window of acquisition and tracking that was inherent in flying at 50,000+. To ignore this reality and continue to build fighters focused on nailing mach2-3 bombers flying at high altitude would be the "height" of stupidity. The Russians would still be building the Mig25 (with improved engines), if your thinking was valid.

One of the things that annoys me is the incredible cost of our planes. Unfortunately, if you want it to do everything, as we seem to prefer, it's going to cost a lot.

The reason I love airplanes.
In the early fifties, the AF
decided that to defend against the Bear and the Bison, speed was the ticket. Arguably the best Interceptor
ever built, the F-104 with its new state-of the-art aam
Sidewinder was commissioned and built by another genius,
Clarence "Kelly" Johnson.

Warning: don't turn the F-104. Ever. Not unless
you have miles of bogie free airspace. But you can't Rat Race in a AA fuelie either. Yeager flew the F104 above FL100. I am still trying
to visualize a Buff at FL60 at trans sonic AS.

The Lockheed "skunkworks"
launched the "missile with a man in it". Mach 2 and an ROC
that I think still has records set by Yeager. Concurrently, the CIA needed
a very high flying lightweight with ages of loiter and look down cameras.
Both were hard to fly and would kill a pilot who even thought about daydreaming.
You know, the U-2? They are the
SAME aircraft. Clip the high aspect diving boards off the
spy and put on seven foot long ANHEDRAL potato chips
change engines and Voila!
Both the creation of a contemporary of Boyd's. You all like hangar talk? This could get better than my first flight in a Republic Sea-Bee at eight years of age.

qwer - 6 or 7, maybe 8, Red Herring? That's enough for a Red Herring sandwich!

Let's see, since we now have had vetkoeks delivered, I wonder how they would taste on those?

OK, Ok, I just went to a funeral today, and those always make me loopy, so please continue as if I weren't here.

Thanks all for the stretchmarks on my brain from trying to get round all your big thoughts.

Greetings to old acquaintances, and special thanks to GHS & Bill.

Here's an actual question for Ryan (simplistic, because I know aip about the planes involved, so can't discuss them with any kind of specificity):

If all these planes you talk about are so much better than Boyd and Sprey's designs, then how come the military increased use of the A-10 after they had been in Iraq for weeks in Gulf War I?

Um, normally I can spell, but this time, aip = zip.

"I know zip about the planes involved"

I repeat:

The F-16 is the only airplane in the past few decades that cost *less* than its predecessor.

Mr. Shepard didn't do a thing to address that point directly, even though I think *he* thinks he did. All he did, if one actually looks at what he typed, was to mention something about "that canard again" and then zoom off elsewhere, thinking that insult somehow changes *facts.*

And here's another inconvenient truth: fighter pilots are generally required to acquire a visual ID before they shoot. This also generally means that using a Big-Ass Radar to acquire their target for a Beyond Visual Range (BVR) shot is the same as firing off a neon sign above one's self going, "Here! Shoot me HERE!" Since this is a Bad Idea, fighers are generally vectored toward their targets through radio directions sent from either AWACS, or from sightings from other fighters, or by ground control means until they can make a visual target ID and then shoot.

Um...this all means -- at least if one uses LOGIC -- that having a Big-Ass Radar on a fighter is a waste of mass and money.

FWIW, I have been a civilian puke here at the Pentagram for the last four years.

Cult of Boyd? So I'm a cultist? Very well: I *am.* As, I guess then, as is all of the Marine Corps. Me, compared with being a Marine? I accept the title with honor. Thank you!

Aw, shoot, Dougman, you've probably already left work. If you look like that picture at DaddyQuatro's Chaise Longue, I'd gladly deliver you a pizza in my F250 Cheval Blanc wearing one of the swimsuits I was just looking at... at Sports Illustrated. Like this or this or this :)

Mr. Salyers:

A rejection of Al Qaeda is not identical with a rejection of Islamic authoritarianism; it may be a strategic rather than ideological rejection. I meant by the Japan example that basically the only sure way to change a culture in a fundamental way like that is to take charge of the whole society.

qwer:

I'm not sure why you think it's helpful or informative to simply write "red herring" and "straw man" after quoting some of my assertions. At least one of us must not understand the other's argument. Otherwise, obviously, I would not be raising what you see as red herrings and attacking what you see as strawmen. But you have neither told me why my arguments are irrelevant (i.e. why the premises I think are necessary to yours are not in fact necessary), nor even what you understand me to believe.

Where you do elaborate, I don't see what your response really has to do with my argument. Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to think I disagree with you more often than I do. For instance:

and the subsequent humiliation of their emperor.

Hard to avoid given that Japan was forced to *not* win. After all, the japanese emperor was a deity and how can a god lose without losing face. Then again, he wasn't tried and executed for his ordering the murder of American POWs, so humiliation was the best deal he could get.

I agree fully; it was impossible to win the war without humiliating the emperor. And this was in fact a positive effect of our victory; it crushed a large part of the Japanese militarist spirit.

Well, we are doing well without "complete domination" currently. The "nuking" is yet another Red herring. And, the previous tyrant (albeit not quite an emperor) was captured and handed over to the duly elected Iraqi government -- and is no longer in a position to be humiliated by anyone. Of course, perhaps the "humiliation" is supposed to be of the Iraqi people, themselves -- one cannot tell.

I was responding to this:
"Japan re-invented itself after WWII because it was more than just defeated -- it was demoralized in every way on every level."
It seems to me as if you agree with me that we are not practicing that level of domination over Iraqi culture. If we want to change Middle East Muslim culture on a similarly deep level, it will require a similarly deep level of control.

The French revolution achieved partial success in extirpating religion and aristocracy, mainly by killing a lot of the clergy and aristocrats. But it certainly wasn't a simple matter of depriving the supposed tyrants of the mechanism of government, as the naive revolutionaries had initially supposed; old habits die hard.

If my argument seemed a little rambling, I will attempt to summarize it here, albeit imprecisely. To have a good shot at achieving the kind of cultural change people are looking for in Iraq, we would need to essentially impose an American-run dictatorship for several years. That strategy would involve a lot more killing than is going on right now, and a lot more money and soldiers. Japan only didn't require a bloody occupation because we'd already clearly won an all-out war, and the population was too cowed and humiliated to resist -- a situation which is not the case in Iraq. Consequently, unless we want to at least double our yearly investment in Iraq and incur the open and direct hostility of the surrounding nations, we can't count on cultural change.

Mr. Shepard didn't do a thing to address that point directly, even though I think *he* thinks he did. All he did, if one actually looks at what he typed, was to mention something about "that canard again" and then zoom off elsewhere, thinking that insult somehow changes *facts.*

I see you missed my entire point; the early block F-16As had little if any radar to speak of, limiting it's BVR capabilities. The original APG-66 didn't even have any guidance capability for Sparrows; meaning it was a gun/sidewinder only fighter. Basically it was an updated, modernized F-104 Starfighter, without the vicious pilot killing abilities of the original.

The original F-16As with the gun/sidewinder only armament cost the USAF $10.2 million each in 1977; the F-16Cs built in 1984 cost the USAF some $16.5 million each.

Size/weight of the airframe is no longer the major cost in aircraft procurement nowadays. Electronics is; and they can account for half or more the flyaway cost of a modern fighter. So of course; a budget aircraft will skimp on the radar and other assorted electronics to make the cost go down.

As for being cheaper than what it replaced? Well, no.

The F-4E when it was in production in 1968 cost the US Government a cool $2.4 million; when you account for inflation between 1968 and 1977; that $2.4 million became $4.2 million; which comes in cheaper than even the original wildly-optimistic figure of $5.16 million million per aircraft in 1975 that the US offered the NATO consortium in 1975 for European F-16s, before the inevitable cost overruns.

And here's another inconvenient truth: fighter pilots are generally required to acquire a visual ID before they shoot.

Considering that about 80% of all kills in the '91 Gulf War came from Sparrows, nope.

This also generally means that using a Big-Ass Radar to acquire their target for a Beyond Visual Range (BVR) shot is the same as firing off a neon sign above one's self going, "Here! Shoot me HERE!"

Only if you radiate continuously; because you're a constantly moving target. That said, I'd hate to be a ground radar operator in a shooting war; I'd want the radars at least a mile from my command van...I like to survive the opening minutes of an air war....

Since this is a Bad Idea, fighers are generally vectored toward their targets through radio directions sent from either AWACS, or from sightings from other fighters, or by ground control means until they can make a visual target ID and then shoot.

Nope. They're vectored around because the AWACS controllers have the "big picture" and can perform battlespace deconfliction to obtain the most efficient use of resources; e.g, everybody isn't all firing their missiles off at the same target(s). That said, AWACS aren't invunerable. The Soviets/Russians have actually built very large, very long range radar homing missiles designed to kill AWACS aircraft. That said, the AWACS people can just turn their radar off, descend or ascend a couple thousand feet on a different bearing, to evade the kill zone of the missiles; or have their escorts shoot down the missiles with their own missiles. That said, if you force the AWACS people to turn their radar off for the 15-20 minutes it'll take to evade the missile, you've "shot them down" for that 20 minutes via virtual attrition.

Um...this all means -- at least if one uses LOGIC -- that having a Big-Ass Radar on a fighter is a waste of mass and money.

I'm sure there have been studies done on the feasibility of AWACS vectored fighters with no radar, and the problems involved with such an approach by various think tanks; the big problem is that an AWACS may not always be available in your theatre of operations due to commitments elsewhere.

FWIW, I have been a civilian puke here at the Pentagram for the last four years.

Taking money from the American Imperialist War Machine! You should be ashamed of yourself! (insert smiley here)

Oh hey; since you work in the USMC section of the Pentagon; can you do a small favor? Tell the Marines to start fighting back on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle; all the reports about it being an unreliable piece of equipment are garbage. I've actually looked up the failure rates of the original prototype LVTP7 (AAV7) from back in the 70s; and the EFV easily beats those failure rates. The failure rates in the EFV spec are simply insane; and so of course, when it fails to meet them, the critics begin circling the program.

If all these planes you talk about are so much better than Boyd and Sprey's designs, then how come the military increased use of the A-10 after they had been in Iraq for weeks in Gulf War I?

Ah, the A-10 Thunderbolt II. One of the few good ideas to come out of Sprey's mind, built around the obvious fact that really fast, blazing fast jets aren't the best design for support of ground troops.

Mind you though; it's original attack profile of hugging the earth and strafing enemy columns with it's cannon has become pretty much obsolete due to the proliferation of MANPADs throughout the world; this was evident even in Gulf War '91 -- I read a book about the pilots who flew the A-10 in that war -- at first, they went in against the Iraqis in the good old classic "trim the hedges at 40 feet" attack; but after several losses and near losses to Iraqi air defenses, they shifted to a higher altitude profile, emphasizing dive bombing and strafing from altitude, rather than their "traditional" low altitude attacks. Technology has also obviated the role the A-10 once played; now with new GPS guided bombs, even a B-52 can perform danger-close air support to ground troops; and it can loiter over an area even longer than an A-10 and at much higher altitudes....whatever replaces the A-10 is going to be...interesting.

Warning: don't turn the F-104. Ever.

I always loved the joke that went around Germany, concerning the high loss rate of the F-104 in their service:

Q: "How do you get a Starfighter?"

A: "Buy 10 acres of land. One will crash in it eventually."

Almost as funny as the distance between German villages being measured in kilotons.

Hey Kim; I managed to find the EFV figures:

The GAO has been remarkably savage on the EFV development program, making great hay of how the preproduction vehicles which have had 20 equivalent years of hard driving done on them - but not 20 equivalent years of maintenance are averaging 43.5 hours between Mission Failures, when the EFV requirement is 70 hours between mission failures (!!!!)

By contrast:

The LVTP-7 (AAV7) Prototype had a mean time between failures of 7.1 hours.

The LVTP-5 had a mean time between failures of 2.61 hours.

So yeah, you can see how the unrealistic goals are hurting the program.

Ryan, one factor you conveniently overlook in your adulation for the F-22, and denigration of the earlier fighters, is that the 22 is designed as a totally unstable airframe. The plane is not airworthy without total computer control. Comparing it to fighters designed prior to these advances is akin to a Bearcat pilot thumbing his nose at the pilot of a Flying Tigers vintage P-40. Different generations of design. Both do the same thing, but capabilities are inherently different.

Actually, I wasn't comparing the supermanouverability aspects of the aircraft where FBW comes into play; but the relative lift generating capabilities of their wings; which allows the pilot to fly and fight up high, without having to worry about being on the edge of a stall. This of course requires a big wing, EVEN with advanced computer design helping you.

You also ignore the reality of bomber designs over the past 30-40 years. The B-70 was canceled due to the perceived ability of SAM and AAM to knock down high flying bombers.

Back in the sixties, everyone thought that SAMs would soon be capable of speeds beyond Mach 10 at 200 mile range and effective altitudes past 100,000 feet. These capabilities of course, didn't materialize. The best SAM today in the world has a speed a bit over Mach 6. In order to have a marginal capability against a target, a missile has to have a 2x speed advantage; and what this means is that even today, our best SAMs would only have marginal capabilities against a Mach 3 target; which is borne out by the fact that the SR-71 overflew Cuba, Libya, North Vietnam, and tons of other places; and had hundreds of missiles shot at it; including SA-5s, and not one SR-71 was shot down.

The Russians would still be building the Mig25 (with improved engines), if your thinking was valid.

They did. The MiG-31. Entered service in '82; the Russians also continued to develop the aircraft, with the MiG-31B flying in 1990, and the development of the MiG-31M which was to enter service sometime in the nineties; but the collapse of the USSR delayed entry of it via upgraded airframes to 2000~.

One of the things that annoys me is the incredible cost of our planes. Unfortunately, if you want it to do everything, as we seem to prefer, it's going to cost a lot.

Everything is costing a lot with all the introduction of high tech electronics, and the systems integration for it all. My friend Stuart (who I mentioned earlier in this discussion) over at Forecast International recently finished a study on major warship construction out to 2016; and the basic summation of the study is that by that date, the $1 billion dollar surface combatant will be the minimum. Even the cheapest decent frigate out on the world naval market today (which the norwegians are buying) costs $680 million per ship; Same thing for fighters; even the F-35 is going to cost $50+ million per unit by the time it's flying in large numbers.

I'll finish replying to the other comments, including Bill's later; doing a coherent reply to each comment takes time to do; since I figure you guys deserve something better than the average one line comments you find so often on blogs.

Ryan, Your comments are founded in logic, but your data is challenged. You LIKE
interceptors, yet you dis the 104. We unloaded it on
Nato and the wolfpack bacause it was really good at something we didn't need.
Lockheed had to sell them somewhere, and because they were hard to fly and single purpose, why shouldn't they end up in Western Germany. The Germans needed the capability; they were the ones most likely to need a rocket to Blast into Heaven to take on Ivan in his Tupes. I thought you thought Boyd was missing something when he favored low and fast and agile ( something both the F-16 and A-10 excel at) (Sorry, nevermind the fast part about the Warthog.)
Nothing Coram says would lead anyone to assume Boyd was a fraud, why exactly do you think so?

I appreciate a heated discussion more than most,
you obviously are bright and
articulate, so don't be offended by differing opinions about aircraft types especially. You like the Convair? The B-36, not the Hustler. Pilot to Co-pilot: FEATHER FOUR !
Co-pilot to pilot:
WHICH FOUR ? !

My point about Boyd is this:
Of anything you could say about him, the most ridiculous is that he was a fraud. He was the real deal. He was convinced beyond reason what he was doing was right and necessary, if not even inevitable. A more devoted and tireless researcher you couldn't find.
That kind of passion is contagious among honest men, and people who don't observe that may run the gauntlet if they challenge something about a devoted comrade that is just wrong. A troubled and driven man? O.K. A fraud?
You want your ass kicked?
Ryan, your disagreement with Boyd's (demonstrable) postulates has you seeing fuzzy.
Less Thrust at altitude? yes. Less Drag? also, yes. 21 hours to climb to FL60? Sounds about right. A B-36 dogfighting anything? Maybe rolling over a Blind dog in taxi. (with a tire
that weighs more than an F-16). B-70? Fast!
Useless! The unchallenged champ at turning money
into noise? The Raptor. Strike a nerve? Hold your bile. Let's be rational, an aircraft with that many missions must have a weak spot, so let's say that at its price you could have so many other wonderful things. Acquisition has generally been the Military's weak spot. Buying
costly systems to defend or project a threat against an enemy you haven't met yet and hasn't been born is silly. It wasn't once, when spending
was what defeated the Soviet Bloc, but the Raptor
is old, OLD. Modeling is important in Defense,
but like Climate Change, it isn't the real deal.
Human factors are now limiting, and my best guess
is that aerial warfare will soon be waged by kids
at a screen downtown in a Black Building with
more screens than a main street arcade. I used to call people like me fossils. OUCH.
One last thing, Ryan, then I'll let you go. Be careful with your devotion to stand-off capability in Air to Air. The further you can be away from an enemy, the less you need an airplane
at all. That's our secret, us old pelicans. We've
known it for years, and that's the only thing I find fault with in Boyd's work, He wasn't dishonest, he believed in fighters, as do I.
But we really don't need them, and I'm sad. If
I were to duplicate his work today, I WOULD be a
fraud; I would be looking for missions for my old
friends, me and our stallions.

About the F104

Some genius in Germany thought that just in case the russians had taken out the landing pads fighters should be able to land on short tracks from the road system with the help of arresting nets. Now remember that the F104 had a high landing speed. It was the increase in weight for strenthening the F104 to withstand teh strees of net assisted landing who made herdangerous.

I have seen the documentary made by the Italian armed forces in 200x whenb the last Starfighter was retired and guess what? Italian pilots just loved her.

JFM You are right. But all notable airspeeds she had were high. Sitting still on the ramp she was making 100 knots. What a beauty. There is one thing every starfighter jock had tattoed on the inside of his eyelids:

SPEED IS LIFE. If you weren't flying her fast, you would soon be dead at the bottom of one of Ryan Crierie's germanic holes. Talk about a demanding mount. For her Vne wasn't Velocity, never exceed, it was Velocity, never enjoy. If you were having fun you would soon be in inescapable unusual attitudes. Actually anything but FAST, balanced, straight and level was hazardous. 104 jocks seldom smiled, and their
insurance was ALWAYS paid up. It isn't surprising
the Italians were attracted to her; Fast, beautiful, demanding, and fickle.

My point about NATO was that the Air Force had given up on interception as a goal for fighters
(which the 104 was NOT) and Boyd knew where manned aerial combat needed to be, Low, Agile
and multi-faceted. Or High, agile, and multi-faceted. Saying that there was a conspiracy that
the Boyd group foisted on the Brass is just wrong. We all have favorites, but I question any ones pimping the F-106 (an area-ruled F-102) as
a fighter or a B-52 as a dogfighter. To each his own. Don't EJECTEJECTEJECT if you are right side up and close to the ground.

Benquo:

I'm not sure why you think it's helpful or informative to simply write "red herring" and "straw man" after quoting some of my assertions.

Not to worry. I am.

Where you do elaborate, I don't see what your response really has to do with my argument.

Sometimes a little clarity can be helpful.

we are not practicing that level of domination over Iraqi culture. If we want to change Middle East Muslim culture on a similarly deep level, it will require a similarly deep level of control.

Thanks. Good position, well articulated. But it's just your opinion. And I disagree. And I believe a fair assessment of Iraqi current events supports my opinion. YMMV.

To take one example, recently in the news: the Sahawah Al Anbar (AKA Anbar Awakening) has Iraqi Sunnis, formerly insurgents who seriously disagreed with having a Shia top dog in Iraq, helping the Coalition fight Al-Qaeda Sunnis -- and killing them themselves.

Take another example, 98 Iraqi batallions head up combat operations in their respective areas -- it is they who take the lead, not the respective Coalition forces. (Of course, maybe a dozen of those are older Peshmerga Kurdish.)

Take a third example, since the surge started, war-related violence has dropped by more than half. The 600 Iraqi civilians killed in December is closer to US highway fatalities (2.2 Iraqis per 100,000 versus 1.2 Americans) than to a media-hyped "civil war". Sure there's a terrorist war going on in Iraq -- but it doesn't appear to be "civil".

So, no; my opinion is different than yours.

The French revolution achieved partial success in extirpating religion and aristocracy

I assume from your comments that you don't wish to assert, by analogy, that Iraq will take less than Napoleon's ten years to become a success. Unless you want to tie specific elements of the French revolution to the Iraq war, I will continue to assume it's a Red herring. If, when you make comments, you tie them in to the subject at hand, it will be easier to assume that they are not Red herrings. But, its your choice how you wish to be perceived.

To have a good shot at achieving the kind of cultural change people are looking for in Iraq, we would need to essentially impose an American-run dictatorship for several years. That strategy would involve a lot more killing than is going on right now, and a lot more money and soldiers.

Good summary. I disagree. Nor do I think that Japan is a good model. Reminds me of the Last-War mentality -- although I don't intend that to be a criticism of your approach. I think our current two-pronged approach -- counter-insurgency (winning the people's support, establishing safe areas, and turning over security to host-nation forces), and an interlocking checks-and-balances constitution (ideally preventing any one of the Shia, Sunni and Kurd groups from takeover) is the only way to do the job. Just my opinion.

unless we want to at least double our yearly investment in Iraq and incur the open and direct hostility of the surrounding nations, we can't count on cultural change.

I disagree. But then I'm not looking for cultural change, just a representative government in control of its own security. I believe that that is a political change, not cultural. Again, YMMV.

Bill Mecorney, I take it you don't think mounting a cannon in the nose of an Airbus A300 would make it an air supperiority fighter that could take on an F-16.

Sorry, I'm still laughing at the image of the B-52 at the edge of its flight envelope, unable to accelerate because it's at max speed, unable to climb because it's at max altitude, unable to dive because it's already at Vne, pulling a 1.41G turn (in a 45 degree bank turning in a 9 mile diameter circle, which it will complete in 3 minutes) and thinking it's an air combat maneuver.

I can imagine the F-16 pilot interviewed on the History Channel. "So then I think 'What's he doing? OMG! He's turning!' In a panic I radioed back for instructions, then called my wife on the cell and told her I loved her, but of course she starts going on about her Aunt Betty and I have to sit there and listen to it, the whole time watching this B-52's heading swinging more toward the north, and then I think 'Don't the Packers and Patriots play tonight?' So then I tell myself 'focus - focus - you're in a really slow dogfight and your enemy has sighted you bored.' So I split-S'd down to 30,000 and mach 1.5, overtook (to recover from the Aunt Betty story which I thought would never end), then went ballistic for a belly shot."

Sobh bekheir! You have me ROFWL, GT!

I loved the story, but one sentence is so self-contradictory I'm surprised no one else has caught it.
Talking about air superiority on the modern battlefield the story says:

"You can still lose if you have it, but you have no chance to win if you do not.
"
If you have it and you lose, who do you lose to? It me must be to someone who doesn't have air superiority (only one side can have air superiority at a time). But the sentence says without you've no chance to win. mmmm... perhaps you just lose to yourself?

Still catching up with reading all the great posts above.

Kierk at 3:24 PM, 3 Jan 08 re the three insurgencies. Laser sharp insight! And so well summarized in the last paragraph.

I once wrote a poem
about a black stallion
cavorting in his harem of foam

Being here amongst the fliers
I'm inspired --

Free Form Sky Writing

Clouds - nuvola - nuvolo - nuvole

Volare - to fly
Nudo - naked

Clouds - The flying nakeds

Nube - cloud, haze, mist
Nubile - unmarried girl, marriagable girl

Nuvole - like flying virgins, nubian maidens

:)

George, BUFF is in a pickle. Wait, he still has his power point laser indicator from the briefing this morning. He'll blind Mr. Falcon with it and reverse. When the cocky upstart regains his vision and recovers his composure the Boeing will be... still reversing and the Packers will be in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl.Aunt Betty's estate will be in probate....

I'm still in baffled mode and thinking I've been had by an impostor. Nobody could be for God's sake that thick.

Yet...

To All : Take in these pix. Think about what a beautiful country we live in and how blessed we are.

Best Wishes, Bill Mecorney

http://home.comcast.net/~bzee1a/

It seems they can, Bill! But as Boyd would say, "He's just strokin' the bishop."

If you've never read Boyd's essay "Destruction and Creation" it is available here. I mention it because it helps explain how people can be that dense.

Misha at the Rott and I have shared a beer while discussing how it applies politically, when the entropy in an invalid worldview causes some people to undergo the sequence Boyd described, destroying their old model and taking the set of real-world observations that caused problems to their old view (such as 'why aren't communists rich if their system works?') to create a new mental model.

In online debates you can almost see it happen as one side produces examples that to them fit a consistent and general pattern and the other side doubts the examples (demanding links), and then still processes them as exceptions, mentally tagging each one as a unique anomaly, aberrations in the way they think events should unfold.

Hee, GT, images of Faye Dunaway's chess distractions in The Thomas Crown Affair come to mind.

Bill M - which pix?

BR- my Bad. My link went to some mysterious clearinghouse for clearance and approval. I guess. My brother sent me the link with some of the most breathtaking snaps of Fleetweek (S.F.)I have ever beheld. I am not exaggerating.I think the issue is that the photog., whom I do not know, is offering to sell prints. A commercial faux pas, on my part, and if Bill W. reads this, may I fall on a sword of your choosing. I hope they end up here, but if not, I apologize to all.
Aside: why the Navy continues to perform at Fleet Week, for nothing, while S.F. people make millions, and the cretins in City Hall call for
defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan (by official proclamation) merely emphasizes the Class of the military, and the lack thereof of the chosen ones.

Dear Bill, could you just copy the url here and we can go there directly? Last night, my post with 3 links to bikini pix was held over, but eventually did post.

I have many good memories of the beauty of SF, despite the bleeding hearts there. (They really wanted to see blood run in the streets of my birth country and when the changeover happened peacefully, they were probably disappointed.)

These are worth waiting for, I don't feel right about evading what might be a Houserule. You know, a dinner party on private property. This is a very cool site, I think Whittle is an amazing writer, and His ancestor may have invented the jet engine, Google Frank Whittle.

Hee hee, Bill, Speedy Gonzalez couldn't wait -- so I googled Images for SF Fleet Week. Ahhhh! Love those Blue Angels. And the beautiful Bay - I used to kayak there.

PS - Did you type the href code to link the pix in your 6:29 pm post or a separate one?

I think Boyd was brilliant and his work is easy to get; he provides sequentially ordered and increasingly less
disordered surmise. There is a difference, really, though the statements appear to say the same thing, but in "different" ways. His conclusion about observed and observing is prescient.They describe not entropic
states, but "directions". There is no such thing as a point in space, because there is Time. (Thank You, Albert) What we "see" as a "point" is really a "smudge" We can't even
imagine a "point". We are not in a system that allows
"pointness". There is coalescence, having to do
with matter, and resolution, having only to do with Light. There is a saying,
actually my own, "To find a solution it is necessary to discontinue looking or seeking". It is organizational perception that creates dissonance and forecloses the imagined "solution" . This is where it gets spooky. Also why Eastern thought is so seductive. To prevail, become what you are looking at. This is why I have an intuitive unease with mathematics. It is only a language and carries only logic and not intuition. Perception "isolates" the observer and "shelters" the perceived. If we seek the truth, we must travel to where we have never been. Because we seek it, we prevent it. Seeking,
"observing", destroys what we seek. It isolates
from the "wholeness" of the system that is being
"observed". With all humility, I think it may be why Einstein was so upset with his two theories.
The "very small" and the "very large". To even state that implies that there is a division between the two, which is impossible. Demarcations don't exist, and cannot be observed,
neither can they be imagined. If I am correct that "points" cannot exist, it follows that there
are never "pieces", neither is there a "whole".
This is a complicated and perhaps insane way of stating that "observation is definitely NOT
reality" Think of it this way: There is never
a 90 degree angle anywhere on a sphere. It is impossible. That is fact. From that it is correct to say "there is no 'straight' line anywhere, because that is also true." The more organized a system "appears" and the more finely you try
to "measure" it the more the reality becomes
disordered, until the flow reverses and the opposite case prevails.

When I first read Boyd, I was annoyed at his
departure from combat and flight into warfare in general, then into something I balked at completely, something that I thought I wasn't interested in at all. At times I actually despise
his work, because I feel I was seduced by his
skills in flying and his grasp of conflict into the arena of consciousness and philosophy, which I actually prefer. George, your post about otherwise bright people believing (denying) what appears to be obvious got me started, and I thank you. I am too old to give a rip anymore
if others find me crazy. At any rate (that is an expression given to me by a chemistry professor
and may be the most profound phrase in my vocabulary, such as it is), it's late and I am
retiring. What a pleasure to meet you, I hope we meet again.

George Turner

I can't believe I put your name in "Posted By"

I told you it was late, Bill.

Bill,
for the most part, a great post on John Boyd and the OODA theory. The reality is that the USAF as an institution has paid short shrift to his ideas while the USMC has tried to understand and employ his concepts. It is easier, I think, to think of the OODA Loop in the context of tactics and strategy and a litle harder in a dogfighting context.

As regards Mr. Crierie, I have no desire to get into a long winded discussion with you sir, but what you say sounds to me as a lot of theory in defense of a widgit or a pet rock. I have not seen a single commentator say that they ever flew B-52's and I did as a Nav and a Radar Nav and there is no way, EVER, I would want to go up against an F-16, whatever Block it was. By the way, the highest I ever flew in the BUFF was 49,000 because above 50K, you needed to wear a pressure suit, something that has not been worn by line crews in a very long time, if ever. The concept of a BUFF outmanuevering a fighter or interceptor, at altitude, is kind of silly.

Yeah, we had an EWO and yeah, we had Gunners back in my day, but the whole idea was to avoid the engagement, not to get into a close in fight.

This is a great (if not long!) thread. Good job Bill.

Otto

as an ex-RCAF guy (albeit a medic), I well remember the CF104 guidked missle. We lost a couple every year at the air weapons range near my home in Alberta. Of course, it was the right tool for the job of defending that long, long DEW line. I, too, don't remember every seeing a Starfighter jock smiling .. pretty intense guys, the ones who survived.
I can't say I was surprised to see they took another US cast-off as the replacement ... although seeing the CF5's stand up and shoot skyward at Cold Lake was always cool ... but I don't remember a lot of those jet jocks smiling either.

I have to admit I goggled a bit at the figher vs. BUFF crap ... 'cause the first picture that entered my mind was a Washington state air show and teh fireball caused by the BUFF driver who thought he could stant the Big Ugle on it's wing at slow speeds. Too bad his whole crew had to pay for that error in judgement.
And as far as reading the BUFF at 60,000 feet ting ... my first thought was Powers/U2.
Talk about comparing Apples and Uzis!

To go kinda nonmilitary on the whole fighter vs. interceptor vs. kite thing ... it's usually handy to have a jack-of-all-trades around ... but when you want a problem at a nuke plant fixed, you usually call an expert who may not be able to win every game of parcheesi ... but can fix the leak before the system goes critical ... as a OODA (sorta) trained guy out here in business-land (Six Sigma black belt in MAIC (measure, analyze, improve, control) as well as DFSS (design for six sigma) ... I can tell you that a Swiss Army Knife is cool, but I'll take a sharp knife for slicing and scissors for cutting any day. The last thing I want to see is a plant blowing up because some clown used vice grips instead the appropriate torue wrench and socket.

Back after the weekend!!

* BR - Like your chess scenarios!

* BR passing around goodies - Hey, does that feel like old times around here, or what?

* D4, - If BR's stepping up like that... maybe you could use an extra hand around the Lounge?

* George - the History Channel piece - Holy Crap, yer killin' me man!

* Mr. Mecorney - THANK YOU for those pics!!!

Thanks to those who finally just said "BUFF v. Falcon...????? WTF?!?!" - I didn't want to go there while everyone was trying to out-tech each other.

- MuscleDaddy

More on Boyd-

To keep it short, Boyd's genius is a tough wrestle.
My bottom line is this: It is in the nature of things that battle can get arcane
and bogged down. Extending Boyd's concepts forces one to look at the arena as a"whole space". If you "become the enemy", get in his head, you are his twin,and all that it necessary to win is:

BETRAY HIM. Stop thinking. If you are plugged in completely, you need only
ACT. Short circuit OODA, go directly to "A". There's alot more, and I think people will be discussing this genius' work for decades. Or they won't, at their peril. To anticipate argumentative responses from wonks like Ryan,this is about COMMAND, not execution. A pilot (and his crew) are the "whole space".
So extend the theory to larger and larger arenas, as did Boyd. The reason the marines love Boyd and the AF
denies his work? The Leathernecks want win, the AF wants to survive. A warrior knows the difference.

To Pete- I was tempted to link the video of that incident, as I recall, the pilot was wing commander.

To me, the fighter is the dancer on the floor, the B-52 is the fat lady serving punch.

Bill M. ... I have to admit that the closest I've gotten to a Big Ugly Fat Fu ... Flyer ... is standing under one at the SD Space & Air Museum ... but I'd have to second your mental picture ... and note that Buffalo and Wallow are frequently found together. I find it hard to get an mental picture at all when trying to juxtraposition B-52 and "nimble."
But then I'm neither an aeronautics engineer, nor do I play one on TV ...

PETE - I reflected on the "FAT LADY" crack, and while I know it is apt, I fear some may conclude I am dissing fat ladies. Or Big Ugly. Neither. The punch lady
is someone's Mom and may have
10 Bravo in Judo. Likewise, BUFF is everyone's Momma and has a fat belly full of Plutonium and Lithium Hydride. Armed with the knowledge of such possibilities, I will avoid both.
The former out of respect, and the latter out of respect and knee twitching FEAR. That was the mission.

Aside to George T.: I wasn't going to say anything, but your pilot's "Belly shot" was
maybe ill-advised, given the contents of Ryan's steed's belly. Did your pilot remove his shoes before he "trespassed" in BUFF's airspace?

Hi, everyone :)
Bill M at 10:43 AM - love it! The "whole space" concept, everything you wrote there. Because I'm a big spirit with a gentle female body, I often have to remind myself of that concept when things get tough.

Ahhhh - the pix! What sweet distraction from my work :)
I'll keep the videos for dessert!

Great post, thanks.

But I'm especially NOT convinced we needed more "boots on the ground" from the beginning.

The Awakening was led by Sunnis, who needed time to decide AQ was worse than mostly-Christian America.
They also needed the Rumsfeld 'Light Footprint', so they understood the reality that what happened locally, in Ramadi or Fallujah say, was NOT really the responsibility of the USA. It was the responsibility of the local Iraqi leaders.

Since we wanted Liberation, it was always going to be the case that some Iraqis would be the local leaders. We have been waiting for Iraqis to self-select anti-AQ leaders who are sufficiently OODA competent to survive under AQ domination, and to fight back.

I think we could have helped more, earlier, but we needed better doctrine. "More boots" is not better doctrine. More local decision making of Iraqs, with US advisor vetoes, might be. Earlier local elections of Sheik-based city councils, might be.

MORE MORE computer supported intense Arabic (and Farsi) language training for troops might be.

While I believe all of these would have been improvements, it's not certain.

Shab bekheir, TG :)

****

Looking at those beautifully synchronized Blue Angels, I wonder if pilots have telepathy with each other. And if they have it with enemy pilots, it could be a great disinfo tool. Camaraderie - disinfo - think nothing, like breaking off. Even if not, just letting the enemy know our pilots have such abilities, could cause the enemy pilots to doubt their own OODAs. That leaves our pilots free to enjoy the clouds :)

PS - In my language, "bekheir" pronounced with its soft "g" sounds like the word for desire: "begeer" - so I always giggle when I say "sobh begeer" or "shab begeer"... those wonderful desires of the morning and the night.

Airfoil at 7:11 AM 6 Jan 08

Here's a Feather Six joke for you:

I discovered a sixth gear on my F250's dashboard tonight. It's over there where it says: Heat - Vent - Flr/Defrost.
I kid you not, it suddenly went into a smooth glide!

Tom Grey,
Thank you, Jebus, for a comment that had nothing to do with AIRPLANES!
Did you people not read the title of this post?
"Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture"
More boots wasn't our shortfall. It was our lack of strategy from the beginning.
We were indeed met with flowers and dancing, but we didn't have an idea how to proceed from there.
We followed centuries old traditions and manned fortified bunkers, inside a country that we had already conquered. We walled ourselves off from the populace with no possibility to Observe or Orient. Consequently all of our Decisions were based upon what happened yesterday. Thus, all of our Actions were two steps behind.
The Surge changed the strategy and brought us inside the AI loop. We were no longer behind the wall: We were engaged. We were no longer conquerers: We were liberators. That has made the difference.

BR,
You have got to join us in the Lounge. We hang out, shoot the sh_t, and kick back a few. I try to man the bar between 7 and 10 central.
Which means it's way past my bedtime.

D4, I'm a nightowl - glad to see someone else is still awake :)

PS - Thanks for the invitation! I guess you didn't see me, in my bhurka, quietly admiring the statue.

PPS - Is smoking allowed there? Wearing a bhurka is about the only way one can smoke cigars these days :)

But I'm especially NOT convinced we needed more "boots on the ground" from the beginning

I beg to differ. It was a huge strategic mistake to set up guard posts around the oil ministry whilst leaving the rest of Baghdad (most of all, the national museum) with no protection. That made it appear that the U.S. was there to grab the Iraqi oil fields rather than liberate the people and had no concerns about the destruction of their national identity. Too few soldiers were then put in police positions without nearly enough cultural education. For example, it was never explained to the initial wave of troops just how important the front gate/door is in an Iraqi home (they put a goodly percentage of their resources into this structure to keep their family safe). Rather than knocking and waiting to be let in (we were, after all, theoretically "guests" in their country), the troops would use vehicles and battering rams to knock them down, causing them to be badly damaged and rendering them useless. This was followed by seeking out and removing small arms that were traditionally kept for family protection (and rightly so, as we soon wittnessed in the wave of sectarian kidnappings and murders), and often concluded by taking away the men of the house for prolonged periods in harsh prisons (leaving their womenfolk unprotected in the meanwhile). A lack of understanding of the very basic security needs so prized by the Iraqis ended up turning a very pro-American populace against their sincere but over-stretched liberators. If there had been enough troops, the hurried, heavy-handed tactics of insecure soldiers would rarely if ever happened. The fault of the "light, fast military" was never its ability to travel and take targets rapidly, it was (and always will be) about dealing with the civilians in the aftermath, in which it fails miserably.

Interesting. Were you there? Tell us more.

Did you read Bill Whittle's article entitled "Strength" and the Marines of May '04?

Gentlemen, I must confess my total ignorance in the realm of actual training, exposure, experience, or virtually anything to do with combat flight, weapons systems, psychology, and on, and on, and on. No bout adoubt it!

Some time ago, however, I read a series of fictional novels by Dale Brown that were pretty enthralling, and interesting. From Flight of The Old Dog to Dreamland, if memory serves me right, they posited the venerable "BUFF" as the ultimate Sky Battle Cruiser, capable of such defensive maneuvers and EWF/Missile Firepower as to be nearly invulnerable.

I take this opportunity to ask for some education. How plausible were/are those Super-MegaFortresses Dale Brown spoke of? Just curious.

Bill,

Marvelous essay! Easily the most vivid depiction of OODA that I've seen. Part 2 might be better framed within Boyd's insurgency / counterinsurgency PISRR model. Dan at tdaxp has a nice analysis here, among a number of pieces he's written on the subject.

Mike

Dear BR - My routine is to read a thread or post until I sense the need to write. Sometimes this finds Trouble.Trouble is what makes the swordless warrior smile, and not because he is cocky. Another reason why Mr. Whittle's website is not only elegant, but a perfect metaphor for how we act as a Nation. I'll start by saying
something you may find odd. The energy that potentiates a solution comes from an almost always unexpected place. The SW (swordless warrior) is a Leader. A leader is aware of the "enemy". Wait, let's call the "enemy" something else. Let's call thechallenge "Gestalt" and the SW "solution". Now, the Blues. I was never comfortable flying formation.I'm old enough to realize now that all humans play different instruments, and some play the Hornet. For a little deeper spot in the pond, think about Yeager.He flew alone. I've had the honor of speaking with him,he is the epitome of self-assurance. Could he do what the Boss does? I think, no.To fly as a Blue Angel means feeling a different universe, knowing a different vocabulary. Focus? No, focus is for something else. To fly like that means
awareness cubed. It's different than focus. When flying a four ship, diamond or line abreast the "whole space" is the diamond. Because
the airspace is empty, you are able to fly like a tenor can sing at the Met, no worries. This potentiates freedom. The Angel isn't necessarily the top gun, the good stick, the ace. He is a man or woman who knows about teamwork and
artistry. It is my humble opinion that the best Airman may never be known to us,it may have been someone like a Picasso, or Horowitz.
Or Babe Ruth or Didrickson. Awareness of your own soul and the confidence to deal with fear, and Lead, those are the Angels.

BR
As much as my pride would have me reply,"Yup, that's exactly what I look like."
It won't change the fact that no, that ain't even close.

That's the statue that D-4 threw up there for me butt,...heh heh- It does bare a striking resemblence to my Brother.

Anyway, thanks for the pretty pictures.
They were wearing swim suits?!
Guess I'll have to take another look at those. 8~o

BR, George, Pete, D4-

One full week. My guess is that for many of us: education, aha, annoyed, someone doesn't like endless airplanes, indignation at a bright man who spouts the ridiculous. Swordlessness. Metaphor. The Human Brain operates in metaphor. What is that, WhatISTHAT. Whatis it like, have I seen it, is it dangerous, Oh not so much, OK back to my coffee.The bottom line the Sine Qua Non for me. Swordlessness, "Empty Hand",
Zen, Einstein.

E3- The arena (battlefield)
Whittle- the catalyst, (Gen. Pose)
Boyd- the premise
Humankind-the tenor with bad teeth (GOD bless you Daddy)
Quanta- Warfare (disorder)
Relativity- Peace, order
Tactics- the working mind
Swordlessness- entropy

Yin- see Yang
Yang- see Yin

The empty hand is on the arm
of the warrior, the one who isn't chained to thinking, the one who.... is, and knows.

Low on fuel, everything looks_________ from here, Airfoil out.

Bill --

Excellent post, as usual. I do, however, have a nit to pick -- and it's a damn big one.

A popular meme has it that the war in Iraq was horribly mismanaged from the start, and that only upon Gen. Petraeus arrival have operations been conducted properly by someone who knows what he is doing.

This is far from true. Gen. Casey, who implemented the enclave strategy, is now the Army Chief of Staff. That doesn't seem like punishment for a job poorly done. (Please, no comparisons with Westmoreland.)

I would maintain that the "surge" has been planned for YEARS, and that Petraeus was "tagged" for the job a long time ago.

The idea that Petraeus is some maverick, bucking the system, makes for a compelling story, but one that is a myth. Gen. Petraeus did NOT come out of nowhere; after successfully implementing COIN operations in Iraq at a location where they could be applied, he was shipped to TRADOC to "write the book" on "the surge", and then sent back to Iraq to execute it.

But why wait so long? I would say to shape the battlespace to a condition where "surge" operations would work. A big part of the "surge" is that Iraqis themselves would have to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting. Three years ago, they couldn't do that.

Alec Rawls at Error Theory puts it much better than I can, here: http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2007/12/rumsfelds-victory-retrospective-look-at.html

Dougman, hmmm, deliberate typos are delicious! I'm blushing under my bhurka, 'cause that's the part I most admired :)

BR,
Sorry you missed last call last night.... er.... this morning. I should have sent out the invite earlier. The Chase Lounge is always open, I just can't man the bar at all hours.
The Lounge grew out of the collective imaginations of the commenters here back in May. We envisioned a place to gather and kick back after a hard day of slaying idiotarian dragons. That comment thread is posted over there and it's a real blast from the past.

Bill Mecorney said,
"Whittle- the catalyst"

I find a definition of;
catalyst/ The enzymes in saliva, for example, are catalysts in digestion.

I raise my glass to you all who virtually spit in my eye.

Words with Meaning, what a concept!

Okay, Replying to Bill now.

Fighters and Interceptors have fundamentally different missions, as presumably you know. The job of the fighter is to own the airspace over the battlefield to allow Supply, Interdiction and Close Air Support missions. The role of the interceptor is to intercept. It is to fly high and fast and destroy incoming strategic bombers with missile fire.

Actually, the roles are pretty much blurred; because there's so much crossover between the two roles. If you want to fly high and fast, you need a powerful engine and a big wing for manouverability up high. Those characteristics, when you apply them to a fighter; result in a good load carrying capacity for bombs and rockets when deployed in the ground strike role. Plus, if your aircraft flies higher and faster, you gain significant advantages in air to air combat:

Here's a scan from the Sparrow III (AIM-7C) Standard Missile Characteristics Sheet that I found at the Naval Historical Center in DC:

Link

You can see how the higher you go, the longer the Sparrow goes; at sea level; about 6.5 nm, 30k; about 8.2nm, and at 50k, 12nm. It's why the AIM-54 Phoenix has a range of 100+ nm when fired from a F-14; but when they were studying a "Sea Phoenix" design for ship defense, it's maximum range was only about 20~ nm.

Even in visual combat; the higher flying plane has advantages; the slower, lower flying plane has to waste speed to get up to the higher altitude; and when it gets up to that altitude, it will be slower than the higher flying plane. It's why on the Eastern Front, (I can no longer recall which side, Russian or German issued it), there was a standing order to decline interception/air to air combat if the other side was flying a couple thousand feet above you. This has become a bit less important with the widespread introduction of afterburners, but those significantly increase your fuel consumption, nothing is ever free.

What's really come to differentate the interceptor/fighter role really; has been their electronic fit; and that costs money, not only to build it, but to integrate and debug it; for example, the F-4C Phantom, of it's $1.9 million price; 90% went towards airframe+engine costs. Later, as the production line got more used to building Phantoms; this cost percentage went down to 86-75%. On the opposite end; the F-106A cost $4.7 million, and only 50% of that went to the Engines+Airframe. (!)

The prices are from Marcelle Knaack's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF US AIR FORCE AIRCRAFT AND MISSILE SYSTEMS - Volume 1, by the way.

You can download both volumes in the series from here (legally, because it was published by the GPO, and done under contract to the USAF, so it's public domain).

Vol. I: Post-World War II Fighters, 1945-1973
Vol. II: Post-World War II Bombers, 1945-1973

I must warn you though; the file sizes are quite big; so don't expect a quick and fast download...

Boyd's thoughts -- what you refer to as the "cult of manouverability" applied to fighters -- as you should well know. From the beginning you have tried to discredit these ideas by picking the flight regimes where fighters are not intended to be flown.

Flight regimes that we've abandoned, pretty much, as a result of the emphasis on manouverability above all. The old F8U-3 Crusader III fighter that the Navy turned down in favor of the Phantom, could sustain an altitude of 65,000 feet; with a zoom climb capability to almost 90,000(!) feet.

Of course, such mind bleeding performance, even if we had the F8U-3 today, wouldn't be available to us. I did not know, until Mr. Pernotto said so in a comment that pressure suits (which are required for operation above 50,000 feet by USAF regs), are no longer worn by line crews. So, this pretty much limits our aircrew to operations below the 50,000 foot limit in peace time; and you need to train for how you fight.

You could have made your point even stronger by raising the fight a few hundred thousand feet and compared the performance of the F-16 to various satellites.

That's actually quite funny and leads me to a sort of tangent; which I don't think you would mind.

It's actually harder to shoot down a F-16 than it is a satellite; because the F-16 can manouver. The satellite can't (excepting small orbital changes with it's thrusters; which can't be refilled). In fact; the more advanced and powerful a SAM system is, in order to deal with fast and high flying targets; it gains an ABM/ASAT capability; because hitting a manouvering target is much harder than hitting one that's moving in a precisely calculatable (Ballistic) course. Way back when we were developing PATRIOT (back then, it was SAM-D); we had to significantly cool down the system to comply with the ABM treaty. Now, we're putting that capability back into the latest Patriot models.

The missions that a fighter is designed for -- air supremacy to protect Supply, Interdiction and Close Air Support -- is not a high altitude mission. Again, you must know this.

Of those, only "Close Air Support" has traditionally been a low altitude mission; the air supremacy mission has always been about flying higher and faster, even during World War I; manouverability at the expense of everything was seen as a dead end; it's why tri-planes never caught on widely; the Red Baron's famous Dr I triplane was considerably slower than contemporary Allied fighters in level flight and in dives.

Likewise; removing the turbo-supercharger (needed for good high altitude performance) from the production P-39 Airacobras turned them from good aircraft into rather poor aircraft useful only for ground attack missions in USAF service.

Further, you must know that the interceptor mission -- the aircraft design you seem so enamored with -- is essentially an obsolete mission. What used to the called the "High, Fast Sanctuary" -- that is, the 60,000 ft flight regime which is the only place your argment makes sense -- is no longer a sanctuary and has not been since the sixties when SAM's elimated that refuge.

Absolutely wrong.

If Surface to Air Missiles eliminated the "high and fast sanctuary" so decisively, then why did it take the North Vietnamese some 2,000~ SA-2s fired from the most heavily networked and defended area in the world at the time; the environs of Hanoi, to inflict 3% casualties on B-52s flying at 35,000 feet and in extremely predictable patterns (as in, very close formations reminiscent of WWII), with their on-board EW not working right, during the Christmas Bombing of 1972?

Not to mention the thousands of SAMs that were fired at the SR-71 during it's career blazing over North Vietnam, Libya, etc and a whole host of fun spots. There's a video out there somewhere, released by Aviation Weekly. In the video, an SR-71 is overflying Libya going high and fast; and the guys on board detect a SA-5 launch. The pilot and the RSO then spend the next twenty(!!) seconds to debating the merits of the two methods of SAM evasion while flying very high and fast (increase your speed or change your course by 5 degrees); they finally decide on increasing their speed by 100 MPH, causing the SA-5, which had been fired at a point in space where the SAM battery's computers had calculated the SR-71 would be, to miss completely.

The reason for the SR-71 being virtually immune to SAMs, even the more advanced SA-5s, comes down to the kinematics of the missile.

A lot of people look at the range and altitudes for SAMs, like for example, the SA-2; which is listed by most reference books as having a range of 30 km (19 miles) and a maximum altitude of 82,000 feet; and assume that it means you can hit anything flying at 82k feet within that 30 km radius.

In reality; missile performance is a bit more complicated than that. The altitude usually listed for missiles is the maximum altitude the missile can reach if it's fired straight up, and comes straight down. It's effective engagement area at that altitude is very small. Also, "range" is the maximum range the missile has if it's fired on an optimal course at the optimal altitude. If the poor missile needs to manouver to hit a target that is also manouvering; then it's range drops a lot.

There's also the fact that most SAMs are basically fin manouvered (some newer ones have vectored thrust; but that only lasts as long as the engine is burning) -- and the majority of SAMs have very small fins/control surfaces -- because large fins create drag down low, and because they make it hard to deploy the missiles in compact launchers, like those found on modern SAM systems. So once the missile gets up to altitude; it can't manouver very well, compared to it's target.

You must also know that enemy air threats have, for at least forty years now, not been strategic bombers but low-level fighter-bombers targeting our ground forces and enemy fighters that seek to deny us the control of the battlespace.

Actually, the evolution of hand-held MANPADs and mobile SAM systems such as the Russian TOR-M1 have pretty much closed off the low and fast route; there's a reason the A-10 operates much higher now than it did before. Plus, flying low and fast opens yourself up to just about everything there is in the enemy inventory; even rifle caliber fire from people firing randomly into the air; bird strikes; and flying into the ground.

Looking at the aircraft loss rates from Korea (a nice SAM free environment) is instructive; if at times gruesome reading:

122 F-84 Thunderjets lost to AAA.
113 F-80 Shooting Stars lost to AAA
172 F-51 Mustangs lost to AAA.

Vietnam was even more gruesome; we lost 2,076 helicopters to enemy fire in that conflict. (and another 2,000 to accidents of all types; for 5,000~ total lost out of 11,000~ deployed to Vietnam)

And of course, in a more modern setting; there is the March 24, 2003 attack by a full battalion of Apaches, against the IRG's Medina Division; they ran right into a flak trap set up by the Iraqis; which caused 30 out of the 33 AH-64s sent to be damaged; with the majority having to be scrapped as beyond economical repair even though all but one got home. This was probably instrumental in the decision to terminate the Comanche program in 2004; since the Comanche, while being stealthy; would not have fared any better against such a flak trap than the Apache.

Even in the post-invasion part of the Iraq Campaign; the Army lost 34 helicopters to ground fire in the period from 2005 to May 2007.

Break down was 10 x AH-64Ds, 10 x UH-60s, 6 x CH-47s, and 8 x OH-58Ds. (by the way, the Army also lost about 100~ more helicopters to non-combat causes, including 43~ Apaches).

Army Helicopter Losses

The Army's response to the continuing losses is to of course, fly ever higher over the battlefield; and accept the increased risk from enemy MANPADs, because you at least have a chance of evading a MANPAD, and there aren't as many of them in the hands of insurgents, while on the other hand, the bad guys can easily get their hands on heavy caliber automatic weapons.

Disparaging Boyd's fighter design theories by comparing them to the designs for interceptors is sophistry.

Really? American fighters continued to get heavier and fly ever faster, higher, and further with each successive generation; until Boyd and his "fighter mafia" came along, and convinced people that manouverability was the most important attribute of a fighter, even to the detriment of range, payload, and avonics, and cruising speed; as said in Sprey's own words:

Addition of 3,000 pounds and $3 million per unit to the F-16 changed a great fighter to an “almost great”

Considering that 3,000 pounds added an a whole bevvy of features, turning the F-16 from a day-only fighter into an all-weather strike fighter, I'd say that was 3,000 pounds well spent, even if it meant the F-16Cs manouvered slower than the original F-16As.

So, your point is..? What? Boyd's a fraud?

He's someone who is very overrated; and was part of group of people (beginning with Robert McNamara) who led us down a path which negated our overwhelming technological edge. Lets say for a moment that Boyd never managed to secure any influence with his theories in the Defense Department; and the F-15 turned out to be what it was originally intended to be; a design evolution of the Century Series aircraft; a 60,000 pound fighter with a top speed of Mach 3; as TAC wanted originally. Basically, we get the F-108 Rapier version 2.

Then we get a fighter that cruises a whole mach number higher than all the new Soviet superfighters of the 1980s (MiG-29 and Su-27)'s top speed, and can sustain it, unlike the MiG-25; whose engines burn out above Mach 2.8.

You've also rendered just about every Soviet fighter-carried air to air missile obsolete by flying so high and fast; as well, since we would have been able to improve over the first generation of Triple sonic aircraft like the B-70/F-108/SR-71; and that means; well...I'll let a Soviet Pilot explain.

"First of all, the SR-71 flies too high and too fast. The MiG-25 cannot reach it or catch it. Secondly, as I told you, the missiles are useless above 27,000 meters, and as you know, the SR-71 cruises much higher. But even if we could reach it, our missiles lack the velocity to overtake the SR-71 if they are fired in tail chase. And if they are fired head on, their guidance systems cannot adjust quickly enough to the high closing speed."
-Lt. Victor Belenko

Not to mention there would have been enormous improvements in all sorts of other flight regimes. For example, dropping a JDAM from a F-16 at Mach 0.83 and 21,000 feet yields you a range of 8 miles.

Doing the same from a F-22 flying at Mach 1.6 at 50,000 feet gives you 34.7~ miles.

Dropping it from an aircraft cruising at Mach 3 at 75,000+ feet gives you a range of 93.7~ miles (Cruising speed and altitude of the cancelled B-70 and F-108)

By the way; North American specified the following growth requirements for the B-70 bomb/nav system: operation at Mach 3.5 and 110,000 feet. Even if we cool that down to M3.3 at 95,000 feet; a JDAM dropped at those speeds and altitudes would have gone out to 144 miles.

Pre-Boyd: 2:1 Post-Boyd: 105:0 That's a lot of rafts.

I always laugh when I see the F-15 touted as having an 80-0 kill rate. It's not that hard to rack up impressive kills flying against Arab pilots who are picked for their political reliablity to the regime; and/or blood relationship to the ruler; rather than for merit. Not to mention their equipment was always significantly cooled down versions for export - e.g. the Russians never gave the advanced T-72s they equipped the GSFG with to people like say, Saddam or Assad.

I'll let you guess the major interests of such Arab/African pilots sent to Moscow for advanced flight training to fly the new fighters that their countries have purchased from the Soviet Union.

Yep; acquiring Stereo equipment and television sets using their hard currency; plus chasing Russian women, instead of training. (ref; Fulcrum by Zuyuev; who also detailed an AIDS scare involving a group of pilots from the Congo)

A much better measure of how well the F-16/F-15 would do is during the Cope India exercises we held/hold with the Indians annually.

There are some disclaimers that must be said when mentioning the Cope India exercises - severe limitations are placed upon the USAF in these exercises; all combat is at visual range, or just within; that means no BVR shots; and for the last couple of Cope Indias, the USAF has sent only AIM-7 Sparrows instead of the newer AIM-120s; AWACS support was given to both sides, and the US pilots were fighting at a numerical disadvantage - e.g 4 Indian aircraft against one USAF.

A Good scoop on it.

That said, our pilots found that even the Indian Air Force's MiG-21 Bisons (upgraded MiG-21s with more modern avonics and radars) were still credible threats against F-15s in visual range air combat; which is impressive for such an old fighter; and makes me think of how bloody a full on NATO/WARPAC war in 1985 would have been on all sides, with top of the line Soviet equipment being flown by well trained Soviet pilots (The Soviets had their own version of Red Flag at a place called Mary).

That said; enough plane talk.

Boyd's OODA loop sounds like a good theory for ground combat; manouver, and keep your opponent off center. The problem comes when your opponent doesn't go down or get dizzy like you expected him to do. Several examples from history:

1.) Lee found this out the hard way when he went up agains Meade and Grant; who did not come to pieces after Lee gave them drubbings;unlike the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Lee then found that no matter how much he manouvered, Grant was always there, punching right back; leading to Appomatox.

2.) Hitler found this out the hard way when he invaded the Soviet Union. After managing a stunning victory against France by completely demoralizing the political leadership of France via blitzkrieg; (Note: Poland doesn't count; the Germans attacked with so much overwhelming force, that even with no tanks, they would have crushed the Polish Army) he achieved another string of stunning victories against the Soviet Union; encircling and destroying whole armies in the initial months of the Campaign. The problem came when the Soviet political leadership; led by Stalin, did not go to pieces completely; and seek some sort of harsh settlement that ceded large parts of the Western USSR to Germany; Hitler and the OKW really did not have any other plan than "invade russia, beat them up, win in 6 months"; so when they did not win in six months; it became an attrition battle; which the Germans ultimately lost.

3.) Israel found this out in Lebanon last year. It appears so far, that Olmert and the IDF staff did not have any real plan beyond "hit Hizbollah hard and fast, and then they fold, and we win". So, when Nasrallah did not immediately fold, Israel found itself slowly being sucked into a larger, wider war; which they did not have the political or military backing to successfully accomplish.

4.) The Iraq War - The original plan was to go in, smash up Saddam; install democracy; and leave. Rumsfeld and company didn't count on our opponents in Iraq refusing to give up and continuing to fight us in a campaign of attrition via IEDs and other various means. (remember those early days in 2003; when spokesmen spoke of "just a few dead-enders refusing to give up"?).

5.) Japanese War Plan for 1937; Beat China silly in 3 months or less until China seeks terms. They didn't count on the Chinese continuing resistance to the Japanese, tying up the Imperial Japanese Army in a years' long attritional campaign until the end in 1945.

6.) Japanese War Plan for 1941; Beat America silly in 6 months until America seeks terms. I don't think this one needs explaining.

Unless you can score a major stunning victory, like the Japanese did in 1905 with Tsushima; and one that causes the near complete collapse of enemy political morale (see Tsushima); conflicts inevitably turn into long attritional contests; which favor the side with more men.

There IS a counterpoint to this; one that's very rare; but must be mentioned. If you have a very large technological lead over your enemy, plus the ruthlessness to apply it; you can win despite overwhelming odds in an attritional battle. The best example in history probably is the Spanish Conquest of the New World, especially the Aztecs.

Bill - have I got two books for you. Just read on my trip to Yurp a) 'Black Swan' by Taleb, and b) 'On the Psychology of Military Incompetence' by Dixon (the latter is hard to find, I'll loan you my copy if you'd like)...

A.L.

Dougman- God bless you. In my reality, I haven't picked up a dictionary for 30 years.
Words have meaning, and you demand a specific one, one that suits your reality; Sir you are a liberal. In chemistry, a catalyst is a compound that facilitates or increases rate, without being consumed, or altered.
Like PLATINUM in a muffler.

You have, however, left a rathole to escape through. You can't be one of those liberals at cocktail parties who finish others' sentences, then interrupt because they're the smartest, dontcha know, and have the more compelling point? You don't strike me as such, perhaps yours was an honest attempt at humor at another's expense, another
cheap liberal trick. My attempt was to sum and finis.
I always strive to be kind
and credit everyone present.
My address in the summation
excluded you because you had not responded to me in the trail. Now that I have sensed your presence, I will
allow your entropy into my whole space. My definition
(MINE) of humility is this:
Know the TRUTH about yourself.

er, bill mecorney,

You write beautifully, rhapsodically. I very much enjoyed your comments thus far and hope to see more of you here. If you would allow me to make a small offering though - I wonder if in your exchange with Dougman on the semantics of "catalyst" that perhaps there is a battle perceived where there need be none. My guess is that you may be unfamiliar with the mythology we have developed here on e!3 concerning the Dougman; the eye-spitting phrase is related to his historical role as the voluntary scapegoat for all foibles and failures, ranging from typographical errors to endless rambling, power blackouts, missed orbital rendezvous events, et al. So I suppose it's Dougman's fault after all. But no reason to fall on a sword, even a swordless one. That is to say, given time I don't believe you will find in Dougman an adversary.

Kind regards,

Thanks, Otto, I couldn't figure out how to say that properly.

I also found Coram's biography of Boyd to be an interesting and enlightening read. If you're really interested in Boyd's work (and his OODA loop, in particular), I highly recommend Chet Richard's "Certain To Win." Mr. Richards is one of Boyd's "acolytes" and as the book's cover states, "Certain To Win" is about the strategy of John Boyd as it applies to business. It's a must-read.

Thanks for another excellent set of essays, Bill. I greatly enjoyed your "Silent America" book.

Wayne, since I'm often at a loss to understand Dougman myself, I can appreciate that intended meanings can be elusive given his poetic mode of expression. Indeed I've wished for an interpreter! (not that I feel in any way qualified). Subsequent to the above comments, a little birdie told me (actually, a Scarecrow) that there is a Biblical reference wherein the spit in the eye serves to clear the vision, removing the obstruction of the truth from the seeker. The sense of catalyst is thus translated to the sense of truth seeking that happens at this party, where at its best the conversation opens doors of understanding and resonance between individuals that might never otherwise encounter or enjoy each other. Close enough, Doug?

This is not to say I don't appreciate bill mecorney's platinum catalyst, on the contrary, there are many paths to seek truth, and the bouquet apprehended by the traveler depends on the installed nose. It's all good, and it all helps.

As a turtle whose wearing of the sheepdog armor takes me out of natural element, I have been known to cry wolf on occasion where high speed merely served to add to my confusion. The beauty part is that as I fell over the cliff expecting to land on my back, I found instead a gentle bounce in the safety net of understanding, forgiveness and good cheer, whereupon I was once again free to crawl at my own tempo. The hands on that net have my unrestrained affection.

When I think of our armed forces doing what they must with their human strength and frailty, to be at once strong/powerful and gentle/merciful, I am awed by their devotion and sacrifice. They must find a balance in a much greater chaos than most of us will ever encounter. All gratitude and respect to them.

OK, I better stop gushing before I'm swimming in my own pool.

Sorry, Monster: I'd.

Damn you, Dougman.

Posted by: Otto Gass | January 9, 2008 2:32 PM --

Sir Otto,

Much better said than I ever could, although my thoughts were in a very parallel vein. Expecially in the remarks concerning the incredible restraint, professionalism, dedication, and toughness being shown by our outstanding military and civilian warriors in the front lines battling the jihadists.

I stand, sit, exist each moment, in complete awe of them, and their predecessors. They ALL have my complete admiration! And Thanks.

Sir- Thank you so much for your kindness, and patience.
I love all expression, everywhere I encounter it. To me, everyone is vital to the encountered space. I believe the rascals are perhaps even more germane to the discussion. Without passion (sometimes engendered by a "fool"), men may relax and cease to grow and protect themselves and their loved ones. I have been a student of the Swordless Warrior for three decades. When I encountered Boyd, I inherited a kind of impetus that was unsettling. My mortal fears abide, and patience, though critical, can potentiate scattered and chaotic patterns. When I see our banner, I weep. When I encounter the 19 year old in camo at the airport, I am humbled and grateful. My old man regrets and so many years in abject ignorance of what is truly important, and just, give me shame.

You are a kind man.

Spittle? Platinum? I wasn't within miles of either. My prose is based to a great extent on my unsaid request that the reader indulge my dependence on metaphor, and this style sometimes can't withstand close and overblown demands.

bill mecorney, let us then indulge ourselves in good cheer. The less well I can see detail, the better I can hear the clouds.

I really only meant to say that you are in good company, and welcome, Sir.

Ryan Crierie,
Blogspot is free.

Otto at 2:32 -- so beautiful.

Ryan, I'm learning to fly from this site. So far, I've learned about feathering and propellers and so much more. Tonight, while reading yours, I've learned the pilot's 20-second exercise :)

Bill M - thanks for a new word to my vocabulary: potentiate. (No viagra needed at this site, hey!)

Dougman - I've just begun reading DaddyQuatro's blast from the past and understand your funny role. You must have some big shoulders! (Btw, how does D4 know what your butt looks like? Is he your brother?)

Oh wow, thanks D-4, enjoyed that thread so much!

Otto -"Close enough, Doug?"

Picture me on my knees, arms straight out in the worshipful pose, repeating over and over, "I'm not worthy."

BR
Not blood related but kindred spirits, or "Brothers from other Mothers."

PS-D4 being the articulate and focused smart-ass.
I'm just the dumb-ass :^)

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum:
I was looking for a funny air pilot's sedentary butt flexing exercise, but all I could find were these:
EEE, ARR. SAN, SOE and OE! (That's 1,2,3,4,5 in Mandarin)

PS - #4 looks more like manual feathering to me.

Otto-(and anyone) I recently retired and have jumped into the pond only within the last few months. The Internet is many things, most of which I remain clueless (re:). It is a new environment, I'm learning daily. An acquaintance at the regional daily has told me that the venue frequently encourages disrespect, even aggression
from those who might not be otherwise inclined. An analogy might be the mild-mannered teller who mounts her Subaru and turns into a AAA micro type, all finger and no peace.

I believe that a reasonably accurate personality assessor is "what is their behavior when driving"? If I have an investment in someone, we go to lunch; they drive. Or we Golf, another gold standard assessor of people. (Their integrity, mostly)

My point is: in real life, my circle had major elements of face time, actual speech and hard copy.

So it occurs to me that we're at the Gen1Book1 of a new era. How about:

"Dorothy's Little Wizard Nation Builders and Global Power Projection". Why not? Nobody knows my location, resources or mission statement. The little guy had amps, effects and little monkeys, What's a mother to do?

Dougman? My real person has a set specific parameter: People know me, like me, know how to deal with me. I couldn't have known someone would isolate a puff of my screed and extrapolate. In a different venue, I would
be offended; I was in a different set, and was irritated. My apologies, to your person and your electrons.

Sobh bekheir :)
I posted a funny around 4:44, for your delight, with 5 links, it just hasn't showed up yet.

Holy Crap Batman- It's too long, I can't read that much
at once, I'm a heart patient.

One thing Ryan, just one. Discussing relics, DINOSAURS, does not serve us well. The F-106 was cheap? Right, but that was because it had been developed and became operational as the F-102. They are the same aircraft. The 102 was a major disappointment and was NOT supersonic. With "area ruling" it was born again as the F-106, a better aircraft, but still crappy airplane and major disappointment.

Let me say that in my humble opinion, If you paused to reflect, instead of looking through old copies of TimeLife, you would have by now concluded that Fighter/Interceptor isn't blurred, and hasn't been for twenty years. Big Wing/BigMotor High/Low is the
realm of the Aircraft we all love but can't afford. This is
also to say that mammals can't survive 10G. You are
a representative of the Mootman Academy.

Apology readily accepted and no hard feelings.

It's not the first time I've been hit with Friendly Fire in the blogsphere and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Ryan, Unpleasantries aside, thank you for your work. I appreciate your opinions and research; you are what Shakespeare adored, the FOIL.
(See: Laertes)

Ryan- Except in Politics, it is more important that your audience understand than convert. Your presentation is tantalizing, and other than needing a dedicated proofreader ( a Bison is a NATO named bomber with Soviet genes, the Mig-21 is a Fishbed; F for fighter, B for bomber) I am engaging your surmise with relish.

The OODA force, AS I PROPOSE it, isn't like the force you
envision. It is past the
enemy who isn't lightheaded
or confused, and always will be. OODA is victory prior to
battle, it has prevailed and is seated at the head of the Peace table, awaiting your
troops with doughnuts and handshakes.

Ask Otto, who knows about such things; details are for people who can't SENSE their
dilemma, and crave answers,
because they believe they are at the top of the Gestalt.

Ryan- That was easy. I'm going fishing. You were the Deer. My Army the Headlights.
Fair? Fair is for Liberals.

God Bless You, airfoil out.

Much as I would love to trust my intuition, I don't have the chops to distinguish sensitivity from reflex with any reliability, and find that I am more often mistaken than I'd hoped. We have the quick and the dead; it seems I am destined to watch the world whiz by, yet I am still here. What a wonder.

OTTO- What most people identify as detail is merely a misunderstanding of the underlying genius of swordlessness to wit: reflex and intuition are different expressions of RATE. When reflex is intuition, you CANNOT be defeated. If you must think, you will die.

SPEED IS LIFE.

If I am flying, I am in one space, If I am a tactician, another. I am NOT religious, but everything important about warfare is in the Bible.
"Pride goeth before a fall."

One gets full of himself just before defeat? NO. Hubris disappears just before your melon hits the deck.

And PRIDE is the reason most vanquished are melonless. Now I'm really going fishing.

Well that about covers it. Don't ask me. Looking forward to retirement. Quite a ways to go.

*channeling D4*

MMMmmmm... Melons!

"When reflex is intuition..."

Reflex is always intuition - otherwise, it's not reflex - it's "acting on a thought as fast as you can...after you finish the thought."

True Reflex is acting from the Void - where thought and motion blend to become something that is neither quite one nor the other - and taking on a third, less definable, aspect.

It is more than speed.

Not that speed isn't nice, too.

- MuscleDaddy
[don't be lonely, guys - I'm still around sometimes ;-) ]

No. Intuition is Space, and always foreordains reflex, or movement, or mass.

Airfoil says: Time is God's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once.

You have however, nicely defined TRANSITION.

and, REDUCTION

If I have written anything that would lead you to even think that, I am mortified.

Have to flip every now and then to let off steam. Forgive me.

I associate the term reflex with the physical, temporal phenomena - which although very fast, is not as fast as no time at all. No time at all is the eternal, and the domain of intuition that instantly informs of meaning and relationship.

But such hair-splitting is no doubt more entertaining over a Guinness, no, El Oso?

Ah,
Aerospace, acronyms and aphorisms.
The Zen is the Gestalt.
The way I figger it, you gotta press the trigger when you are aiming at the spot where the bird is gonna be. If you think about it in real time, you will miss every time.
Training can help to get inside the opponents reaction time. Your muscles have memory as well. They will do what they have been trained to do without having to think about it.
Coming down out of the clouds now. Request Turing Test for IFF.
Svinrod Out

OTTO: YES. Except, there was once a "Time" when "Space" wasn't, and all "Mass" was nowhere. Hair split enough?
Because there was a time before that... What a captivating and pleasant person. Is there any thing you write that isn't gracious?

I wasn't going to make the jump to get into that, but thank you for the segue.

Space is the third aspect.

We move through the universe, almost able to get out of our own way.

There is a 'place' for each of us - a 'dent' in the fabric of life, if you will - that is always 'near' us and into which we could fit if only we could get the rhythm right.

When/If we are able 'blend' into a smooth singularity of Being (most often achieved in moments of true Reflex), we step out of 'phase' with those things which are not 'We', and without which, we 'fit' and are able take our 'place'.

In these moments, we cease to move though/alongside/against It All and instead become of it - we become of the fabric of that very thing that all others (to include those who would oppose us) move though/alongside/against.

In those moments, they would as well rail against moonlight.

- MuscleDaddy

Oh, I've left plenty of steamers around. Turtles get grumpy too.

I do enjoy a bit of whimsy now and then. But I do need to keep my bearings. I draw the line at reliably afforded experience. To ask a Zenny-Wenny question like "what is outside outside?" holds no attraction for me. Just as a for instance.

Ah, too true brother!

But we must muddle along as best we can - even in the absence of Guinness.

(we really must arrange some sort of in-person Ejectia-reunion...)

And - to answer your question, Mr. Mecorney -

No. Nothing.

- MuscleDaddy

Packing up to go home now.

I'll make a real attempt to get to TCL tonight.

- MD

At MD's latest, I am flummoxed in a most pleasant way. I am generally uncomfortable when out of phase, as now, but... I will roll that around until I see an attitude I recognize and will recover. I am reminded of how the Hawk looked when I tempted him into my tip vortex while in a Schweizer, and now I know what the raptor was feeling. Hawks can give dirty looks. Pardon me while I reload my wingspan.

Regards, bill

Good people, I just want to say that I've read here for quite some time. I thoroughly cherish the mental agility that, perusing the posts on this site and the comentary section - seconding or rebuttle, exercise within my soul. Today I found an eloquent offering which echos my sentiments concerning our great country and that which we SHOULD be considering as we both visit the polling booths and go about our daily lives. Thank you so much, Chris Keith, for your vibrant and passionate rendering of the feelings residing so unalterably within my heart.

BR,
I glad you enjoyed my little trip down memory lane. At least now we have a place to point when someone asks, "Why does everyone curse this Dougman guy?"

Uhh...heavy. Heavy, to be sure. Now I don;t want to get taken for a troll, coming in and chiding straight off the bat, but these latest posts are rather groooooovy. Bill, I am substantially with you.

But Ryan is who inspired me to put in my oar so let me proceed:

Ryan, maybe we could be doing better in the 50K+ regime...but who else is there? You have the notion we are in the business of shooting down American aircraft. In fact, I believe we are not. Can you specify who it is, the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, maybe Hugo Chavez, who is going to come in at 90,000 feet and eat our lunch in some new and horrible way? We cut our coat according to our cloth.

I believe incidentally that the problem is turbofans. IIRC, turbojets are what work best, really high up. But as you have learned, super high altitude doctrine is so beyond the pale these days that pressure suits are a foreign language to USAF, so who cares?

I would also note that mixing B-70 and JDAMs is, well, not right. The B-70 would have been retired well before JDAM arrived. As for B-58, well, that was retired far far earlier. You note that it is the subsonics which have survived and thrived. Oh and yes the B-1. Pretty pretty plane, that.

Oh also - if this quote of yours was correct:

The F-16 was the first airplane in DECADES to cost *less* than its predecessor, the F-15.

then I can only suggest that in this thinking, the F-22's successor is the F-35, which will indeed be cheaper. But what was your point again?

In fact, just generally - what is your point?

...now Banquo: sigh...haven't the heart. I think he's just a cleverer troll than the first one. But the exercise you get answering them patiently is always healthy. So let me try these two quickly:

1) Double up in Pak/AF? Splendid idea! If you're saying it and not doing it, that is. I don't think you understand how hard it is to do there what we're doing there. Incidentally it is harder now because we didn't coddle some Central Asian dictators, so we have less access than before (e.g. no K2). But sure, let's get into a big mess in Pakistan. You first.

2) Russia in A, B, C or XYZ PDQ regretting instability in the Middle East? When Russia sees a threat of instability in the Middle East, what do they do? They break out the smores and vodka. Have you heard of the Great Game?

It's late and I'm tired (giving blood is a great excuse for bailing on the Internet; you should all try it!), but Banquo, I think you should put up or shut up.

Stop arguing about what is happening and offer real alternatives. Then defend them.

Great essays 1 and 2, Bill. One final insight - if you don't think OODA is catchy, I once saw it referred to as SODA: Seeing vs Observing. In a Guns & Ammo yearly, of all places, IIRC.

Dear Ryan- Good morning. I hate when someone writes,"enough of aircraft".
If one writes of other things, I simply feel they are being dismissive of my passion.We are in Love with the same woman. Odd how that happens.I am comforted that tho I will not have her, neither shall you. The Raptor
(F-22) cannot be criticized, though some years hence, some may rue her appearance as merely a debut. There will be others, faster, higher, farther. Whatever the Airspeed, cruise is cruise. 1+ is 1+.

Your closing paragraph, I thought, was very important.
Your point was powerful and I liked your examples. Fair's fair.

Aside: I have led, facilitated and participated in several thousand meetings of all different kinds of groups. Here, I see there are
long periods of "empty" virtual space. I don't mind that, I have led functions at which I was the only one who showed, and others where several hundred showed up who were not expected.

Perhaps everyone is out hunting, or gathering. I am in those instances "firekeeper" or third watch.

One last itch. Is Bill Whittle Ryan Crierie? In a previous post I brought up
the "Foil". It occurs to me that if Ryan weren't around
He would need to be invented.

My Prose is clipped this morning; it is less florid.
I have finally taken in MuscleDaddy's post. That is one of the most perceptive
and apt descriptions I have heard since I first was exposed to it in Dino Airale's Dojo in 1967.

A gracious good morning to Otto, George, MD,
D4, BR ( thank you),and Dogman. (Dog, I want my
"u" back, I know you took it.)

Woof !

Not retired yet, although I "could" retire next month if I so chose (nope ... 58 is too young to be set adrift ... and I fear the economy will make short work of my savings at the current gas/food prices ... dang you Dougman for the corn farce!)

Therefore I infrequently have time to long in and disturb the peace and tranquility.

Today I had my bi-wwekly NON-ooda meeting ... trying to convince my German counterparts (which would be difficult enough, without MY German parentage making it worse ... 6 squareheads in trigonometrically incremental to 5 squareheads!) they are NOT going to get to restart this project on their terms, more than a year after all the rest of us agreed to the parameters!
Maybe I should say ANTI-ooda rather than NON-ooda.

Tangent ... translation is not only difficult, but also frequently humorous. A question arose about an item which I immediately had a mental image of ... and they had quite a different one.
Those of you who may deal with fasteners from time to time could probably identify a thumbscrew as a fastener with a large knurled head, designed to be "finger" tightened, rather than mechanically tightened.
My German counterparts had a different mental image ... the only common understanding of "thumbscrew" from their side of the ocean .... was a medieval torture device used for mangling peoples thimbs ... and they wondered what kind of operating atmosphere we had "over here".

The joy of positively and uniquely identifying 2.5 million items in 14 languages cannot possibly be imagined. I'm agog at how this is gonna work once I get to Mardarin and simplified Chinese ... maybe I'll just have to turf the whole description thng and just convert the whole mess to pictures ... LOL.

Dang you, Dougman, for this Tower of Babel (or is that babbling?) world!

nichevo,

"Now I don;t want to get taken for a troll, coming in and chiding straight off the bat..."

Then why do it?

- MuscleDaddy

Mr. Mecorney,

Thank you - I was many years internalizing that one to a point from which I could consciously strive for it.

Letting Go can be the most difficult thing to do ... on purpose.

- MuscleDaddy

MD - Like, if you turn everything over and don't let go you are upside down?

Pete, when Monsterette 1 got to go to Europe one summer with a group from her HS German class, they flew in via Amsterdam, and took a trip to the Torture Museum there before going on into Germany.

She told me about some of the things in the museum. [Shudder]

Yeah.

Just like that.

- MD

What to say?

Bill Shoots! He Scores!

Once again, an essay which plows new ground and plants many seeds for thought...

Side Story: I stopped on the way home from work to finish reading the essay before going home. Yes I did sit there at the bar reading an essay. When the Navy Officer, Lt Cmdr John asked what I was reading and I replied Ever herd of Bill Whittle? Yes. Forty Second Boyd and OODA - I read each letter like an acronym - And he looked at me like an alien and laughed.

For anyone planning to discuss this topic using actual spoken words with someone who knows anything about it; it is pronounced UUUDA.

I surrendered my prized reading material and he started reading. Knowing nods, a chuckle and he points to the quote:

That is more than luck. That is more than skill. That is more than tactics. That level of supremacy is the result of the ability to see things in an entirely new way. It is the difference between escaping from a maze you are embedded in, versus finding the way out from one that you look down upon from above.

John took the essay home, read it, and shared it with both an F16 pilot and later a General. Gotta love recycling!

A thought from the essay: OODA as applied to a fighter battle, although complicated, is actually much simpler than OODA as applied to an insurgency; which is most likely less complicated than OODA when applied to fighting the MSM.

I have been lurking during the discussion of the performance characteristics, both anticipated and actual, of 50 year of fighters, interceptors and bombers. I was under the impression I knew something of the topic. I was wrong.

When I read Bill's essay, then the comments, then go back to the essay, I get the feeling somewhere in the fine detail of the debates in the comments ..And The BIG Picture is getting lost.

Somewhere, way back, somebody got it. But I can't find it to quote or reference now. It was not about the battle between opposing sides in the aircraft design war taking place West of the Potomac; it was about hope, character, persistence, respect - and what actions WE take in the future.

I have enjoyed lurking in these comments more than I deserve, and they have been both entertaining and educational, but, I suggest you go back and reread the essay and ask... Have we been discussing Forty Second Boyd And The Big Picture or debating the finer points of meeting minutes?

-- Please do not take this wrong. I respect all of you. Bill Mecorney, Well met Sir! As I said earlier, I have enjoyed the discussion. I just wonder what would come of redirecting some of this brainpower toward advancing Bill's concept instead of picking at nits? What Bill does for me is put me in a different frame of mind, looking at things I thought I knew from a different perspective. My question is: How can we combine that with the obvious brainpower of those Bill attracts?

Reread Bill's Essay. How can we apply both what we have learned of OODA and Boyd's determination to what we do tomorrow.. and the next day?

Bill,

You are so smart I just crapped my pants. That was a flat-out brilliant display. Magnificent. I've thought about sixty-second Boyd's theories before, but I've never had them synapped like you just did! Take sixty bows yourself, good sir, and then right back to the desk, likety-split, and let's have more sheer mindpoweringly fantastic and intelligent essays here at the eee! Once again, sir, I am in awe of the way you string these beautifully crafted strings of pearly-wise text into a fashionable river of Nilistic Power and Prosaic Ponderings! Godspeed to you sir, and to yours, and may the God of Infinite Wisdom never leave his perch o'er your majestic mind and munificent mental musings, and may Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, if she ever comes into mortal form, seek her mate in the wise and hyper-intuitive form that is William "El Genio" Whittle!

Unquiet ! - You Lurker! I knew you were there; MuscleDaddy and I have discovered a personal swordlessness. Did you miss my invisible parry re: connectedness? The critical value of every entropic presence in the encountered space? You are too COY! I've been trying to write a structure, a DESIGN/BUILD and critical path for the extrapolation of swordlessness into every connected pair or pod! This Blog is a pristine example of how powerful, wise, and knowing the group grows.Whittle has a Genius for communication; he talks of the sleepless scribe in his HEAD. I have met this man,
it WILL occur to me where it was. His keyboard is plugged into the quintessential
passion maker, the weapon that confers Truth on those in its presence. It cannot be
missed by those present what this blog ordains for the future.
The metaphor is too strong, too obvious, too...POTENTIAL. I'll put this BLOG up against any cloistered, empowered and hackneyed political force from anywhere. Only the Fool considers the TRUTH mysterious.

Aside: There is a true and preordained aura to this. Why would electrons named MuscleDaddy, Airfoil, Otto, Dougman, DaddyQuattro, BR, GT, and all present have this serendipitous,this Beneficent PRESENCE resulting from a brilliant essay about an irritating Colonel who had the large ones to stand a lethal fire breathing Titanium Aluminum and Kerosene Dragon
on its tail, and rewrite the nature of life
on the Planet? We all know. Some of us just don't know we know.

For someone reading this without benefit of a grounding in the prior 300 plus posts, please know that this new paradigm isn't about anything, really, because you haven't seen the original potentiation and everwidening awareness that has created some thing so powerful that when I describe it, I sound, well
lunatic-ish. For me, I read a book in 1967
that described Swordlessness; I was a brown belt at the time, and eager for wisdom ( what a dolt ). Since then, the magic of flight became my own, children, many wonderful friends and wives, more books, a personal spiritual miracle
that repeated and repeated, more reads, military
and other gurus, mentors, et al. I can honestly
say, everything I knew about what is called Swordlessness I knew prior to reading Coram's book and Bill Whittle's distillations. I just didn't know I knew. Epiphany, thou dost feign the Sabre.

Bill Mecorney:

One thing Ryan, just one. Discussing relics, DINOSAURS, does not serve us well. The F-106 was cheap? Right, but that was because it had been developed and became operational as the F-102. They are the same aircraft. The 102 was a major disappointment and was NOT supersonic. With "area ruling" it was born again as the F-106, a better aircraft, but still crappy airplane and major disappointment.

The -102 and the "Six" are very good examples of the problems of developing a bleeding edge integrated weapons system; the "Six" ran over schedule by five years, and it took from 1959 to about 1964 to apparently overcome the initial problems with the entire fire control system complex. Of course; it hurt a lot that this was the late fifties, early sixties; everything was big, vacuum tube powered, and all custom hardware with their own built-in programming; meaning that if you messed up somewhere, you had to spend a lot of money to totally redo the entire thing. Good example was the update to the USN's F-4 Phantoms fire control systems that added the electronic boxes to allow it to drop nuclear weapons - the new boxes never worked quite right with the existing stuff, causing such Phantoms so modified to have all kinds of gremlins in their fire control system, right up to weapons firing by themselves. They never did totally fix that problem.

Modern computers have made systems development and integration a lot easier, since you can quickly reprogram a system to fix bugs, instead of having to replace entire parts. This has the side effect of the aircraft or weapon not working well until you've debugged the software, then afterwards they work with near 100% reliability each time.

A good example is the the AIM-120 AMRAAM program. It might be a surprise to know that the entire program was in danger of cancellation many times. The first pre-production AIM-120As were fired in 1984, but it took until 1991 for it to enter service, because it just didn't work; there were too many bugs with the onboard computers and their programming, resulting in failed launch after launch. When Hughes finally worked out the bugs in the programs, the -120 worked every time.

Your presentation is tantalizing, and other than needing a dedicated proofreader ( a Bison is a NATO named bomber with Soviet genes, the Mig-21 is a Fishbed; F for fighter, B for bomber)

I originally typed in FISHBED; but then I noticed that the Indians seem to call their upgraded MiG-21 (with all the new radars etc) Bisons. Don't ask me why.

Dear Ryan- Good morning. I hate when someone writes,"enough of aircraft". If one writes of other things, I simply feel they are being dismissive of my passion.

Well, there was more to Bill's original discussion of Boyd and the OODA loop than aircraft manouverability; like ground combat; and I didn't want to hijack the blog/thread into a discussion of technical aircraft minituae (although I seem to have done that). There's plenty of room here for everything. And I do like just about every aspect of modern warfare from 1860 onwards; I have a small (decent) library that is slowly growing that focuses on all three (air, land, sea) aspects of warfare.

One last itch. Is Bill Whittle Ryan Crierie? In a previous post I brought up the "Foil". It occurs to me that if Ryan weren't around, He would need to be invented.

LOL, thanks for the vote of confidence. I can categorically state I am not Bill Whittle. Bill has actually piloted general aviation craft, while my aviation experience consists of looking out the window of whatever Boeing product I am flying on at the moment. I have actually thought about learning a little how to fly; but the big problem is I'm deaf since birth (although I do have a cochlear implant), I wouldn't be able to understand air traffic controllers.

----------------------

Nichevo:

Ryan, maybe we could be doing better in the 50K+ regime...but who else is there?

Nobody...right now. Eventually however, someone will build a supersonic business jet; and that's going to be hard for our existing aircraft to intercept, since it by design, will have to fly as high as possible in order to reduce drag to make it economical to operate.

Google News Roundup of SBJ Articles

Also, by 2025; I have no doubt that there will be supercruising fighter designs available on the world export market; the USAF is expecting to still have F-15s, etc in service at that date. If we want to have something available to ensure continuing dominance in the 2025 era; we need to start putting some paper work down for designs, so we can have them available in that time frame.

Plus; widespread supersonic flight by large, heavy aircraft trickles down eventually to the commercial segment of the market, in the same way Boeing used their experience in building large swept wing aircraft like the B-47 into the 707. Speaking as someone who suffered recently through the experience of commercial air, anything that gets me to my destination faster is better.

You have the notion we are in the business of shooting down American aircraft. In fact, I believe we are not. Can you specify who it is, the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, maybe Hugo Chavez, who is going to come in at 90,000 feet and eat our lunch in some new and horrible way? We cut our coat according to our cloth.

The problem is not now; but looking outwards to the the future. We're already seeing advanced air defense systems, such as the S-300 being exported widely - even Libya has ordered some; and while they are not the superweapon that Russian marketing literature claims they are, they are significantly more dangerous than the older systems such as the SA-2 and SA-5 still present in wide numbers around the world. I realize that my explanation does sound remarkably like the campaign literature that Lockheed Martin puts out to sell the F-22 to lawmakers; but it is the truth.

There's also a space angle to this - in the 1950s and early 1960s, the idea at the time was aircraft would fly ever faster and ever higher until they were spacecraft - right now, some ideas are being tossed around in the Pentagon and Think-Tanks for an Ohio SSBN replacement (12 nations now are developing an ABM system; with another dozen nations who want to buy such systems), and they include such things as scramjet-powered drones flying at Mach 12 and around 200,000+ feet. Any higher than that and you're getting into suborbital territory; which may be the idea.....

I would also note that mixing B-70 and JDAMs is, well, not right. The B-70 would have been retired well before JDAM arrived.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If we had built a hundred or so Valkyries, about 50 or so would still be flying today; the high altitude regime is much less stressful on a fuselage than low altitude tree hugging.

As for B-58, well, that was retired far far earlier.

The B-58 was always a problem plane; apparently it was designed such that the skin of the aircraft also formed part of it's structural airframe; which meant that if someone dropped a wrench and dented a piece of the skin hard enough; it's not a simple matter of beating it back into shape with a hammer, but having to send for a replacement skin panel from Convair.

You note that it is the subsonics which have survived and thrived.

Mainly because of the seductiveness of the low-altitude penetration route -- which looks good at first, but when you look at the drawbacks:

-You're putting major stress onto airframes flying in the thick, bumpy air down low.
-You can fly right into the ground accidentally
-Bird strikes (the first B-1B to be lost was IIRC a birdstrike, nobody got out.)
-You're flying into the teeth of just about every air defense system out there:

Warsaw Pact Air Defense Network, Circa 1983-84

If you fly below 5,000 meters (16,000 feet), you're putting yourself into the range of just about every air defense system built; while if you fly above 15,000m (49,200~ feet); you really only have to worry about SA-2s or SA-5s; everything else just runs out of energy far below. You've defeated the majority of the enemy's air defenses without even firing a shot.

Ryan- Just a few things. Fire your proofreader and send him to Delhi then. No shame in flying General Aircraft. I currently pilot what's called a "bug-smasher". I can tell where I've been flying by the entomological forensics done by my #1 son when he cleans the windscreen. In fact, it's mostly the slow bugs I kill; dragonflies and bumblebees.

I have been musing about your thesis (thesae?). Your grasp, scope and data are first rate; what's with the
selection of arcane and less than useful boneyard examples
of fighters? Most pre-date Boyd and his work and for me
there are better data points available. The F-108 was an
example of a "test bed" that should have been sent to Edwards and studied. Of the 180 ordered, two prototypes
were started, one finished and if memory serves, it was flightless. The 102 and 106 to me were place holders, they took up room in the century coat closet. Yes there was an F-107, it was called by an AF Gen. "The best airplane we never bought". This leaves the 101, and the best example you could have used, the F-100. The North American Super Sabre. It was Boyd's
plane, and was ubiquitous, supersonic, well armed and for its day, versatile. It served in Vietnam in many roles. With it, Boyd perfected a manouvre called Flat-Plating. It was the Pose du Jour for the pilots who were given his 6 and then unceremoniously waxed. It is basically a 400knot start
then a series of instantaneous rudder and aileron inputs that allow a full yank on the stick, quickly resulting in what is
called AOA90. Picture a plate
flying forward. but presenting its entire flat
section to the airstream. With it you could bleed energy at alarming rates. You saw it in "Top Gun" when Maverick went geo slow with the F-14 wings. Remember when it pitched up and Tom Skerritt flew past him, Maverick gunselects, stitches his CO and Kelly Mcgillis melts, or whatever you call that? Seriously, the F-100 is a good rep for both of us.

For me, I'd rather Trim for econ cruise and write back and forth more often, with less info to chew per pass.

This about the F-108. If you like to talk about aerodynamics, her wings are fodder for endless animated
exchanges. Delta, "cranked" clipped tip, blended form, etc. In Plan view you can visualize the wings of: Concorde, F-15, Grumman's A-4, F-22, and more. Talking about amazing and leading edge airplanes is fun for me, but in a discussion of Boyd and OODA, he had bogie in sight and his thumb on Mr. Clicker always, I think he loved airplanes, but in my opinion, they were million dollar steppingstones for him and his squadron rats.

Ryan- I forgot to mention something that may interest you. You mentioned General Meade in a prior post. I'm working with a group in Pennsylvania currently, (I live in Cal.); In my group is a gentleman who is a whip on Civil War history. His name is John Meade, Jr. Great(3) grandson of the bespoke Commander. We have fascinating conversations about the General, small world.

Unc' Wyatt-My question is: How can we combine that with the obvious brainpower of those Bill attracts?

You have me tapping my fourhead, with my finger.
Channeling Winnie the Pooh"...Think...think, think,think..."

On the fighter talk and the big picture:

I think the point Boyd was making is that the OODA loop is a way to describe thinking about the problem so you are actually "solving" the problem you currently have. Comparing the JSF to the F-16 is a pointless exercise not because technology has advanced - although thats true of course, but because the problem has changed.

Its why I get antsy at all the democrat "Kennedy" talk and republican "Reagan" talk - Reagan was what he was because he was the man of his day. Trying to replicate his success by taking policies out of some conservative Al - Hadith will fail because its 2007, not 1980. The RIGHT answer to WWRD? is not whatever he did in 1982.

Agility is not the same thing as maneuverability. It WAS the same thing as E-M when Boyd articulated it, but it isn't necessarily anymore because the threat has changed. That is the same point Boyd was making way back when.

Ironically Boyd was calling for Rumsfeld's, leaner more agile (and less expensive) Force back in the 1980's - While the POINT of the Reagan buildup was as much to spend money (to scare the Russians into financial collapse) as it was anything else.

Agility is the ability to redirect your efforts more quickly than your opponent. It comes from buying yourself more options to recover from screwups up front so you don't get emotionally invested in a course that may not work.

In OIF we (the royal, American "we") have lost the big picture because we talk of surges and SASO ops and boots on the ground and argue over who was right when - which doesn't matter bupkiss - rather than what's true now, what do we do next and how do we see this thing through to the end? - which should be a functioning Iraq willing to talk and trade with the world rather than threatening or attacking them.

There is nothing magical about democracy - it doesn't make people any better or worse than they were before - democratic elections often go awry. What IS magical is (classical) liberality and rationality - concepts that are the coin of the realm here - it does NOT mean we always agree or that you're on "my side" it means we have agreed to a set of rules as to how we will treat and deal with each other ESPECIALLY when we can't get along. We don't have to make the whole world "like" us - who care? - it IS in our interest, however, for places that may not like us to do so in a less violent way - So what if France doesn't like us for a while - they aren't going to invade or start killing American tourists - because we have both decided as societies that is wrong - that doesn't stop the random mutant from doing harm of course, but the SOCIETIES don't condone it. we cant say the same of the middle east yet, and until we can, "terrorism" is going to be a national threat.

"and until we can, "terrorism" is going to be a national threat."

Terrorism ,the ME version anyway, hinges on "The Prophet" and the legitimism (spelling?)of said "Prophet".

I would like to know:
1) what, if anything, did he prophesy?

2) Did he die of natural causes? Was he martyred?

3) The biggest question is did he adhere to the two Commandments that "All the Prohpets and ..."(something)hang"

IMHO if he didn't, than he fills the role of the False Prophet" and can be dismissed by all who say "Truth is God."

I'd like to make some comments on Bill's original post; to try and get this back onto the original track

Why is it, do you think, that the United States was able to win a war in Afghanistan in five months, with far, far smaller forces than the Soviets used in the nine years leading up to their ultimate failure?

It’s a complex issue, obviously, but I maintain that it is essentially that the Soviets relied on firepower and attrition – the iron mace – while the US focused tremendous force delicately and lightly and with great precision – the rapier. If the Soviet failure was due to entire armored divisions flattening villages wholesale, the US achieved victory with one or two Special Forces men on horseback calling in precision air strikes that with few notable tragic exceptions hit only what they meant to hit.

I have a copy of the translated Soviet General Staff study done post-Afghanistan on that conflict, I've only scratched the surface of it; but the Soviet Union was a lot more advanced in it's handling of the Afghan war than we generally give them credit for, and they deployed advanced weapons systems to the Afghan conflict, ranging from laser guided bombs from aircraft to guided mortar rounds; following below is a case of them using a guided 240mm mortar round.

Once the Soviet army introduced the Smelchak ('Dare Devil') guided mortar round into Afghanistan, the 2S4 proved effective in destroying Mujahideen strong points and fortifications located in caves and terrain folds that howitzers could not hit. In June 1985, Senior Lieutenant A. Beletskiy employed his 2S4 battery against a Mujahideen stronghold that artillery could not engage. The stronghold was located near the Pandshir valley and garrisoned by Mujahideen of Ahmed Shah Masood (Ahmed Shah Masood became the leader of the Northern Alliance, and was killed by Taliban assassins on 9/10/2001). Lt. Beletskiy used a laser rangefinder to determine that the distance from the target was 2,350m. He then fired a conventional HE spotting round to establish the PGM footprint. He adjusted his firing data and then fired a Smelchak round. It hit the target exactly- the 2S4 battery completely destroyed the Mujahideen stronghold with just twelve rounds.

A good primer on the Afghan war is The Lessons of Modern War: Volume III by AH Cordesman and AR Wagner. Even though it was printed in 1990, and without access to Soviet/Russian sources, there's a lot of good information in the book.

A basic timeline of the events leading up to the Soviet Invasion -- it wasn't as clear cut as it appeared to be.

1955: Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud turns to the Soviets for military assistance after the U.S. refuses. Khrushchev and Bulganin visit Afghanistan. Aid package includes construction of Bagram airport and Salang Tunnel. Afghan officers begin training in Warsaw Pact countries.

1973: Prince Mohammed Daoud overthrows King Zahir Shah while the king is abroad and introduces a pro-Soviet, quasi-Marxist regime, supported by both major factions of the Afghan Communist Party.

1975-1978: Daoud slowly removes key pro-Soviet officers and political figures from his government, seeks closer ties to Pakistan, and increases support for nonalignment.

Mid-1977: Soviets force the two pro-Soviet Marxist factions, the Khalq led by Nur Mohammed Taraki and Parcham led by Babrak Karmal, to reunite as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

April 1978: The army, air force, and PDPA stage a coup and kill Daoud, who has been weakened by economic problems and his failure to provide the army with modern weapons and financial aid. The USSR recognizes the new government. Nur Mohammed Taraki becomes President

May 1978: The new government starts radical reforms that soon alienate a growing number of the people in rural areas.

August 1978: Several senior conservative Moslem leaders declare a Jihad (religious war) against the PDPA because of atheism, "land reform," and imprisonment of political opposition. The Mujahideen start a low-level war against the government using Lee Enfields, Martini Henrys, FN-FALs, and AK-47s

December 1978: Soviet-Afghan Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation is signed. Revolts occur in twenty-three of Afghanistan's twenty-eight provinces.

February 1979: U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs is kidnapped and killed during a rescue attempt by Soviet-advised Afghan security police.

March 1979: Afghan soldiers join revolt in Herat, killing Soviet advisors and Afghan officials. A forced literacy campaign, combined with the impact of earlier attempts to abolish bride prices, sharply increases Mujahideen activity in the Kunar Valley as well as rural unrest and major riots in Herat. The 17th Infantry Division, ordered to put down riots, deserts to the Mujahideen.

May 1979: A brigade of the 7th Division deserts with all its equipment to the Mujahideen.

July 1979: Afghan army nearly disintegrates, torn apart by low morale and desertion; the countryside is largely under guerrilla control. The Afghan army becomes increasingly reliant on Soviet-built armor and helicopters; Soviet advisers number about 1,500.

August 1979: The government's new land reform efforts trigger major new problems with rural unrest. Soviet military and economic advisors have risen from 1,000 to 5,000.

September 1979: President Taraki is quietly murdered by Hafizullah Amin's guards during a coup, just days after meeting Brezhnev in Moscow. His death is announced in October. The Soviets responded to Taraki's murder and Amin's coup with a major military build-up.

October 1979: The USSR mobilizes five Category II and III divisions in Central Asia to allow it to concentrate Category I divisions for invasion.

November 1979: The Soviets create the command structure for the invasion.

Late November 1979: Spetsnaz infiltration of key points inside Kabul begins.

7-9 December 1979: Soviet airborne troops from 103 Guards Airborne Division arrive at Bagram air base north of Kabul.

24-26 December 1979: In a round-the-clock airlift of 75 to 125 flights of AN-22 and AN-12 aircraft per day, with 350 sorties to Kabul and Bagram, 15,000 Soviet troops enter Afghanistan in 24 hours.

26-27 December 1979: Motorized rifle divisions cross the border. Spetsnaz forces, sometimes using civilian clothing and DRA uniforms, seize key check points and work with much larger airborne forces to seize chokepoints and C3 facilities. Soviet military advisors immobilize key equipment and neutralize key DRA personnel.

27 December 1979: "President" Amin is killed by KGB Spetsnaz and Soviet airborne forces. His palace is defended by eight T-54 tanks and troops, and an initial Spetsnaz raid fails. The Duralamin Palace is overwhelmed by two battalions of Soviet paratroops. Babrak Karmal is made president. The four Soviet motorized rifle divisions already pouring into Afghanistan are "invited" by Karmal to help secure the country.

6 January 1980: Soviet military units have secured most key cities and important military airfields. These airfields are being fortified with SAM batteries and equipped with modern command and control facilities.

9 January 1980: Soviet Antonov aircraft make 4,000 separate flights into the capital during the first week of January. Soviet central Asian troops start to be replaced by more politically reliable and combat-ready troops from the western and eastern USSR. Large-scale defections take place from the Afghan civil service. It becomes increasingly apparent that Karmal's government is viewed by many Afghans who formerly supported the PDPA as a Soviet puppet regime.

--------------

You can see how even before the Soviets invaded, the Afghan government in Kabul had managed to alienate a big majority of the population with reforms which we'd consider justified; such as eliminating bridal prices, and mandatory literacy reform; hence even if the Soviets had behaved more like we have in Afghanistan, they wouldn't have had enough grassroots support to reduce the insurgents to a minor annoyance. In a way, we were pretty lucky; we came in 2001, after the country had been torn by 20+ years of near continous warfare, causing war fatigue to set in amongst the population, and to oust an increasingly unpopular government (the Taliban); who had managed to alienate a lot of the rural population with their increasingly strict application of Islam.

That said, we did manage to keep our initial standing with the Afghan population high, mainly because we didn't resort to the increasingly brutal methods that the Soviets resorted to as their war dragged on. That said, when I read this account of Soviet Operations in Afghanistan in Zuyev's Fulcrum, I was reminded how similar it was to our efforts in the famous Blackhawk Down mission in Somalia:

Boris must have known the situation when he rolled in on his own bomb run. The enemy was wide awake and had definitely gotten the range. They were so confident of shooting him down that they didn't even use one of their valuable missiles.

Boris's plane exploded even before he pulled out of his dive. The tumbling fireball smashed into the ridgeline across the valley from the enemy fort. Eduard saw the ejection seat fire from the tumbling mass of debris. But he couldn't be sure Boris's parachute deployed before impact. The surviving pilots definitely saw an orange and white parachute canopy crumpled on the rocks not far from the smoke of the crash site.

They called in an Mi-8 rescue helicopter and requested more fighters to suppress the ground fire. Two helicopters answered the call. After the surviving MiG-23 and the Su-17s made strafing runs on the enemy ridgeline, one of the Mi-8s flew across the valley to strike the enemy bunkers with its own rockets and machine guns while the second helicopter flew straight toward the parachute on the ground.

The helicopter pilots had a grim responsibility. According to Soviet military regulations, a man's family did not receive death benefits or a pension if his body was not recovered from the war zone. Soldiers' statements that they saw a comrade fall in battle were not considered sufficient evidence of his death. This cruel regulation stemmed from the desperate days early in the Great Patriotic War when some men had gone missing from their units hi the thick of battle, but had actually deserted to the Germans or been captured. A soldier was meant to fight to the death if surrounded. To surrender willingly was a serious offense, punishable by years in prison.

But few of us actually considered surrender as an option in battle. All our intelligence briefings had stressed the fact that the NATO forces would torture Soviet pilots savagely to extract as much military information as possible. Then the poor devil would be either executed or killed in one of their horrible medical or drug experiments. Apparently the Westerners had carried on this barbaric tradition with the assistance of their ex-Nazi allies. No one in his right mind would surrender to the Afghan Mujahedin. Their torture methods were less sophisticated than me Americans', but even bloodier.

By Soviet doctrine, pilots who are shot down are "transferred" to the infantry the moment their boots touch the ground and their parachute collapses. They are then bound by the same orders to fight on as the ground troops. Many of the fellows in Afghanistan carried hand grenades in their flight suits, and strapped a paratrooper's folding-stock AKM Kalashnikov to their ejection harness.

Whatever the origin of the body-retrieval regulation, the crewmen of rescue helicopters knew they had an obligation not just to the airman on the ground but also to his family.

The rescue helicopter was halfway across the valley when it took a direct hit from a Stinger. Luckily the aircraft did not explode, but it did smash onto the side of the ridge several hundred yards below the wreckage of Boris's aircraft. The sky above the ridges and valley was suddenly crisscrossed by streams of heavy-caliber tracers. At least one missile was fired, but exploded among the helicopter's decoy flares. The pilot bore in to try to rescue the crew of the first Mi-8. But the valley was a death trap. The second helicopter went down on the lower slopes of the ridge. Now there were two helicopter crews on the ground and possibly an injured Soviet pilot.

By this time, rotating flights of strike aircraft were laying down an almost continuous bombardment on the enemy-held ridges. They dropped cluster bombs and napalm, fired rockets, and strafed with their cannons. The next morning a ground force of Spetsnaz commandos arrived in light-armored vehicles and rescued the helicopter crews. But the fire from the enemy positions intensified. Now the Air Force used powerful fuel-air explosives to neutralize the Mujahedin gun positions in the caves and bunkers. These were cruelly effective weapons. A mist of fuel droplets was dispersed from a canister by compressed gas and allowed to seep into the enemy positions before being ignited by a delayed fuse. The resulting explosion literally ripped the caves and bunkers apart, killing everyone inside. But the Mujahedin had devised means to counter even these bombs.

The fight dragged on for three days before the enemy fell back in good order. When the Spetsnaz finally reached Boris's airplane, they found his burnt and mangled remains near the ejection seat. He had been dead before the parachute deployed.

Here's some more information on the Soviet-Afghan War from the aforementioned The Lessons of Modern War: Volume III:

Soviet Mine Warfare

Both sides utilized mine warfare extensively.

The Soviets laid somewhere between 30 and 50 million mines, depending on which estimate you believe in; and they offically admitted to laying 2,131 minefields by 1988.

The Soviets used the following types of mines:

MON-50: Basically a M-18A1 Claymoreski with a 60 degree arc kill zone out to 50m.

MON-100: A cylinder with a concave face that can be set on a tripod or mounted on a tree or rock wall. It has 450 steel fragments set in five kilograms of plastic explosive. It can spray these fragments as far as 100 meters.

MON-200/MON-500: Large 52~ cm diameter mines with 12 kg or more of plastic explosives.

PMN-2: Size of a small fruitcake tin, buried.

UMK: Remote Control mines (or wave mines). First used in '85, they explode by either vibration or remote electrical triggering. A central sensor system is tied to a simple battery-powered discrete transistor circuit and is triggered by up to four wires and possibly an acoustic trigger. Linking to other mines is allowed; allowing traps to be set with one mine triggering simultaneous explosions from other devices.

PFM-1 "Butterfly/Green Parrot": Widely dropped from helicopters. Basically BLU-43B ski. Plastic case, 12 grams. Exists in Green and tan versions; camouflaged to look like stone or sand. It self-defuses after several hours or days, but this often fails. Is virtually impossible to detect with conventional gear. Up to 1 million of these may have been dropped in the first 7 years on Mujihadeen Lines of Communications.

Mujihadeen Mine Warfare

The Mujihadeen got most of the DRA's stock of Soviet TM-46 AT Mines early on. Mines were also recovered from Soviet laid fields, while others were imported. Unexploded Soviet aerial bombs were used to make mines as well.

By 1982, the Mujihadeen began to get significant amounts of non-metallic mines. After 1982, their efforts became relatively sophisticated. The scale of this effort can be drawn from two examples:

A.) One sapper battalion of the 201st Motor Rifle Division claimed to have cleared 30,000 mines over a five-year period, covering some 1,000 kilometers of roads.
B.) When the Soviets took on the Mujihadeen fortress of Zhawar on the Pakistani border, they found 6,000 AT Mines, and 12,000 AP Mines.

Soviet Counter-Mine Warfare

Right from the start, the Soviets had to use combat engineers and sappers to clear mines. At first, UAZ-469 Jeeps with mine detectors were used; but this rapidly shifted to tanks when snipers began killing the crews of the mine-detecting jeeps. Columns often didn't move without mine detection units and sappers. Handheld detection devices became very common.

By 1984, Soviet publications were warning about mines that were undetectable by conventional means, but they weren't as concerned as the US was about the lack of a field deployable technology for detecting plastic mines.

The Soviets achieved some success with using trained dogs to detect mines by smell. The sapper units involved in this used BTR-70s. The Dogs didn't work with buried mines, but seem to have worked with surface mounted booby traps and mines.

After 1983, the Soviets began placing mine rollers on their tanks; and converted T-55 and IT-1 tank destroyers into mineclearing tanks by removing their turrets and mounting the roller systems.

To counter this, the Mujihadeen used Chinese and Italian made pneumatic fuzes which came closer to setting off the mine with each vehile that rolled over them. Remotely triggered mines were also used, as were different mine laying methods.

Mujihadeen Counter-Mine Warfare

As opposed to the Soviets, the Mujihadeen had serious and never-ending problems with dealing with mines. Due to the lack of any advanced detection devices, they were forced to use old-fashioned methods:

A.) Using poles to probe the ground ahead.
B.) Driving animals into minefields to clear them
C.) Threw rocks into minefields
D.) Used professional mine hunters
E.) Simply walked single file into minefields, accepting the inevitable losses of the leading men.
F.) Used slingshots to set off the mines.
G.) Used mortars and rockets to set off the mines.

Later in the war, they recieved several Lightfoot mine breaching systems; which consisted of a 120mm mortar round which dragged a 1/2" cable about 1,000 feet through the air. The cord exploded on contact with the ground, clearing a 6 foot wide path through 80% of the types of mines used in the war. They usually fired them in groups of 3-4 to clear a secure path. These were effective in breaching the minefields around DRA and Soviet strongpoints.

As the war dragged on, the Mujihadeen's tactics became better and more sophisticated.

A.) They used Forward observers to map the minefields as they were laid.
B.) Over time, a trained cadre of people who could locate mines by sight or touch was created.
C.) Night-time scouting of minefields before attacks was also done.

To counter all this, the Soviets deployed concentric rings of mines, increased the density of mines per square klick, added flare mines, put in advanced mines with acoustic and sesmic triggers, and increased surveillance of mined areas.

Soviet Logistics

The Soviets relied heavily on airlift until 1987-88, and even then, most supplies were delivered by truck convoys consisting of 100-300 vehicles, of which 30% were convoy defense vehicles. The remainder of the convoy was divided between POL and other supplies.

These convoys formed at the main Soviet Kairaton Transhipment Complex at Termez or at Kushka on the border to the east. They moved south along routes to Herat or to the Pol-e-Khomri Logistic Facility. The convoys using the latter route from Termez to Kabul had to travel 450 kilometers, including the 2,700-meter long Salang Tunnel. Further, the difficult mountain conditions required 70-90 percent more gasoline than routes in Europe and 30 to 40 percent more diesel fuel.

It took two weeks to complete the round trip from Termez to Kabul, and the maximum number of trips any driver could normally make in a two-year enlistment was eighty. The trips were so dangerous that pennants for "courage and valor" were awarded for twenty, forty, sixty, and eighty trips.

Soviet Infantry Units and other Miscellaneous Stuff

* Soviet body armor throughout the conflict was always continually being improved and replaced with more advanced armor as the war dragged on.

* ATGMs were used in long range fire against Mujihadeen positions like fortified stone forts, as tank guns and other weapons could not be elevated to the angles needed.

* Parachute equipped ATGMs were used to lay commo wires over rough terrain.

* The Soviets exerted tight control over ATGM allocations, due to the fact that if a DRA unit with them was defeated or routed, the weapons would fall into Mujihadeen hands, or when such troops defected. Eventually the USSR demanded that a number of ATGM systems be turned over to them. By 1980, the USSR had removed the SA-7 MANPAD from DRA inventory.

* A very high proportion of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan (25% or more) consisted of the VDV, instead of conscripts.

* Many of the Soviet units in the initial invasion of Afghanistan had no reason for their deployment other than the fact that they had been mobilized with their parent units. These units were withdrawn by 1980.

* The Soviets found that Mujihadeen equipped with European rifles could outshoot AK-74 equipped infantry at distances exceeding the effective ranges of the infantry's weapons. This led to special sniper suppression squads which dismounted first from vehicles, and were eqipped with scoped long range rifles and RPG-18s to deal with such nusiances.

Soviet Armored Vehicles, etc

* T-55 and T-62 tanks had frequent clutch problems in hilly terrain and lost tracks frequently on rocky ground. Strains on the engines in traversing rough terrain and slopes caused tank engines to overheat unless coolant supply was doubled or tripled. Fuel expenditure was 30 to 50 percent more than on flat ground.

* The T-55 lacked the gun elevation and depression to be effective in mountain fighting.

* The BMP ended up being largely replaced because they were too large for many mountain trails, broke down a lot, and were difficult to service in the field. The BMP's replacement ended up being the BMD and BMD-2; which were lighter and more reliable, although they could not ford streams as fast, due to them being smaller. Another factor was the BMP's highly visible exhaust trail. This was caused partly by an over-enrichment of the fuel mixture which occurs for the BMP at high altitudes.

* Many routes were impassable to the BMPs, BTR-60s, BTR-70s, and BTR-80s, and these vehicles were used instead in the cities, for protecting lines of communications, armored ambulances, and protecting strategic crossroads.

* The low-pressure 73mm gun found on the BMD-1 and BMP-1 could only elevate to 33 degrees; a critical problem in mountain fighting and lacked the rapidity of fire to deal with large amounts of infantry. It's replacement, the 30mm cannon of the -2 variants, could elevate to 50 degrees. SAGGER missiles were still useful because of their higher elevation.

* Virtually all of the BTR-60s that appeared in theatre were the -60PB version with armored roofs.

* The BTR-60 proved easy for Afghan forces to handle and maintain.

* As delivered, the turreted machine guns of the BTR-60 and -70 could only elevate to 30 degrees, but modifications in the field expanded that to 50-60~ degrees.

* The Soviets liked the 2S5 152mm SP Gun, because it could fire to longer ranges than the older guns (27 km normal range, and 37 km range with Rocket Assist); and could rapidly displace to keep pace with convoys, etc. The towed version was also widely deployed.

I have noticed that a simple, cheap, metal mesh has been welded to the outside of Stryker vehicles:

I assume this is used to pre-detonate incoming RPG rounds that would otherwise penetrate the actual armor. Did we find this out the hard way? I don’t know.

The concept of a grille to defeat incoming HEAT rounds is not new, nor is the concept of firing explosive charges (like the Israeli TROPHY system) into the path of the oncoming enemy round. In fact, if you look at the data, you'll find that a lot of ideas go a long ways back.

I must recommend Richard Hunnicutt's (R.P. Hunnicutt) books on American armored fighting vehicle development, which is where I found the following images. Sadly, many of them are out of print; I believe his one on the Sherman goes for upwards of $200.

The following image is from Hunnicutt's Patton:

Grille Armor for M-47

The caption under it says:

The model of the M47 above is fitted with protective grills intended to defeat shaped charge (HEAT) or squash head (HESH or HEP) projectiles. Tests at Aberdeen indicated that it was effective against the 3.5 inch antitank rocket at 60 degrees obliquity.

Time period for the above is roughly during the development period of the M-60, when new concepts were being investigated.

Later, in his Abrams book; you can find the following proposals, both from the 1960s; as part of the MBT(MR) concept proposals:

Bar Armor

Another innovation was the use of grill or bar armor to defeat shaped charge (HEAT) ammunition. This concept employed a screen of equally spaced steel bars to increase the standoff distance from the main armor plate. On some arrangements, the screen was moveable and could be extended or retracted when it was no longer required.

The Dash Dot System

One such project at Picatinny Arsenal was dubbed the Dash-Dot Device. With this equipment, sensors, such as infrared or doppler radar, detected the incoming projectile and fired linear shaped charges to destroy it. One limitation of this concept was the space required to mount and provide replacements for the linear shaped charges.

Everything old is new again, like the new M1 TUSK upgrades, which have a telephone box on the back of the tank so that infantrymen can talk to the tankers inside, without them having to open up. This dates from World War II and unofficial modifications done in the field to M4 Shermans. Unfortunately, the idea was "lost" after WWII.

Just for fun, here's another old idea....

105mm Unmanned Turret -- Circa 1953

When Pierre Sprey and others demanded real-world testing on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, what they got were tests on vehicles whose gas tanks were filled with water. It was only after almost Herculean efforts that defects were corrected and niceties such as anti-spalling Kevlar inner linings were installed.

You mean the tests that were shown in HBO's "Pentagon Wars" movie with Kelsey Grammer?

I have a copy of the live fire test report for Phase II of that. Here's a copy:

Bradley Phase II Live Fire Test Report - 1987 - 2 MB.

The media and the movie were very unfair to the Army's program managers in that. There were several factors which were completely overlooked:

1.) Congress only allocated funding for a few Bradleys for live fire destructive testing. So if you caused a catastrophic on board fire which caused your test vehicle to melt into a pile of aluminum on the first live round test; you were out of luck for the rest of the testing program.

So filling the fuel tanks with water actually made sense; water weighs 997~ kg/m3 while Diesel is about 885 kg/m3. Also, Diesel is relatively inflammable, and recent armored fighting vehicle designs have actually incorporated their fuel tanks into the protective scheme for the crew.

Leaving out ammunition also made sense; you want to be able to study the post-penetration spalling from shell fragments and armor fragments inside the Bradleys' fighting compartment, so you know where to place the kevlar anti-spall curtains to catch fragments. You can't do that if the ammunition blew up, making reconstruction of what went where from the penetration hole a nearly impossible exercise.

You always leave the final full up destructive test with a full fuel and ammunition load for last, after you've done all the other tests. More so if you only have a few vehicles for destructive testing.

2.) The reason the Bradleys went out to the troops without this testing, was because it was viewed as more important to put the capabilities of the Bradley (25mm stabilized cannon, thermal sights, TOW, and vastly improved armor) into the hands of the troops in Europe, who were still relying on the old M113 APCs right away. The plan always was to do initial M2/M3 deployment, and conduct the live fire testing concurrent with deployment, and then use the results of the tests to plan the product improved Bradleys (M2A1 and M3A1); as well as issue new stowage charts for the in service vehicles.

To Dougman Re: the Prophet.
The first question people ask an author (generally) is:
Fiction? or Non-fiction? In my opinion, and my answer if feeling playful, is what difference does it make if you believe it? There is a corollary in Religion, and even here at the site. What your faith instructs NOW is what matters. What do you believe? The "Legitimacy" of a spiritual set is defined by a culture that may pull people in different directions, I think Monopticus might be saying an important question would be: "What is the Trend Line?"

A democracy is three Wolves and Two Sheep voting every Day to decide what is for Supper. Enervating, and NO JUSTICE. A republic is asking
(voting for) Three shepherds and Two Butchers to find common ground for a time specific, and at a neutral site, because the Third Wolf will eventually become hungrier than he is mendacious. The two Sheep will eventually run out of Bribe money anyway.

"...what difference does it make if you believe it?"

Terrorism makes the difference. A large group of people who do believe it, and justify themselves to themselves, the wolves.

I'm at home with 3kids trying to do some housekeeping so I can't "chew" on to much today.

I'm going to study a little on Trends Lines.
Anyone else care to way in?

Of course, but the genesis of that (seemingly to you) flip and insensitive answer was my comment about writing, not IED's.
You seem too often bent on correcting my reality to conform to yours, Doug. You lean on old style; Boyd would grant you a frown, but perhaps also a cigar. I inject a corollary, not a TRUTH; I am not my prose. I need to reread OTTO. What am I missing? Am I flaunting your Rules?

Far more important to me is to be Happy than Correct.

Sorry if I seem insensitive. I'm not trying to be.
I just don't have alot of time, and that's as good as money in a capitalistic democracy.

Now I'll have to look up corollary too.

I think I'm getting it now.
Are you related to Norm Crosby? BTW a Corollary is a heart attack, like:

"He had a corollary yesterday, a real mitochondrial inflection."

Put that Dictionary down!
Trust me, I'm old.

bill mecorney,
No worries. There are no Rules to flaunt. You do make a fundamental error, though.
"I am not my prose."
Existentially that is absolutely true but in this textual space all we can know of you we must discern through your prose. So, in a very real sense, in this place you are your prose.
I've had little to say lately since my knowledge of airplanes began and ended with balsa wood flyers 35 years ago. I must say that your comments here been thought provoking. Just sometimes the thought is, "Huh?"
I believe it was our friend WayneB who said it best a few months ago. "Explain it to me like I was a six year old." (Forgive me if I have the quote and/or attribution wrong.)
Your prose takes for granted much background knowledege on the part of the reader. Nothing wrong with that, but it leaves some of us scratching our virtual heads.

fourfather - I had left behind my heraldic banner, the one I commissioned when I entered Politics:

"Except in Politics, it is more important that your audience understand than be converted".

