No Way Out

Network Centric Warfare: OODA Loop, John Boyd, and Creating Operational Flow

• Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera • Episode 148

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What if the secret to winning—on the battlefield and in business—isn’t more technology, but smarter trust? We sit down with Col (Ret.) Frederick P. Stein, coauthor of Network Centric Warfare, to unpack how Admiral Cebrowski’s vision was never just about sensors—it was about reorganizing around shared awareness, clearer intent, and the courage to push decisions to the edge.

We connect fighter aviation’s shift from ground-controlled F‑4s to information-rich F‑14s with Walmart’s rise under Sam Walton, where data and decentralized authority beat legacy giants. Col. Stein breaks down the triad of sensor, engagement, and command networks and why technology without doctrinal and organizational change falls flat. Through vivid analogies—soccer’s flow versus football’s huddles—we explore self-synchronization, the power of mission command, and how speed of command depends more on orientation than sheer tempo.

The conversation ranges from Apache cultural resilience to IDF case studies, from Blue Force Tracking at Peach Bridge to the pitfalls of stale “red” intelligence without timestamps. We examine why incentives matter more than dashboards, how Enron’s reward structure crushed sharing, and why “walls of knowledge” and flattened inputs outlearn hierarchy. Then we look forward: AI and machine learning can spot targ

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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John Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral was originally titled “No Way Out.” In his words:

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”


Download a complete transcript of Conceptual Spiral for free by clicking here.

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

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Mark McGrath:

Oh, okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Oh no. Uh so Moose, years ago I was a young lieutenant and we had this thing called transformation happening. Um there was this thing in the background called network-centric warfare, and the way I understood it, the way I thought it was presented to me was it's all about technology and information systems and things like that. So here we are, we have Donald Rumsfeld, we have this war going on. Uh, we're going through these large transformation, they call it the transformation office. Um, years go by, I get into the agile space, agile coaching, and I start looking back at some of these books that were written in the late 90s about network-centric warfare, planning in complex environments and so forth. And I realize that what the military, what the military was trying to do back then isn't what we were, you know, not the perception I had of it. It was really about building, I'm going to say it, team of teams, using mission command, net network approaches, guerrilla warfare approaches uh applied to large organizations, if you will. Now, in the Agile community, I quickly realized that that's what Agile was trying to do as well, is create agility via sound principles. And then when you get into books like this here, this is called Network Centric Warfare, Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, it's fantastic. It makes connects to John Boyd's Observer One Decide Act Loop, uh, has some other nice connections in here. And again, it also gives us great insights into what was going on with Admiral Zabrowski. Hopefully I said his name correctly, when he was leading up the Office of Transformation. Now, I found myself in here in Norfolk, Virginia, going to this conference room in this building that had his name on it. And I'm like, that guy sounds really important. I want to look into it. So I run down the library and I grab this book. There's a bunch of these books down there. And our guest today happens to be one of the authors, Frederick P. Stein. So, Colonel Stein, uh, welcome to the show. How are you doing to this this morning, sir?

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Happy to join. So glad you're here. Uh, I'd love to go back to learn a little bit more about how you became connected to Admiral Sabrowski, how you got involved with network-centric warfare, uh, what was going on at the time, and then what was the true intent behind NCW?

Speaker 1:

Well, I that uh so I had been selected to serve on the joint staff at that time. I think it's still currently the case. You can't make flag officer unless you uh have had a sin on joint staff, and I was being considered for that and had not had it. And so I left my brigade and uh and Bosnian Rwanda, period, and went over and became a member of Sabrowski's staff. Sabrowski had assumed the J6 a little bit earlier than that. Roy Edwards, Colonel Roy Edwards, a buddy of mine, was a speechwriter, and I ended up as plans and programs chief then on Sabrowski's staff. And NCW was just beginning the piece that Sabrowski wrote with, I guess, with Edwards' uh help on it, had had really just come out, and we were just becoming, we were just starting to talk to people uh like the mayor of New York and Sam Walton and others about the concept. And so we went rather rather in on the ground floor of it. I guess at that time, I think had uh one other person uh in the book, I'm sorry, had just been hired as well as the GS-14. And so John Garska and I started going around talking about network centric warfare as we understood it, if you will.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

What's the uh connection to to Walmart? This is fascinating, and and what was going on there.

