Decoding John Boyd: Unveiling the Complexity and Influence of His Theories with Shawn Callahan, PhD | Ep 54

Are you ready for a mind-blowing exploration of the profound theories of military strategist John Boyd? 

Buckle up, as we've brought on Shawn Callahan to guide you through the maze of complexities surrounding Boyd's misunderstood Orientation-Observation-Decision-Action (OODA) Loop. Often written off as a simple time-competitive process, Shawn enlightens us on the significance of understanding orientation to truly unlock the power behind Boyd's concepts. 

The journey doesn't stop there. We navigate through the intriguing impact Boyd had on the Academy, shedding light on how his abrasive personality and scarce written work may have served as a barrier to understanding his revolutionary ideas. Shawn also underscores the potential of Boyd's theories in fostering organizational evolution and growth. Plus, we delve into the unsung connection between Boyd's study of thermodynamics and his energy maneuverability theory - an insight you wouldn't want to miss.

As we pivot towards Boyd's influence on the Marine Corps, Shawn expresses concern over the reduction of these theories to mere dogma and advocates for a much-needed revision to restore Boyd's original intent. Together, we emphasize the importance of advancing Boyd's ideas and works, echoing the need for more publications to propagate these concepts amongst professionals and students. It's a captivating exploration of John Boyd's legacy that will leave you pondering long after. So, are you ready to challenge your preconceived notions and discover the true power of Boyd's ideas? Tune in!

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
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Transcript

Mark McGrath: 0:58

All right, we're going to begin today's episode with a disclaimer, and the disclaimer is that our guest today is an employee of the Davis Defense Group providing educational services to Marine Corps University, and the views that he expresses here do not represent those of the Davis Defense Group, marine Corps University, the United States Marine Corps or any other aspect of the US government. This appearance does not constitute an endorsement of AGLX by the guest or any of the other entities mentioned and, without further ado, we'll dive into our conversation. Fellow Marine Sean Callahan, it's good to have you on no Way Out.

Shawn Callahan: 1:38

It's great to be here.

Mark McGrath: 1:38

Mark, I know that you're a fan of the show and that you've listened to it.

Mark McGrath: 1:43

You've listened to a lot of our episodes and you can see a lot of the overlap and the work that you're doing.

Mark McGrath: 1:49

The work that we're doing and I think where we really hit it off, in addition to being Marines and you're also a naval aviator and Pontch is one that we kind of recognize that there's a lot of problems in the scholarship of the theories of John Boyd, which in turn reduce him or create wide misunderstanding of John Boyd's theories, which in turn leads to a lot of dismissal and people, I think, leave a lot of power on the table when it comes to their competition, their collaboration, their creativity.

Mark McGrath: 2:27

They're leaving a lot on the table by not really understanding Boyd, the way Boyd designed all these ideas and came up with all these ideas. So they're missing out and you've done a really good job of pointing that out, and our role as teachers and the mission of no Way Out is to advance and develop these ideas, because they are left open intentionally. And identifying these faults or shortcomings in the Boyd scholarship I think are very important that people see these gaps and understand them. So why don't you give us a little background on how you got interested in this end of it, this understanding of Boyd, and point out some of the glaring things, and then we'll kind of go from there.

Shawn Callahan: 3:15

Sure, sure, absolutely. First, let me start by saying that I'm really pleased to be here because, in my opinion, no Way Out is the place where the most kind of cutting edge collaboration is going on with regard to Boyd's ideas and their value and their meaning. What I really love about this podcast is that some of the things we're going to talk about these misconceptions that exist out there, like your starting point, is that the folks who are on no Way Out have typically already gotten past the basic misconceptions, and that's why you're able to kind of take it to the next level and begin really seriously talking about what they mean and how they apply and can be used. So, yeah, sure, my background was as the United States Marine.

Shawn Callahan: 3:59

I was in the Marine Corps for 22 years as an F-18D weapons and sensors officer, so a naval flight officer, and one of the things that became apparent over my career both in aviation and also I had kind of a second career in teaching at the US Naval Academy, teaching history for a while, and then also as an instructor at the Command and Staff College is that Marines do not understand their own doctrine.

Shawn Callahan: 4:28

We have this thing called war fighting. It's the basic doctrine of the Marine Corps. It is a philosophy of war, it describes their understanding and approach to war and it is founded upon these ideas of maneuver warfare. But Marines, frankly, don't understand the underlying theories. So as I got into some of my postgraduate work, I really wanted to get to the origin of why does this problem exist, what are these obstacles and where do they come from? And that led me to a journey and to Boyd and his evolving ideas, as well as maneuver warfare, because there's a relationship between the two. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today does relate to maneuver warfare, because that's what drew me into the topic, but also because misunderstandings of Boyd are also intertwined with these misunderstandings of maneuver warfare and its validity and relevance.

Mark McGrath: 5:28

Yeah, a lot of us leave the Corps and we think we know it. I did six years active duty and it was, I felt, well, yeah, I know what Udalloop is and I know that war fighting is a philosophy and a way of thinking, et cetera. It was actually when I stepped out into the business world and I've said this on several episodes, that's kind of where I had my epiphany and started digging and realizing that there was a lot more to what John Boyd was trying to say. There must be a lot more to what John Boyd was trying to say. And the deeper I got into economics I ran into it was like a perfect storm, right.

Mark McGrath: 6:04

I had Franz O'Singh's book, john Robb's Brave New War, and I had this, just, you know, like ha ha moment, like there's more to Boyd, and we started digging and digging and digging on it and then it's very clear, if you just go into it with an open mind, he's massively misunderstood and he's massively reduced. Why don't we start with the reduction? I mean, they think Boyd Udalloop and that's it. And they think Boyd Udalloop, yeah, he was a fighter pilot. He came up with this idea as a fighter pilot in Korea, as a fighter weapons instructor, and that's all you really need to know about John Boyd. But you and I know that to be not the case.

Shawn Callahan: 6:46

Yeah. So that's the most important thing. If you talk to somebody and they've heard of Boyd, they equate him with Udalloop and the four step cycle and, as no Way Out has pointed out on so many different occasions, it is a massive oversimplification and distortion of one of his core arguments. And that debate about Udalloop you know, is it really something that's worthy of being called theory? Becomes the first obstacle that eclipses his much more important ideas and unfortunately prevents people from really getting to this larger, what I call a system of ideas that he constructed.

Shawn Callahan: 7:26

And, as you point out, it's easy to assume that Udalloop was a product of Boyd's aviation experience and there's things that happened in the development of his ideas and the presentation of his ideas that helped give people that impression.

Shawn Callahan: 7:42

For example, one of the briefs that he was so most famous for giving was the patterns of conflict briefing, and early in that brief he uses his aviation experience and two historical models or events as a way of kind of pre-briefing his audience on this idea of Udalloop and getting them to understand what it is. So somebody who sat through that brief, which might have been four, five or eight hours long, it's probably reasonable to see that many of them would have walked away and said oh yeah, I remember somewhere in the beginning of all this he was talking about F86s and MIG-15s in Korea and Udalloop, and obviously that's where he derived all this from. But we can get into the evidence a little bit later. I think the archive, the documentary evidence, shows that as sure as we can know anything in history, that Udalloop was not derived from Boyd's aviation experience, but rather from his historical studies and his theoretical work.

Mark McGrath: 8:45

And I would add that it evolved.

Mark McGrath: 8:47

His own thinking on Udalloop and how to present it evolved. The Udalloop and quotes sketch that we are all familiar with and you can see it on all over my LinkedIn page or you can just Google Udalloop and basically the diagram, the abstraction that Chuck Spinney helped him create in 1996, the year before he died. So even his own thinking on Udalloop and how to think about it evolves and it changes and it develops with more scholarship. And that's the other thing I think that people miss and you pointed out, you've heard us discuss these things with neuroscientists and people that understand the Kinevin framework and people that understand sports and other things because Boyd was pulling.

Mark McGrath: 9:32

Boyd was completely multidisciplinary and pulling from so many places, including beyond science and engineering, eastern philosophy and the Toyota production system and other things such that his own theory of Udalloop or his own understanding and how he taught Udalloop would move away from that simplified process that everybody knows him as and it becomes more of an abstract understanding of how we deal with reality as cognitive beings. Is how we deal with complexity. Is that Absolutely yeah?

Shawn Callahan: 10:07

And I think that's as a historian was really to get into the many different versions of patterns of conflict and his other briefs that exist in the archives, and you can really trace the emergence and evolution of his ideas from what started as Oda observed, a side enact. We're eventually realizing like there's something missing here, and we all know orientation becomes known as the big O, the one he focuses on, and, as you just pointed out, it's not until basically two decades later that Boyd actually produces the first Oda diagram, which some call the, you know, the advanced or the improved Oda diagram, but it's the only one out there.

Mark McGrath: 10:46

Right.

Shawn Callahan: 10:47

So why, if he was talking about this concept for 20 years, did he never, ever from what we see in the record illustrated as a simple four step cycle, and it stands to reason, I mean, I think it's obvious. He felt that was a mischaracterization of this thing that he was describing with words but would be misunderstood if it was represented on paper, in a graphic format. It's a simple four step cycle. I think he knew from the start there was something much more sophisticated here, and the idea that he incorporated orientation as the big O and then took so many more years before he's willing to kind of schematize it, I think says volumes about how he understood Oda from the very beginning.

Mark McGrath: 11:31

I like to point out to people if I'm explaining someone that knows nothing of the military or nothing of Boyd, when I'm explaining Oda, I always begin with orientation and I help them understand what orientation actually is.

Mark McGrath: 11:42

And the way I describe it is that orientation is your cognitive software.

Mark McGrath: 11:48

You know your internal operating system that you're born with and through time and through learning and through challenging assumptions and through your cultural background and your genetic behaviors, et cetera, that orientation continues to change and revise and over how it functions, we could look at, say, oda as a graphic depiction or as an abstract illustrative depiction on how our orientation shapes or implicitly guides and controls how we see the world.

Mark McGrath: 12:20

It shapes how we decide within it and it shapes how we act within it. And I find that that piece alone is the biggest gap in you know your run of the mill, oda loop training, right, they're not talking about how one's orientation or one's cognitive being cognitive software, how it's shaping how you see things and how it affects how you decide and act. And then you start tearing it apart. You realize that not only did they misunderstood Oda and they misunderstand Boyd, but it's likely that you know even quote unquote professionals that are talking about this. They've never read destruction and creation, they've never gone through conceptual spiral, which also has transcribed recordings, and it has a very good addition on YouTube available. Like they've never thought of those things because they bought into the story that Boyd was just Oda loop.

Shawn Callahan: 13:14

Right. I mean, if you look at it as a simple four step cycle and reduce orientation to again simplest terms, sense making what's the big deal right, it becomes very easy to look at this as a time competitive process to see who can go through their loops the fastest, and that is part of the reason we understand it that way is that's the way the Marine Corps described it when it put together its maneuver warfare. It's warfighting doctrine, right, and that really helped get that's just you know, that's just you know. Boiled out there into the public awareness, or at least the military awareness. I guess I would say so. Marines are partly at fault for this, but I think you know something like that, that elegantly simple cybernetic speed loop, is very easily hijacked by folks that want to focus on warfare as basically knowing the physical domain and fires on somebody else faster than he can put fires on you. And that is definitely not how what Boyd thought the essence of competition, military or otherwise, really was.

Mark McGrath: 14:23

And, to be fair, it's not necessarily wrong, it's just an incomplete interpretation. It's just an incomplete understanding that you know UDA can be fractal down to the very minute things subconsciously that we do if I'm just hitting my face or whatever and some kind of a situation. But punch pointed this out when we were on the School of War podcast or there in McLean that it's not necessarily wrong, it's just way incomplete, like there's a lot more that you're missing. But I always find it's that implicit guidance and control part. People just don't understand that. Also, too, how you know the loop or, as I like to call the loop, really the learning you know through the feedback. It begins going back at decision. So we learn from our hypotheses, we learn from our decisions in addition to the action, in addition to what we observe unfolding after that action. So it's so many layers and you could sometimes go OO back to O, ood back to O. It doesn't necessarily have to cycle through the process the way it's often depicted.

Shawn Callahan: 15:31

Right. So, in response to your initial statement, I'm not necessarily wrong, I will say yes and no, you're right. There are situations maybe when the Marine Corps was first trying to develop warfighting doctrine and kind of provide a segment of theory to help it make sense. It worked in that sense right. But the reason I say it's more than incomplete maybe it's like critically incomplete is because if you buy off on that simplified explanation, it can really promote habits of thinking that are antithetical to the very essence of what Boyd argued. Absolutely Right, okay.

Mark McGrath: 16:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we're on the same page. Yeah, so it's not only incomplete, you say radically, I would say potentially catastrophically incomplete. Well, let's agree on this it's how you would want your competitors to understand OODA. You'd want them to understand it that way and not understand it the way that Boyd was working on and had intended. And that's really where thinkers like us I guess that's kind of what we recognize is like that. It had to evolve, because it did, right through his course of scholarship, from destruction and creation coming out in 1976 to his death in 1997. And our first guest on the show, dave Snowden, said it would have been interesting to see if Boyd had lived another 10 years. Where would it have gone? You know what would? What else would he have added or taken away, or what else was he thinking about?

Shawn Callahan: 17:11

So you know, I think in order to get Boyd, you have to make like a mental adjustment. And this is part of what the beauty of the Marine Corps Warfighting Doctrine was and is Is it really promotes a dynamic, nonlinear, holistic, you know, way of thinking about war, which is a nonlinear phenomena, you know it's unpredictable, it's dynamic, as opposed to trying to let people try and treat it as a kind of determined, mechanistic, linear phenomena that can be understood and mastered through like analysis and application of principles and things right. And so I think that in order for people to really understand Boyd, you've got to make that mental adjustment. Those who have read him deeply, deeply, understand this, and I think it gets to your point about why, if you haven't read O'Singhah, that's probably should be your first point before you start going into reading or listening to Boyd in his lectures.

Shawn Callahan: 18:12

Can I say one thing though? Yeah, absolutely so. This conversation we've had right now we spent, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 minutes talking about UDA. It illustrates exactly what I was saying before, which is that UDA has eclipsed, you know, all these other important ideas he has. Yeah, you know, and it's so easy that here's this thing that you can reduce to even the improved, you know more sophisticated diagram, which has so much more meaning and subtlety to it, and then you miss all this other great stuff that he argued and developed over his 20 years.

Mark McGrath: 18:46

So the biggest thing there I would say is that it goes back to the misunderstanding of orientation and that not only is he known just for UDA, or people talk about that fundamental to all.

Mark McGrath: 18:58

I mean, I've said in the economics papers I've written about this that UDA is essentially the axiomatic way that humans act in their environments, and so that it is critical. It's a critical piece of Boyd and it's not everything but the misunderstanding of orientation and the misunderstanding of how orientation shapes how you see, decide and act. It does have a broader effect because if all human decision making and action is axiomatic in the way he drew it out, that's going to have a direct effect on everything else. We know Boyd for Sure, and he was trying to basically reorient us to what Help shape the way we observe and see things, because if we don't do that, we're going to start doing what he warned about. We're going to start verifying the efficacies of systems within themselves, which is going to lead to more confusion and disorder, which is why we get business failure and sports defeat and everything else.

Shawn Callahan: 20:23

I see UDA as a descriptive part of his theory. He's explaining to us the way things work. He's not telling us to do UDA or telling us to orient. That's stuff you're going to do with greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness anyway. But understanding that, his explanation of how human minds work in competitive situations, is also critical to understanding the prescriptive things that he puts out there. The things that he says that you should do are probably more accurately the way you should be in order to be a more effective adapter and competitor.

Mark McGrath: 21:02

No, I like that a lot.

Mark McGrath: 21:04

I mean, I would agree and I would say that reinforce it's an abstraction, it's an illustrative abstraction, so let's keep going on. Then, One of the things that people are misoriented on Boyd and we get a lot of haters every time we put something up on Boyd on LinkedIn or whatever. I have a really interesting description on a previous episode recently of how somebody was described on it which people can go back and listen to that episode. But I find that a lot of the people that dismiss, that have academic credentials or that have a position in the academy, it's likely they've never been in the archives of John Boyd, which are at Marine Corps University, which you have extensively and I have a couple times, and Pontch has been through several times and O'Singhah friends of O'Singhah was in, and Ian Brown has spent a lot of time in. A lot of the people that are dismissive don't really know the scope and scale of his work. That is evident in two seconds when you're in the, when you look at his archives. What would you, what would you add to that?

Shawn Callahan: 22:22

Well, I'll start by agreeing. You know, some of the most critical work, which I would basically just summarize as character assassination, has been written by folks who didn't take the time to make sure they understood his argument before they attempted to destroy it. And to me that's unconscious, unconscionable, especially if they purport to be academics. Others have been there and visited the archives but I'm not sure they got a point of his ideas and I'll just be honest in saying it's not easy.

Shawn Callahan: 22:58

Boyd is kind of was kind of a mad genius and it can be maddening going through his papers and trying to make sense of all the scribblings and all the various pieces and kind of reassemble them.

Shawn Callahan: 23:14

You know, the Boyd papers at the Marine Corps Archives in Quantico are great because they have so many different copies of his briefs which, if you put the time and effort in, allows you to correlate. You know what he was reading sometimes, what he wrote in the margins of the books he was reading, with the appearance of ideas in his work. But that is a project that, just for the patterns of conflict brief, took me almost a decade and I'm only really now just getting in depth into this later work, and so I guess what I'm saying is it is somebody's life's work to really get to the bottom of what he has to offer and offer a counterpoint to some of the critiques that are out there. If, as one author recently has done, somebody wrote that you know, hey, these are Boyd's principles, that statement alone tells me that you don't get Boyd, who categorically rejected the notion of principles of war or competition.

Mark McGrath: 24:13

Right, they pointed out. Well, we have nine, they have 13. They only have four Like. But again to your point, you're not going to know that unless you go through the, you go through the scope and scale. I mean, I think just powers a conflict alone which is probably not necessarily his best brief but or his most most important academic contribution, but certainly his biggest contribution as far as how we all, how we all know John Boyd and how certainly we as Marines, how we know John Boyd. But that brief alone, I want to say there was something like in the archives, aren't there like 39, 40 plus additions?

Shawn Callahan: 24:48

I found more than 30.

Shawn Callahan: 24:51

Not all of them are in the Boyd papers, some of them are in General Gray's papers, some of them I found in other places, not in the archive, just online and things. But you know there's a lot of versions out there and frankly I don't know any other theorist that we have that much insight into the evolution of their thinking. Like if we could go back and understand what Klaus Schwitz was reading from year to year and how he reacted to what he read, wrote what he read and what he wrote in reaction to it. You know we've got this giant pile of papers that was assembled by his widow into on war. There's arguments about how complete it is and how valuable it is. But man, if we could just go back and have the same kind of insight that we have on Boyd and to where those ideas came from, we would know Klaus Schwitz even better.

Shawn Callahan: 25:40

And that's my argument for not being able to dismiss Boyd. For example, this idea in case we haven't already said it that he derived his ideas from fighter combat, his notion of an observed-aside act cycle does not appear in his briefings until many months after he'd begun his historical inquiry. And looking at theorists like Sunza and then Uda doesn't appear for almost a year and a half after that, when he's got into many, many more dozens and dozens of more theoretical and historical works. I'm not saying it wasn't shaped by his aviation experience somehow, but to think that he directly transferred it from 1v1 air combat maneuvering and then said, oh, this applies to the rest of history and competition, it just doesn't hold war.

Mark McGrath: 26:31

We have a lot to that point. I mean we have his books, we have his, the bibliography, the sources, that I think the final version of patterns of conflict. I remember there's something like 300 sources. I mean there were, yes, yes, I mean this is a guy that read a lot of books and I was looking for it here on my shelf but in the archives it has a sticky from, I believe, mary Ellen Boyd. It says Dad's favorite book, and that was how the Leopard got his spots, by Brian Goodwin, which, again, evolutionary biology. Right, it's not a war fighting book, yet it informs so much of the things that he would talk about in patterns of conflict and conceptual spiral and other briefings. I also think it's important to point out that all of those books and sources are not all. I just pointed out one example. But there's physics, there's philosophy, there's economics, there's there's history that's not just military history, there's social history, there's intellectual history, there's biology, there's engineering books, there's management books, things like the Toyota production system and some of that, right.

Shawn Callahan: 27:40

Especially later on, he was really interested in management principles and more important, I think, than you know, what could be learned about management itself was this idea of how did these revolutionary ideas occur and how do we capture that so that we can come up with revolutionary ideas that are going to give us competitive advantages. I think that's ultimately what he was after.