That I paraphrased from St. Thomas:

"It is better to understand, than be understood"

Which is to say,

NO RULES? IS THIS HEAVEN, DOROTHY?

thank you, daddy. There are two seats at the featured table, care to join me?

daddy - Lost my 10k in five minutes. I want to thank you again for posting the vid of Paul the Welshman singing "Possum Flander", or whatever. I know you didn't miss it, the part when Paul hits Profundo, or Crescendo, and the camera cuts to Amanda. Watch her BREATHE !
That is the sexiest video I've seen in some time. It got me to phone an old flame, you know, Booty call?

Dougman, your woof is worth a thousand words.

Re - prophesy, if any, my thoughts exactly. And if so, which of them came true, pray tell.

My understanding of him is that he felt left out, took bits of the OT and NT stories, imbibed some hash, had some visions, etc., etc.

Besides, Mecca is actually an old Hindu shrine for Shiva. When Moslems walk around in circles 7 times, they are actually performing an old Hindu-Vedic ritual. Ever heard of Vikramaditya? An Indian prince who conquered that area and called it Arabia, the sanskrit word for horse, land of the horses.

I'm going to type the link, otherwise it won't post right away. Just add the usual h t t p : // in front of it:
doormann.tripod.com/the0.htm
(That's a zero after "the")

I especially like the blue statue. Below that, you'll find the interesting info on Mecca (sanskrit for "sacrificial fire").

If India wanted to pull the rug from underneath Islam, they could start claiming their shrine back.

Oy, Mr. Crierie... I must admit, you've got me quite flummoxed here.

On the one hand, as the official "House Bouncer" here, I would normally feel compelled to chastise a commenter who not only wouldn't let a subject drop, when everyone else had moved on, but who also insisted on posting such mammoth essay-length comments several times a day. On the other hand though, your posts are not only fairly well written, often educational, and (with the exception of certain "hardpoints" in your first installment) even civil, but they also seem to be based on actual data, precedent and history -- something more than just seething emotion. And that's refreshing and even enjoyable in its own right. I agree with almost none of your conclusions, but at least they're founded on evidence and some form of intellectual rigor. And that's worthy of inclusion... and even, IMO, some appreciation.

Similarly (speaking now in my less "official" capacity as a fellow commenter), on the one hand, your clear propensity for detailed research and apparent love of numbers and technical minutia (however biased it might be) seems counter-balanced by your apparent need to shove every last ounce of it down our throats... which in turn leads one to suspect your agenda is more about impressing than informing. This might not be your actual conscious intention, but with this MUCH of a data avalanche, it's tough to avoid that impression. THEN AGAIN, for the most part, you have been responding to individual counter-arguments -- and that's as it should be -- and since there's been a lot of them, well...

As for your specific points, I can't help but feel that what we've got here is a masterful dissection of a couple of trees, which you've then used to describe the entire vast primordial forest -- that you haven't actually seen -- behind them. I mean, the extent to which you've gone to not only hunt up every possible historical equivalent to Boyd's OODA principles, but then find fault in every single one of them -- regardless of how absurdly successful most of them were -- is almost breathtaking. And to then throw that back as "proof" that those principles are therefore flawed and inappropriate on the modern battlefield... to acknowledge Boyd's "blatant rip-off" (my words) of Nathan Bedford Forrest's simpler homespun tactics (which were both highly successful AND considered quite wise by most standards), and then claim that those very same time-tested principles AREN'T sound as espoused by Boyd, despite the fact that YOU called them analogous... well, that's got me flummoxed a tad too.

Any strategy, any subterfuge, any weapon, no matter how brilliant or exquisitely designed, is defeatable, most commonly by the sheer weight of overwhelming numbers -- when all else fails, you can always smother your opponent with enough meat, blood and bullets (and in your case, data) to prevail in the fight, as long as you're willing to absorb the attrition. But that doesn't mean that the vanquished -- the outnumbered -- were conquered because their methods were stupid, or that their chosen tactics weren't the best they could employ considering the odds. Yet that seems to be the basis of your dominant theme against Boyd's principles. They were ultimately defeated, therefore they were ultimately wrong.

For instance, you held up Lee's ultimate defeat at Appomattox as evidence of the fallibility of his "OODA-like" strategies, despite the fact that for 3 of the 4 years of the Civil War, he and his likeminded commanders owned almost every battlefield upon which they were ever engaged -- in fact, came damned close to winning the whole shootin' match, if it hadn't been for Gettysburg -- despite typically being outnumbered and outgunned, many of his troops starving and shoeless... despite having less than a fourth of the rail lines the North had (the rapid-response tool of the times), and almost no heavy industry to replace their lost war materiel. And then along came Grant, a general who WAS willing to absorb those bloody attrition rates (unlike his predecessors), and just kept hitting Lee with all those fast-moving men and cannon and commissary supplies at his disposal. As Bill said in his essay, it's not that attrition doesn't work -- Schwarzkopf's initial plans in Gulf War I would have worked -- but they're just costlier than we're willing to accept in this day and age (and this marginally more enlightened society).

You held up Hitler's OODA-like blitzkrieg tactics as another example of a flawed and doomed principle, because in the end, Stalin's steadfastness and unwillingness to cave in to the enemy "inside his OODA Loop" showed the fallacy of the whole idea... as if the Russian winter, which had done in so many invaders in the past, and for which Hitler's arrogance and megalomania provided no cold weather gear for his troops, had nothing to do with it... nor did his over-extended supply lines, or the fact that the Russians were able to move all (or most) of their heavy industry east of Moscow and beyond Hitler's reach, from which they then spat out relatively primitive tanks, trucks and airplanes by the shitload... that and of course the millions of cold-acclimated troops that Stalin and his generals were willing to throw into the meat grinder, over and over and over again -- the sheer overwhelming numbers -- those had less to do with the Nazi's reversal than the fraudulent shortcomings of those stupid OODA-like blitzkrieg principles.

It's like saying that a kung-fu master is no master at all if, while fending off several hundred screaming Chinese mercenaries, he gets his ass beaten and hacked to death. And obviously that's not true.

As for your aeronautical arguments: I'm having trouble figuring some of those ones out too. On the one hand, you acknowledge that we've never actually had an opponent in the high-speed/high-altitude dogfighting arena, and on the other hand you call our "optimization" toward low-altitude Vietnam-style maneuverability -- the only dogfighting game in town -- a "stupid 40-year detour." In another instance, you decried Boyd's "Energy-Manouverability Theory" as stupid because it's just "fighting Vietnam all over again; a war in which you have beyond visual range missiles." Why? Because "due to restrictive rules of engagement, you have to visually identify the target before you can shoot at him; which of course GIVES THE ADVANTAGE to the lighter, guns/ATOLL-equipped MiGs, and not the bigger, heavier US aircraft with large radars and equally long ranged missiles." And this after you'd just finished shouting about how stupid the light, short-range-missile-and-radar-equipped F-16 was.

On the one hand, you cited the whole evolution of the interceptors-and-SAMs vs. higher-and-faster-bombers progression, providing us with an excellent example of a typical tic-tac-toe style escalation -- every move (or advance) followed by a counter-move, followed by a counter-counter-move and so on ad infinitum, up and up and up until we've practically got space shuttles chasing SR-71s at the fringe of space. And on the other hand, you hold that up as what we SHOULD have aspired to, pushing for uber mach3 FT-1000 (that's a Terminator reference, by the way) Rockwell interceptors, presumably for the "inevitable" near-sub-orbital dogfighting that anyone should have seen coming.

I don't know, man. You SOUND so reasonable, and certainly well-informed -- downright encyclopedic, if you ask me -- but all that "evidence" you've amassed seems to be bent towards supporting your own foregone conclusions. And those conclusions seem to be founded upon the primary appearance of you being the proud, outspoken, and courageous "Defier of Conventional Wisdom." You heap the data on (using that "overwhelming numbers" strategy, I guess... the same one that you seem to think discredits the OODA principles... like Bill's Debate Club story, in which the participant with the most index cards automatically wins), perhaps thinking that evidence = a correct conclusion... kinda' like giving us the precise sunrise and sunset times, then taking us outside to watch the sun track from horizon to horizon, right on time, and THEN holding that up as "proof" that the sun goes around the Earth. Your numbers predicted what we'd see and when we'd see it, so therefore your conclusions about their orbital relations must also be correct... and they are not... at least not in Boyd's case, and at least not in my opinion.

So I'm not sure what to make of you -- smart, BUT (to all my experience and understandings) WRONG... pushy and insistent, BUT interesting to read and even civil... contrary to the group consensus, BUT at least wielding facts and historical figures, and not just sticking your head in the door and casting aspersions.

I guess that just means you're "interesting."

(and I suppose it's too late to say anything about cutting back the size of these posts... jeezy pete, look at this behemoth... sorry about that folks)

GHS

GHS, the real irony of Gettysburg is that Lee's troops lost due to a traffic jam. The streets they were moving on converged on a single intersection, so they couldn't move through town fast enough. By the time they could get to the battlefield, the Union troops had taken up excellent positions on the high ground, and were ready to repel the Confederate attack.

Their lack of agility cost them the battle, and therefore the war.

Jungle leader- Breathless I am.

Yours is the last word, mine are spasmodic drivel next to yours.

But, Ryan wants ADOO. Conclusion (ACT) then decide, then orient then observe.

I know liberals like Ryan. Gotta be the smartest, dontcha know, and I can make you eat doo-doo. But forming a conclusion, then casting about for evidence to prove the prescience thereof won't work in the presence of those who can listen as quickly as they can compose.

You are patient, sir, and skilled at separating buckwheat from bull s.

ADOO (Adieu), bill mecorney

*Standing O to GHS*
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I must say that this is the longest post I've ever seen from this gorilla. I wonder why?
Maybe the walls of his enclosure aren't high enough.
Or,
Maybe he was taunted.

As I said before Ryan, Blogger is free.

Ryan - You have 15 martian minutes to initiate a conversation about the SabreSuper or I will start thinking Hairy was too kind.

Daddy4 - you dis my zoo?

> what they got were tests on vehicles whose gas tanks were filled with water.

Heh. Methinks that someone KNEW it was an issue and wanted to CYA for the tests in question, since they didn't see fit to call attention to & fix the problem before they were out of the design phase.

"Changing the scope" of a problem is a classic bureaucratic response to a known issue, weakness, or other problem.

An excellent piece, BTW, Bill.

Lord help me, I'm beginning to understand mecorneese.
Ain't the zoo. It's the tiger.

> Boyd would say, “he’s inside Red’s decision loop.”

I think the correct response, once you recognize this, seems clear: Some form of random action which does not logically follow from the existing circumstance -- preferably one which is still sem-rational in the context of it -- if you should logically dive where you are, then turn left or climb.

The goal is to break your opponent's OODA loop by invalidating it sufficiently that the whole situation resets. You can do it wrong, of course -- if you are flying 500 feet off the ground then diving does, in fact, break his OODA loop but not in the way you want :o)

It seems as though training for this ought to include learning to rapidly dvelop decisions which are not BAD in the context but which don't rationally follow from the current situation -- they aren't sufficiently optimal to be a GOOD choice, but aren't so BAD as to be a LOSING choice (i.e., augering in). If you make a few of these at random quickly enough you ought to be able to break your opponent out of their working OODA loop and get a chance to reset things to an even keel, even gain the advantage if they are not prepared for you to make such choices, and themselves get flustered because things aren't woking as they expected. The comments made in your link to Thach Weave:
=================================
Saburo Sakai, the famous Japanese Ace relates their reaction to the Thach Weave when they encountered Guadalcanal Wildcats using it: [1]
"For the first time Lt. Commander Tadashi Nakajima encountered what was to become a famous double-team maneuver on the part of the enemy. Two Wildcats jumped on the commander’s plane. He had no trouble in getting on the tail of an enemy fighter, but never had a chance to fire before the Grumman’s team-mate roared at him from the side. Nakajima was raging when he got back to Rabaul; he had been forced to dive and run for safety."
=================================
... a case in point. Break your opponent's OODA and they get flustered, angered, and stop thinking smoothly, themselves -- esp. if they aren't used to having it broken.

Oh, and by the way -- This strikes me as the basis for humor. Break your "opponent"s OODA, and the response *can* be:

"HEY! I'm *alive*!!! Ha!... Ha-ha!! ALIVE!!! HA-HA-HA !!!! Yahoo!!...Alive!!!"

:o)

What's with the selection of arcane and less than useful boneyard examples of fighters? Most pre-date Boyd and his work and for me there are better data points available.

The F-108 was an example of a "test bed" that should have been sent to Edwards and studied. Of the 180 ordered, two prototypes were started, one finished and if memory serves, it was flightless.

IIRC they envisaged it as 480 aircraft, to act as long range escorts for the B-70, and to provide air defense for the US; the furthest it got was a mockup made out of wood.

F-108 Mockup

The 102 and 106 to me were place holders, they took up room in the century coat closet.

They were pretty much interim aircraft until the USAF could get the Ultimate Interceptor; the F-12B.

Yes there was an F-107, it was called by an AF Gen. "The best airplane we never bought".

I think what really killed the F-107's was it's huge engine intake right above and behind the pilot's head.

Photo of F-107A

I wouldn't be very happy about ejecting in that plane....

I've also heard the moniker "The best airplane we never bought" also appplied to the F8U-3 "Super Crusader", and the F-12B Blackbird.

What was the F-12B? Well, it was the *armed* version of the famous SR-71, and the production version of the YF-12A. Top speed of Mach 3.5 at 90 to 100,000 feet. Armament was to be 3 x AIM-47Bs and one 20mm Vulcan. The USAF actually did order 93 of them, and Congress actually allocated the money for it (!).

What happened? Well, Secretary Robert S McNamara used a legislative sleight of hand in the law, which allowed him to *refuse* the funds allocated; stating that he did not belive buying the F-12B was in the Nation's best interest. He then reallocated the funding to building a field army.

This leaves the 101

Fun fact, the Voodoo was actually originally designed as a very long range escort fighter, to escort SAC's B-36 into the Soviet Union, but when the idea of long range escort fighters died, it was reborn as a long range fighter bomber and interceptor.

And the best example you could have used, the F-100. The North American Super Sabre. It was Boyd's
plane, and was ubiquitous, supersonic, well armed and for its day, versatile.

I wouldn't be so quick to praise the F-100; it was a nice plane for it's day, but it had several very nasty characteristics which led to a high loss rate as you can see below:

F-100A - 25% lost to accidents
F-100C - 17% involved in major accidents
F-100D - 39% lost to accidents; 500+ out of 1,274 built.

With it, Boyd perfected a manouvre called Flat-Plating. It was the Pose du Jour for the pilots who were given his 6 and then unceremoniously waxed. It is basically a 400knot start then a series of instantaneous rudder and aileron inputs that allow a full yank on the stick, quickly resulting in what is called AOA90. Picture a plate flying forward. but presenting its entire flat section to the airstream. With it you could bleed energy at alarming rates. You saw it in "Top Gun" when Maverick went geo slow with the F-14 wings. Remember when it pitched up and Tom Skerritt flew past him, Maverick gunselects, stitches his CO and Kelly Mcgillis melts, or whatever you call that?

And what use is the Flat Plate in a real combat situation to be honest? If you're doing 400 knots, and you flatplate your plane; you're going to bleed airspeed like it's going out of style. Even if you manage to score a gun kill on the guy as he whips in front of you, you're going to be left in a very unenviable position; having bled off the majority of your airspeed; leaving yourself vunerable to just about everyone else; like your opponent's co-pilot.

The modern day example is Pugachev's Cobra; as performed by the Su-27 Flanker. Looks great and inspiring, until you realize that the airspeed you have upon finishing one is only 135 knots.

If you like to talk about aerodynamics, her wings are fodder for endless animated exchanges. Delta, "cranked" clipped tip, blended form, etc.

I always loved the B-70 and her "winglets", which actually when you added them together, had more surface area than the wing on the B-58(!)

> Because if you guess wrong and the Americans leave, you will be taken out into the street in front of your family and have your head sawed off.

Which, I think, shows the difference between Western Culture and Muslim Culture.

In Western Culture (see post-WWII France), guess wrong, get your hair shorn off.

In Islamic Culture, they cut about 9 inches closer to the neck...

Ryan,
It's been fun.
You've really impressed us all with your vast knowledge of aircraft and sh_t. We stand in awe of your ability to read reference books and make god-awful long posts from their contents.
But I think it has been noted a few times that the subtitle of this post is "THE BIG PICTURE"
You seemed to have overlooked that part. Bill's point was not about frakkin' airplanes!

You have missed the point.
You have missed the boat.
You have missed THE BIG PICTURE.
I thought GHS said it as best it could be said. Did you not read before your latest magnum opus?
Probably not. That would detract from the composition of your next pronouncement from on high. Spare us. This is not an aerodynamic forum.
The wings we seek here are not made of steel or composite but of ideas. You are getting in the way of those ideas. THE BIG PICTURE isn't about airplanes.
k?

Sorry to all if this seems harsh but my last nerve has been trod upon.

Actually, I hadn't intended for my last post to come out sounding hostile at all. I wasn't FEELING hostile at the time -- it was just late at night (here in Orlando), and I was typing as fast as my little fingies would fly. All week long, I've been wanting to respond to each of Ryan's individual points as they came up, but I've never had more than a few minutes available at the computer at any one time. So I had to let it build up until last night, and then let fly with a single "summary" post of all my objections (I know... hard to believe that was a "summary"). But I really wasn't feeling as cranky as that sounded when I wrote it.

To Monster: yeh, the thing that kills me about Lee at Gettysburg was that (a) he was essentially on his way to Washington at the time (and not far from it), and (b) accidentally ran into a leading element of Meade's army going the other way. Then it was just a mad dash for everyone on both sides to draw up their lines in the best possible places, and as quickly as possible... and the Union just barely won. Hell, if it hadn't been for Chamberlain, at the far end of the Union left, on Little Round Top, even the Union's initially superior positions would have been defeated... and THEN what a different ending the war would have had... what a different COUNTRY (or PAIR of countries) we'd have ended up with... and what a different WORLD.

And what did Chamberlain do that was so amazing?

The unexpected.

You'd almost think there was something to that way of thinking.

GHS

And next from left field...

I once had an opportunity -- back in '87 or '88, while I was stationed with the Air Force in Germany -- to sit in the cockpits of two Russian fighter types of the time... the MiG-21 and the swept-wing MiG-23. And boy, was THAT enlightening.

Pilot visibility in both aircraft was very restricted. The headrests on their ejection seats were HUGE, to accommodate those humongous (and heavy) brain-bucket helmets the pilots wore. And these, combined with the tiny field of cockpit glass and the single palm-sized rearview mirror mounted on the canopy bow, meant that the pilot was all but blind anywhere between 3:00 and 9:00 behind him. In addition, the forward gauge/control panel sat so close to the pilot -- overlapping his legs -- that the decision to eject had to come with the knowledge that, if you survived, you were going to spend the rest of your life as a double-amputee.

And one thing that we all thought was funny -- on both sides of the MiG-23's fuselage, just in front of the intakes, bracketing the cockpit, there were these massive inches-thick slabs of what looked like lead sheets. According to our briefer, the Soviets told their pilots that this was protective armor plating, a defense against small arms fire. But in reality, it was BALLAST -- because the aircraft was so unbalanced, nose to tail, that, just sitting on the tarmac, it would have fallen back on its exhaust cone without it.

On the one hand, it was appalling how primitive and user-unfriendly those machines were. On the other hand, it was amazing how creative they were with some of their solutions to the problems inherent in the conditions under which they operated -- like the need for component access and part replacement that could be handled by relatively low-skilled field maintainers, landing gear that was sturdy enough and tires that were big enough to handle dirt-strip take-offs and landings, and a design that was simple and effective and cheap enough to be reproduced by the millions for decades.

It was a real eye-opener... and I have no idea why I brought it up here. I guess it just came to mind while I was re-reading Ryan's stuff.

Hmmm.

GHS

Hirsute One,
Some of the Brass @ E3 would have us believe they have synapse issues. On the one hand, it is urged that people show restraint regarding their aeronautical
longings, but airfoil (me in a manic wave) suggests supra swordlessness and is sent to the Penalty Box. Daddy 4 liked to build Balsa airplanes, but anally witheld
possible posts about the relative aspects of the Canberra Bomber and how it should have been deployed in Amaerica's Civil War.

"The Big Picture", the point of Whittle's essay (if we are to believe you, ape of worthiness,) is what I call "whole space" the "thought become urgent
literal supremacy on the Battle Field" part of MY
take on a theory of war posited
several decades before Boyd's
Asperger's induced rants @
Langley and other real-world-become-fiction locations.

These are my conclusions I grant to you, Sir gatekeeper of irrelevant thought:

1. I am addressing my existential blunders re:
Beingness v. Prose

2. I am addressing my all too apparent lack of keyboard skills

3. I have volunteered to walk the picket line in Hollywood.

In return, I expect GHS and DaddyQuattro to 'splain some
basics of E3 etiquette to me and the rest of us.

Also, demonstrate conclusively that William Whittle is not you and is not a deranged out of work
Hollywood writer who, though brilliant, creates websites to induce paranoia in the "Thompson for President" wing of the Hillary campaign committee.

OTTO- Kind one, please explain to those who would remain nameless the Gestalt of "Big Picture". It is most necessarily about aircraft, and not. It is about arcane theory of War, and not. The reality is illusory,
Yes? Muscle Daddy said it all in his fabric dent thought, think? Do you want to be the one who explains it to all of us; my stuff is "thought provoking" but the thought invoked is "Huh".

GHS: To me, the "Empty Hand" is self explanatory at every level. The "hand-raised" at the scoping session of life is exquisitely important to understand everything, and all are important.
Whether you have the patience to absorb all or not determines the reality of "your" conflict.

The internet can degenerate into "virtual impostership" and to avoid craziness, you must amble directly into it.

It isn't the self absorbed poster who makes it crazy, paduan, it is those of us who would "control" the ether who piss on potentiation.

One last (for now) thought to those who make cracks about our beloved Fleishacker Zoo.
Gavin Newsom, extraordinarily pretty Mayor that he is, is responsible for the tiger attacks.

He is good lookin', but it was his idea to make the Zoo interactive.

Mr. Mecorney, and all others of relative newness to these hallowed halls:

I can address one of your questions, if DaddyQuatro doesn't beat me to it. The following is the text of the "Rules of the Road" that were intended to be posted, and agreement/acceptance indicated, as one was standing at the gates of the Land Of Ejectia!, prior to being allowed entry.

I have no "dog" in this, as I have no actual experience in the aerospace arena other than flying commercial, though I have long had interest in strategy, tactics, and winning. I also built balsa models, and "fought" "air combat" with U-Control models way-back, but don't count that. My training is in Chemistry, my experience is Business Analysis. Good for very little in the "real" world, I admit.

I sincerely hope this helps assuage any feelings that may seem bruised.

"Greetings and welcome to Ejectia! This is a basic user's guide to give you, the
prospective participant, some idea of what goes on around here.

FIRST AND FOREMOST
1. This is not a public square in its truest sense. This is a privately-organized
community. Behave as if you were someone's guest at a very large party, not as if
you were part of a mob. If you insist on rudeness and poor conduct, you will be
bounced from the party.

2. This is a voluntary online community. Your posting of any material, whether in
comments or otherwise, grants to [Ejectia and all of its members], a perpetual,
royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, sublicense, reproduce or
incorporate into other material all or any portion of the material posted, for
commercial or other use. (Translation: if Bill quotes you in a book, you can't sue
for part of the royalties on sales. That's the difficulty this is here to
address.) Plagiarism is frowned upon in Ejectia. If you borrow material from
another source (and borrowing is fine with us!), just give credit where credit is
due. You are solely responsible for the content of your posts! We obviously cannot
check your content for factual accuracy. Do not libel or slander people, don't
tell fibs, don't disclose information that is legally protected, don't violate
other people's intellectual property. If you do any of these things, you are
responsible for any consequences, including any losses suffered by Ejectia or its
members as a result of your actions.

3. While we will not insist on knowing you by the same name the government of your
country does, we DO insist on your choosing one identity to be known by and
sticking with it. The practice of "sock puppeting"- or creating multiple
identities- is extremely frowned upon and will result in swift banning. Your
reputation is your credit here- trying to get out of a bad one or create a good
one using this tactic is the equivalent of major fraud. If you choose to use a
"handle," remember to keep it simple - not only does that make you easier to
remember, it will make it easier for others to search for your posts and pearls of
wisdom. You may be able to remember the number or abbreviation in your name, but others probably won't be able to save their life.

4. Be NICE- treat everyone you meet with good will and the best expectations
unless and until they give you a good reason not to. Text will not always carry a
person's true intent well; if it's not totally clear if someone is being rude or
just misspeaking, assume the latter. At best you'll give a good person slack to
recover with, at worst you'll give someone more nasty-minded rope to hang
themselves with. Even if it is totally clear (to you) that someone is being
deliberately rude or obtuse, STILL assume they are just misspeaking - "A soft
answer turneth aside wrath."
This is because people will RETALIATE- persons providing good reasons not to
expect niceness won't get it. If you are rude, you will be called on it, by the
membership itself. Moderators will only become involved if it becomes clear
certain of the involved parties are intent on causing trouble and it is not merely
a resolvable disagreement or minor conflict.

Be FORGIVING- once someone straightens up and starts being nice, drop any grudges
you may have developed and be nice. Right away. Getting the last word is not an
goal to be admired here.

Be NON-ENVIOUS- this is not a competition. We are trying to build something, not
score points on each other. Your character will create your reputation- this is
NOT a zero-sum game of popularity.

5. Last of all the cardinal guiding principles? Bring your sense of humor. This is
not always SERIOUS BUSINESS, and remembering that is a large part of what keeps
disagreements and minor conflicts from turning into small wars.

WHAT YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU NEVER TO DISCUSS AT THE DINNER TABLE: CONTROVERSIAL

TOPICS OF THE AGES.

POLITICS
It is a fact of life that the majority here fall into some sort of conservative or
libertarian camp just because of who started it and where. This does not mean that
liberals are shot on sight; indeed, without contrarian points of view we all
eventually find ourselves in an echo chamber. It is, however, a warning-
conservatives! Treat nice liberals nicely! Liberals! Be nice and be aware that you
will probably be in the minority here. If you do that, you will be among the most
valuable of members- a real test of ideas rather than a straw man. When discussing
politics, all of you keep hold of your temper with both hands and a boat anchor.
Be aware of the unspoken assumptions of your point of view. Above all, remember
that you're talking to another person who you probably have more in common with
than not. At the very least never say anything that would be likely to get you
punched in the nose if you said it to their face. Remember that your views
probably sound as stupid to them as their views sound to you - and NEITHER of you
will convince the other by saying so.

RELIGION
This is a religiously diverse community. Be ye believer or heathen of any stripe,
bear in mind that this is the place for cooperation, not for evangelism. We mean
to form around shared values, which is not the same thing as shared faith- if your
faith holds that no one can have values without your faith, then you might want to
keep that sentiment rather toned down, or perhaps do your good works through your
church. "You're an amoral being, heathen" is no more appreciated a sentiment here
than "You're just a stooge of the religion delusion" is. Remember: the most
successful method of attracting true converts any religion, ideology, or movement
has ever enjoyed has been people living their lives as an example. We will give
you a forum meant for serious debate, and religion is certainly going to come up
there- but in less gladiatorial places? Even if you don't feel particularly
inclined to love thy neighbor, at least be pleasant and civil to him.

IN GENERAL
We have places where you can take up a sabre and charge into debate. In these
places, reason reigns; attacking the person is regarded as low behavior, but
crying hurt feelings because someone has just effectively demolished your argument
won't be sympathized with either. While we admire passion (well directed) we
respect logic and calmness more. Try to persuade and educate more than shout down or belittle.
We also have places that are there for the community to relax and chitchat and
remind ourselves why we like each other. Keep these places light-hearted; if
something comes up that you absolutely cannot let slide, take it to the dueling
fields. Try to be the kind of guest that people want to invite back.

HOW TO GET THE RIGHT KIND OF NOTICED:
Be helpful, friendly, and funny if you can manage it. Come to give what you can
and use what you can; ego should not be a close companion here. If you are wrong
(and given the diversity of expertise here plus human nature, you will be at some
point), admit it and concede cheerily. This can sting like hell on the old ego,
but people remember this kind of upstanding behavior very positively.

Additionally, it will help you a lot to use good spelling, grammar, and generally
nice English. There are a lot of brilliant people who are horrible typists, but
the only reason you'd know they're brilliant is by hearing them TALK. Remember:
online your biggest noticeable feature is your ability to communicate in text. If
your text is garbled, it's like having a severe speech impediment. We won't hold
dyslexia or undeveloped skill (or english as a second language) against you, but
we will have no sympathy for the attitude "I shouldn't have to make the effort,
it's just the internet".

On profanity- in the spirit of civilized conviviality as well as wanting to save
all the really juicy curses for when they're really needed, we would ask that you
tone your language for polite company. Nobody is going to hunt through your
material for Bad Words, but we'd generally like it if the tone of discourse
doesn't bear any resemblance to Howard Stern's normal delivery.

HOW TO GET THE WRONG KIND OF NOTICED:
Come in with a chip on your shoulder and an attitude that the community has
something to prove to your glorious self. Suck up moderator time and attention by
being involved in numerous conflicts. Let your ego lead and derail multiple
threads into topics all about YOU, or get into dust-ups with other members about
how you're the only one there that really knows what you're talking about. Get
caught out claiming expertise and/or experience that you don't have- the people
who really have it will catch you FAST, believe me.

Here's a basic rule of thumb to wrap up on: If everyone tells you you're
obnoxious, there are one of two possibilities:

1) You are a misunderstood genius and everyone who tells you different is merely
in awe of your intellect and sheer righteousness. If they weren't so mired in
groupthink they'd accept you as their guru, or at least commit hari-kari over
their depths of wrongness. This possibility will only ever be true in your own
dementia.

2) You're really, really obnoxious. Acceptance is the first step to solving the
problem. Continue to be obnoxious, and we'll invite you to leave."

All my best, with appreciation for some interesting thoughts.

And, oh, BTW, a few thoughts on which I simply have no clue, but which I am still pondering. I'm not nearly as "quick" as I used to be! My bad!
My best to all!

Dear Ryan - you make me think. That is a good thing.
Flate Plate is just a manouvre, Ryan, warts and all.
Your grasp is too tight, everything is just what it seems to be to the observer.

You think so quickly you commit "Big Picture" suicide.

You infer conclusions that "aren't wrong" but commit you to thinking that urges you ever closer to the
abyss.

Case in point, Sir. What you see as winglets weren't intended to dissipate wing tip vortices at all. You presume, and you err. Those "winglets" murdered
a good friend of my mentor, Colonel Ed Cutler.

Those "Droop tips" were intended to "tunnel" airflow.
A prized theory of many AE's is "Ducted Flow". At very
high altitude, there is a minor price to pay in drag
for the assumed enhancement of Lift, and Stability potentiated by dropping the "add Delta" flow of that
ridiculous exercise in aeronautical masturbation.

The story is long and involved; long story short.
The pilot who slammed into the Valkyrie and caused that
very expensive fireball was Joe Walker. He and Ed were friends. Joe thought like you, Ryan, rapidly, based on experience and rapid synapse.
And he died and took the co-pilot of the B-70 with him. The B-70 died as well. Everything you see, Ryan, informs you of your next action.

You are closer to Boyd's
Big Picture than most who live here in this ether.
Some people think the Big Picture is a command of current reality. No such thing. It is the knowing that on occasion doing nothing is doing something.
What drove John Boyd was
in him, and in you, that which makes us crazy. It is OK
Ryan, to own the Truth, and do nothing, where indicated.
Or take action without having to think. It is especially OK to be brilliant
when others are not.

God Bless you Paul.

I know what you write.

Now I will return, and take it in.

Thank you Paul, Thank You.

I have lost my call sign. Not wanting to appear schizophrenic (I wonder what I meant by that) Airfoil is back at the base, and will remain in situ, unless someone here wishes to speak with him. I am not a sock puppet, never have been. This place has become very important to me, very quickly. There is brilliance here, in everyone, and that is what I hold to be true for me.

A note on proper attribution, which I earlier failed to do --

While the "Rules of The Road" were to some extent a collaborative effort, there was a "primary" author to whom we owe much gratitude, as I believe them to be an outstanding summary of our hopes vis a vis civility in this corner of the ether.

Thank you, once again, LabRat!!!

Good Sunday!

To Paul, again.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is about understanding. First, I will apologize for being so ever-present, say the word, and I retreat. If not, I will say that one of my fears is to be misunderstood.
Balsa Wood models kept me alive in a distressing time of my life as a child. I love and have empathy for anyone who even knows what balsa wood is. I am ashamed if anyone thinks I meant that comment in a disparaging
way. My creed is from St. Thomas:

"It is better to understand than to be understood."

Blessings to you and to all, bill

Hi All is there a difference between a flight suit and a "g" suite and How do they work or what are they supposed to do? And how does flying at such extreme force and altitude differences affect the inner ear thusly balance,vertigo type affects.
I work in the hearing field but not with this kind of thing.

To Mr. Whittle - I am done here. I have just finished reading your preview essay to Boyd, etc. And I am angry.

Anger can be fortunate if it is fuel, not fire.

Money is the last refuge of the defeated.

You have surrendered, sir and I am pissed off,
and ecstatic. The last step at the gate of swordlessness, is surrender, and you are clueless.

What you long for is not community, but connection.

If your destiny is assured
money is as well.

Lean on your Prophet, sir, not your profit.

If you want a solution, I will give it to you, and the cost is nothing.

Get out of your pity pot, leave the f-ing desert in your dust, and shoot me an e-mail, GHS knows my address.

Sir Leeds, I believe I can help you with a couple of your questions...

A "flight suit" is basically just a semi-fire-retardant one-piece garment which, at least in the military, pilots wear as their "uniform." It's covered in pockets and patches, and will give you a wedgie if you reach too high with both hands at the same time.

A "g-suit," on the other hand, looks like biker chaps. It has air bladders built in, and hooks up directly to a pressure nozzle in the cockpit. Whenever high g's are experienced, the bladders automatically fill with air, which squeezes the lower extremities, and prevents blood from pooling -- and becoming trapped -- below the waist, which in turn helps delay the onset of a black-out from blood loss to the brain.

As for how such forces and altitude changes affect the inner ear... that seems to be a mixed bag. For someone like me, with my genetic predisposition to ralph anytime I'm in a moving vehicle (give or take), there probably isn't much difference. Once my gyros start tumbling, a technicolor yawn is imminent one way or another. For others? Well, you've probably seen the classic footage of centrifuge tests before, with pilots clenching their teeth and chuffing air rapidly, until the blood loss finally catches up to them... then their eyes roll back in their head, and their chin drops to their sternum, and they never hear all the guys in the control booth laughing at them.

I've enjoyed the "Altitude Chamber" experience once in my life -- taken my mask off at "35,000 feet," and breathed oxygen-depleted "air" -- and I was unconscious and drooling in less than ten seconds. Enjoyed the "explosive decompression" part as well -- all the air blowing out so fast, it leaves the moisture behind as a fog. But the only affect on the ears was to make them go instantly muddy.

Personally, considering how much effort I have to put into keeping my ears clear on just a regular old commercial flight, I've often wondered how fighter pilots do it, flitting up and down across a wide breadth of altitudes without apparent effect. Any fighter pilots out there who can explain how you keep YOUR ears clear?

Hope that helped.

GHS

Posted by: Leftfoot Leeds | January 13, 2008 9:34 AM --

I'll try to answer the question, (and I'm sure I'll be gently corrected if I'm wrong...)

A "G-suit" is intended to help minimize the loss of blood or blood pressure in the brain as a result of G-forces driving the blood from the head toward the thorax, or body. It has bladders at critical points that, under G-force, are pumped to fill, and by the pressure against the tissue (muscle) that they generate, help to force blood "up" from the feet, legs, abdomen, and so on. This, with the outstanding athletic conditioning of the fighter pilot and certain breathing activities, helps to forestall the blackout that would result from loss of blood pressure in the brain.

On the other hand, a "flight suit," at least as I believe you to be using it, which is in support of flight above the limits of the human body to tolerate in terms of air pressure and oxygen content, is used to provide just that... a relatively "normal" pressure environment. The oxygen would be supplied by the face mask, again if I'm not mistaken. It is sort of a "space suit," although not nearly as "hardened" as the units worn for Space Shuttle EVA or Apollo moon walks...

Does that help, and am I close, all? Just tryin'...

I've been reading all the comments here and I'm a bit confused. Bill Mecorney, you're often very difficult to understand. Perhaps a little lessening at the attempts at poesy and a bit more straight prose would help. Do I read you correctly in your last post that you're quitting us because you think BW was unjustified in his smackdown of that vitriolic fool "american?" If that's correct, I think you have misunderstood both the rationale behind Bill's response and the tone of it, and the intent of the original poster. Your writing style is nearly incomprehensible to me (and to others?), but if you're so easily offended by what most of the rest of us see as the absolutely proper response then perhaps you're too thin-skinned to survive the rough-and-tumble of discussion here. Of course, maybe I just can't make proper sense of what you say...

"Bill M..." at 10:25. Huh!? Has the real Bill M been impersonated?

Doug Loss,
Rest assured that you are not the only one on this thread that finds Bill M. incomprehensible. Thank you for stating it so plainly. I thought I was losing it.
Regards~Svin

Doug- It is because I used to BE someone like vitriolic fool, that I LOVE what Bill W. wrote to him. I am nothing if not thin-skinned, and generally fear people getting too close. This morning has been difficult
for me, I get complicated when I am upset. Again, "stay away,". I have recently gotten loud personal news, and it infects much of what I do, and write. First, I am so grateful someone has noticed
that this site is important, and I owe Whittle a debt I cannot pay. I believe in what Bill W. seems to me to be doing, and if you are rattled, you should have a glimpse of me.

Read this or don't, it is me. My country is more important to me than my life.
When I see that others may share this feeling, I get passionate, and containment is a challenge. I spend way too much time on unimportant things, and avoiding what my beloved Judo instructor taught to me. Dino said,
"Life is pretty much just doing the next right thing, and if you want GOD to laugh, tell him your plan
for your life". There are such wonderful people here, and you know many things and have much wisdom; my impatience is plasmic when I see
good hearts mocked and wisdom missed.

GHS, you are absolutely correct, Sir, (as always) regarding the "flight suit," in current day practical use, at least as I understand it. I was referring to a "pressure suit," as I recall them from the days of Yeager et al, and the X-15 flights to the literal "edge of space."

Bill M., you are most welcome, (Rules of the Road post), and I sensed such a love of country which I certainly respect and humbly share. I believe your Judo instructor was wise. I merely wish to add the following thought for consideration -- to wit, perhaps the one aspect of progressing toward Swordlessness is something I have found most difficult to acquire, and which may (at first blush) seem something totally foreign to the realities of combat -- patience.

And with that, perhaps my sanity will be doubted. But gently, by this austere group, I'm sure.

In humility.

Paul - It is frequently a surprise (aha!)when a concept becomes clear. My path in quest of swordlessness started with Dino and a man named Dan Millman. Millman wrote a book
called "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior". Oxymoronic? No. Swordlessness
contains everything in it to prevail WITH not against the Enemy. Because the Enemy is...Who? When you demonize the opponent, instead of "getting" him, you create an energy that potentiates His victory, not yours. I posted LONG ago, here that to prevail, you must occupy His "whole space" and not just your own. I have also written to those who understand Physics about Quanta, and Relativity. Aeronautics, Ducted flow.
One of the things I have learned here about the Internet (From GHS, D4, BR, Doug, OTTO, MD.et al.) That
if you're smart, be careful, some one will read in your comfort with the difficult, a CHALLENGE. KNUCKLEHEAD.
If all is forgiven, I'd like to post a nasty one I was about to drop, a real steamer, both ends dirty.

This is framed in heated words, from my love for our
land, and...well. it is me too.

The beautiful aircraft sitting on its extended landing gear, chocked and draped on the ramp, is not an airplane, RYAN, it is a truck,a parked and motionless TRUCK

The bird isn't a bird,Ryan, walking clumsily on its spindly legs. it is a feathered reptile, probably looking for a crumb, how embarrassing

What absolutely has been missed by everyone here is what Boyd knew, What I know, and Dan Millman, and Richard Bach, and Clausewitz and Petraeus.

Now I'm not going to be the one rushing to the dictionary or the encyclopedia, trying to one-
up Santa Claus, the word is Gestalt. Like all other words
it is wise, and idiotic, depending on who is perceiving it.

I have no axe to grind. I have a genius IQ, but a troubled Heart; I have ruined my life,and that of many others, trying to reverse that paradigm.

We are at War, and if I thought that I could help
Ahmed and his brothers understand the place we all must live a little better, I would offer him my neck. I would only ask that he allow me time for a short prayer to MY Higher Power, to allow
me to enter what is not Death with a smile.

Paul - Ah. Patience. without it I cannot write well. I am holding so many swords, none of them will function. What a comfort and blessing you must be for those who are fortunate to know you and be near.

God Bless

Well, umm... I feel compelled to respond to Mr. Mecorney's questions, since several of them were directed at me, but since I'm still trying to figure out the apparent mood swings in a couple of them, and I honestly don't know what he's talking about in most of the rest, I'm afraid I can only address a couple of points right now.

First of all, it is Bill's general practice to read and participate in the comment streams for only the first 3 to 5 days after any given essay comes out. It's too much of a full-time distraction beyond that. So Bill -- who got strung along a little longer than normal this time because of Ryan Crierie's comments -- ceased to be involved in this exchange back around the 8th, when he last responded to Ryan. As such, THAT part of the "Brass @ E!3" has played no role in the grooming and maintenance of this thread in quite a while.

And by the way, Bill Whittle is the ONLY "E!3 Brass." This site is just his opinion vent, his personally paid soapbox. There is no staff.

Instead, since Bill and I have known each other since he was 10 and I was 12 (good gravy, that's 38 friggin' years now), and are of like mind on almost everything, he has chosen to leave me as the comment stream's "overseer" in his absence. And as such, I have the "keys to the throne room," and thereby the capability to delete, banish, or edit the problem children, and even post-edit the typos in the essays themselves. I also "publish" any acceptable comments that I find caught in the spam filters (comments with a lot of links, comments that sometimes get duplicated, sometimes even comments that are just too long... I never know or understand the computer's bizarre auto-selection process). However, my primary function thus far has simply been to go in each day, and cull out the mountains of spam, porn, and other viral smegma that make it into ALL his comment streams, non-stop, all day everyday.

For the most part then, I don't pop my head up much in these streams. The vast majority of the time, the small army of "core" regulars handle all issues of contention far better than me -- they're usually better informed, up on current events, and unlike myself, they're capable of keeping it short, simple, succinct, and even funny. So I've got nothing to add. I made an appearance here recently only because Mr. Crierie addressed one of the few subjects about which I do have some expertise. That's all.

But if one of your (or Airfoil's) posts got "sent to the penalty box," as you say, presuming there wasn't something blatantly offensive about it, it most likely just got caught in the automatic filters for some reason -- maybe too many links or something. And if it did, and I found it in there when I got home from work that evening, I can assure you I "approved" it, and it showed up -- in chronological sequence -- shortly thereafter. It's probably there now. If it WASN'T in the filters when I checked, then I don't know what to tell you -- I guess the danged software ate it.

Computers are all black magic to me.

As for "demonstrat[ing] conclusively that William Whittle is not [me]," well... you'd have to backtrack through E!3's archives -- back to like December of '04, or January of '05, or maybe a year earlier than that, I don't remember -- to when Bill wrote an essay/article about a cross-country flight that he and I made in an experimental aircraft. Because in that essay (I believe), there are picture(s) of me. Compare them to Bill's headshot on this site's masthead. He weighs about 60 pounds less than me, still has his original hair color, and has no facial hair. He's also two years younger than me, and has the most gorgeous and adventurous girlfriend in the world, the lucky bastard. He also lives in L.A., and I'm in Orlando.

Other than that, I guess you'll just have to take it on faith... we ain't the same guy.

And finally, as for the "self-explanatory 'Empty Hand'" thing (whatever that is), or the "scoping session of life," or the "virtual impostership" of the internet, or the "pissing on potentiation" by "those who 'control' the ether"... well... I'm afraid I just don't know what to say to that. I've just re-read those posts of yours for the 10th time, and I still don't have a clue what you were talking about. I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be angry or not. So, in accordance with the by-laws of Ejectia, I will presume the best, take it well, and just say, "Um, okay. Have a nice day."

But for now, back up to my roost in the cyber-trees.

MAN, I wish I could learn to keep it short.

GHS

Yep, I found a picture. In his January of '05 archives, in an article entitled "My New Year's Revolution," he included a picture of me AND his gorgeous girlfriend.

Man... talk about beauty and the friggin' beast.

GHS

GHS, FWIW, I'd bet Tolsoy probably wished the same from time to time...

"MAN, I wish I could learn to keep it short."

Wishing you well! ;=)

Hee, GHS - yours earlier:

"...had to let it build up until last night, and then let fly with a single...."

I've read that men who do that, have many male
children. Those who make love to their wives
every night, beget lots of little girls in a row.

Dougman, when you've finished making love to your wife, I have a msg for you up at 7:42 1/12/08 :)

PS - How many girls do you have?

And do you all know what Tahitian hut-hopping is? It's gentler than barnstorming and augering in -- see, now I'm learning air driver's slang :)

BR and Dougman, that last reminded me...

For info on Mo, I rely on Robert Spencer's books and his web sites, Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch. Excellent resources, all.

There's something about swordlessness and empty hand that doesn't feel right to me. It's poetic, yes. But feels like weakness. The only surrender I like is in a Bob Dylan song (not his anti-war stuff; that romantic one -L, L, L upon my b b b).

I like the Italian (Latin) word "vincero" - it's so positive.

Besides, swords are beautiful things and a warrior should never leave home without it --or come home without; in fact, a free spirit's sword is not detachable. The use of force and intelligence for the greatest good for the greatest number is a duty.

Gods and goddesses also have free choice to be playful, lazy or active in the games of their making.

BR,
Hail and well met. The Gods can indeed be capricious, though that is not their best quality. The use of the sword, however, is to protect the individual. The greatest good for the greatest number is not served by that most elegant of weapons. I have a black belt friend who is an excellent swordsman of the Japanese school. He refers to the masses as "Pike-men". It is not a term of endearment.
Regards~Svin

Thank you for the flight suit and g suit info.
Mr Bill M,
I can understand the frustration and empathize with the depth of your love for this country and all that means.
I am stunned at the frivolousness and vitriol from purposely ignorant fools that are not Americans, they just happen to live here.
The regulars that are ejectians are not of that ilk.

An excerpt from one of my poems, wishing you peace

Then comes the moment
When a weight is lifted off
Your lungs can breathe deep again
And as you exhale you step through a doorway
Turning, you see you on the other side
In a place you used to be
Relish the moment, you earned it
Be happy with the choice to know
You walked the harder path
And you let the hard go

Ahhhhhhhhh...

1) bill mecorney, I suspect pain and wish you the best. If we can help, please sing out. Which perhaps is what you are doing...

But as for your writing, candor obliges me to tell you that while it may be more important to understand than to be understood, in the same wise, it is better to give than to receive.

Therefore, by offering your thoughts in a simpler, clearer form, you confer the benison of understanding upon us.

Were it of value, you might find this also helps you better understand yourself. At the risk of becoming maudlin I had a friend, who is no longer with us, who always had to be told to simplify. For him, high-flown rhetoric was like a squid's cloud of ink, an escape maneuver. (Would that I had him here and blathering today! But he understood what I meant.)

I hope I have not spoken in a manner such as to give offense, and that you will be so fortunate as to in turn understand me and to divine my kindly intent ;>.

2) re:

GHS, FWIW, I'd bet Tolsoy probably wished the same from time to time...

"MAN, I wish I could learn to keep it short."

Wishing you well! ;=)

Posted by: Paul A. | January 13, 2008 2:45 PM

You are looking for Blaise Pascal:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci [i.e. cette lettre] plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

This one [i.e. this letter] would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.

Man alive, could that cat lay it down!

PS GHS, Bill, sysop, whoever, standard html isn't doing quite what I expect, e.g. blockquote. Is there a guide for usage on this site?

Nichevo, I've never had trouble with blockquotes:
<blockquote>

This is a blockquote.

Wow. Between New Years' and a mini-vacation to Vegas, I'm well behind the curve in responses to this essay. And of course, Bill's brilliance sometimes requires two or three days for me to take it all in and wrap my puny mortal brain around it.

I don't know what Bill's been having for breakfast, or maybe he's taking some really friggin' good peyote, but between this and YOU ARE NOT ALONE, he's been writing essays that, instead of making me say "Right On!" like most of Silent America, have made me say "Holy sh . . . inola."

I know Bill's reticent to take credit he doesn't feel he deserves, but while he may not have invented the concepts he discussed here, I started reading this essay not knowing the difference between an OODA loop and a gouda wheel. Now that I've finished it and had 48 hours or so of reflection, I've come away with new insights on everything from why my novice friend cleans my clock at chess to why I'm awful at picking up women.

With that in mind, let me first echo the calls some made that the day Yon and Totten receive the thanks of a grateful nation, then Bill should be there too. If he can get a clumsy oaf like me to pick up on fighter-pilot concepts, that deserves a medal. And a beer. (But correct Totten's name in the link, Bill. "Michel" is actually how you spell my name, not his.)

Now then, let me chime in on a couple things:

Ken Schatz, January 6, 2008 12:19 PM: If you have [air superiority] and you lose, who do you lose to? It me must be to someone who doesn't have air superiority (only one side can have air superiority at a time). But the sentence says without you've no chance to win. mmmm... perhaps you just lose to yourself?

Yes. For example, if we lose in Iraq, it's not because we were beaten by our foe; it's because we've lost to ourselves, so to speak.

Unquiet, January 11, 2008 4:40 PM: When the Navy Officer, Lt Cmdr John asked what I was reading and I replied Ever herd of Bill Whittle? Yes. Forty Second Boyd and OODA - I read each letter like an acronym - And he looked at me like an alien and laughed.

For anyone planning to discuss this topic using actual spoken words with someone who knows anything about it; it is pronounced UUUDA.

Later on, you're going to implore us not to pick nits, but I have to in this case: despite not knowing what it was until reading it, I knew it was called "UUUDA" and not "O-O-D-A" precisely because an acronym implies it is spoken like a word ("NATO," "SCUBA").

Benquo, January 3, 2008 9:31 AM: Imagine someone barricading the door of a house against an intruder. Someone else in the house says, "What about the window? We should use some of that stuff to block the window." The first person responds, "Whose side are you on? Do you think we should defend this door, or don't you?"

You can peddle that somewhere else; it won't fly here. If you're looking for someone who wants to barricade the windows, look no further than the very essay you're commenting on. Or did you miss your host pointing out the flaws in the thinking of people far, far more powerful than all of us? If this entire essay had a theme, it was introducing his readers to windows we either never knew existed or simply had not really thought of before.

Now to something I can really contribute to:

OBloodyHell, January 12, 2008 10:35 PM: It seems as though training for this ought to include learning to rapidly dvelop decisions which are not BAD in the context but which don't rationally follow from the current situation -- they aren't sufficiently optimal to be a GOOD choice, but aren't so BAD as to be a LOSING choice (i.e., augering in). If you make a few of these at random quickly enough you ought to be able to break your opponent out of their working OODA loop and get a chance to reset things to an even keel, even gain the advantage if they are not prepared for you to make such choices, and themselves get flustered because things aren't woking as they expected.

There's a concept in no-limit Texas Hold'em called "the battle of mistakes," and I think it relates to what you're talking about. In Hold'em, as in all forms of poker, you must make your "DA" without true "OO," because you don't know your opponents' cards. So you cannot play perfectly.

Generally, whoever makes the fewest mistakes in a head-to-head matchup wins. But since we're playing no-limit, the key is not to make the fewest mistakes, but to make mistakes that cost you the least. Thus, in order to win "the battle of mistakes" you must occasionally deliberately make them — as long as they're cheap. This is to trap your opponent into making just one mistake — but it's a colossal one that costs him all of his chips.

Now, the really interesting thing is that those times when you can't get in your opponent's head and derive a perfect strategy, you can randomize your actions to at least make yourself stealthier. That gets into game theory and becomes almost impossibly complex at times, but in theory you can combine both perfect knowledge of your opponent's decisions and perfect randomization of your own to create a strategy that, although it can't win every hand since luck still plays a role, is unexploitable.

Of course, that's if you're good. If you're not so good, like me, you drop a few hundred bucks when you go to Vegas. If I had known that reading E!3 would have provided me insights at the poker table, I would have checked in here first. I'll have to keep that in mind for next time.

BR
"Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!"

(English translation: "Vanish, o night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At daybreak I shall win! I shall win! I shall win!")
www. reference. com/. . ./Nessun_dorma

I'm finding there are many ways to make love to my Wife without even being in the same room, or within miles of each other.

I'm reading "Winning Your Wife Back, Before It's Too Late" by Gary Smalley, at her request.
After which She has more material lined up for us to do together.
That and *-Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch,Vikramaditya,Mitochondrial, Corollary,Trends Lines, along with all the History and Mythology I skipped long ago.

Professional Student is what I'd like to be it seems.

Tahitian Hut-Hopping? No, never heard of it. Is that a Family friendly activity?
One Boy and Two Girls.

*-Thanks Paul!

One Day!

I'm gone One lousy DAY, and the whole thing goes all higgledy-piggledy!

I'm just hitting a couple of points:

Paul,
Sir, you continue to rock!

GHS,
Wish we could hear from you more often.

BR,
As someone with extensive training in both the use & constrution of swords (both actual & metaphorical): Swordlessness is not weakness - instead, think of it as a formlessness that is not hampered by the inherent & finite limitations of the Sword - not necessarily superior in every situation (sometimes you find that the only way to meet a sword is with a sword), but at least not committing itself to the lanes & patterns on which even a superior swordsman depends - and at best, allowing the 'Swordless' to bypass an opponent entirely - like water flowing heedlessly around a stone, rather than breaking against it.
(if anyone's interested, I have an allegorical and somewhat self-aggrandizing little anecdote with which I could illustrate)

Mr. Mecorney,
I have understood every word (I once explained to Otto the condition that allows this).
That said, you're even starting to wear out the voices.

Take a breath - remember that every time you say something out-loud, you're also explaining it. Guiness helps too.

Svin,

Remind your friend that Pike-men have their place in The Line.

- MuscleDaddy

MuscleDaddy said,
(if any one's interested, I have an allegorical and somewhat self-aggrandizing little anecdote with which I could illustrate)

I always enjoy a ripping yarn. Go ahead and self-aggrandize. We won't tell.

"Svin,

Remind your friend that Pike-men have their place in The Line."

Pike-men do indeed hava a place in the line. From the days of the Greek Hoplites, to Alexander's Phalanxes, to the Swiss pike-men of the Thirty Years War, mass formations of pike-men have played a dominant role.
The role of the swordsman is conceptually different. A good swordsman can fill many roles. Scout, assassin, messenger, saboteur, etc...
It is the difference between "armies" and "warriors". Swords are for warriors. Pikes are for pike-men. All is as it should be. I have played at both and have the scars to prove it. I prefer the sword, but value the pike-men for what they are worth.

Best regards~Svin

Hullo to everyone :)

Dougman: Hmmmmmm!!!! to everything you wrote. ((And yes, THH is family friendly - it begets communal families.)

MuscleDaddy: Yes, you understood my meaning exactly. A master doesn't have to wield his force, but can at any time, in any form. I love the scene where the master and the young girl fly through the trees in a beautiful swordfight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And the immense beauty of the symbolical flying dance over the lake in Jet Li's Hero. I've seen it four times.

Look forward to reading your allegory.

A warrior is not simply wielding weapons, they are tools. He is wielding his WILL. Granted, sticking a sharp piece of metal into someone is a good way to get your will across - but bending them to your will without resorting to impalement is the essence of swordlessness - quite the opposite of appeasement.

Countries and civilizations due much the same when they interact.

When Reagan spent (among other things) the Soviets into defeat without starting WWIII - he bent them to his will with swordlessness. The height of the art.

Monopticus- Now I count four who grok swordlessness

Mike Marchand - great meeting you! I'd love to learn how to play poker.

OT - can anyone recommend a site that defines tune up exactly? For my F250. An exact checklist. So far I've googled and find Distributor cap, rotor, sparkplugs, plug wires, PCV valve, air filter, fuel filter, breather filter and this mysterious thing called timing. Is there anything else on the list and where can I find out exactly what timing is?

BR,

Ask me:
What's the most improtant thing in comedy?

OK
What's the most important thing in com...

timing

Spelling,
not so much.
Oy

Splutter... all over the keyboard, DaddyQuatro :) I was just missing you, and whoops, here you are.

In my mind, I've designed a poker table like the round table in Camelot, but mine is soft like a bed, with lots of pillows and trays for drinks and food. You guys would recline, sometimes like the spokes of a wheel, or sit back against the cushions. And this little imp would play with you and learn. I think giggling will be my poker face and I promise not to remotely look at your cards, even though I can see through people's clothes :)

PS - your timing at 11:38 is impeccable! Those are 2 of my lottery numbers :)

BR,
it would be easier to answer your question if we had one additional piece of information. Year of the vehicle. Oh, and mileage plays a big part, as well.
Many of the things you mentioned are very seldom changed or even checked in modern vehicles. I'm at 102,000+ in my minivan and have yet to touch the spark plugs ...
At the back of almost every owners manual I have ever seen is a chart showing the items to be checked and/or replaced and the intervals.

regards

GreatHairySilverback-

I sent some G rated pictures of swords to the group via you.

Are you in receipt of these?

Computers intimidate me. I know less about them than almost any other thing on the planet.

So I tell myself it's just like our 1949 Philco, only I have control. I can't find HowdyDoody anywheres, and everybody knows but me.

They are images of America's new sword(s).

GHS- There, sent to Bill@ejectejecteject.com

Hi, Pete :) I don't want to take up too much space with my truck, but it's 1989, 302 cubic inches, 8 cylinders, 5.0 L. (I'm usually a new car owner, always checking fluids, never a problem, but this one had 5 previous owners and no manual). After getting a new dist. cap, rotor, sparkplugs cleaned, wires connected in the right sequence (previous repairman connected them wrong and I must have driven on pure will power and magic), new air filter and 2 new catalytic converters, the Chevron station said it needs a tune up before I have it smog checked. He also said it's missing on one cylinder. Is there a way to e-mail you or Svin?

PS - I'm shy to admit it's automatic transmission - I usually drive stick shift.

Had to get dressed to check the milage: it's 95354 - more of my lottery numbers :)

BR, while I'm sure Tahitian Hut-Hopping has its appeal, I'm not too certain of accepting Mead's conclusions following her anthropological research as recorded in "Coming Of Age In Samoa". The problem is that Mead's primary source of 1926, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, had recorded an interview in 1987 in which she clarified that the stories Mead took to be factually true were instead a series of fibs and suggestions, which Mead then interpreted into a flat-footed concrete sobriety, by fleshing out the stories in a manner so as to better conform to assumptions made about the "exotic" culture.

That leads me to question the value of academic education in this field. There is a huge establishment invested in propagating compromise against the values of Western Civ with cultural relativism as its tool. Entire universities are operating with this concept at least present within if not permeating virtually all their pedagogy. Mead is just one brick in this construct, but it is near its foundation. As bricks can crumble, it is no wonder that the tenured witch doctors seek to disguise the cracks, lest they be discovered. In such a grab for power and permanence of influence, the desperation is evident amongst the relativists. How long did it take them to reject Ward Churchill?

A properly informed warrior will have the agility to take the shortcut. Yet our most precious resource is information, and it is polluted. Very difficult to see clearly in such circumstances. For Western Civ, it is a matter of survival. A critical thinker may be able to cut through the sludge of a mountain of irrelevancies. But expect little help from academia, you are on your own except for such connections that can be made in the weightless realm of the mind.

H'm, let's see, get inside the OODA loop of everything that threatens the survival of humanity on the planet - what a wobble in the web. What's a jittery turtle to do?

BR,

new dist. cap,
rotor,
sparkplugs cleaned,
wires connected in the right sequence
new air filter
2 new catalytic converters

If you replace the plugs & wires, that would be a tune-up (and more, w/those converters) (hate catalytic converters).

Go to your local Autozone - here's a store locator - and spring for the wires & plugs (I tend to go with the highest-end Bosch Platinums, especially in older engines).

If that doesn't take care of the 'missing on a cylinder', that will be an indication of something more serious.

'Timing' refers to the coordination between the motion of the pistons/valves and the 'timing' of the spark to each cylinder,

- hard-mechanical motion (pistons/valves) is maintained via a chain between the crankshaft (bottom) and the camshaft (top)- and cannot be adjusted in your engine without dismantling the entire assembly,

- spark-timing can be adjusted via minute rotation of the distributor.

The timing would make the engine run more/less well, but would not affect only ONE cylinder.

Just out of curiosity, did this Chevron station do all of the previous work (to this point)?

- MuscleDaddy

Otto,

You used the "W"-word.

Ick on you, man.

- MuscleDaddy

Shutting up. *grin*

OTTO- You, sir, are a blessing to rational thought. My degree is in Anthropology; settled at a time when I self-righteously Believed in social science and the need to maintain our
"Library of cultural knowledge". Most of what passes for "Academe" these days is a far too large group of condescending blowhards, educated well past their intelligence.

May I be allowed back in the sandbox? If so, I have some pictures (My life is visual),that I have been trying to give to the group, but I am PC illiterate. They are aviation, but get past the hard copy if you can, into, you know, Sword......ess.

Aside, My life coach (me) told
me to always ask the one who
is the nicest if you want something.

BR, it's nice to meet you as well. I'd love to teach you, but as I've already established, I stink. Also, there's a much better teaching tool; it's called Getting Started In Hold'em by Ed Miller, and it's available at finer bookstores nationwide.

Now sudoku, that I'm good at and can teach. If Ejectia! had become a reality, that would have been my specialty.

GHS:
There is a huge establishment invested in propagating compromise against the values of Western Civ with cultural relativism as its tool. Entire universities are operating with this concept at least present within if not permeating virtually all their pedagogy. Mead is just one brick in this construct, but it is near its foundation. As bricks can crumble, it is no wonder that the tenured witch doctors seek to disguise the cracks, lest they be discovered.

It's sometimes handy to remember (as I'm sure you already know) that witch doctors are apprenticed and tenured the same way professors are.

Dougman:
I'm reading "Winning Your Wife Back, Before It's Too Late" by Gary Smalley, at her request.
After which She has more material lined up for us to do together.

Good work.

Remember, being more-than-fair contributes most of the Goodwill in the world. Conversely, just being fair contributes most of the Evil.

Otto- I always wanted to ask Ms.Mead a question, one I developed in a manner I thought consistent with her conclusions from her "Data"

Ms. Icon of Cultural Empiricism:

Would Faapua have enjoyed one of my Mother-in-law's
chocolate chips, had he actually have ever eaten one?

Mike,

"If Ejectia! had become a reality, that would have been my specialty."

Sentence Modifiers, man!

That one needs to go:

"If Ejectia! had become a reality on its original schedule, that would already be my specialty."

We may be desperate men on the raggedy-edge.

But it ain't dead.

- MuscleDaddy

qwer,

That was Otto.

- MuscleDaddy

bill mecorney, we tarry at the pleasure of our host alone; I am no gatekeeper but a guest like yourself. (Unless I misunderstood your polite request and it was not directed to me) Sandbox permission I can neither grant nor deny. If you wish to deliver more than comments-as-text I'd have to advise that this is not the place. However, I appreciate the idea you have of sharing out of your experience. As D4 mentioned, Blogger is free. You have disclaimed computer competence but I cannot think that given your obvious strength that the command of the toolset is beyond your grasp, and Blogger has to their credit been fairly helpful to newcomers. Re: blog etiquette, pimping one's website on others' sites is generally considered poor form, although an occasional mention or discreet link is usually tolerated. And re: email etiquette (not that you asked) I very often delete without reading any email carrying attachments that I did not specifically request. I don't like people sending funny pictures, thoughts of the day, chain letters etc - I shovel enough sh*t as it is. If I'm interested, I'll go to a site and pull it myself. Pushing it invites a cold shoulder from me, just a Pavlovian response.

Go to blogger.com/start . Can't hurt to fool around a little bit, and who knows, you may like it.

and BR, by focusing on a problem and where it led me, I don't mean to suggest that I cannot enjoy the playfulness you bring to the party. Far to the contrary, and I fear I have not adequately acknowledged the pleasure of your acquaintance.

I don't drink much, but I make a mean Jello shot.

MuscleDaddy- Went from dejected to elated, thank you.
I have a bad day when my optimism for others is challenged by a GODDAMN inaccurate post.

E3 lives, I'm going to crack a NEHI
Bless you

BR- Yep, what Otto said, you are delightful.

qwer,
That was Otto.
- MuscleDaddy

And then there are times when gravity seems to go south. :)
(Thanks, MD. Sorry GHS.)

qwer, south is good.

BR, MuscleDaddy gave you most of the info ... the only thing I'll add is that it appears as though you already HAD all those parts put in place .... and that (as MD said) IS a tune-up.
Timing will make the engine run smoother ... if it is currently out of adjustment. But. If the smog guy is correct (and I hesitate to believe that, withe the "clowns" I've met at those places), it appears as though one of the spark plug wires is not attached (correctly). A single cylinder miss is unusual, especially after a mechanic has been wrenching - so it sounds more like someone made an oopsey.

If you want to take the discussion offline ... and I'm not a mechanic and seldom play one on TV ... you can always use my blog email ... pete pete-in-midland com

BR - we'll get you running right sometime. As the owner of many a used vehicle in my time, I'm familiar with many of the complaints you mention.

As MuscleDaddy said, the tune-up has already been done, per your list of items, but I'm a little concerned where you said, "spark plugs cleaned". Did the first mechanic replace them before the other mechanic found the wires were out of sequence (By the way, if the wires are connected 180deg out of order, your engine will run, but it will run rougher than heck)? If not, definitely go with replacing both the plugs and wires. With a big truck like that, you may be able to get to the plugs yourself without too much trouble, but I am not familiar with the engine compartment of most trucks.

I'm surprised that the guy at Chevron didn't mention any possible causes of the missing cylinder. If the plugs and wires don't help, start checking vacuum lines. I just had to replace one coming out of my valve cover, which was causing my Ford Escort to run so rough it would stall when it idled. I actually fixed it first with duct tape until I could get to the Parts Store, and it was about 500% better immediately.

Then again, you may want to search the internet to find out the spark plug order for that truck, to see if the Chevron guy got it right...

Just came back from a lovely afternoon at an airport with French restaurant and outdoor fires on the patio to keep me warm as the sun set, getting to know the sounds of different small planes, soooo much fun! I love the physical sensation of take-off in a plane. Today, I experienced the beauty of their smooth gliding motion as they land. One of them even landed in a gentle sideways sweep, like a surfer on the waves.

And wow, I see there's response to my truck questions! I'll read it all slowly with much appreciation.

Otto @ 8:39: Hee, hee, "Meade" was a joke. I'll have to figure out what tickles you :)
Otto @ 12:01: I put MM onto researching "jello shots" :)

MuscleDaddy @ 8:52: Check. I'll have the wires and plugs inspected to see if they need replacing. Agree w/you on cat. converters. My caballo blanco has failed 3 smog tests since I got him in March and each time they do it, it feels like they're damaging the engine. Tks for the Autozone link and info on Bosch.

Ahhhhh! Finally a clear description! It's piston/valves-spark timing! Tku! Tku! Tku!

I think the timing is okay, because it runs smoothly at idle and high speed. It shakes at 35, so I use the 1st gear up to 35. So, if it's really missing on 1 of 8, then it's not the timing. Tku for that datum, if I understand correctly.

Truck lost power on freeway in June. Mech #1 found oil in air filter and loose plug wire. Drained oil, cleaned 2 airpipes, new air filter, new dist. cap & rotor, cleaned plugs. Left rag in airfilter compartment and overfilled the coolant.

Mech #2 - Second new air filter. Discovered Mech #1 had put plugs in wrong sequence.

Dec: Truck lost power on fwy again. The Chevron mech #3 found oil in air filter again, replaced it and cleaned air pipes. Two miles later, truck loses power again. Chevron mech #3 installs 2 new cat.conv. and says will only guarantee the work if I have a tune-up and it's missing on 1 of 8.

Monsieur Marchand @ 10:21: I think we're already playing poker. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - old Chinese proverb for never letting your enemy know your strength :) I'll google Sodoku tonight!

Pete @ 2:14: Another ahhhhh! That loose wire may still need to be handled terminatedly. Ford Service charges for estimates, so the more info I have, the better. And tku so much for yr blog email.

WayneB at 7:31: Tku vvv much also. With every piece of data I feel more confident re the upcoming repair. Found the wire sequence on a diagram under the hood finally. After watching Mech #1 fumbling around there, I really do think if I stand on a footstool, I can reach them myself :)

Yes, re Chevron guy - I've learned not all mechs are experts, much as I wished they were.

If I left anyone out, pls forgive, and thank you.

*****

You guys are bringing tears to a widow's eyes for yr helpfulness. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

PS: It's not losing oil since Mech #3 put the 2 cat.convs in 400 miles ago and I see no new oil splatters in the area of the right side wires and air filter compartment.

DaddyQuatro: can you believe it, look at my "11:38" posting timing! Now I'm smiling again.

Oh.my.god. 54 is another one!

As punishment for your constant displays of exceptional and insightful writing talent, I am hereby drafting you into the WWW - Wretched Wrefuse War (politics) with the following formal declaration:

Bill Whittle for President in '08

You may choose the flavor of your last motto. Choices include:

"Whittle: The other W"

"Send me the Bill in '08"

"In November, pull the loud handle for Whittle"

"If you don't vote Whittle, you ain't worth spittle!"

May God have mercy on your soul, rthym, and blues.

BR,

Couple of things:

* Don't even bother checking the plugs & wires - just change them. If they've been in long enough for someone to want to clean them, it's worth the $ to just do the upgrade and have that thought behind you.

* Oil in the air cleaner is almost invariably going to be the PCV valve - being the plastic valve sticking out of one of the valve covers, with a short hose connecting to the air cleaner -- it's function is to allow warmed air into the fuel/air mix for more efficient combustion, but without allowing oil to get past. Too much oil getting into the mix will affect performance, but that would be a lot of oil.

* A plugged catalytic converter(s) will cause sudden decreases of power @ speed & under acceleration, but I'm at a loss for how they would cause the engine to 'lose oil' - someone may be telling you stories, there.

* An '89 F250 has a fairly enormous engine compartment, especially for such a small-block motor as a 302, and reaching anything (even around all of the '89 emissions crap) shouldn't be a problem - That Said, unless you're pretty confident about what you're doing in there, I wouldn't.
It's too easy to get turned around and start second-guessing yourself.

* Rule-of-Thumb for finding a good shop:

- Go to a Big Chain Tire Place (tires only),
- Look around for the guy that others seem to defer to - sometimes that's the manager, but not usually.
- Tell him that you need a good, solid shop for general mechanic work that isn't a dealership and won't hurt you for $$.
- Don't be shy about playing the 'Girl Card'; if they're not looking at losing a labor-commission (the reason for asking @ a 'tires-only' place), most mechanics will err on the side of chivalry.

- MuscleDaddy
(who used to play a mechanic on TV, a million years ago)

If, OTOH, you've now got the bug to start messing with this stuff yourself, I refer you to the 'Routine Maintenance Guide' section for your truck on the Autozone site - follow the file-tree on the right under 'Routine Maintenance'.

- MD

BR -

Ditto MD about the PCV valve causing oil in the air filter. This would also contribute to failing the smog test. Again, if two mechs didn't mention it, time to find another one. MD's plan there sounds good.

Shakes at 35MPH? That sounds more like something being loose - either the suspension, the motor mounts, or possibly the pickup bed. When that happens, it's usually some part of the vehicle reaching a vibration resonance with the engine. It doesn't vibrate when you stay in first gear up to 35 because the engine is turning so much faster, that the vibrations don't match up. Bad shocks or struts can allow this to happen, too.

Also - does your smog test failure include a report on just what was too high and by how much?

(my .02$ after having spent most of my childhood staring at engines with MD)

Smog is Nitrogen Dioxide, Ozone and particulates. Not every state looks at them the same, but fortunately each has a finite set of causes, especially in a car that old.

Cat converters deal with unburned hydrocarbons which contribute to particulates - if they are clogged, your engine wont accelerate as fast, and at high speeds usually smells sulphurous (except on really expensive gas)

the NO2 is reduced by an "exhaust gas recirc" or EGR valve, which is connected from exhaust manifold to the air intake - it lowers the temperature at which the gas burns. If the timing is advanced too much, or if the carb/FI is running lean - it will also increase the burn temp, and thus NO2.

Burning oil will also cause particulates - a bad PCV valve (and it sounds like you had one -its just a BB inside a tube with a hole drilled in it, not a real hi-tech device, that lets oil VAPOR in and keeps oil LIQUID out)will cause that.

OZONE also comes from high burn temps , but ozone and carbon monoxide are dealt with by an "air pump" and the EGR valve

If the engine shakes at 35, (or really whatever RPM equates to 35) then that is probably a missing cylinder. If its the whole truck at 35 mph regardless of engine RPM, then that is suspension.

Agree on changing the plugs and wires. If you look at the old plugs and they are black , then you are blowing oil, if they are white and frosty, then you are running hot, if they are glazed "wet" and brown, then the cylinder may not be firing.

An 1989 MAY have a distributorless ignition -DI (if there is a black rectangular box about 8 inches on a side instead of a round thing that all the plug wires come out of, that's a DI) In that case, you probably have a bad module - which is the thing that will cause BOTH a missing cylinder and the appearance of the timing being off (DI don't have timing in the classical sense - its set by computer)

No DI.

Before about '93, something less than 10% of F250s came with a 302 (Ford apparently figuring that anything bigger than the 150 was going to be use-specific and need a bigger motor), and those were pretty plain-jane.

They didn't go DI in trucks until into the mid '90s.

Crap.