Speaker 1:

Well, Sabrowski uh had many contacts, and one of them was the mayor of New York, the second one was Sam Walton, and he asked me to go down and interview Sam Walton and try to understand why Walmart was overtaking the traditional giants of uh retail uh Sears and uh Kmart, both of which are effectively deceased. And so I had a chance to interview uh Mr. Walton uh down in down in his headquarters in Arkansas briefly. Uh the conversation revolved around many things, but one of them was what was Walmart's significant advantage? And my exit question, I guess, was what do you fear most from competitors? And he said, I fear most by competitors if they understand how I'm using data and how I've reorganized Walmart in order to allow subordinate layers, I would call subordinate commanders, he didn't use those terms, but people in the store, down at the store level, and even below the store manager to utilize the data. And so I thought the, I thought the answer was going to be the way he was using McLean's trucking, which is a trucking firm out of Texas that I was familiar with. And he was using those. They they no longer use those. But what he was really doing is he understood he had put his own database together that's before people were using Oracle and others significantly. And he was passing information and he was allowing his organization to use information in a decentralized manner at just prices, if you will. They were very aware of their own blue information, their own sales, and they were relatively aware of, quote, red information, competitors' information. And so he said, those that uh understand that I fear. Those that see me as a retail business, I don't fear at all. And so I thought that was an interesting perception. And they had changed their organizations and their command relationships significantly to take advantage of the information available. And that's when we were developing the sensor networks, the engagement networks, and the command networks and those three, which were always conceptually what Sabrowski had in mind. And so although Secretary Rumsfeld emphasized technology, it was always about organizational and doctrinal changes simultaneously with technology changes, which rarely happened simultaneously, but that was a concept. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Well, there's so much to unpack here. Uh I don't know which direction we go into first. I do Zabrowski's uh background in the Navy. In the book Network Centric Warfare, and I just reread this. You guys talk about the um paradigm shift from F-4s to F-14s, and my background's in F-14s. Zabrowski was a naval aviator. Is that correct? That's correct.

Speaker 1:

And and and I'm not an aviator, so I can't talk airplanes, but yes, he was an aviator.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So that that transition, and we'll make the connection back to information and all this, is we went from highly high reliance on what we call ground control intercept. So we want radars on the ground to control those aircraft in the air. When you change from an F-4 to an F-14, you get a bigger radar, you get the Og9 radar back then, which has more capability to see more a bigger piece of sky, right? So that information is readily available to the pilot and Rio in that aircraft. And that transition, if I understand it correctly, is Zabrowski and you saw that from the F-4 to the F-14 as that information is readily available to that air crew. So we need to go ahead and decentralize, I guess, the execution and decision making to those that are closest with the information. And I never made that connection that that was also part of this thinking is this multi-sensor integration approach. Where's the information coming from? And how do we push that information out to those that are closest to the front line? And I think that's what the Sam Walton story kind of brings up there as well is I have an orientation that allows me to push information to those closest to the customer in this case. Any holes in that, uh, Fred or Moose in what I'm saying?

Speaker 1:

Not from my point of view. Again, I was unaware of all the connections because Sabrowski didn't necessarily talk about it that way. But conceptually, the idea of the of the sensor network of various sensors, and we can talk about silos of information later if you wish, breaking down the silos of information and then empowering the uh the folks closer to the combat operations and allowing the doctrinal changes to take place that support those. So, yeah, it was a again, I used to draw a diagram that had those three axes of advances, if you will. And the more out of order those axis became, the less likely you were to identify and utilize the change. And I think that's the danger we have with it. So as new technology, we talked about it later, as new technology is introduced, it's even more difficult to do that. I think in this case the radars were already there, but it was a case whether the Navy was going to uh uh allow the change, if you will, between those.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah, so so that shift is huge. I think we're on the 10th anniversary of the book Team of Teams coming out. And I want there's a connection here I want to make. It's a much celebrated book. Many business leaders look at it as like that's a paradigm shift in how we do things. When I read it, and and you know, I know some of the guys that wrote it, um, they just implemented what I believe to be the work that you and Zabrowski put together and others put together, network-centric warfare. They had no choice, right? In order to fight a network, you got to design your organization like a network, right? So that's what is in that book. So what General McChrystal and others did, they did it out of necessity, but we also had doctrine. We had the guidance that you and Zabrowski and others came up with on how to fight this type of war. And it's not, it's not war fighting. It's just, I don't know. I'll say unfortunately, you you put network-centric warfare in there. It's network-centric-centric business, sports, whatever it may be. It's it's a network approach. And you often talk about the the the, you know, if you look at wrestling teams or football teams and soccer or rugby teams or basketball, there's a difference. The game is different. Can you talk a little bit about that connection to sports so we can give provide our listeners with another analogy?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the sports analogy tends to work pretty well. Uh, and I I will tell you, I don't know if John Garska came up with it, I did, or with some combination, because we did a lot of talking together at the time. John had a tremendous ability to uh synchronize or to synthesize information. He was good at that. But uh, so if you if you compare basically the playing of American football, which has violent action, has assigned positions, then has a break-in action, receives more information, and then conducts another violent uh engagement. If you compare that with uh soccer, which is a free-flowing game, positions are assigned, but they're not as rigid as a tight end or a or defensive tackle or center or running back. It flows continuously. And so if you had a if you had an organization that was, quote, playing soccer, that had loose confederations of people informed by each other, but with changing roles, and you had them playing in an American team that was playing a game like American football, the gaps were obviously during the time of the huddle. Now you can have a lot more sophisticated plays in football, American football, than you can in soccer, but you don't do it continuously. And so I would sort of discuss that those two groups represent probably the easiest transition. You can do it a bit in basketball as well if you wanted to use two American games on it. But the idea is that one requires a stoppage in action to analyze information, to pass information, and then then uh execute it. And once again, one doesn't want to leap to the conclusion that one is superior to the other necessarily. It's depending upon time and place on things. And we can talk a little bit about organizational structure with the with the Apaches if you want, as an example of that. But that was basically the sports examples. We use soccer and American football. Again, you could use basketball, the same same analogy.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So that analogy is actually how uh folks in team science talk about different the different types of teams. You have pulled teams like wrestlers, you have sequential teams like American football, like you just described, and you have reciprocal teams, and it's all about the degree of interdependence, uh, what they call uh dynamic reallocation of resources. So in in warfare, special operations, and things like that, there are times when it's a high-intensity, reciprocal, dynamic reallocation of resources. And I'm using uh, you know, agents and humans and all the tech is as resources. Same thing in aviation. It's that stoppage of the game, quote unquote, the game, that that, like you pointed out, it doesn't mean you're not a team. It just means it just it's a different context. So this this this analogy you used back then is one that current IO psychologists try to help people understanding understand what's going on in their organization. You're moving from a pulled group of people to a highly interdependent uh group activity, which requires you to learn how to do something that looks something like network-centric warfare, pushing information out there, mission command, connections to ONO and Shingo and all the other stuff. So that connection is fantastic. And our military saw this, but like I started off with, I thought the way it was presented to us in the early thousands was it was highly misunderstood. It was presented to us like this is all about information systems and we got to fix these things over here. But it was never presented about human and organizational behavior, right? Even though it's very clearly clearly articulated in the books and the guidance, it's about human and organizational behavior. So any more, Moose, on what you heard so far?

