Full pdf from Air University is here
Some highlights from the Patterns of Conflict presentation:
New Conception:
Human Nature:
Essence of Maneuver Conflict:
In 1989, Boyd presented Patterns of Conflict at USMC Command and Staff College. I received a transcript. This is what he was saying while presenting the Essence of Maneuver Conflict slides:
And that’s what blitzkrieg does. Once you may have an initial deception, but once you start riding, you’re riding on what? You’re riding on ambiguity, not on deception. You can’t stop the operations to set up a new deception. You ride on ambiguity when you’re exploiting an existing situation.
And another thing, novelty. That’s one thing technology gives you, are new ideas. In other words, create situations the guy’s never been aware of before. He didn’t know what to do. He’s never experienced it before. Whether it’s technology, whether you’ve got a new wrinkle in how to set up an operation, or whatever. You face a novel situation, can’t cope.
And then fast transient maneuvers. Not only rapid, but also irregular and rapid, so he can’t get an image of what’s going on. And your effort, directly against those features that permit him to retain his organic wholeness.
So if you pull all those together, what’s your payoff? You’re deliberately trying to generate a disorientation in his mind, mismatch between what he anticipates and that which he must react to, to survive. A mismatch. Now if you think about that, you can redefine surprise. Surprise is nothing more than a disorientation. It doesn’t say that, but that’s what it is. You can get it either from ambiguity, deception, or any combination. It may take a long period of time, but generally it’s a disorientation generated by perceiving an extreme change. It doesn’t mean it happened over a short period of time, but you perceived it. All of a sudden you say, my God, what happened? It may have been working itself out for a long, or it may be just speed.
So, surprise is nothing more than a form of disorientation. Likewise, shock, except in this case shock is so awesome, it’s so paralyzing, Christ, you don’t know what to do. You go into a state of shock. I look at shock as nothing more than a hard surprise. You can look at surprise as a soft shock. They’re both forms of disorientation.
[15:00] And disruption, the state of being split apart, broken up, or torn asunder. So all these things, you’re trying to realize this kind of an aim. But now we’ve done something interesting here. Since we’ve defined surprise and shock as a form of disorientation, why not just remove
them from the board and look at disorientation and disruption? Before we do that, let’s look at it a little bit more carefully. We may want to do it, but let’s look at it a little bit more carefully.
When you begin to examine it—and that’s what this note’s directed to here—you can also say, surprise and shock also can be represented as an overload beyond one’s immediate ability to respond or adapt. In other words, they can’t respond or adapt because of that sense of surprise, or shock, or both.
So, what you really want to do is put them in an overload condition, so they can’t respond. So just take out surprise and shock on the next chart, and substitute overload. Not that we don’t want to surprise and shock them. But another way of looking at it. The right and left side is still the same. I just adjusted the right side. So I get disorientation, disruption and overload. That’s what you’re trying to do. Disorient the guy, disrupt the guy and overload him. Then you realize this aim, or equivalently state it that way. So maneuver warfare is just not a bunch of guys going down the highway at a high speed. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Not just a bunch of guys going down a highway at high speed. There’s movement.
So if you look at this, the content of this has a heavy, what? Mental content. Whereas attrition has a heavy, what? Physical content. So we’re back to the moral, mental and physical. The attrition is related primarily to the physical and the maneuver related to the mental. So you can leverage that guy. Remember what I said, terrain doesn’t fight wars, machines don’t fight wars, people do it and they use their minds. That’s exactly what we’re working on in here. So don’t let yourself be sucked into the thing where all maneuver warfare is a bunch of troops going at a high speed down some highway, or across some plain in a tank or something like that, or a bunch of tanks. Okay? It’s a little bit more sophisticated, if you really want to think about it. Okay?
Essence of Moral Conflict:
Name of the Game:
from transcript:
Note what I’m saying there. And I underlined the key word, penetrate. Unless one can penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being, and sever those bonds, or connections, that permit him to exist as an organic hold, as well as subvert or seize those things that he depends upon, you will find it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to collapse adversary’s will. If you can’t penetrate and do that, why should he throw the towel in? He won’t.
…
Which leads to what I call “the name of the game.” With that penetration, then it permits you to isolate him from his allies, or isolate themselves from one another. In other words, you’re generating those many non-cooperating centers of gravity, they don’t have a base of support that nurtures, that keeps the operation going. It just withers away. It withers away.
Now, if you’re going to have principles of war, which I’ll get into, these are two good principles. Penetrate and isolate. Two of them, at least. You want to penetrate that guy, they’re outwardly focused—you want to isolate those components one from the other, and then subdue or overload those components so you can get him to do what you want him to do, not what he wants to do.
Pattern:
Theme for Vitality and Growth:
Wrap Up:
