No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Strategic Evolution: Unrestricted Warfare and the Future of Asymmetric Conflict with Bill DeMarco
Discover how retired Air Force officer and pilot Bill DeMarco unravels the mysteries of "Unrestricted Warfare" by two Chinese officers, revealing its contemporary relevance in shaping China's strategic approach towards the United States. Learn why understanding asymmetric and nonlinear strategies is crucial in modern conflict, as we draw connections to influential thinkers like John Boyd and Mao Zedong. We also question if the dissemination of these critical texts by state entities serves as a strategic signal or a clever ploy of misinformation, emphasizing the necessity of a broadened knowledge base for better decision-making in complex scenarios.
Journey with us through the evolution of warfare as we uncover how cultural awareness can prevent strategic misjudgments, drawing from historical military engagements and the potential misalignments of Western and other military cultures. We'll explore the fascinating intersection of strategy and sacred geometry, pondering how concepts like the golden ratio might subconsciously shape military tactics and strategic thought. Using the innovative approach of the Grateful Dead as a metaphor, we highlight the importance of adaptability, creativity, and continuous learning in military strategy and leadership.
This episode pushes the boundaries of traditional military thought, advocating for a new breed of intellectual leaders who thrive on interdisciplinary engagement. We discuss the tension between traditional military structures and the need for innovation and creativity, spotlighting leaders who have successfully challenged the status quo. By weaving together insights from Eastern philosophies, cultural influences, and the principles of the OODA loop, we champion a holistic approach to strategy that embraces both chaos and order, urging today's leaders to adopt a mindset of perpetual curiosity and learning.
AGLX Confidence in Complexity short commercial
Stay in the Loop. Don't have time to listen to the podcast? Want to make some snowmobiles? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive deeper insights on current and past episodes.
Find us on X. @NoWayOutcast
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccrone
Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
So we have Bill DeMarco joining us. Bill, you are a retired Air Force officer and a retired Air Force pilot, or do we?
Brian Rivera:say aviator too.
Mark McGrath:You've spent a career asking questions about a lot of the things that we talk about and you came on our radar screen in a conversation around the golden, mean and sacred geometry and the application of that concept in a treatise of two Chinese officers that was written decades ago, called Unrestricted Warfare. That we've talked a lot about, about the grand plan of China versus the United States in the years to come, which is likely not going to be a naval showdown in the South China Sea, as we've talked about on other episodes, more asymmetric, more nonlinear, more the type of things that we talk about with John Boyd and Plexity and the Kedeman Framework and things like that. How did you let's start there. So you're a strategist, you're a teacher. How did you come across that, specifically gravitating towards chapter six of that around the golden ratio, what really jumped off the page for you? And then we're just we're going to riff off that.
Bill DeMarco:Yeah, that's a good question. So you know, first of all, guys, thanks for having me on. You know, mark, you reached out on LinkedIn. Then I kind of went and looked at all the stuff you guys have going on and it's amazing. So one of the things that I'm always looking at is how do I learn more? So just going into your website, looking at things you guys are up to, it's really, really impressive. So thanks for reaching out, mark, and thanks for this opportunity For me and that idea of learning more.
Bill DeMarco:So I went to SAS, the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies here at our university many, many moons ago and one of the first books we had to read was Unrestricted Warfare and of course, that book came out in 1999. But I keep thinking from a historical point of view, how many times do we look back at situations and go the information was all there? I mean just something as simple. As you know, if you look at the version of Unrestricted Warfare I have, it's got the Twin Towers burning on the cover, so I think it was like the first or second edition of the book. Now there's a new cover, but I look at like that, just in 9-11, you know, we look at the reports after the information was all there, we just failed to piece it together. So when we think about China, or, as a Gen Xer, you know we looked at the Soviet Union. There were so many things that were written that nobody read. And if you go back to World War II, I mean you know it's like stuff is all out there.
Bill DeMarco:So I thought I need to pick up Unrestricted Warfare and give another read, and that was maybe 12, 18 months ago. But I read it and I was just like, oh my word, it's all right there. Everything, even though it was written 25, 26 years ago, everything that we see going on right now, whether it's the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, economics, cyber, you name it, and think where we're at with cyber back in 1989, and think where we're at now, worlds apart. Yeah, it's all there. So that was kind of why I picked it up. I just figured, looking at that book and of course we all know that was released by the state right, the state approved that book to be released. So then you have to start wondering well, what did the state want us to know? They clearly want us to know that. I'll pause there. I'll go on forever.
Mark McGrath:No, it's interesting, you know, when you talk about books like that. I remember as a young officer I was a first lieutenant and one of my second lieutenants came up to me to complain that one of the Marines was reading Mein Kampf and I said well, you know, it's actually on the Commandant's reading list and the reason that was on the reading list was to try to understand how the you know the mindset and the frame of reference and the thinking that led up to the invasion of Poland, or you know the rise of the rise of national socialism and things like that. And you know he was shocked. And then I also said by the way, guerrilla Warfare by Mao Zedong is also on the Commandant's reading list.
Mark McGrath:And there's, you know, there's very clear reasons that we're encouraged to read these things, and that's to broaden our scope and to broaden our perspective as warfighters.
Mark McGrath:And we translate now the work that Ponch and I do, that you're familiar with, we translate the warfighting ideals to business and sports and other areas. But, taking the same concepts, it's very important to read as many perspectives as possible, even things that would seem on the surface unseemly, because it gives us a frame of reference and understanding of how circumstances unfold and how things interacted such that, as we become better at sensemaking in our own environments, we're able to identify patterns faster, so like if you had read Mind Comp or if you've read Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Zedong, when you see things emerging that match those patterns, you're able to do something about it faster than if you had. And unfortunately, a lot of that is lost in, I think, the modern military People. One, they're not reading and two, they're focusing on tech, they're not focusing on thinking, they're not focusing on the cognitive software that shapes and scans and comes up with decisions, actions and the learning capability.
Brian Rivera:Hey Moose, I want to bring up something. Bill brought up that unrestricted warfare was released by the state and that may be a misdirect, it may be a probe, it may be to create some type of mismatch. I want to point out something that Air University released, and that is this book here right, the Discourse on Winning and Losing.
Mark McGrath:Okay.
Brian Rivera:This is out there but nobody reads it. Very few people understand, right. So, bill, back to you on this. Is it possible that the unrestricted warfare document that's been around since 1999, there you go, love it, love it. That's been around since 1999 is not? It could be a misdirect, it could be a mismatch, it could be out there just to throw us off, or, in fact, it could be a sound document that very few Chinese leaders understand and even fewer American military thinkers understand.
Bill DeMarco:No, poncho. I think that's a really good point. When I said released by the state, I don't mean as a misdirect, I mean they released it for a reason and I think it might have been more of the idea of, hey, this is what we're thinking and think about. When it came out, it was kind of a. It was a new way of looking at warfare, maybe, but it wasn't, as I don't want to say mainstream, that's the wrong word. But the way we look at it now is like we're like, yeah, of course you know you've got all these different asymmetric ways of attacking an enemy. It's not all going to be like you said. It won't be probably fought in the Straits of Taiwo, I don't believe. You know, like in Air Force, we talk a lot about this idea of dogfight. I think the dogfight could come back, but I don't think it's going to be a massive dogfight, you know, in the channel or in the streets. It's going to be much more nuanced, it's going to be more asymmetric, all the things that we know. I mean that Boyd talks about. So I mean I didn't mean that in terms of it's a misdirect. I kind of meant it in terms of it's something that the Chinese probably want us to know. Interesting too.
Bill DeMarco:You brought up this idea of not reading. Since I teach at the Staff College and the War College. I shouldn't say this because our students that take our courses it's kind of an elective. We do a research task force on innovation, so the students pick this course and so I don't see a lack of reading in that course. But I know there's a lack of reading when you go to the core courses and I've had this conversation with several majors over. Well, why do I need to read? And there's sometimes you have to read and reread. So I look at unrestricted warfare. Now I'm that. I'm that geek that I bought the audio because I already had the book. So then I have the book and the audio because I want to be sure, am I really hearing or reading everything that's in the text? And you get something different when you listen to it. You know what I mean versus when you read it. So I've done both of those with Understricted Warfare, trying to understand the nuances of Chinese culture, because that's really what we mirror, image ourselves on the Chinese or the Russians, and it's not the case.
Bill DeMarco:I was in a briefing with a general. It's been a couple of years back, but they were talking about something along the lines that there's no main highway or freeway between Moscow and like St Petersburg or something like that. And they were saying well, that shows you how backwards Russia is, why wouldn't they have a main road there? And this general said you're mere imaging, they're Russians, they don't need a freeway because they're Russians. I mean, it's like the idea is we're saying you should have a freeway. That shows that you're, you know that you have achieved a certain level of infrastructure. And maybe in Russia it's like well, we don't need an American freeway, we're Russians, we just go.
Mark McGrath:We're not really good at cultural alignment and it's funny other books that have been on service Cheech reading lists, like Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence. We have somebody forthcoming that we're going to be talking with next week that recommends reading books that Boyd talked about, like Andrew Kopredovich's, the Army in Vietnam and others, and one of the things Bing West's, the Village, is another great one. Disconnection from culture is a huge problem that we have. That we go around thinking everything is like us. That we go around thinking everything is like us. General Stanley McChrystal talks about this in Team of Teams that we're running around Iraq with JSOC looking for a group of people that have a CO, xo, s1, s2, s3, s4, and then we realize they don't have any of that stuff. And they don't have any of that stuff for a reason because if they had that stuff we'd pulverize them and they would come at us our way.
Mark McGrath:I find that the unrestricted warfare thing is not only important to read. It is scary that a lot of people don't know about it. One thing I would add too. In Science, strategy and War by Franz Ossinga, he read that he cites it as a source. In fact, he dedicates a good section of the last chapter to asymmetric warfare, the things that the Chinese officers were talking about in that book. And the last thing I would say was that we had GI Wilson on the show before.
Mark McGrath:That was an acolyte and a collaborator of Boyd within the Marine Corps from 1979 till Boyd's death in 97. Had those officers that wrote Unrestricted Warfare? They've likely read the discourse book that both you and Ponch have held up. They read Boy, but they also read the book, the article rather, that he co-authored with Bill Lynn, mike Wiley and I forget the name of the army officer called the Changing Face of War, which was released in October of 1989, a month before something that they predicted basically happened the know the Berlin Wall coming down. That nobody expected. And these guys were talking about these patterns. And I don't think the tone of unrestricted warfare is doing anything other than trying to dial us in and attune us to the patterns that Boyd talked about.
Brian Rivera:Sun Tzu talked about Moose. But it's going to be the patterns that we're not oriented to right that we need to pay attention to those weak signals that are out there that people like Bill are pointing out. So that orientation within the OODA loop is we can't project our orientation onto other cultures, onto other people. You and I don't have the same orientation right, and that's what the OODA loop is telling us. It's an active process. Bill. I've read books. I've gone to every university, I've gone to ACSC years ago.
Brian Rivera:I get your point about people not reading. We've had many folks on the show, several that talk about flow systems and physics of flow, and in their books they have sections on the golden section, the golden mean, the golden ratio, that I ignored. I just passed through. I'm like whatever, this is some nonsense that somebody's talking about Reading Unrestricted Warfare. Years ago I didn't pay attention to chapter six. I was like what the hell? Is this Some nonsense? So again, mark and I say this quite often and we hear it in the complex adaptive system world, and that is, in the neuroscience world is we only see what we expect to see, right? We have the idea that seeing is believing and believing is seeing that type of thing too. So I want to start there with what is the golden section? Golden mean where we find it in nature, that type of thing. So how did you get attracted to chapter six, based off of the golden section?
Bill DeMarco:I'd love to tell you. I just came across it and it was boom and I was like check it out. Somebody told me about it, and I don't remember who. I wish I did, but it's one of those that it was in a conversation, I think, when somebody mentioned or it might've been even it might've been another podcast, but somebody had mentioned chapter six and the golden mean and I thought, man, I need to go back and look at that. So I picked it up, went back and looked and, yeah, it's so interesting to see that this idea of this mean is everywhere and it's like we find it aesthetically pleasing almost to go and seek this mean out. Now, of course, when we apply it to strategy, I don't think it's as maybe obvious or as potent as like, let's say, you look at the, you know in Athens, you know. You look at the up on the hill. What do they call it? The apocalypse, not the apocalypse. Yeah, that's it.
Mark McGrath:The acropolis. The acropolis, thank you. The parthenon on the acropolis the parthenon?
Bill DeMarco:Yes, exactly, the pillars, all those things are designed along the lines of the golden mean. So if you think about that, you think about a spiral shape of a shell. You know the golden mean is everywhere in nature, it's everywhere in architecture. Is right here. I don't think you can measure it in strategy, if that makes any sense, but you can see it because maybe we default to it and we don't know we're defaulting to it.
Mark McGrath:Let's hammer down on that, though we can't measure it by way of, maybe, objective metrics. But does it mean that it's not still occurring? It doesn't mean that it's not still present.
Bill DeMarco:I think we desire to measure things. You know what I mean. It's like back to even what Ponch was kind of saying.
Mark McGrath:I get that. I guess what I'm saying is that, in spite of our desire to measure things, it still appears that any universal phenomena, be it human action or otherwise, keeps presenting this ratio continuously. We talk a lot about how it appears in markets. Why would we think that geopolitical intercourse between nations would be any different? Why would we think that strategy would be any different? These are still humans. Humans are part of the ecology. They're part of the cosmos. Why would they not be acting in accordance with the way the universe is designed? We don't have to go too far, I agree.
Bill DeMarco:I just think that that's the thing that was, like somebody said, like you know, in this, this piece that I was playing with, which was totally just riffing off this chapter of trying to find out where do we, where do we see this ratio, and I kind of played with this idea of fortifications and defensive positions, the idea of, maybe, military formations and tactics. You know, uh, you think about this idea of infantry and cavalry. You know the idea of do you see, more obviously, you have more infantry than you have cavalry. Did that mean was it there in battles with Alexander the Great? I think the answer is yeah, but I don't know if Alexander measured it intentionally.
Mark McGrath:Yeah Well, it's kind of like equilibrium. You don't know that you're in it, but it still happens. It's still. It's kind of like equilibrium. You don't know that you're in it, but it still happens.
Brian Rivera:Yes, it still is. I wonder if we can go back to the air war in Iraq, and you know those first days, and look at the proportion of something. I'm sure there's something there and the reason I bring that up is Iraq one or two? One One.
Mark McGrath:Go for it, go for it.
Brian Rivera:Yeah, so my time in an air and space operations center. Think about it, with how we're allocating weapons or weapons on platforms and things like that. It's based off the threat. So the context is driving the way we behave, right, and that's changed in the last 20 years. We're not going to see that type of warfare, or at least I don't think we are today.
Brian Rivera:And I struggle with the application of I'll call it sacred geometry for now to strategy, because we just don't know how to do it. But I believe it's there right. I just don't know, like you and Mark, I don't know how to measure it. And then the path that we've gone on in the last few years is we've looked at the golden ratio inside the pyramids. We've seen it in the Vitruvian man from Leonardo da Vinci. We're learning more about squaring the circle. We've discovered that President Lincoln sat in his office for a couple of days trying to square the circle, which is matching the area of the circle to the area of the square, using nothing more than a compass and a straight edge.
Brian Rivera:We're learning about harmonics in the application to understanding markets, music why is music appealing to us? Why do we see patterns? And then a connection to the free energy principle. We're trying to minimize the energy we spend in connecting with the world, and that's probably why these things are the way they are, why beauty is the way it is, because that helps us minimize surprise, reduce the energy we spend on things. So, when you think about strategy, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to minimize the energy spent on influencing your opponent? And again, I'm throwing this out there because I struggle with how do we apply this to strategy, but I do believe it's there.
Bill DeMarco:Yes. So that's exactly what I'm getting at is is that we look at this and we're like, well, show it to me. And I don't know that I can, maybe I could. Another thing we talk about math. You know what I mean. It's like I'm so not a math guy, I mean. So that's the other problem too. If I had a mathematician, maybe we could pull these things apart. That's an interesting scenario.
Bill DeMarco:Desert Storm I wonder if there's something there. You think about the opening night of just taking down the IADs using soft on the ground Apaches and then stealth fighters. Could you play that out with something along the lines of the ratio of the idea of the man on the ground or the small team on the ground? I think it was two Apaches and a few stealth fighters, and then you know the idea of the man on the ground or the small team on the ground. You know, I think it was two Apaches and a few stealth fighters, and then you go through the hole with all the bombers. So there's your, there's your bulk. You know, there's the 1.68 or whatever you want to say. That's the bulk of it, but maybe those lines are actually smaller as you look to the opening of that door with the force coming.
Mark McGrath:Well, we talk about too in the article, though it's not a rigid formula. It's not rigid, yet it doesn't mean, like we were saying, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, yeah.
Bill DeMarco:so that's why I find it fascinating, because I'm very attracted, like Ponch you mentioned, art music and, again, not an expert in any of those things. In fact, music has been, it is a passion of mine. But I played an instrument many, many years ago. I played guitar and I was terrible and I was in a couple bands that I just leaned on the talent in the band and kind of hid in the background, if you know what I mean, in other words, enjoyed the experience, but I was not the person that added much to the team.
Brian Rivera:Well, I'm wearing my Tool shirt today because they're a band that actually understands sacred geometry and they use it quite a bit in their music. So, kind of like you, I grew up around music. I understood the way they train music when you're younger and all that. I never came across the math. At least I don't remember coming across the math and the geometry inside of music. It years ago when one of our colleagues pointed out to us you know from his type of work he's doing on Wall Street and then I shared with my daughter. You know there's Euclidean geometry and there's this new type of geometry out there that it's kind of three-dimensional and all kinds of stuff.
Brian Rivera:Then you get into the fascination between you know what's going on with the pyramids. Why are people like Aaron Rodgers going to the pyramids? To go experience something at another level? So you're starting to see this come into. I'll call it mainstream. You can find it on the web. You can find it on different specials on Netflix and wherever Gaia, wherever you want to look. But why aren't military leaders thinking like this? What are your challenges with communicating what's in this document?
Bill DeMarco:with leaders. I really think we're looking for the like back to the measurement, like show me that two and two is, show me that this makes sense. You know, we, we invite. You. Guys might have heard of CASI, the Chinese Air and Space Institute. It's an air university thing, but it really is part of NDU also. So Dr Mulvaney is Brandon Mulvaney is the lead, and, and so we asked Dr Mulvaney to come out every year to speak to our class, and one of the things that he says every year that I just I think some of the students get it and some of them don't.
Bill DeMarco:But we look at China and we want to say there's good and there's bad. You know what I mean. In other words, we do this and it's good, they do that and it's bad, and he'll say it's not good or bad, it's different. And I think sometimes it's that space that we want to say, like two and two is four, so like the golden ratio. When, when you read about this, you go well, that should be easy. Then right, I mean, if it's a mathematical equation, I can solve for x. I don't know that you can solve for x. It's more of a. Like, mark, you said it's fluid, right, I mean it's it's not necessarily there. Like you listen to a song, you know the math might say this is a great song, but you hear it and you're like, oh, I don't know there's something off, it's not quite right.
Mark McGrath:OK, so we're Gen Xers, right? You know it's song from the 80s that I absolutely abhor, I hate and everybody loves except me White Snake. Here I go again on my own, absolutely hate that song and I actually do believe it is something with the frequency or the impulses of that song that just absolutely put me off. I can't stand it's funny.
Bill DeMarco:Um, yeah, it's just funny that you say that about white snake. I saw white snake as a lieutenant over in germany and we went to the monsters of rock tour and aerosmith. It was like a whole day, but just total side note. White snake was a lieutenant over in Germany and we went to the Monsters of Roptour and Aerosmith. It was like a whole day, but just total side note. Whitesnake was a headliner. Aerosmith was the band right before Whitesnake, and Aerosmith destroyed them and I just wondered what the conversation was backstage because it was just like they were so much better.
Mark McGrath:So I wonder if it goes to what Ponchal teaches us, is that it goes to a state of flow Like something like white snake. To me doesn't flow. Say like I'm a grateful dead guy, I love jazz, I love, I love the beatles, like I don't feel like when I listen to something like that maybe it's I don't get to the the level of flow. And then, as a as an additionally to what we're talking about too, remember that john boyd never published or printed anything because everything was constantly changing, constantly flowing, and his snowmobile of what he made OODA Loop Sketch out of was entropy right.
Mark McGrath:And then the other two would be uncertainty and incompleteness. So when we go around with this desire to constantly measure everything, we've got to constantly measure this, we've got to constantly measure that. It's the same thing in war fighting. It's the same thing in business. It's the same thing in war fighting. It's the same thing in business. It's the same thing in sports. Rigid measuring doesn't get you where you're going to need to be, because things are constantly changing. And when they do and you're stuck to those rigid formulas, then what? And even the Chinese officers are telling us like hey, this is a good baseline and guideline, this is how the universe presents itself, but don't use it as a rigid formula. Just have it in mind as you scan and sense make of the world.
Brian Rivera:Moose, I'm going to riff off what you brought up here and I'm totally going to get this wrong. Okay, so going back to your Whitesnake point, I read this over the weekend that typically in music we know when something is going to happen. We can anticipate it because music has patterns in it. What we don't know is what. So it is possible that you could anticipate something in the Whitesnake song and that what isn't surprising to you. It doesn't satisfy you right? So there's great examples in a book I'm reading about music, that why we're attracted to different types of music. But the key point here is the patterns tell us when something is going to happen. They don't tell us what right. So maybe that's true with strategy. Just throwing that out there because I'm building on that Whitesnake piece.
Mark McGrath:Jazz there's the baseline, there's the structure of the overall piece and then each individual takes a ride, right? So the saxophone guy's going to go, then they're going to go through the whole progression, and then the trumpeter's going to go, they go through the whole progression, and the pianist, et cetera, et cetera. To Poncha's point if you know the baseline, you can. If you know music well enough, you can sit there and be like, hey, I could go up there if I knew how to play it. But I can think of notes in my head that fit these scales. So, in other words, something fits the scale, but I don't know exactly what. But I can anticipate. And if something is off, I'll know, because it'll be out of sync. It'll be out of sync, right. It'll be out of harmony, right, we talk about the difference between harmony and synchronization. It'll be out of harmony with what? The scale or the structure or the rhythm pattern is right. Yeah, so it goes back to the whole thing, Like, well, why wouldn't strategy be any different?
Brian Rivera:So one more thing, and I'm sorry, this is amazing, because over the weekend I listened to Ella Fitzgerald sing Mack the Knife from 1960s, where she got it wrong, but she knew everything about the structure of the song and she even sang in the song that she's making a wreck out of it. Right, but it got her. I think it got her an Emmy or whatever. Yes, the structure of something we can improvise in it, right, and that's the whole point of warfare, I think, is if we have a sound structure that we allow those distributed warfighters to improvise hopefully I'm saying that right then you create the conditions to win a war. You're right on. Okay, bill, can you build on any of this man? We're just throwing things out there.
Bill DeMarco:No, no, this is so. If you and I know, you guys have gone to my blog and my blog, really, the whole reason I did that, which I've been doing it for just like 15 years now, is that I don't have a huge following, I mean, but it's because I was trying to figure things out. So there's a lot of pieces on there where I'm looking at a piece of music and trying to pick, like, okay, what did the artist mean when they said this? And they're trying to lay it over leadership, strategy, innovation or whatever. So everything you guys are saying it's like. I'm just like, yeah, these are my people. So it's funny.
Bill DeMarco:When you talked about, you know the idea of the methodology to the music, because, moose, you talked about the Grateful Dead and I know there's that great piece on your is it Substack? Or on the, the blog. But I went to it and was was checking it out, uh, last week, um, you know, the dead are so interesting because they break those norms in so many different ways. But we love yes, exactly, but we love the dead. And then I ponder music today and again I sound like the old crusty, whatever white beard guy. I got it, but but the idea is like so much of music today is just so basic and maybe that's because, to your point of, if you know what's coming, it's like the warm blanket. You know what I mean. In other words, I can wrap myself in it, because it's not, it's not really challenging me the way.
Bill DeMarco:Honestly, jazz so much of jazz challenges us when we listen to it, because you don't always know. But then you listen to it a few times and you're like LFS Geraldine and her version of mac the knife, like I love that version, but I can't remember the first time I heard it and it was wrong. You know, I mean, but now I hear it and it's right. So, in other words, we, we adapt to the grateful dead. When I first listened to the dead I was very young, but I thought the grateful dead had to be a heavy metal band, you know, because, like zeppelin, and I'm like, yeah, they have names like mega death, you know, and guns and roses grateful dead isn't like metal.
Bill DeMarco:How do they get to be the grateful dead? Oh well, it's a little bit of blue corps, it's a little bit of jazz, it's a little bit of eastern music and philosophy. You know, I I saw them years ago at stanford and they had two drummers and I was like well, how do you do that? I mean, so it was all these things that don't make sense that later do make sense.
Mark McGrath:Well, that so. And they had no studio albums like that. Well, they did, but but that's not what people you know, that's not what people went after. They, they were totally in flow state. That was the whole idea to to have like a core, a core riff and then build flow around it. They made all of their stuff available so if you came to a show you could tape it and you could trade those tapes and you could bootleg those tapes. And the reason that they did that was so that the word spread and their fan base ended up becoming their biggest marketing group. And it was decentralized, it was harmonized.
Mark McGrath:It just seems to me like it. It's the john boyd type of of music for a lot of, a lot of reasons and it's extremely misunderstood because it's not produced. You know what I mean. It's not quote unquote, measured and structured and what we're expecting from sort of the mainstream, that it actually kind of goes along with the rhythms of the universe. And the last thing I'll say is another john Boyd angle of it is it's interdisciplinary. They had all different types of music. Phil Lesh was a classically trained composer. They wrote suites, they integrated music from every single genre. To your point about Eastern philosophy, which, of course, is a big part of John Boyd's OO-Loop sketch. Who used it? Phil Jackson was a deadhead and he talked about how he built the bulls and he looked at Michael as like the sort of the Jerry Garcia and constantly building an act around them that could bring them to a consistent state of flow as they encountered. Uh, and it was never the same. It was always always changing, built around that same core.
Bill DeMarco:So those loose, loose ties, like like Poncho was saying. That's when I think about strategy. That's kind of what I'm getting at is how do you build those things around? Strategy, in other words, it's not do this, then do that, and I do think that so much. I hate to say that doesn't sound right, but so much of what we think of today has to be if I do this, then that will happen, and increasingly that's not the case. If you do this, we don't know what will happen, but you need to get off your ass and do something. Don't sit there and be paralyzed by what do I do?
Brian Rivera:Do something and then react to the action, so the strategy is adaptive. I mean it's taking feedback from the environment and adjusting as necessary. So go back to the 1999, look at where we are today with technology. And I think what did the Chinese put in that document? As far as hacking, I forget they called it something other than Well, they had a really good name.
Bill DeMarco:It was a crazy name. I wonder if they had it here.
Brian Rivera:It was an interesting name that they had for their hackers.
Bill DeMarco:What I'm going with this is yeah, they totally called in the hacking.
Brian Rivera:Yeah, so there's a pattern to the strategy that looks more than likely aligns to the geometry or the golden ratio, the golden section, and then, if you can set your strategy up such, then there's touch points where you can anticipate when something's going to change. It's the what that matters. How do you take that information from the environment and adjust at the local level? And that's what we're trying to tell folks. With strategy, you can't have a rigid approach to warfare, right, and that's maybe what the Chinese are telling us with this document is we're going to be an adaptive approach to kicking your ass while you guys are spending billions of dollars on aircraft carriers fighting the wars from 20, 30 years ago.
Mark McGrath:Do you find that, bill, as you're interacting with officers today at every level, from flag officer, general officer, all the way down to brand new into the force do you find that much of what they're being taught and much of what they're exploring personally and I'm talking on the great average, I'm not talking about the outliers say, like us, that are reading obscure things that no one's thinking about like maybe Boyd would be, but do you find that what they're doing is it's more tech-heavy or it's more agenda-driven top-down? Or do you find that it's kind of like the old days, like where generals that graduated from West Point in the 19th and 20s and 30s that these were well-rounded, not only engineers but trained in liberal arts and languages and culture and other things, to give them a broader understanding of how the world works? Where do you see us at right now?
Bill DeMarco:So that's a really interesting question because I've worked for, honestly, I've been fortunate where I've had some really, really amazing bosses. I mean I think about people like you know, general Post. General Post is not your average general. The guy is he's a different level of thinker General Duncan McNabb I worked with him. Same way, different level of thinker Kip Self. I mean these generals were definitely not your standard. Like, this is what we do things. So I know that we have some amazing leaders. I mean I look at, you know, general Alvin, our CSAP. He and I were on the staff together a million years ago, so he is a deep, deep thinker. We've been lucky to have people like Brown and Goldfein and Welsh that I think they do think very different.
Bill DeMarco:But if you think about it from an org behavior perspective, what does our organization reward? It's not those thinkers, like you know, quast, and that's what I think is really interesting. Yet a guy like General Quast can raise up and be a three-star. You know, arguably. You know my opinion should have been a four-star, but nobody called me and I didn't get to sit on that board.
Bill DeMarco:No-transcript, acsc. You see, maybe fewer of those folks, and then probably War College, maybe a few less. There's a great book you guys have probably read it called Over the Giant Hairball by Gordon McKenzie, and one of the things he has in there is he talks about going into classrooms and saying, like in kindergarten, how many of you are artists? And every hand goes up. And you go back in in like fourth or fifth grade and maybe half the hands go up. You go back in high school maybe 20%, you know. So the idea is that we kill this idea of this innovative and creative thinking in, especially the bureaucracy. So I think that the talent is there and I think some of the people who've been assimilated can still do that thinking but they also know they're in this organization doesn't necessarily reward that thinking.
Mark McGrath:Does that make sense? It goes back to yeah, you're right on, and it goes back to what our friend Don Vandergriff talks about all the time with mission command. You know, mission command the term has been completely perverted from what it was intended, and one of the things that Don calls for all the time is an overhaul of the personnel system Because, to your point, the personnel system does reward metrics, bureaucratic metrics, and the innovators and the thinkers likely get pushed out and they go into Wall Street or they go somewhere else because they don't want to deal with the machine anymore, so to speak. I think it does go back to the well-roundedness of leaders and thinkers. Now I do say and I'm biased as a Marine I really do think that the Marine Corps always did a good job at least when I was in of getting us to read and think about things that weren't really top-down. So we were reading Mal mein kampf was on the list and starship troopers by robert heinlein and other science fiction books. You know, it wasn't all just hey, america's great, this is the way you do it. One, two, three always equals this, and that's that's how we do it. Um, it was promoting uh, you know, fluid thinking, knowing that, as it says, in war fighting, knowing that everything is chaotic, frenetic, constantly changing, that you have to have the ability to do that and what Don always talks about we've done some staff rides with him and others.
Mark McGrath:When you look at these great leaders of times past, I mean these were not just engineers, these were also men of letters and culture. I mean these were people that could speak multiple languages. These were people that could, uh, read philosophy. I'll never forget this as long as I live. So I was the second lieutenant at field artillery school in fort sill and the marines were segregated away from the soldiers in the platoons, like they. They broke us in platoons, although we did have one strand of army guys and they were all like future 82nd guys or whatever that would be in our platoon. I guess they could pt with us anyway. I was reading a john paul sart book, yeah an arm sir called me out.
Mark McGrath:Why would you read that? That has nothing to do with artillery? And I'm like, well, no, actually it's philosophy and we should be talking about these types of things. I mean, like it's just like it's. It's it's ridiculed and mocked, like it's it where it should be. The other way around, we should be having these conversations about Chinese culture, sun Tzu, the golden mean, jazz music, grateful Dead, white Snake, whatever it is, and the thing about you brought up this idea of reading who's reading?
Bill DeMarco:but the thing is, it's not just a one read either, like Sun Tzu. I can't tell you how many times I've read Sun Tzu or Lao Tzu. Or you mentioned Sartre. I mean the idea of nausea, or how do you? I mean, when I was working on my doctorate, I really started reading a lot of existential philosophers, because what I was looking at was existential. So how do we understand that, except to go back to those philosophers that were wrestling with these ideas of what it means to be human?
Mark McGrath:Well, I want Ponch to chime in on this, because this is something that boils our blood. So. So OODA loop is always reduced to a mechanical, formulaic template that you can put on any situation. As long as you're faster than the other guy, you're going to win. And then OODA loop sketches, we know it, which came at the end of John Boyd's life. So Ponch and I have spent considerable hours and days inside of Boyd's archives and books that he has there. Thousands of them cover every single category and they're drowning in margin notes. What would you add, ponch? What's your experience of learning from that? Of what was input? You know what Boyd was inputting for himself to give us what he gave us before he died. That's reduced.
Brian Rivera:Man, you got me thinking on this and something else that Bill wrote about optimization and decision making. So the OODA loop could reflect this ratio where tempo matters, right, we know that there's connections to harmony. He writes about that all the time. So what I'm thinking now is the way you use the OODA loop is consistent with nature, which is we know that we actively engage with external environment to solicit input and feedback, to get sensory signals to tell us what's going on the outside world. So it's constructed inside out or top-down inside out.
Brian Rivera:With that being said, I think what we're learning about today, and what you and I have learned about the OODA loop, is it is not, it's not the reductionist, passive approach that many people use. In fact, the AI community is quickly finding out you can't scale linear OODA loops, the reductionist approach. What they are finding out is you can scale what John Boyd actually sketched out and gave us, which is an active inference approach, a Bayesian inference approach, a mathematical approach to dealing with uncertainty, right? So I don't know if I'm answering your question. I've actually got a question about the golden, mean, golden section connection to economics that Bill came across, because I think it feeds into decision-making and optimization, which the OODA loop is about minimizing energy and maximizing not control, but adaptation and learning in the environment. Sorry, bill, I just kind of rambled there, but is there a connection to what you discovered with the economist that was studying the golden section?
Bill DeMarco:Yeah, I mean that was interesting too was to go in and see who actually has been using this, and there was an economist and a mathematician and of course I'm terrible with pronouncing Chinese names, but Lao Zhen, I believe, is how to say that name. But Lao Zhen was looking at this idea of from a mathematic perspective. No-transcript.
Brian Rivera:Moosted, my answer and what you just heard from Bill. How's that resonate with you and the question you asked about Boyd's work?
Mark McGrath:Well, I think it goes right to the things that Bill points out in his article about strategic positioning, flexibility, adaptation, deception, misdirection, holistic thinking, patience, long-term planning and, lastly, leveraging strengths and weaknesses. I mean, that's right out of the John Boyd playbook, which is heavily Eastern influenced, and this is lost on most that, I think, in our military establishment that focus on Western models which are largely driven by bureaucracy, they're largely driven by metrics, they're largely driven by personal gain or or or an obsolete personnel system that is not enabling our orientation to deal with reality as it actually is. Now, I'm not saying that the Chinese officers are like spot on that to what reality actually is, but at least it seems that they're trying to create and destroy and destroy and create models that are trying to help them align to it more than, say, your average, average american here's another thought.
Brian Rivera:You and I had folks on to talk about attractors, adjacent possible and affordances in the external environment. If we look at music again, if you look at sacred geometry, these little attractors, the adjacent possible and affordances in the external environment, if we look at music again, if you look at sacred geometry, these little attractors are out there, right. So maybe that's what we need to be looking at are the attractors, the affordances, the adjacent possible in the external environment and looking for patterns there. And that informs our strategy. By the way, the way we develop a strategy by looking outside in right.
Brian Rivera:Not inside out.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and that's why Boyd didn then just take patterns of conflict. I mean, why does he start all the way back as far as he could go with recorded military history? Because his point was these concepts don't change, they don't go away, and, and, and. What empowers an underdog to defeat um, not an underdog, I don't know what empowers David to defeat a Goliath is exactly this type of thinking. It's exactly this type of exposure to interdisciplinary ideas.
Mark McGrath:Understanding how things flow, understanding how patterns actually work and why you study, why you make Marines read Mein Kampf and Mao and other things, is so that they can identify these patterns, so that when they do happen, it's evident to me, it's part of my orientation, so that when I'm sense-making and it occurs, I can see it faster than my opponents. And it's radical, it's decentralized, what Boyd talks about, what Marshall McLuhan talks about being radical, decentralized and pervasive in understanding media. And that, unfortunately, is not a popular way if you want to climb the ranks in a bureaucracy. Yet at the same time, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to win everything just because we have all the capital, all the tools, all the weaponry, all the sensors, all the guidance systems, all the missiles and rockets and bombs, et cetera. Because, as Boyd pointed out in Patterns of Conflict, using Andrew Kropenovich's book, the Army in Vietnam as an example, we had everything and we lost to people with bicycles, ak-47s and we killed more of them than they killed of us.
Mark McGrath:We didn't win the moral war and we didn't understand the cultural war there and the places where we did with, like the Marine CAP program and the and the uh, the green beret, uh a teams and things like that we did, we completely undermined all that in the name of open field showdowns, trying to lure the nva into the open field showdown with with force on force and go after terrain and, as we know, terrain does not win wars. Technology does not win wars. People do and they use their minds and that's what is lost, I think.
Brian Rivera:This is a very deep-thinking episode where we're just throwing things out there. Bill, I mean this topic. I don't have an answer. I don't think Mark has an answer. Have we triggered anything? What are you going through? What's going through in your mind right now? Are we?
Bill DeMarco:crazy. No, no, I'm totally with you and I think that some of the things that Mark just brought up it makes me think about. If you get back to this idea of just basic Eastern philosophy and you mentioned this idea of strengths and weaknesses how do we look at these things? One thing that I've always been drawn to is this idea of yin-yang, and I kind of break it down when I'm talking to students. You know, I put it up there and I always kind of make the joke that this is not something you get drunk and just get it tattooed on your butt. I mean, like what does that symbol really mean? It's one, it's unity, it's also order and it's chaos.
Bill DeMarco:So if you start thinking about order and chaos, you know what is the US really trying to do so many times is to bring order to the chaos. But the chaos is always going to be there. The chaos isn't going to go away. So, as we go into these fights a lot of times, think about, you know, the war on terror. We were trying to bring order into a place like Afghanistan, which historically has always been chaos. Well, how did that go for us? Or back to your point, mark, about Vietnam. I mean we were trying to impose our will on a situation that we couldn't that mean and that yin-yang was still going to exist. So how do we exist in the chaos? Our bureaucracy is all about order. You know what I mean. That's, what we promote is order. Yet future conflicts, past conflicts, but let's just talk about the future is going to be chaos. So how do we train and educate our leaders to understand the chaos and the order?
Mark McGrath:no-transcript, because he figured out, like Lawrence did, how to harness culture, how to assimilate with culture and be a true liaison, how to bridge two worlds from a point of empathy, from a point of a cultural understanding. And he actually had marked progress that could be measured, because violence went down, the influence of the enemy went down, just like it had with the CAP program in Vietnam, just like it had with the Special Forces A-teams in Vietnam. That always is going to get pushed aside for something that's more. Hey, this is what America does. It's Uncle Sam, we don't want any casualties, we're going to bomb you into the Stone Age and you're just going to submit. That doesn't work, it doesn't work and that's why we can't. It's why Afghanistan was a failure, it's why Vietnam was a failure, because that cultural aspect, I think, goes back to Boyd and Sun Tzu. It's tying in.
Mark McGrath:Can I connect with these individuals on the philosophical level, on the moral level? And if I can, I'm going to build a bond that cannot be disrupted by competing ideas, competing forces or whatever. I'm going to build trust and be able to build mutual trust. We're going to have intuition. We're going to be able to accomplish things together because we're able to connect on the moral plane. I used to tell clients this in my previous life in Wall Street. Asset Management was like if you can build relationships with your clientele on the moral plane, on the philosophical plane, that bond is indisruptible and you can't get underbid by a lower price, you can't get beaten by a competitor because that bond that you have with that client assuming that you're not a lawbreaker or anything like that that bond is impenetrable.
Mark McGrath:And I think that what we're talking about, what we started talking about, about why unrestricted warfare shocks so many people or they don't even want to read it is because it does great against what we're taught culturally from a bureaucratic complex versus a bottom-up. This is how things work and this is how we can assimilate and work together in a part of the world that's still, by and large, completely misunderstood by intervening in the Far East since the 1830s. So I do think that the Navy and the Marine Corps does have some kind of edge just my own personal theory of understanding sort of Eastern ways or being open to Eastern ways more than maybe the Army and the Air Force. We should be open to that, especially if they think that this is where adversaries are going to be. We should be learning why they think the way that they do, why they understand things the way that they do, so that we could hopefully get to a point where we don't have to fire a shot, which is also very Sun Tzu and very John Boyd.
Brian Rivera:Thought here Chinese healing. You brought up yin and yang. I know there's some sacred geometry in that too. I don't have the document in front of me, but the way they look at healing in the East is not how we look at it here, right? I mean they're more into functional type approaches, whereas we're into siloed approaches in our healthcare system. So those experiences, that culture, if you will, triggers how they are oriented to the external world. We're not that way. So I'm just wondering is there a connection to-.
Bill DeMarco:So I think it's a really interesting point because you read unrestricted warfare and it's a spectrum right, that's why it's called unrestricted warfare. It was a new way of looking at warfare, in other words, and that translation is not a great translation of the title either. But let's just think about the United States we talk about and I don't care what acronym you use, I always go back to because it's simple diplomatic information military economics Over the last 30 years or so. Military economics Over the last 30 years or so. We've really gotten to this giant lowercase d, lowercase I, giant lowercase e. To your point, ponch, I think that's the stovepipe right back to the healing. We're going to cure cancer. That's it. It's all about this cancer drug or the military will solve all of our problems and we know that's true.
Bill DeMarco:You look at what China's doing right now with things like just picking up Belt and Road Initiative. I mean, that's not necessarily military, although there's an M component in there, there's a D component, there's an I component and there's an E component, all in that idea of a Belt and Road Initiative so we can span the spectrum from the Eastern side. We're not doing that very well on the Western side. Arguably, I would say that we might've done a better job in the Cold War. The idea was that we had a pretty robust USAID as an example. Usaid aid is like they're minuscule. I worked with them a lot when I was in the Pentagon and the quote was always something like we have more band members in the DOD than they have members in USAID. But USAID is really important when you're trying to do things that are not military oriented trying to make friends and influence people.
Mark McGrath:Huh, so there's a great picture of David Shoup, who was the Commandant of the Marine Corps Medal of Honor recipient the Battle of Tarawa, reading the book how to Win Friends and Influence People, which I think, to double check me, I'm pretty sure that's been on Service Chief reading list at some point, and what is it ultimately trying to do?
Mark McGrath:It's trying to teach you how to become empathetic as a leader, to try to understand rather than just simply know. Anyway, back to your article, though. What about the side principle rule? That's the. That's a concept that's talked about in chapter six. I've seen other people write about that too. There's Quintus Curtius, who's a former Marine that does a translation of military thinkers that we hope to have on the show at some point too, and he talks about. It was in the chapter six side principle, the side principle rule, and they spelled principle not with a L-E, with an A-L.
Bill DeMarco:Yeah, and also the side element is another way of looking at that. I'm just looking at it right now, but the idea is I remember what they called the hackers. Now they were called web rascals, but the idea was that there were these web rascals that would get into the system and in a way, that's kind of the side element. Right, it's how do I attack or do things on the side. That's not a frontal assault.
Bill DeMarco:And we started thinking about. Think about China. I don't think to your point. They don't want conflict over the Taiwanese Strait, they want it to be obvious. In other words, how do I win without firing a shot? Yeah, when it becomes obvious. And just think about, over the weekend, those pictures released of their new, possibly sixth gen fighter. Um, you know like hey, look at all the stuff we have fighting us is useless, we will win. Think about back to ronald reagan and star wars. The idea of star wars wasn't really a thing. You know what I mean. It was like we didn't have the technology but this idea that we could do this. And then, knowing that America, if they say they're going to do it, is going to do it. I'm not saying it's what won the Cold War, but I'm just saying it was one thing on top of it, kind of a side principle or side element of how do we keep attacking this from the sides so we're not doing the frontal?
Mark McGrath:It amplified the adversary's friction. It got them thinking about things that they shouldn't necessarily be thinking about. It got them entertained with a sideshow and they get distracted from focus. And I think that that's what when I take away and I think about unrestricted warfare. That's why I give TikTok a double take, and that's where I give a lot of the things that we see in media, you know, a double, a double take, because I think that the distractions are being put out there and then we wind up losing our focus.
Brian Rivera:So the principle side rule is that kind of like the concept of obliquity. And I don't know if you ever read John Kay's book I think it's about 15 years old now. It's the same thing in complex adaptive systems thinking is you generally don't want to take things head on, you take an oblique approach. No, exactly right. How do you come up with things from?
Bill DeMarco:the side we do some work with Michigan and a guy up there named Jeff DeGraff and he always talks about the side door. You need a side door into this. How do you get in through the side, especially in bureaucracy? The idea of, oh, just get a few generals on board. Okay, generals are really busy and to get a general's attention is really hard. And just a little side note I spent a lot of time working with generals.
Bill DeMarco:They don't like saying no either, so they get their henchmen to say no, which is usually their colonels to go say no, or their captains, in your case Fonch. But the idea of you know, like the general's, like that's a great idea. Then they look over at you and like, hey, go kill that. But so the side doors. Really, how do I come in it from the side, maybe how do I go talk to the 06s before I talk to the general? Get the 06s on board. You know what I mean. And now you run a casual schlock maneuver. The idea of like you've got a cauldron around the individual and they don't even know that they're surrounded.
Brian Rivera:Do you just describe what's happening now with the current war right? I mean, people don't know that it's happening to them.
Bill DeMarco:Yes, exactly right, it's the frog in the water. Interesting. You brought that up too, because I believe and again, I have a terrible tendency to give the adversary too much credit. I learned this. You know, panchano, you were over in the Air Operations Center, I was too. There are so many times that I would look at things like, well, the enemy's going to do this and they wouldn't do it, and I'm like that was an obvious left hook. You could have got me right in the chin and you didn't do it. So I do that often. But I look at China right now and I do believe Bill DeMarco. Only they can hear us think. So they know what Americans do Think about it. They're all in Hollywood right now and it sounds so stupid. I wrote a piece on this too. Why are there no Chinese bad guys? Like back in the Cold War? There were Russian bad guys all the time. Red Dawn classic example right, I mean the first Red Dawn, not the second one, I mean you're describing the Gen X canon.
Bill DeMarco:Yes, but the idea was the Soviets were the bad guys, and you know movies and all these things. In other words, it was in our culture that you went to a blockbuster. The bad guys were Soviets. Today, the bad guys are who, aliens, monsters, you know what I mean. The idea is like, well, it's just everybody's okay, but it's not, because China already owns so much of a massive percentage of Hollywood that you can't do that.
Bill DeMarco:Red Dawn, the sequel, or not the sequel, the current version, I guess it's like 10 years, 20 years old now. But they wanted to be China and China said no, so it became North Korea. So the fact is, we all know North Korea has no capability to launch an airborne assault on the United States of America and their members are too small, blah, blah, blah. But the Chinese said no, so we said it's okay. Fentanyl, fentanyl, drugs, tiktok great example of social media, all these things that the Chinese are like. We'll just side door here. We'll just do this oblique movement here, here and here, so they can hear us think. I'm sorry, bruce, I stepped on you.
Mark McGrath:No, no, it's interesting because I think back to World War II and you look at the movies that were produced before December 7th 1941, like Abbott and Costello in the army, now about getting drafted the dictator, with Charlie Chaplinplin. I mean it feels like there was a lot of things that were programming us and preparing us for uh, for war in europe. And then every movie that came out after I always was very clearly the bad guys were the nazis and the japanese. I mean that was every single movie we ever, we ever grew up with into your boys bunny and daffy duck, I mean I was like even the cartoons and the Japanese. I mean that was every single movie we ever grew up with, even Bugs.
Bill DeMarco:Bunny and Daffy Duck. I mean, I was like even the cartoons had the same thing. Yeah, the propaganda.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean, that's really. It is really fascinating to think about. But again it goes. I think that people understood that the war is also in the mind. It's not just. It's just not against the terrain or against, you know, people we don't like. It's just not against the terrain or against people we don't like, in those cases Germans or Japanese. In those days we have to be conditioned to think that. First, because in our country, as we all know, before December 7th 1941, there was a lot of Japanese people that were Americans and a lot of Germans that were Americans, that were living amongst us and a vibrant part of our culture, just like China.
Mark McGrath:Chinese have been in the United States since the 1800s. You know from the very beginning. And then when you read books about, like you know, james Bradley that wrote Flags of Our Fathers and the Flyboys, about the Aishimara, he has been taken off the good list because he wrote a book called the China Mirage and he goes list because he wrote a book called the China Mirage and he goes back and he documents a lot of these things that over the last hundred or so years that China really has a burr in their side, that the Western world, between the United Kingdom and the United States has caused for them, like the opium wars and pushing opium and selling opium into China and taking Macau and and uh, hong kong and stuff and what we forget and this is about the cultural differences right back to that. They're thinking back thousands of years, like a hundred years to them is like, but like, think about us. We think like 24 hours ago, like people are already not talking about how quick did donald trump getting shot came right out of the news site, right?
Mark McGrath:We don't even think in terms of that because we're so attuned in the West to this 24-hour news cycle, whereas their minds and their thinking is going back, you know, thousands and thousands of years, in some cases, such that where the golden ratio comes from right, I mean, that's not a new concept. No, it's an ancient concept. Yeah, we talk about psychedelic therapies all the time. That's not a new thing. Those are thousands of years old. It's new to us because I didn't see it on CNN in the last 24 hours, although more and more it's on.
Mark McGrath:CNN. Yeah, a recency bias is a massive problem, but it goes back to the loop sketch. I mean, if I understand my opponent's biases, I'm able to leverage those to my advantage, I'm able to amplify their friction. And to your point, bill, we broadcast our biases religiously. It's everywhere.
Brian Rivera:Yeah, you do it on social media everywhere. So that's it. The capturing of the external environment by the Chinese informs their strategy. That's it right? I mean, we can't, we don't think like that.
Mark McGrath:We've all lived on bases overseas right Me, not only as an officer but also as a kid. And you step on Grafenwoehr Army training area in 1983, you leave Germany, you leave Bavaria and you go into America. It's got the PX, it's got American cars, it's got everything. It's like everywhere we go we put America. And I remember reading about Jim Gant in the book American Spartan was written by his wife, ann Tyson. They're talking about how whoever relieved them or replaced them like the first question when they would get to these villages that he had been so successful with the first thing out of their mouth well, where's the chow hall? Where's the weight room? Where's the PX? Where's all this stuff that we're so accustomed to versus what was culturally attuned to success, understanding how things operate elsewhere?
Bill DeMarco:So then I always have to wonder how to fix it, because then you realize that we're not going to get rid of the idea of social media. That's not going away, no. So what do we do? How do you counteract it, to get rid of, you know, the idea of social media? That's not going away, you know. So, like, what do we do? How do you counteract it?
Bill DeMarco:And the problem is, as a capitalist entity, you know, you think about let's go back to Hollywood. It's all about the money. There was some interesting work done, you know, speaking of philosophy, all this you guys probably have read some of the stuff from the Frankfurt School. But there was this whole bit about how do you make art in a capitalist society. Because the fact is, you'll keep making the art that makes the money. And again, I love capital. Capital is a great thing, but the fact was, if you keep making art to make money, you'll keep making the same things over and over again. So then I look at superhero movies. Just an example they were great. Think back to 1989, batman. That was just Michael Keaton and Batman, amazing. And then all of a sudden, wow, that made a lot of money.
Mark McGrath:Still, the best Jack Nicholson the Joker.
Bill DeMarco:Yes, we've got to keep on making that movie over and over again, the Niagara of Gotham.
Mark McGrath:That was the best. Kim Basinger, come on. Yes.
Bill DeMarco:It's a great movie, but we keep on trying to remake, then Marvel comes out.
Mark McGrath:The first Marvel movies are really great. When's the last good Marvel movie, bill? How many movies have been made about TV shows that we grew up with? There's a Chips movie and a Dukes of Hazzard movie and a Charlie's Angels movies and things like that. It's like find something original. What do?
Bill DeMarco:we keep on remaking it because that's where the money is, although arguably not, but it's a safer bet than making something new. So the Frankfurt School is saying the same thing with art. The fact is that, basically, art will continue to only be made based on what we know we like. That worries me a bit. This is a way tangent, but since we talked about music earlier, it worries me with the algorithms now and like Apple Music Because what it's doing is feeding me the music it knows I like, but I'm the guy that likes music. I don't know that I like, if that makes any sense.
Mark McGrath:Well, so now you've done it. Now you've opened another thing that we've talked a lot about Marshall McLuhan. So Marshall McLuhan thought that the artists were actually the do line. If you remember the defense early warning system artists, out away, the money-making art that you're talking about, and you're actually looking at the art for art's sakes, the actual legitimate artists. That's the do-line, that's telling us what's coming and that's what's actually leading the turn that are coming.
Brian Rivera:Huh, hey, Ponch, I don't know about you, I smell a live broadcast with Bill John Robb and Andrew McLuhan go and then does a lot of work in sacred geometry, very familiar with Shakespeare, and he actually had a series that I watched called the America Codes where he decoded the Declaration of Independence. What's in there and all that. It's kind of interesting Connecting back to Tao and Phi. Again, there's a lot of connections in there to what we talked about. But we're pretty early in our exploration of this topic and we've come across it again in physics from Adrian Bijan and his work on the physics of flow and beauty. In time it's in the back half of some of his books. We've come across it in music.
Brian Rivera:We've definitely come across it in the world of psychedelic assisted therapy and some work on Wall Street with Mandelbrot connections to Mandelbrot, in fact, mark and I pointed out that John Boyd was starting to explore a little bit of Mandelbrot's work before he passed. And then, of course, we're looking at sacred geometry applied to the planets, the universe, and understanding the connection to the pyramids. What do the pyramids really mean? Finding more connections back to the pineal gland, back in the sarcophagus of the pyramid. So there's so many unknowns right now and I think what we definitely want to do is have you back and continue this conversation as we explore with experts in the field of sacred geometry what this means, because I do believe, like you do, I think you do. There's a solid connection to strategy or decision-making.
Bill DeMarco:Yeah and I think Moose brought it up the idea that it has to be fluid and agile, because if we're looking for the absolute answer, it's probably not there. In other words, it's not going to be full every time you put these two things together. But if we don't have a basis to build off of, then we've got nothing. And I kind of feel like right now we're taking a lot of shots in the dark when it comes to national level strategy and we don't really know what it is, so that we're not basing on anything. We're like chinese, they're bad. So therefore, the strategy should be we'll kick your ass. Well, I don't know. That's a good strategy, because do you really want to go toe-to-toe? Do you really want? I mean, I don't think anybody wants, but you have to deter also, which means you spend money on defense. So it's's like I don't know. It's just one of those that I agree with you and obviously I'm very early on in these thoughts as well. I mean, I'm throwing spaghetti at a wall hoping to see what sticks.
Mark McGrath:Are you familiar with SACO? S-a-c-o is the Sino-American Cooperation Organization. It's also the nickname was the Rice Paddy Navy and it was commanded by an admiral, a US admiral, named Milton Miles. His call sign was Mary, because there was a famous actress, mary Miles, so it's Milton Mary Miles. In his book which I challenge you to find it, I actually have a copy and I paid a lot of money for it it's called A Different Kind of War.
Mark McGrath:And how I heard about this was General Gray, who we lost last year, who was a collaborator with John Boyd and was the force behind warfighting, the MCDP-1 warfighting, said he was talking about one of his predecessors, robert Barrow, that had won the Navy Cross at the Chosin Reservoir and then the Distinguished Service Cross in Dewey Canyon in Vietnam.
Mark McGrath:But he talked about how General Barrow, when he was fighting in World War II, general Barrow was not on the islands. He wasn't in Tarawa, guadalcanal, iwo Jima, any of them. General Barrow was in the Rice Paddy Navy under Admiral Milton Miles and what they were doing was basically creating a guerrilla force inside of China to counteract the Japanese domestically in China and basically it came down to sort of two rival arguments One was the Chinese nationalist argument and the other one was the communist argument. And then I guess the Americans were kind of split on that. So Milton Miles, he had one view one way, and Donovan, who was the first CIA director, I think or he was at OSS at the time he had a different view and that split in his assessment was what was causing all the problems with China after World War II, like how Mao came to power and things like that. But the point of it is is that we actually do have a history, we do have a lineage of these things like Seiko, like the CAP program.
Bill DeMarco:Seiko, like you know, the CAP program, we do have a history of these types of things that are aligning with cultures and making massive outsized outcomes with very small, very small, differentiated inputs. Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up too, because I ponder things and similar but very different Things like Radio Free Europe, like our culture, the american culture is extremely, very I don't know, I haven't read, maybe I have. I imagine the chinese are afraid of our culture, which is why they're attacking us, and I don't mean that in a weird way, because they're not necessarily, it's not, it's a side door, right, it's, it's hollywood, it's music, it's this it's not wrong yeah, james bradley talks about, in the china mirage, how the the, the mandar and the Emperor of China.
Mark McGrath:I mean, we were referred to, let's say we, meaning Westerners, anglo-saxon Westerners, from the United States and the United Kingdom. They were called barbarians. They weren't allowed to leave the areas. What became Hong Kong, what became Macau? They weren't allowed to leave those areas. They had to be restricted. They could only do business certified, with all approved. And we were again. We I didn't say we, but Westerners that were intervening in China have always been referred to as barbarians. Yes, that's. Who was at the gate that overturned Rome, right? I mean, I guess that's the understanding maybe of sort of the Eurocentric lineages were barbarian hordes. I guess I don't know.
Brian Rivera:Bill, is it possible that and I don't want to use a term here that I don't like that much but center of gravity is culture? Is it possible?
Bill DeMarco:I think for the Chinese it is something that they feel is a center of gravity. Maybe not the center. Of course we can argue if there's multiple or one centers of gravity, but I do think that the culture for the Chinese is a center of gravity, but to the point of this whole conversation, that's a very loose center of gravity. In other words, what do the metrics look like to attack somebody's culture In the West? We'd want to know. Have we degraded the culture by 6.2%, or is it 8.9%? Or is it the Chinese? Don't care, I don't believe. I think they just know if I can buy enough studios in Hollywood, if I can influence music, if I can get into social media, I am making a difference in their culture.
Brian Rivera:So the world of complex adaptive systems thinking says that you just amplify the behaviors you want and dampen the ones you don't. It's really simple. Says that you just amplify the behaviors you want and dampen the ones you don't. It's really simple. You don't measure it, you just keep going in a direction, direction of travel. We struggle with this with our leaders, right, they're challenged with this type of thinking. So when you brought that up, I'm thinking if you're going to attack us, you break our culture. You leverage the internet, create tribalism, amplify that, you make us hate each other Democrats hate Republicans, republicans hate Democrats. So this is the idea of Boyd Zutley too is to fold us upon ourselves. And I don't know, mark man, when you're talking about that this is it.
Mark McGrath:This is the war that we're fighting. It goes back to what Sean Ring was talking about the other day when we were live on X, that, when you think of, we talk about the 24 hourhour news cycle right, a four-year presidential term is not that much longer than a 24-hour news cycle in the scope of things.
Bill DeMarco:No, four years is nothing, it's nothing.
Mark McGrath:A two-year congressional term and a six-year senatorial term and even a two-term president in eight years in the grand scope of things. We're constantly, constantly on this, like got to get things done quick. So we don't have the ability. Just, I think, by design of our system with representative democracy, we don't have the ability to take a long view. And I'm not advocating a system. I think that our system of a representative republic, as we were founded, I think, is naturally biased. I swore no to defend that, as you did too. The one thing about it and it seems to get worse and worse is that we're not able to take the things that you talk about in your article. We're not able to take a long-term, holistic view because there's so many competing interests in the short run of people that want to get satiated by money, by fame, by promotion, whatever it really does put us at a massive disadvantage and vulnerability from that respect.
Bill DeMarco:So I agree 100%. The fact is that, not saying we alter our system at all. Yet you talk about the long-term. We took a long-term approach. When you think about things like containment, long telegram, you know all this stuff was like like we were able to rally around something like you know the Soviet Union and communism and say that's bad and it lasted for several generations. How do we do that? You know I mean now and you can look back at Truman and Eisenhower interesting time for the United States. You know Eisenhower inherited this massive debt from Schuman because we were lusting up everything we could to fight the Soviets and Eisenhower knew that's not sustainable. Nsc 68, these other things that all came from that era. The fact was, or even the Solarian Project, I mean these things that happened under Eisenhower's watch that we could easily replicate today if we could get past the partisanship. And then to argue is our partisanship exacerbated by Russia and China? Again, I don't want to sound like I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything else, but we have to admit it's a possibility.
Mark McGrath:No, I think it goes back to cultural understanding, though. So here's a name for you, Lieutenant Colonel Pete Ellis. Earl Ellis was his name, Pete Ellis and he had been over in the Far East. He was a Marine officer, and he had come back and basically predicted everything that was going to happen in the Far East, for no other reason other than understanding them and going over there and saying that we are going to have to go back over there in 20 years and take these islands back from the Japanese because of how they're after the 1919 Paris Agreement, how they're just taking all these German possessions, how it's just going to keep pushing down on us, taking things from us, right, Like Guam and the Philippines and other things.
Mark McGrath:I think, too, we got to look at a guy like MacArthur. I mean love or hate MacArthur. Macarthur had his finger on the pulse of the Far East for most of his entire life, With the exception of World War I, his time at West Point, his time with Chief of Staff of the Army. Almost all of his career was spent over in the Far East, and he had a much different understanding. Success in Japan after the war is because there was an overseer like MacArthur that did have an understanding of the culture that was able to recognize the value of things that we've talked about. Ponch with Charlie Protzman that if we mix these cultures and they can understand each other, we can get a much better outcome than saying one's better than the other and we're going to force that one out. We're going to make you do this.
Brian Rivera:All right, let's build on that. So Pratt's been a Shingo Prize winning author, talks about the origins of lean, the Toyota production system and other things. So what did it take? It took Japanese to come over here and look at what we're doing, to see the world from their perspective and take it back right, whereas we couldn't do that that well. So you can't change the system from within, you have to go outside the system, correct, mark? Okay?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and the more that you try to do it, the more confusion and disorder increases per jumboid. That's the whole point of this creation, that the more I try to fix the system within itself, with all the views within the system, that's where I get the incestuous amplification of confusion, disorder and, if I can get my opponent to do that, more and more and more and more, irrelevance, obsolescence and ultimately, extinction. That's what has to happen.
Brian Rivera:That's a lower energy approach to warfare. Right there you just yeah, yeah, okay, right, but to piggyback on that too.
Bill DeMarco:Think about George Kennan. He wasn't here, he was in Moscow, so he was outside the. He's part of the system, my God, but outside the system learning about what was going on.
Mark McGrath:What did he see in Russia? I don't know how that happened, but how do you learn about the adversary? He's sitting in Moscow making notes and saying in Berlin, and he was writing about all these things that were going on in Germany and nobody listened. Like nobody listened and bam, you know, hitler comes in. And he was writing about that. I think it was like the New York Times correspondent in Berlin and he was sending these dispatches. I think it's like the rise and fall of the Third Reich was his book, but but he had been saying for years as the correspondent all these things that were happening and everybody's like no, no, no, hitler's good. You know he's bringing order, you know he's the Time Magazine man of the Year. Little did we know, but he challenged assumptions, right, I mean, and that's always.
Bill DeMarco:Yes.
Mark McGrath:Yep, which, again, I think that that's the value of what it is. Just to say that article that you put out about decoding asymmetry, about the Chinese using the golden ratio as a starting point, and then you say, as they say, that there is a fuzziness to it. Though it's not exact, there's a fuzziness to it. That's the other thing that people in the West don't understand. They're always looking for exact, correct. This is it, you know, and they're not allowing for the things that Boyd talked about entropy, uncertainty and incompleteness, that it's always going to be fuzzy, fluid in a constant state of that.
Brian Rivera:Like you said, that's a good warfare, that it's fuzz and it's well. That was fun. That was one of the more, uh, challenging episodes, because it's just, we're just riffing off each other there. That's what we want from this, which is jazz. That's what we're talking about, yeah, and it doesn't mean everything we put out there is gospel. It's just like, hey, we're thinking about this live and and I mean there's a lot more to be discussed as we reflect on this. So, bill, I really appreciate you coming on today. Man, this has been a really, really, really fun conversation.
Bill DeMarco:Yeah, and you have to come back. Well, I'd love to. I'd love to, you know, and I get it, because at the end I feel like we didn't solve anything. We just actually just muddied the waters, probably more, but it's good to have those conversations.
Mark McGrath:I think it goes, but one of our guests that we're putting out soon, sam alima, was talking about the importance of the study of philosophy and one of the things he was talking about socrates. Yes, yeah, the more, the more that we ask and the more that we question, the more we realize that I don't know, you know, and people don't like the socratic way of thinking, but that's that's important to keep asking as if you don't know. You know because I think, as Boyd said, he reviled the term expert. If you called him an expert, he absolutely reviled. He said that that is not what I am, it's a know-it-all.
Mark McGrath:And the other thing he hated to be called was an analyst, because an analyst means I can break things down but I can't put things back together as a synthesis. And he said the worst thing you could say on top of those things would be an analytical expert. So you know, we don't want to be those, we want to be, and I think maybe this goes back to really what we were talking about earlier. Officers should be scholars and they should be in a constant state of learning and they should not be limited into what it is that they're learning and questioning, because if they're pursuing things that can help enlighten reality, they shouldn't be written off as a quack, like Pete Ellis was written off as a quack and Patton and others that were doing radical thinking. That should be encouraged, not discouraged.
Bill DeMarco:I agree 100%. It's interesting the book or the movie we Were Soldiers. When Hal Moore is in the movie, he shows them in his barracks or in his on-base house doing all this studying and this reading. I always thought that was so interesting because I don't know that we do that anymore. He was getting this mission that he had to go over to Vietnam. What was the helicopter going to do or not do? There's that scene where he's in his house on base and he's reviewing all these books and he's trying to get smart.
Mark McGrath:For me, that always stuck in my head, because Hal Moore actually came and spoke at SOS when I was a student, a million years ago, before the movie came out, and I remember just thinking my word this guy, he's amazing and like Hal Moore from Bardstown, kentucky, and turn him into a Harvard-level scholar, interdisciplinary thinker, that's able to combine philosophy, technology, strategy, able to fuse all that together to be successful in his own right. Ask people hey, have you read Street Without Joy by Bernard Folling? Who's Bernard Foll? What's that about?
Bill DeMarco:There's this idea. I think that some of our officers not all of them, because this is a problem, you know the bureaucracy wants one size to fit all. In other words, we're widgets, because the idea is when one widget fails, everybody moves up one. That's the personnel system.
Mark McGrath:It is, and there's a lot of talk about you know, redoing it and all this.
Bill DeMarco:I don't know We'll see if if it happens, but the idea of a polymath, like we need polymaths in the military, and I just don't know that we reward it. Yes, exactly right yes, it has to be. You don't want everybody to do that, just like you don't want like innovation where I live. You don't want everybody to be an innovator. It'd be absolutely a shit show. But you need to find those folks who do it well and reward them.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, it needs to be encouraged, not discouraged. Yes, yeah, so well, let's pause there, then, and we will continue. Tell everybody your website so we can. We want people to go to your website and read the article Decoding Asymmetry. Yeah site and read the article. Uh, decoding asymmetry, yeah, it's uh, I'm sorry, decoding asymmetric doctrine, revisiting unrestricted warfare, the golden section and the china's quest for victory.
Bill DeMarco:It's uh, m100 group is acom, m100 the number 100 groupcom, or if you just look up google mastermind century group, you'll find it. Now, are you on X or have you? No, I am, but my presence is not. It's just not huge, but I am on.
Mark McGrath:X. Okay Well, if you want to go live with us, we need you on X Sure.
Bill DeMarco:I can do that, no problem, I'd love to do that.
Mark McGrath:Thanks for coming on and sharing time with two naval officers a Marine and a naval aviator.
Bill DeMarco:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:It's the beauty of jointness, it's what it's supposed to do.
Bill DeMarco:Thank you, I appreciate it.