Mark McGrath: 28:06

I've always found too, his infusion of some of the eastern ideas, not just the business practices but also the philosophical practices like Taoism and Zen. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was one of his favorite books. The other one that I know people on Wall Street read is the Book of Five Rings. Yes, japanese way of war. I mean again different thinking from you know, most war fighting that maybe had been the prevailing thing here in the west was Western industrialist thinking. Right, it's not necessarily taking an eastern view of things and I think that that's a very critical thing. When you look at the epistemology of Boyd's inputs up until his death, it's really interesting to point out that fusion of Eastern thinking and Eastern philosophy it's a critical differentiator.

Shawn Callahan: 28:59

Yeah, I, just because I was nodding my head up and down when you were saying that. I want to throw out like one thing that I think illustrates the kind of the approach you have to take to Boyd's work. I too thought that Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance Robert Perseg's story was hugely influential on Boyd it was so obvious. But I haven't found a trace of that in the archives, at least in the portions that I've looked at.

Mark McGrath: 29:22

So it doesn't take away from. His copy is in there, isn't it?

Shawn Callahan: 29:26

I just haven't seen it in the source list at all and I don't recall seeing it in his box of books. So I myself have lectured and said how important this book was to Boyd. But I've got to be willing to revise that right. I'm quibbling with the detail, but it illustrates a larger point. You're right in saying that he is dramatically influenced by Eastern philosophy, the type of stuff that Robert Perseg was also influenced and writing about. But if we're going to be serious scholars of Boyd, we have to be willing to follow his counsel and revise our conclusions as we discover more.

Mark McGrath: 30:08

I think that's one of the greatest things that people should take away. When it comes to John Boyd is when he was wrong, he could let go and move on quickly, which is really one of the reasons why he never had a book, or even Destruction and Creation was his only published piece, because he thought once you publish it it's ossified and frozen in time, and then it would. I think that the date on the official publication published version was September 3rd 1976. But he still revised it a bunch of times after that that we don't even know about. You have to go into the archives and see the revisions that he made to Destruction and Creation after his published version. Because he thought that if something was set in stone or if something was ironclad, irrefutable doctrine, you should take it out and burn it. Because things are always changing and always evolving. We have to update and change how we think.

Shawn Callahan: 31:02

Absolutely, and I've been critical of the Academy in this discussion the folks who are responsible for the production and dissemination of knowledge, for not Tell us more about that.

Mark McGrath: 31:14

Tell us more about that, because that's, I think, an area that you and I really connected on.

Shawn Callahan: 31:19

You know, academia is responsible to society for the advancement and the dissemination of knowledge.

Shawn Callahan: 31:25

That's why we have universities to study, understand things better and share that with the rest of society.

Shawn Callahan: 31:34

You know, part of the critique I've already been mounting through this discussion is that some of the people who have been writing about Boyd and his ideas I don't think started with the assumption that he had something valid and worth sharing and instead of approached the question with this idea of cutting him down and exposing his faults.

Shawn Callahan: 31:55

And if we start instead with hey, I'm going to understand the argument before I try and dissect it and destroy it, it takes you in a different place. So part of that, I think, comes from an academic attitude. You know, boyd was very dismissive of people who had professional credentials. It's part of, I think, the bad side of his to be or to do argument, because it almost like says if you go on to a high level of achievement in your field and get promoted or whatever, you've made the wrong choice and that might be a deterrent to some people. So Boyd was very dismissive of people with PhDs and people who purported to be experts and I think that probably alienated a lot of the historians and other professionals in various disciplines that heard his work over the years.

Mark McGrath: 32:55

He was not a charming person sometimes, right? No, not at all.

Shawn Callahan: 32:58

In fact, as fascinating as a person as he is sometimes, you know, when you watch his videos and hear him talk, you have to say this would be a little bit alienating to me in some ways, like I'd have to get past some of my own biases to listen to what he has to say, right? So anyway, what I was saying is I think some of the problem is there's been a willingness to castigate him without investing the effort to deeply understand him, and that maybe also represents the very fact that there are elements, as within any profession, where there's a not invented here kind of mentality or this is from outside. Like you see, a lot of critiques to this day is from this idea that Boyd was not a professional historian. So who was he to interpret history and come up with all these synthetic ideas? Well, I don't know about you, mark, but my historical studies have told me that the best work comes in any field, usually comes not from people working strictly within the cons finds of their own field, but those people who reach across disciplines and bring in all these ideas and then create something fundamentally new that changes the paradigm or forces the field, the discipline, to reconsider its paradigm and then creates kind of a new starting point for the advancement of knowledge. This, by the way, is like one of Boyd's central points.

Shawn Callahan: 34:24

So, yeah, I think that's part of the problem of why the Academy hasn't gotten to a better understanding of Boyd. We have to be honest, though, that Boyd contributed to this himself, not just because he was kind of an abrasive guy who might have been offensive in how he presented himself, particularly towards elites in one profession or another, but also the fact that he failed to ever write his stuff down. It's the flip side of constantly evolving. That meant he also never carefully defined his work in black and white in writing with all the citations. The only written piece he has is destruction and creation right. All this other stuff he did came in a briefing format where it was easy to misunderstand him and, frankly, to this day, only now are we getting to the point where getting that stuff out on the internet publicly available is giving people a chance to actually watch Boyd giving a brief while looking at his slides Come the closest we come to experiencing that today.

Mark McGrath: 35:28

Yeah, I mean just for people listening. I could tell them, go on YouTube and type in conceptual spiral, john Boyd, conceptual spiral, and there's a pretty good audio version of him. You can see him, but the slides are murky so you have to follow along on like a PDF or something. But it's consistent. There's also some upgraded versions of patterns of conflict. Both the version I think the version that's on YouTube came from maybe a congressional office that he was briefing, and then the other one that Ian Brown's done a lot of work on. That was at Command Staff College there at Quantico and that's a very good.

Mark McGrath: 36:10

Ian's got that transcription up. We've put that up a few times on our site and it's a very good one to follow along and listen to. But what's really interesting about that it's not so much the slides, it's the back and forth as you listen and read along. It's the back and forth between John Boyd and Mike Wiley and whoever else was in the class. I'm pretty sure one of them was General Van Ruyper, because there's an unmistakable voice, but no way to prove it unless we asked him.

Shawn Callahan: 36:38

For Conceptual Spiral. There's also copies of his 1993 presentation of that to the Space Cast Forum, which was when the Air Force was going through this kind of think of it like a giant think tank, gather people in Maxwell Air Force Base, get kind of the smartest minds in there and let's fundamentally reconsider what the Air Force needs to be doing in 2020. He gave a presentation there of his Conceptual Spiral, which came after.

Mark McGrath: 37:05

I think that's the one on YouTube. I'm pretty sure it is on YouTube. Yeah, that's the YouTube one.

Shawn Callahan: 37:10

Yeah, but to your point, some of the most fascinating discussion comes after the brief in the Q&A and you can't even hear what the question is being asked. But you're just following Boyd's response. You just hear the answers.

