Defense and the National Interest

Predicting Future Military Threats: Implications of the Black Swan
 
COL Bob Toguchi, US Army
26 September 2008
Special to Defense and the National Interest
[Robert M. Toguchi is an active duty Army colonel in the Initiatives Group, Army Capabilities Integration Center, US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), Fort Monroe, Virginia. In his previous assignment, he served [...]

Cyber War, Blitzkrieg, and John Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict
 
David A. Shunk
Col, USAF, Ret.
25 September 2008
[Editor's note:  Dave Shunk is a retired USAF Colonel, B-52G pilot, and Desert Storm combat veteran whose last military assignment was as the B-2 Vice Wing Commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, Whitman AFB, MO. Currently he is an Army government [...]

Nimble Books has just released The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy and War.

Developed from a series of blog posts on zenpundit.com back in the Spring, Roundtable develops ideas from Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. It can be thought of as a companion to, or better, an [...]

The article by William Owen and the response by Col. Eric Walters have ignited a lively debate over on the Small Wars Journal.  Go take a look:
http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=6047
You’ll find yourself in a post-graduate seminar on modern conflict.  Kudos to Dave Dilegge and SWJ for kicking this off!

In another coup, the Small Wars Journal has posted an article by Col Eric Walters, USMC.  Col Walters chaired the sessions on 4GW at last years’ Boyd Conference and was involved with the Marine Corps’ adoption of maneuver warfare doctrine in the late 1980s.  As with TX Hammes’ comments on Afghanistan (see posting below), any [...]

The Family Business Exec MBA program is now underway, and time is becoming a fond and distant memory.  I did check James Fallows’ blog today and found a most interesting post by my old friend Chuck Spinney.  Chuck is sailing somewhere in the eastern Med but I guess he’s found a marina with good Internet [...]

Here’s the report on the Boyd Conference held on 26 August at the Baltic Defence college in Tartu, Estonia.  Three of the giants of the genre — Bill Lind, Grant Hammond, and Frans Osinga — made presentations and participated in panel discussions.
Congratulations to the college for what appears to have been an exciting and productive [...]

Charlie Martin makes the claim in The American Thinker that McCain’s choice of Palin as his running mate shows that McCain is inside Obama’s OODA loop:
At this point, we’re seeing that McCain is completely within the Obama campaign’s OODA loop — they are out-thinking them and out-acting them — and very probably the McCain campaign [...]

By William S. Lind
As the neo-cons celebrate a “victory” in Iraq that has yet to be won, they also proclaim the downfall of Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army militia and staunch opponent of the American occupation.  The headline of the August 5 Wall Street Journal announced, “Radical Iraq Cleric in Retreat.”
Well, maybe.  But [...]

Perhaps Boyd’s greatest contribution wasn’t EM Theory or Patterns of Conflict.  It might have been that he exemplified what it means to be a professional in this day and time.
Retired USMC Colonel Mike Wyly, a guiding force behind the Marines’ efforts to instill maneuver warfare, was also a close associate of Boyd’s.  He writes about [...]