Mark McGrath: 37:22

Yeah, you get the answer. You got to try to backtrack what the question was. Of course somebody had to take a stab at him about fighter design or something that had. Let me ask you this, what you think of this. Gi Wilson was on and as you know, gi Wilson was a collaborator with Boyd, one of the acolytes in those days, that retired Marine Colonel that knew Boyd from 1979 until his death. He believes and he said on the show that and I haven't found reason to disagree with him because I think he's right on the most important things of the Boyd canon are number one, destruction and creation, and then number two, conceptual spiral. Everything else was a riff off the structure and creation, but that conceptual spiral of the weight of his contributions, that was a very influential brief that people would need to pay attention to beyond just understanding who to effectively or patterns of conflict.

Shawn Callahan: 38:24

Yeah, If you look at the progression of his work, from the destruction creation essay and I'm talking about his theoretical work, I'm not talking about a new conception of air to air combat or EM theory or anything like that, but destruction creation, the original essay then you go into patterns of conflict, organic design for command and control, the strategic game of question mark and question mark, which is interaction and isolation, and then finally his one slide brief revelation, it's kind of like a full arc from you know, here's a basic theory of knowledge through some kind of tactical and operational applications, and then they get broader and broader, and broader, until you come back to this point that those who can innovate and synthesize, aka make snowmobiles, will survive and prosper and those who can't will become extinct.

Shawn Callahan: 39:12

Right Conceptual spiral just gets bolted on the backside of all that, and that, I think, is a elaboration of that same argument. So in many ways Boyd had this philosophical understanding of the world and knowledge, the universe, and then his studies looped back to that at the very end. So there's a lot of symmetry between his original and his final ideas that were developed over this 20 year period.

Mark McGrath: 39:45

Right, and it was a 20 year period where it just didn't stop like he just he kept going, as GI said, on his deathbed he was talking about evolutionary biology, like right to the very end, like he was still thinking of these things.

Mark McGrath: 40:01

You know, as you mentioned, you mentioned EM theory.

Mark McGrath: 40:03

I think that's another thing that people don't understand about John Boyd that this guy, as a first lieutenant and a captain, wrote the definitive air to air combat study that's still in use by all NATO forces right In his free time.

Mark McGrath: 40:20

In his free time and it, I believe, knocked off fighter doctrine or other books on air to air combat that were from experts or people, doctorates in air, air space engineering or things like that where this guy in his free time, as a junior officer, writes this and then as a field grade officer I don't know if they call him field grades in the Air Force right as a major he writes, he develops some energy maneuverability theory, and I believe, in speaking with some of the acolytes that they said that his awareness of EM theory like how did I come up with this? I didn't have a doctorate in this, I don't have a PhD in aerospace or air knock on engineering how did I come up with this, and that set him on the path that he just could never put that to bed. Like you know, that's where destruction, creation comes from, and everything after Right.

Shawn Callahan: 41:22

It was an effort to.

Shawn Callahan: 41:24

He was in a thermodynamics class and it was an effort to illustrate.

Shawn Callahan: 41:28

They were studying for a thermodynamics exam and he was talking to somebody who had no military experience and he said let me put this in terms of fighter pilot, because that's what I understand he suddenly realized that there was a relationship between thermodynamics and what he did as a fighter pilot. That's what led him to innovate the energy maneuverability theory, and that kind of connection of those two disparate things was the spark that led to the inquiry of, basically, how do people come up with revolutionary new ideas, truly revolutionary insights in progress? Like, how did I do something that changed the way we approach fighter design in the US Air Force and within the industry and tactics, so that design and tactics were interrelated, based on a common, unifying theory? Why did I as he would say, a dumb fighter pilot trying to study thermodynamics come up with that when we have legions of engineers and a bureaucracy that was focused on trying to get the most and all it was doing, in his opinion, was making heavier and more sophisticated aircraft that were losing capability pound per pound?

Mark McGrath: 42:33

Well so, and let's point out that that occurred long after serving as a fighter pilot in the Korean conflict. Right, he was developing these ideas long after of what people think. So, okay, we agree that Boyd's you know how he developed. These things are not necessarily not that those things didn't inform his thinking, but it wasn't devised in those ways. It's much part of it is part of a larger system of the canima Boyd. We have a spreadsheet of all the different acronyms that he uses. My three favorite are EFAS, vhri and or VRHI, rather in Iowa high. So EFAS, right, einheit, fingersmiths and Gefuels, alftrack, taktik and Schwerpunkt, the way of saying when I teach it, I say mutual trust, intuitive, intuitive feel, empowerment or mission or contract, and then focus on directions, schwerpunkt VHRI. I like teaching that one. What do you, what do you like about VR, vhri and Iowa high? And why should people delve into that? Because most practitioners are quote, unquote, teaching UDA, never bring these things up, okay.

Shawn Callahan: 43:52

So VRHI is an acronym. You don't see him express it that way because it's not as conducive as OODA. Uda, right, that is, in my opinion, the most eclipsed, underappreciated concept within the patterns of conflict brief. Boyd did not seek, in developing that brief over a 10-year period, to describe how humans thought and operated. Like UDA was not the thing he was after. As I said earlier, it was just part of the explanation of why VRHI is the thing that people needed to be after.

Shawn Callahan: 44:28

What he saw in that brief from the start was to find out what it was that gave humans advantages in competition, hence the name patterns of conflict. And as he got into his studies before or more or less simultaneous when he came up first, came up with this idea of ODA Observed Decide Act he really got into Sunza. This is the time when we know for a fact he read Sunza and began incorporating his ideas. And one of the first things he does is he says I think four qualities that give us advantages and those who have read Sunza will recognize these Four qualities that will give a force and advantage are initiative, quickness, fluidity and cohesion. And if you watch over the course of the next nine years from that point, those ideas slowly evolve into variety, rapidity, harmony and initiative. So along the way in this brief he decided he needed to describe something called maneuver conflict. And to Marines, they gravitated towards maneuver warfare and tried to adopt this as a philosophy and they got focused on how to do maneuver warfare avoid surfaces, penetrate gaps and those sorts of things. But what they missed is that Boyd wasn't saying go out and practice maneuver warfare. He was just illustrating as one form that conflict could take.

Shawn Callahan: 45:55

What Boyd was saying in patterns of conflict at the end of his 10-year period was the qualities that you need to promote in your organization if you want to be successful in conflict are a variety, rapidity, harmony and initiative, the ability to have a repertoire. This is a variety of many different things you can do. Don't just be a one-trick pony because, as Sunza would tell you, you've become predictable, your form is known and therefore it's easy to counter you. Rapidity obviously this is part of why UDA helps make sense, because it helps you understand the value of acting quickly. What UDA does is helps you realize how time is weaponized in order to disrupt somebody's moral or mental cohesion.

Shawn Callahan: 46:40

Anyway, rapidity is important. Initiative having people out at the point of contact who can react and take the most appropriate course of action, or any appropriate course of action in responsive of all these circumstances is critical. Don't wait for a slow decision from the rear. And then finally harmony. All of these efforts need to be harmonized. There needs to be some kind of central, unifying vision that ensures that all of your components are all acting towards some common goal, as opposed to just flying off in different directions. As he pointed out, there's a natural tendency for organizations not to have cohesion. You need to have some force, some harmonizing force that gives them a sense of central focus and direction.

Mark McGrath: 47:29

One of the things that I learned in the archives and I found extremely interesting, being the son of a retired Army officer, was that Boyd, basically, was pleading with the Army training a doctrine command aka TreyDoc. Don't use the word synchronization, yes, use the word harmony. You synchronize machines, you harmonize people.

Shawn Callahan: 47:57

When the Army developed active defense, there was a large reaction from the defense intellectual community castigating that. There was a large reaction in the Army as well. It served its purpose at the time. It did some good things to the Army, but it also just started a conversation. When they began developing Air Land Battle Doctor in the 1982 version in particular, they really worked hard to get people like John Boyd and Bill Lindaboard to try and get their endorsement. Ultimately, boyd said if you insist on keeping the word synchronization, I can't stand behind this.

Mark McGrath: 48:33

Yes, which was really unfortunate because he put a lot of work into the Army, collaborating with Uba Vastase, who he went to bat for in his congressional testimony. We've talked about that before and that is so. Harmony is a critical thing. We talk about it a lot and then that expands into Iohi and I've written about that. We talk about Iohi a lot. We've had Chet Richards on to talk about Iohi. Here comes Iohi after that. Why is Iohi important? Why should organizations in any industry understand Iohi?

Shawn Callahan: 49:11

Okay, great. So Iohi is really interesting because I actually got this wrong in my dissertation when I wrote that Boyd did not modify patterns of conflict after 1986 when he had moved on to other projects. But then he had finished patterns of conflict and organic design for command and control and then he was going on to this strategic game of interaction and isolation. He actually, in 1989, went back and modified patterns of conflict in one slide to replace VRHI with Iohi. So insight, orientation, harmony, adaptability and initiative You'll notice that a lot of the terms harmony, initiative, adaptability kind of goes along with variety and rapidity.

Shawn Callahan: 49:54

You know, all kind of capture the essence of VRHI, those qualities you want to embrace.

Shawn Callahan: 50:01

But by adding insight and orientation I think he was going back in a little bit of a corrective and saying, hey, as I get to the end of this brief, you need to understand it's more than also just embracing these four qualities and how important insight and orientation are.

Shawn Callahan: 50:19

And it's really interesting the terminology that emerges when he describes orientation later on.

Shawn Callahan: 50:25

There's like these paired action verbs or qualities or things you needed to do as part of orientation, part of its projection, like you have to have an idea and hypothesize something.

Shawn Callahan: 50:38

But the flip side of that, as I read it, is empathy, being able to see things from somebody else's point of view, and likewise it's a process of correlation how do all the ideas and the random pieces fit together but also being willing to reject that stuff. So I think, by later in life going back and emphasizing IOHI instead of simply VRHI, it further shows the evolution of Boyd's ideas and the increasing importance of orientation and this need to be a fundamentally open system, always viewing things from the outside as well as the inside you can look at. I'm not widely read in business, but the things that Boyd was most attracted to and some of the things I've read, like Peter Senge's fifth disc one and such, really emphasize the need to avoid compartmentalizing and being trapped by your own ideas and instead being able to see things from the outside and adapt to the world as it is and see things from other people's perspectives.

Mark McGrath: 51:51

My favorite thing about so to your point, iohi was added, I think, in 89, and he changed the A. I think it originally been adaptability which changed to agility. The best thing about that slide and this is what I share with executives I coach or organizations I speak in front of is that IOHI just taking the title right out of Boyd's slide is the theme for vitality and growth Right. If you want to have vitality and growth, whether you're a marine regiment or you're a business or a nonprofit organization or a sports team, you've got to have insight, orientation, harmony, agility and initiative. And, more importantly, you have to understand it effectively. And once you do, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And what's great about talking about those things again? We're building off of UDA still, when IOHI is part of my orientation and an understanding of IOHI as part of my orientation, shaping my observations, decisions and actions. That's how I can coordinate action with others on teams of any scale, because it's all fractal to achieve vitality and growth or to pursue vitality and growth.

Shawn Callahan: 53:07

Right, yeah, I mean we're making the case once again that UDA was not the point. You can see elements of UDA within that. You can see where the improved UDA diagram helps you understand why IOHI is what he was advocating as the keys to the success in the future, the qualities and the activities you need to be good at, competent at. But it wasn't. Simply understand this diagram and you can outpace your competition.

Mark McGrath: 53:38

So let's wind down in the time that we have left about. You know, boyd uses a lot of words and you and I were discussing why are they so hydraulic? Sucking up, drowning, hosing, pumping. What do you think about some of the words that he uses? Is it just his fighter pilot background or not? You know hydraulics on airplanes of those days, or engineering background? What do you think?

Shawn Callahan: 54:08

Yeah. So let me just provide a couple of examples for those who haven't listened to a lot of Boyd's lectures and things he does use, just in his linguistics he doesn't pull out a full metaphor. It's the way he describes things has this kind of hydraulic feel to them. He'll talk about hoovering up or constantly sucking up information and taking it in. He'll talk about how you know if you're not an open system, you know the message that somebody's getting you can be drowned out by your own rigidity and misperception and the information that you have, you know all the good stuff you should be able to see gets drowned beneath all that. He talks about pumping ideas an awful lot. Hey, I'm going to get this idea and I'm going to pump it back to this guy and he's going to look at it and stuff and he's going to pump back a response to me.

Shawn Callahan: 55:05

And then, finally, the hosing his adversaries is a little bit interesting.

Shawn Callahan: 55:12

That might be fire pilot terminology, because for those who are a little bit familiar with things like rear quarter maneuvering for a guns solution, you know it's a little bit more of a stable environment and it's a process where you know the pilot is trying to like literally walk the tracers onto the target.

Shawn Callahan: 55:32

A stream of tracers. So think about two kids playing in the yard. Or maybe you have a hose in your hand and you're trying to hit somebody with it as it's squirting. You're trying to like walk it on there. It's a very fluid feel to it, right? But nonetheless, in Boyd's arguments he constantly talks about how he got in this room and he knew how he was going to trap some general and making a statement that would bind him to a certain course of action. And then Boyd would reveal how that was a completely invalid way of looking at things and he described that he hosed the guy. So he may have been saying that you know, I just got a rear quarter entry and gunned him in the rear because fighter pilots like hosing other fighter pilots, or this might be part of the hydraulics anyway.

Mark McGrath: 56:17

So that's an interesting curiosity of yours his linguistics that he would use.

Shawn Callahan: 56:22

Yeah, and I think you know to understand Boyd is to understand the intuitive and the kind of synthetic, the things that defy explanation with typical terms, that when you use a term like we're moving information, we're sharing information, it gets kind of sterile. You know, it sounds like it's the sort of thing that's conducive to a line diagram. I give you my argument, you give me your counterargument. Right, that's just not the terminology used. And I think it's because he understood that the process of really understanding and comprehending knowledge in the end is a very kind of organic process. It's not. You can't divide it up into discrete chunks. You know, and I feel like he felt like information.

Shawn Callahan: 57:15

You know, part of the thing with fluids in hydraulics is like fluid has pressure and power, like when I'm persuaded by an argument. Sometimes it's because somebody has broken it down in a logical way and I see that it's an ironclad, point for point addresses it. But sometimes I'm persuaded just because of the volume of information and the way it all fits together and kind of the pressure of the argument, so to speak. You know the way it kind of seems to represent a whole without needing to go in and analyze all the pieces. Sometimes in my discipline in history, you can't definitively prove something, but you can persuade people of your point through a volume of evidence and argument right and for board.

Mark McGrath: 57:59

Trying to harmonize? Yeah, I'm just trying to do much less, yeah much less sterile.

Shawn Callahan: 58:03

I think it was all about just you know this much more intuitive way of handling information and changing your position over time. Yeah, I don't know. I'm hypothesizing that, it's just something I've been intrigued about lately.

Mark McGrath: 58:17

Well, so we could finish discussing how ideas on teaching and learning void. There's multiple ways to do it, and hypothesizing and wondering about things is a big part of it, because the last line of Franz Ossinger's books I've used a quag, can't think of how to tell my head, but it states something along the lines of he left this stuff open intentionally so that we could continue to build on it. And that's the mantle that you and myself and Paunch and others that very aggressively go after this because we're trying to build on his life work. I always say my life's work is building on this because it's so critical, it's so important.

Mark McGrath: 59:04

I think it's the most important thing I've learned in the Marine Corps and I've had the opportunity sometimes to brief midshipmen in Naval ROTC and it's I'm a Naval ROTC grad and I go back and I tell them hey, when I was 18, I was 19. And 19 and sitting in your shoes, what I'm going to tell you is different from how you're learning it now. But how you're learning it now is going to be augmented by understanding it this way in a larger context, and if you get it and it clicks, you're going to have a much different experience going forward than say I did where it was very linear to me. So what are some of your thoughts on teaching and learning void? Because if I'm teaching void and there's a class of 10 and there's me teaching, there's actually 11 learning, because the more we dig on void, the more learning takes place.

Shawn Callahan: 59:53

I totally agree. I mean, you bring up a great point. One of my things I often say on the first day of any class I teach is that I don't view myself as the instructor, rather as the first learner or the first student in the room, and you kind of have to demonstrate that to encounter void. I mean, I do that for any class, but I think it's especially important when dealing with void because that has to be your starting point. There is no answer, there is no set body of knowledge that's going to be conveyed by the end of it. It's more about a conversion to a different way of looking at things.

Shawn Callahan: 1:00:29

I think if you're going to study void, and those of us who know his ideas better than others can do is be good mentors in that process educational mentors, right. We really need to impress upon people that you've got to understand the context that he wrote within. So let's get a chapter or two of a SINGA and look at the science that was going on at the time and the science they was reading and the way that was. We're talking about what I call postmodern science, a rejection of the idea that Newtonian physics can precisely define every phenomena that we find out there in the universe. And that? What do they say? The linear swims in a sea of non-linearity. Did I get that?

Mark McGrath: 1:01:11

right Right yeah. I use it all the time Stop looking to apply linear solutions to the non-linearity that you're immersed in every day in the context of a voca, a volatile and certain complex, ambiguous environment.

Shawn Callahan: 1:01:27

Right, we'll also spend some time looking at Eastern philosophy. I think you really need to be willing to look at Sun Zha and Taoism if you're going to understand Boyd, because the influence on his early ideas about conflict is undeniable in my opinion. So that's another example. But the biggest thing is trying to modify people, or get them to modify their perspective, from thinking that the educational process they're about to undergo is going to be determined and linear. There's a single cause of this that leads to that and just become fundamentally open thinkers, lifelong learners, people who look at the dynamics and the synergies, systems, thinkers, and begin to adopt that sort of mentality. I don't know that you can understand Boyd without it. Without that, you're liable to go looking for. Well, every theorist has principles. So what are Boyd's principles? You missed the point, as I said earlier, that he categorically rejected that approach to theory.

Mark McGrath: 1:02:30

Yeah, and that's one of the things that we why we love having people from all kinds of backgrounds to come on and talk about these things, because, like Boyd, it pulls from many, many disciplines, be it neuroscience, be it sports, law enforcement, military, teaming, science. There's just so many areas that this stuff applies. I mean, that's kind of just caught myself saying that people are looking well, uda doesn't apply here or whatever. I think we've, as we've discussed and demonstrated that UDA is everywhere. Humans are making decisions and acting, and then going further to understand the concepts, things like orientation, vrhi, that kind of stuff that's going to augment and build your orientation so that you can more effectively make observations in your volatile and certain complex, ambiguous environment and improve your capacity for free and independent action. That's the goal.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:29

One last thing that we've talked about with Ian Brown and others is Ian Brown spoke a new conception of war, john Boyd in the Marines of the New Warfare. General Van Ruiper wrote in the introduction that he had taught a class on Boyd or he had offered an elective class on Boyd at either command staff or war college. It was interesting to him that more Air Force officers attended his class than Marines. It seemed that more Marines were less interested in Boyd because maybe many of us think, oh, I've got that, I know Boyd, I don't need to go any further. It's interesting, I guess, about the Air Force. They never hear about Boyd because his own service sort of oftentimes rejected him. What do you think about the current level of understanding and learning and pursuing effective understanding and application of Boyd's Dears in the Marine Corps today?

Shawn Callahan: 1:04:27

Yeah, well, it definitely evolves within the services and various organizations from time to time. I should point out maybe I even should have said this earlier one of the reasons that I got attracted to Boyd in the first place is because of the very elective you talk about. I was a faculty advisor, an instructor, at the command and staff college, and General Van Ruiper was there teaching. I had no business taking electives as an instructor, but I just thought this is too good of an opportunity to miss. I don't know much about Boyd, but I know he's important. General Van Ruiper seems like the kind of person I could learn some things from. By the way, I have the utmost respect for him as a mind as much as anything else.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:10

Oh yeah, he talks about studying complexity and systems thinking and other things all the time. He's an extremely well-rounded, well-read thinker.

Shawn Callahan: 1:05:18

He used to come in and teach four electives. Now there's only four elective periods, so he'd come in and teach four electives in each, every one of those for the command and staff college, simply because he wanted to share and, I think, because he also liked being in the classroom and growing. So anyway, yes, that elective was a great opportunity to learn about Boyd and maybe as one of those catalyst events that really got me started. To your question about the Marine Corps and Boyd, I think your characteristic may not be so far off. I feel like Marines have succumbed to the prevailing narrative, which is Boyd is a genius who gave us maneuver warfare. There's much more to that story than that. Oh, yeah.

Shawn Callahan: 1:06:08

Boyd is a genius who gave us maneuver warfare. Mcdp-1, marine Corps Doctrine and Publication-1 has a footnote that says here's how the Oolulupe is an important or vital component of understanding maneuver warfare. What more do we need to know, especially when books and articles are being written all the time questioning is this really that much to see here? When you look at Boyd's work and honestly I have had the pleasure of working with some students command and staff, college students working on some of the research papers relating to Boyd, and there's been some really good work there. But on the same token, sometimes I'm shocked how little interest is shown in the topic by Marines writ large.

Shawn Callahan: 1:06:56

Now I've had the pleasure of teaching elective courses that are available to all Marines and those have been great experiences because we'll get sergeants and colonels in a virtual room, you know, writing back and forth on a first name basis. They don't know who's a sergeant, who's a colonel and honestly that's been some of the best teaching experiences ever had. Is that being involved in those dialogues right? So honestly, I hate to say it, but I think I see more interest in Boyd coming from the enlisted force than I do from the officer corps sometimes and among a lot of the things. That just says a lot about the quality of the Marines that we are enlisting today. There are some really sharp folks out there who want to know more and have an awful lot to offer, but I digress.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:46

Yeah, it's amazing that it's especially given his own influence. I mean, the Marine Corps was really the first organization where Boyd's theories were applied and sort of like a consulting kind of deal for improving things. And it's amazing to me that, as you say, there just should be much more of an interest in the scholarship and the advancement.

Mark McGrath: 1:08:16

So I was going to say as a Marine, no longer in the Corps. I'm trying to certainly do my part. But it is interesting that when I have buddies of mine that are retiring now or retired colonels, retired lieutenant colonels, and they say where'd you learn all this stuff about Boyd? We never got that.

Shawn Callahan: 1:08:34

Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of that comes from, you know, warfighting itself FMFM-1 and then MCDP-1. You know? It was a great achievement at the time because more so than I think any other US military service has seen, it redefined a philosophy and understanding of war as a common basis for all Marines, but and it was great that I put it, you know in a hip pocket sized book that all Marines could read and understand. But unfortunately it became regarded as wholly-rit, in other words a dogma which Boyd had warned about Like don't.

Shawn Callahan: 1:09:12

He literally, was shown FMFM-1 when it first came out and he said this is great, but you know I'm paraphrasing here. You know what do you do to start revising it, or what you need to do is start revising it today, right In which, after 1997, it has not been revised once except to adjust gender-specific nouns. So, as I was saying, when it comes to warfighting, you know it's regarded as all you need to know, unfortunately, which is definitely never Boyd's point. I've heard people highly placed in the Marine Corps refer to it as scripture, you know, and wonder, like we can't modify warfighting, but maybe we should write, we should look at it as the Old Testament and then write a New Testament you know, which obviously wouldn't have the same cohesion as just kind of revising the fundamental understanding.

Shawn Callahan: 1:10:05

So there was even an effort when they were first wrote warfighting and people wanted a like a digest or a way to kind of understand what the key elements are. I know there was some rains went together and they wrote the cliff notes for warfighting. It's like, no, you're missing the point. Warfighting is the cliff notes right, it's a lifelong study, is what it's meant to promote? You know, just a starting point, it's not about how to do something.

Mark McGrath: 1:10:34

It's a way of thinking and you know it's still a valuable text. I mean, it's probably the most gifted one I have They'd like to give out as a gift because you can very easily just send the link to the PDF and there's no excuse for reading it. But it should be pointed out that warfighting, while it could use revisions, it's still applicable to literally anywhere. So I tell people all the time let's, let's, let's, copy and paste that paragraph right there. Okay, now cross out warfighting and put basketball and cross out enemy and put opposing team, and then you can now read it back to me. You know, perfect, I just finished teaching a cohort at a university's executive education program and my class was all executives from nonprofit organizations. And guess what Boyd and warfighting applied there too.

Mark McGrath: 1:11:23

You know, the big thing on us we didn't talk about this, we should probably give it a parting shot was the difference between command and control models versus appreciation and leadership. You know like that alone is a massive distinction, a massive valuable contribution that that Boyd brings Absolutely. That's so far beyond. You know what he's reduced to, absolutely. So anyway, well, sean, that is a great place to stop, and we'll, we'll, we'll continue the discussion, will continue the learning. Any parting shots? And he saved rounds that you know. I was looking over my notes. I think we hit all the points we wanted to talk about today, about Boyd.

Shawn Callahan: 1:12:09

I'm glad you give me an opportunity because I was going to edge my way and say this anyway. I'm just really thankful for the opportunity to to be a part of this podcast because, as I think I said at the beginning, I'm not sure there's a group of people that have gotten past some of these basic fundamental misconceptions and created a kind of a new, higher plateau to start from for understanding Boyd's ideas and their relevance and hopefully critically examining some of his ideas too. So I mean, no way out has become a great resource for me to sometimes push my own understanding of what Boyd said and reconsider my own views about him. So it's really good work and I just feel privileged to be a part of it.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:56

So I'll tell you well, we're thankful for that and glad, glad to be on the journey with you as we continue to develop and learn from each other. I will say I do wish more Marines listen to no way out than most of the engagement that I've gotten. If I had to pick one military service, as Joe Manraper said in his introduction, I see the same pattern. It's mostly Air Force officers that have approached me directly asking questions about Boyd or talking about Boyd type theories. So come on, marines, get on the ball there.

Shawn Callahan: 1:13:31

Well, it goes to the Air Force. They had some baggage when it came to Boyd and some of the things that he did to Air Force programs and it's taken a while to get over it. But there's generations of Air Force officers who grew up and they should be commended for their curiosity and all. It probably makes it a little bit harder for them that the Marine Corps was the one who grabbed his papers when he passed away and had the wisdom to kind of get those in the Marine Corps archive, but hopefully in time those will become more accessible. Some more people can really get in on the ground level themselves and not depend upon some of the scholarship. That owes it a closer look.

Mark McGrath: 1:14:14

Yeah, and we've had two amazing Air Force officers one twice Come on no way out. We've had Major General Tank Leonard come and talk about Boyd when he was active duty still, he's retired now and then John Robb, who's a very, very fascinating scholar on these ideas. John Robb's been on twice, and so the Air Force is well represented, Although you know, I'm a Marine, I'm a co-host and you're a Marine, and we've had Don Vandergryff found as a Marine and GI Wilson I'm a Marine and the Marines are getting their duty here too. But hopefully more listen to. I'd love to have more people at Command Staff sitting me notes. Hey, I was listening to your podcast talking about Boyd and you know I read this article that the guest that you had on that was a neuroscientist. I never thought of neuroscience as something that you know, connected or whatever, and that's why we put this stuff out there, so people can see the applicability across, you know, across places, across industries and domains.

Shawn Callahan: 1:15:16

Part of the reason I undertook this topic for a dissertation is because that is a step towards the Academy taking Boyd more seriously, and I'm working on, you know, the manuscript that flows, or manuscripts that flow, from that dissertation. So I hope within a few years we can get something else out there that offers a counterpoint to the existing scholarship and something that the various staff, colleges and other PME institutions will find of a very relevant and interesting and worth sharing with their students. And I don't mean that as a plug for a book, but simply to say you know, podcasts like this, printed works, are what we need to continue this effort to help Boyd become better understood.

Mark McGrath: 1:16:03

Yeah, understood and applied, and then telling people, hey, we've got to keep reorienting, keep learning, keep breaking our models. Right, great place to stop. Thanks for coming on. No Way Out, sean. Thanks so much, mark. Thanks for coming on, no Way Out.