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of the things that even, you know, even Boyd pointed this out is that people were focusing on tech sensors, computers, they weren't focusing on people in the cognitive space. And I think that that's one of the things of network-centric warfare that people misunderstand, or, you know, network-centric business, network-centric conflict, whatever you could call it to be all-encompassing. But I think that the you know, the breakdown of the uh of the being in the targeting the cognitive space and creating that shared picture is so so critical. That was a big takeaway from when I read it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So I'm a little curious about um uh you know, we spoke on the phone, Fred, and that you brought up something that I was not expecting, and that was a connection to Indians, and it was Apache Indians. Generally, when we talk about warfare or philosophy, we we talk about Eastern philosophy. But can you help us understand what you see with how the Apaches fought and how it might connect to network-centric warfare?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and by the way, we we used warfare sort of purposely. Uh, when I was on the science board for Sweden, they used network-centric defense because they didn't want to use warfare. Uh and and I haven't done much consulting outside of it, but but warfare is that's the reason we did the term. So you have a catch all for it.

Mark McGrath:

Like, Fred, like if you were gonna have a catch-all, like if I went into a Walmart or I went into a whatever that I wouldn't say warfare, what would be the alternate word that you would use, not warfare?

Speaker 1:

Well, I guess it's it's not too sexy, Mark, but I probably put operations. Network-centric operations might capture it. But so the Apaches were probably the finest light infantry or one of the finest examples of light infantry, particularly if we focus on the way the Apaches organize themselves culturally. And culture obviously makes a difference. And so and and I would argue, by the way, the introduction of technology into various cultures that runs a foul for various reasons. If you were introducing culture, if you were introducing technology into uh into an Apache organization, you would have a great deal of effort to make sure you democratized it or allowed people to speak up. Because the the Apache organization culture was that they shared a lot of information and they allowed people to complain and to walk away and to uh and to contribute what they wanted to contribute. And so from squad or platoon, or perhaps up to company level, they exhibited tremendous uh flexibility in warfare, quote, violent and and often uh quite uh difficult. They weren't not particularly nice warriors. I don't think warriors are particularly nice, but and they weren't. But they executed tremendous ability to be flexible at certainly small unit operations because culturally they operated in a very democratic, and I use democratic there in the traditional sense of people individuals. Okay, I'm not making a value judgment of it. It's it's it's a description of it's kind of when we would confuse democracy with republics. They're different. So the Apaches allowed people to express opinions and to move forward. They voted on leaderships. Obviously, a person like Geronimo was the leader, but he had to be voted on constantly. And I would argue that small units can operate that way very effectively, and if they can integrate technology and doctrine, then they do so well. Now we have to be a little careful about scale. You would you would unfortunately not be able to say, or fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what side you're on, the Apache's inability to operate on the operational level or the strategic level. And so you can operate up at a small level this way very effectively. And so one of the challenges you've got with network-centric operations is if hierarchical organizations are going to exist, and I argue they almost always do, they almost default to that state at some stage, 50 or 100, whatever number of people. How do you continuously allow yourself to have the advantage of network-centric operations while integrating it at a higher level into hierarchical? And so the Apaches were very successful at the lower level with doing it, and we have a lot to learn from that. But if you ask whether they operated on the operational level, that's where you saw the cavalry come in with both the Comanches and the Apaches in my neck of the woods out here and defeat them. A, they had more people and more equipment, but two, they had a campaign plans uh with the Apaches, and the Comanches had a harder time understanding. And so that's that's the weighting that we have to have. And again, like any continuous spectrum, you have to watch where those gap points occur so you don't stumble over them and make one comment, well, this is good and this is bad. And the answer is this this value in both, which are the American football and soccer, you know, the the ability to pass in information. If you can afford to pause during an operation to correct behavior or to pass in for information, that's great. And we should take advantage of those. We obviously don't know much about the recent activity in Venezuela, but the final portion was very violent on the ground, very successfully executed. Had we no casualties at all, was amazing. We did apparently have between six and eight people injured or two, maybe seriously, we're not sure. But that was executed with true with tremendous force and vigor. Meanwhile, all the other activities went off flawlessly, or if if not flawlessly, we don't know the flaws in them. And so I sort of rambled down. But the Apache example is wonderful, particularly if you study uh the fact that they are uh I had the term here. It's a consensus versus command. There was really no single leader that had absolute command. It depended a lot upon charisma, and and charisma matters. So multiple bands might loosely unite under somebody like Geronimo during a crisis, but then each retained its autonomy. Uh, can you create that? And if so, what are the challenges for mission command and what are the challenges for passing commands? Without going into great detail, we've all seen this circle of information. You start with one and you go around it, and by the end of it, it's a totally different information. And so, how do commanders ensure that their command intent has made it down? And I would argue that that too requires both tremendous education and then technological passage of information. Our examples in network-centric operations and warfare in the Gulf War was a Battle of Peach Bridge, where a commander had uh an infantry uh a cab commander had come up to a bridge. His orders were to go into a hasty defense, which is just what it sounds to your to your view as a defense which is not highly organized. You put out pick But you don't settle into an entrenched arrangement. And then another unit would pass through him. He had Blue Force tracking devices on it, which was the Army's version of network-centric technology, which gave visions of where all the armored vehicles were, not infantry, but armored vehicles and helicopters, fast movers. And he could see that the unit that was going to pass through him had gotten lost. They had gone the wrong way, I said hit some enemy action, but mostly gone the wrong way. He changed his defense into a deliberate defense, which turned out to be critical because the Iraqis mounted one of the few counterattacks during the war and he was able to repel it. And so by watching the information on blue forces, and we can talk about red if you wish, friendly forces being blue, he was able to change the concept of his defense because he knew it wasn't going to be relieved, it wasn't going to be passed through. How much of that was luck? I don't think it was luck. I think he looked at it and said, I need to change this, even though he is the red information in that case about the the enemy had not gotten down to him in a timely manner. Different discussion.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Now this is critical. I think one of the uh principles in action is shared awareness and that that pushing that information out to those that are in the fight allows them to use what John Boyd called their finger spits and fuel, their fingertip fuel, their intuition, along with their learned experiences and skills to make those decisions. Without that mission command approach, that cannot be done. Somebody in the background who hasn't had experience in the field for 10, 5, 7 years, whatever it may be, may make a decision on behalf of the people that are closest to the the that that that sense of feeling, that that environment. So that is a that's a huge shift, I think, that organizational leaders struggle with is that isn't decent that isn't centralized planning. That that is a that is pushing information to those folks that actually want to make that decision on the ground. Can you talk a little bit more about the the principles in action uh and what they mean? And more and I'm Moosh, I want to bring this up too. When people talk about the OODA loop, they talk about speed. And our pushback on that's that on that is if you have a horrible orientation, I don't care how fast your OODA loop is. It's really about uh you can call it speed of command or speed of orientation or quality of orientation. But can you talk a little bit about uh those principles in action, that shared awareness, and what you mean by speed?

Speaker 1:

So yeah, I think there's a couple of terms we use that were probably not adequately described. The the one that was the most difficult to describe was self-synchronization. I'll get back to the others in a moment. So self-synchronization has its birth in mathematical theory, and we should have been clearer about that. The ability to allow units to self-synchronize with each other because they are aware of each other's positions and activities is critical in order to do, in order to increase speed of command. And and speed of command, at least the way we talked about it, was getting inside the opponent's boodle loop, getting inside the orient decide, decide and act loop. And so if you were able to self-synchronize, and again, that's where the soccer American football analogy plays out, you were able to do that. That required uh a higher degree of awareness, and we could talk about situational awareness. I never talk about situational dominance. If you're going to use the terms, then a military person would probably be better off using uh air superiority or air dominance. Did we have air dominance or air superiority when we crossed a D-Day invasion? That was probably air dominance. I think there were two Falk Wolfs or Mescher Schmidt scene the whole day. We effectively cleared the skies of German aircraft. But that was a very, very short period of time for that to happen. And so I think you achieve situational awareness over time. You may achieve situational dominance on a brief period of time, but the enemy has a vote in it. And so the awareness by the commanders of where you are in that phase is vital. Are you really dominant? Are you aware? Is each side aware? If you take a look at the conflict in Ukraine today, we're seeing high levels of situational awareness in a World War I kind of environment, which is certainly interesting. You could argue that the introduction, if you really wanted to go back, you could argue the introduction of snipers during World War I by the Germans and then followed about a year later by the British, the French, and you never really got it right, uh, allowed visibility over no man's land in a way that we never saw before, because we had eyes on. Now, you know, aircraft were pretty, pretty small back then, but you had snipers who were observing no man's land on almost a constant basis. They could see a change in fortifications almost instantly. So situational awareness. The problem was, of course, the sniper's information never passed back to anything more than the immediate group of people. And so self-synchronization, then I think what Sabrowski talked about it was in the aviation area. But can you achieve self-synchronization with a larger organization if you can if you can pass the commander's intent, if it's understood, and you have disciplined people to act within it while still allowing them the authority to move outside of it? And we can talk about authority, responsibility, and command climate if you wish. Did that answer it? That was pretty vague.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No, it no it did. It did answer that. And one thing that we we actually run a simulation on mission command where we show what we'll call it self-organization or or self-synchronicity, how that works when the commanders on the ground, in this case, those that are closest to the customer, know what's happening over here and over around there. They start coordinating, organizing in ways that a centralized approach can't do, right? Um, so so we we actually demonstrate that to folks, and it's a very powerful tool that we borrowed from the military actually to help people understand that. So using teaching this type of thinking through experiential learning activities is huge. And this is something I think that uh Zabrowski learned, and and you we all learned, by the way, because we are the way we train in the military, right? In naval aviation, with our top gun approach, we have it's a leadership apprenticeship program where we learn mission command through uh apprenticeship models, right? We learn how to brief plan and all that other good stuff and understand the technology. You get out there and you run a mission command or mission commander scenario, and you also run a straight leader scenario. And we talked about that recently with uh Ed Brenniger on on another episode about what that's what that's like. But the point behind this is in order to actually know how to do these things, you have to experience them. You have to, you and I think that's what the military did for us is um we had to do this out of necessity. Uh and going back to World War I and the sniper uh story you just shared, that sniper was unable, just because of the technology didn't exist, to share that information with somebody 200 miles away, 50 miles away, 20 miles away. Today that that that's available. Um, and and it also works in reverse. That turns into that thousand-mile screwdriver where uh we can use incidence uh uh you know activities in the last 72 hours. People think they know what happened or what's happening on the ground, even though they're they're not there. So that that that thousand-mile screwdriver that we saw at air and space operations centers, because we could see from the predator feeds, we can what were they called predator porn? I don't know if you remember that, but the the uh the the JFACs, they would um uh joint force uh air component commanders would uh lean heavily and say, why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they doing that? Well, that's not the job uh uh of the person in the background. It's not to get the tactic shorts of the uh those on the ground. It's just to guide the bigger picture. And I think that's where it's very hard for leaders to to do this is because they they're like, well, look, I'm seeing what they're seeing. Clearly they don't know what they're doing. That may not be true. So, Fred, this discussion on network-centric warfare and your connection to Zabrowski, and you left the military. Can you tell us what it was like going into leadership and management, consulting with this knowledge and some of the I guess successes and failures you had in working with leaders?

Mark McGrath:

Before we shift to that, before we shift to that, I want I just had a a couple of questions for Fred. Um, you know, take the US out and move past World War I, like is was as as you were talking and unpacking a lot of those things, it made me think of the IDF and like the say like the six-day six-day war. And I was wondering, um, you know, I I know that uh Don Stari and and uh William DePew were they were they were studying the Yom Kippur War and they sent people over to do that. I know that John Boyd did as well, that he mentioned Yom Kippur War. Um and I've had I've had the IDF on my brain lately because uh a guest that we're recording with later is a Medal of Valor recipient from the from the Yom Kippur War. But when I when I think in context of the IDF, and I think of the study I've done on the Six-Day War and other things, that sort of network-centric approach of where the information is flowing back and forth. Did you ever look at anything with with with the IDF? It's because it seems to me like they're they're pretty good at this historically, from a from a maneuver standpoint, from a strategic operational and uh tactical of being connected.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I I did to some extent. And and it it's interesting. Certainly the uh the Israelis have been very successful at integrating uh uh and the six-day war. I think the interesting one would be would be the both the successful integration and the non-successful integration. So the Israelis have been very successful and were successful in Golden Heights and and uh and and some of the near-run things that they had with the Six-Day War. Uh on the other hand, uh the ability of the Israelis to differentiate uh vital information and and necessarily pass it has had some significant gaps, as has everybody, it's not just the Israelis, to be sure. And so I think what we have to learn from that is uh is if you have Blue Force awareness and you have a degree of red force awareness, how do information systems assist humans, or how does how do humans inform information systems of when gaps of information take place? To wit, red information should have, in my opinion, some sort of timestamp on it that says this bogey has been identified at this time, or in the Israelis cases, this fence line has been identified at this time. And so if you have near continuous information, then you have a tough time understanding when that information is valid or how old it is. And so you need a timestamp on it. And by the way, you need that for industry too. When Walton was talking about price changes, he made it very clear that his people understood when the price changes took place in, quote, competitive environment and how much authority they had to make corresponding price changes to compete with them. And so both militaries, the U.S. and the Israelis, have some trouble understanding the difference between accuracy of blue information, which should be better, and accuracy of red information, which is rarely as good, and the timestamp on each. And I don't know how you do timestamping very well. We tended to use faded icons. It wasn't great, but that's what's what the U.S. Army does with FBC V-2, uh Force 21 Brigade and below, or Bluefoast Tracker. Uh and I haven't been able to break the code on the uh Ukraine situation to know how good they are or how good the Russians are of understanding the information by a nearly transparent battlefield that we're seeing there. The Six-Day War is a good example of synchronization of forces, to be sure. On the other hand, one looks at why did the air defense capabilities of the enemy were so badly underestimated earlier as well. And they missed that completely. And so, how do you understand what you missed, or how did you understand what went wrong with the surveillance systems during the October tragedy?

Mark McGrath:

Versus versus Yom Kippur War, like the difference between the same thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, what what went wrong with those those situations, I think, are useful to study as well. An example, for instance, I had a chance to brief of all odd things of the Enron staff on network centric operations.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No way.

Speaker 1:

I met the vice president on a travel and they asked me to come down. And so I spent an afternoon with Enron. And I talked about network-centric operations, and they compared it to the traders on the floor. And then we went around and I said, Well, do you think there is something to be to be utilized by Enron in this case? And they said, No. They didn't think so. And I said, Why? And I said, Well, because the way we reward traders was based upon their individual performance within Enron. And I thought back to my days at Georgia Tech, both as an engineer and as a business student, and I almost said, I did not say, well, you're a public company and you're obligated to act for your shareholders. And this approach seems to be acting in behalf of the traders, not the shareholders. Of course, I wasn't smart enough to uh short Enron, but uh they had the information, but they didn't share it because the organizational structure and reward structure said don't share information because we want the internal competition to occur.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah. I spent a long time in asset management and in hoarding information and not sharing is is common because you don't want to you don't want to have another portfolio manager beat your performance and you don't you don't want to look dumb uh in front of some other guy. You know, it's it's it's pretty bad. So you know I I spent my last seven years at a firm, uh very well-known firm, um trying to preach that, like that information sharing across networks was actually more powerful, that created a harmonized orientation picture. And people thought I was absolutely effing crazy. Like they thought that's the craziest shit in the world because we're so proprietary down to each level of teams that nobody has any idea what the other's doing. So what ends up happening is you don't, because people would end up saying, well, we didn't think you needed to know that, but you have no idea to know what I need to know and what I don't need to know because you weren't sharing it anyway, and you have no idea of my perspective of how I'm trying to fight the mission or whatever. And there's so much squandered opportunity, it's ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I and that was exactly what I and you have much better experience than I do on it, but that was the Enron experience, that that uh their reward structure. And I found that at MITRE, who I went with after the military and wonderful organization. But even there, there was a sense of how do you, how can you, I've never been able to break this code, but if you did a network map of people in an organization, and I find Linked is the one of the old books that I thought was best about this, how do you identify the superconnectors in your organization? And how do you reward superconnectors? They may not actually do anything other than connect people. And how do you reward the number of connections they make, if you will? We know that some nodes are more important than others. It's not a networks are not a democracy, it's a power law situation. And so, how do you reward those people adequately in order to, or at least recognize, if not reward them? And as again, Enrod, and and obviously your example is is more valid than the Enron one, but the whole system argued against that.

Mark McGrath:

And can we contrast power? Can we contrast the Israeli example? Because like when you look at like just use uh, I don't know, say Six-Day War or whatever, the whole entire operational picture and and the selfless approach to making sure that everybody is successful within that is owned by everybody from the top all the way to the bottom and everything in between. In a standard structure on a in a in a Wall Street firm or a trading firm or an Enron, it's the opposite. It's like shareholder value is prime and we're gonna be doing this and we're gonna be making money, but everybody's kind of every man for himself in isolated silos. And that's what I that's what I observed when I was in that world saying there's so much being left on the table because the free flow of information, kind of like how McChrystal would describe in the uh in the team of teams as the uh operations and intelligence brief, that all of a sudden, with the more people that they involved in that, and the more information was flowing, the more knowledge was created, and the more understanding was created. And they were finding things from I think one of his examples was all of a sudden an air police air airman in Diego Garcia came up with an idea that was effective in Iraq for for, you know, I don't know, something to do with with with with when they would catch prisoners or whatever. But had that person not been involved, they never would have, they never would have found it out. They never would have got the information.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think uh again, I think that's where organizational structure, and I'm going to give one other example, but that's where organizational structure and and the corresponding rewards, obviously, people are motivated by money in many cases. Not all cases, but in many cases. Well, no, I think that's the same. And so that you've got to have an organizational reward structure that rewards that. I've forgotten the gentleman's name, and I apologize. I thought I had it here, but I didn't. In the early phases of Afghanistan, an acquaintance of mine, a pretty good acquaintance of mine, uh, was running one of the uh fleet uh the earl the early uh aircraft carriers that arrived over there. And he had been raised under Zabrowski, he had worked with us in the in the officers, actually at N6 before the Office of Force Transformation. And he put up a wall of knowledge, and he, which at that time was certainly not as complete as they are today, but he allowed everybody to put information in. And I recall being back at the Pentagon, and there was much consternation that he would allow junior members to put in data onto the wall. And uh, he said, you're gonna get about a bunch of bad information that way. It will not have been vetted properly. We won't have the uh uh we won't have all the information, uh, the details about the information. He said, No, I think it's more important. The speed of information is more important, and by the way, I think it'll it'll kind of kind of work like a Wikimedia. It will self-correct. Somebody will put in information that's incorrect, and somebody will say, wait a second, that's not right, and it'll actually be corrected fairly quickly. He was very successful with that. The subsequent commander came in and he dismantled the the organization completely. He was very uncomfortable with organization flowing at all sorts of levels, particularly by people who were not, quote, intel analysts or analysts that should have been putting out this information. And again, it it is both ways. If you don't have a Wikimedia sort of protection that says, okay, wait a second, we have a we have we have out somebody out here trying to put in bad information needs to be corrected. On the other hand, you've got to be able to allow people to put in information. That's a flattening of the input chain that's vital to networked organizations. And once again, you've got to understand both sides.

Mark McGrath:

If I heard you right, you're saying that the naval aviator was trying to create an environment where there was more participation at every level junior, middle management, senior, everything, and the submariner was more of a hierarchical thing, like a more of a No, I I I no I I don't know that.

Speaker 1:

I just know that his the subsequent commander came in and changed it. No idea what their backgrounds were. So I suspect they were both aviators.

Mark McGrath:

Okay. Well, like it's kind of like punch what we were speaking about with Ed Brennar yesterday about how in in the naval aviation community, like an 06 taking insight from an 03 is not uncommon. It's certainly not uncommon in the Marine Corps, what I was in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I mean because as Ed both of you are having that conversation, it just hit me that, and this is the truth. When we created the flow system, and I'll share something with you in a moment, it's really the evolution of network-centric warfare. And I can now say this in the age of artificial intelligence, right? So so there are some things that were written in the 90s and early 2000s about network-centric warfare that John Boyd may not agree with, with synchronicity versus harmonization versus self-organization, things like that. That's fine. That's called evolution, right? We learn from these things. Um and I'm going to share something with you right now, Fred. And I don't think I don't think I talked about this. Uh this is the flow guide. This is just um it's available online for those uh listeners, and I'll I'll put this in there. But as you were talking about uh leadership here in the last few minutes, it clicked to me that boundary spanners, and I'll read this out to everybody, operate in the boundaries between teams and between teams and multi-team systems. Their roles and response to responsibilities included providing resources, fostering interactions, coordination of activities, and an alignment of goals, uh to name only a few, a few. And now this is I'm gonna uh uh give uh correct attribution to John Turner, now at Texas AM. This is his world of expertise, understanding complex adaptive systems and that distributed leadership. So uh just for clarity, uh what I'm saying here is the flow system is the evolution of network-centric warfare. It really encompasses John Boyd's real oodaloop. And if if Mark and I were to rewrite this today, uh I would say the third things that we learned in the podcast and over the last four or five years uh highlight that the oodaloop is one of the things it represents is the flow system. And the key currency is information from the external world. And by the way, the key component or a key component inside of the orientation, not a phase inside orientation, the world model is new information, right? It's right there in the oodaloop. I want to go back to something that I think Moose might be interested in this uh as well. The term Boyd used harmonize. And Moose, I want to turn this over to you to kind of kind of say it more eloquently. What you know, the the problem Boyd had with synchronization in the army. Can you talk a little bit about that, Moose? Yeah.

Mark McGrath:

Fred, for context, you know, I was a Marine officer, um, and I'm a devoted scholar of advancing and developing Boyd's ideas, which, as you know, were extremely influential on the Marine Corps and our warfighting doctrine. And I'm also the son of a career West Pointer who was on the chief of staff of the Army staff at the time that this battle was going on between Boyd and Tradock. And Boyd had been brought out to Sam's at Fort Leavenworth. And for our listeners that may have remembered from other conversations, that's the School of Advanced Military Studies. And uh Uba Vostaseg was bringing Boyd into Leavenworth to basically teach patterns of conflict and other things that you've cited in network-centric warfare. And the one thing, and I forget what it was, and it was coming through airland battle, and I earlier I'd mentioned DePew and Stari, the clash came when Boyd was adamant about the uh elimination of the word synchronization in favor of harmonize. And harmonize had been, you know, an Eastern concept, it had been used in Blitzkrieg and that sort of thing. And the when you go through the boxes in the archives, like we have, and if I recall, I'm pretty sure it's box 14, and I've gone through this and I'm reading these things. And likely my father wrote some of this stuff, and he, because he was there for this, and I'm reading these things because my dad was a uh he was a Mech infantry guy, but his secondary was PAO, and that was his job on the on the on the chief's uh staff. And I'm reading these things, and I think General Foss was the uh was the was the Tradock commander at the time, and General Sullivan, who my father worked for, that he was the chief staff of the army, and they were adamantly fighting about the word synchronized. There's no way we're ever going to use the word harmonize. I I from what I gathered from the readings, and there was a scientist that was at uh high up at Tradock that was an advisor to uh the the Trade Ock CG, and I can't think of what his name was, but he was an ally of Boyd, and they were basically saying, like, it seemed to me, my impression was harmonize sounds effeminate, so we're not using that. We're using synchronized because that sounds like hardcore, you know, good old-fashioned army talk. But but Boyd thought it was disastrous for one reason. He saw that it was disastrous because when you use synchronize in terms of human cognition, you're you're treating a human as if they're not a human, you're treating them as a machine. You you you can you can synchronize a watch, but you can't synchronize a human. You can harmonize humans, and humans are the ones that actually fight wars, not not machines. That was a that was a scuff that they that they had, and it's pretty well documented in a almost a full box in the uh in the archives. I've gone through a few times. I think I but I think also you'd write a book about it, because from what I've gathered is that Airland Battle, it did adopt a lot of what Boyd had been saying, but Boyd didn't get the he didn't get the acknowledgement, and the reason was was the battle over the word synchronization and harmonize.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I I can't recall that coming up. It certainly is an interesting discussion. And I guess I'd give a I'm not sure it fills in, but perhaps you asked uh had asked an earlier question about command climate, and it might might be worth speaking about that briefly. Yeah. My little story on command climate is a pretty simple one. If you if you're a officer in charge and you bring a staff meeting together and you're discussing a problem. And at the end of the staff meeting, you turn and you as a as the senior have felt that there perhaps wasn't enough discussion. And you say either one of four elements are taking place. I'm either the smartest person in this room, and everybody agrees with me. I hope that's not the case, and I don't think it's the case. All of you are insufficient staff officers, haven't done your job, and you're not prepared to talk. That's kind of depressing. Or I have had a command climate in which you don't feel your contributions are going to be recognized and or rewarded, and I guess you could say that either way, and therefore it isn't worth your time to express those. The last is symbolic of a command climate that is not going to allow decision making to be cooperative regardless of information availability. And so the command climate that says, I'm willing to listen, I'm actually willing to listen. I may not agree, and you may have to carry out the order or go with the plan that you don't agree with, but you have been heard and your feelings have been appreciated. Now, whether that gets back to harmonizing or synchronization is an interesting question because it's kind of a soft term. But that would be my that was the battle.

Mark McGrath:

That was the battle. And what he said, what Boyd said in Patterns and Patterns of Conflict, the definition of harmony was that this is slide 166, the power to perceive or create interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way. And he thought that insight, initiative, adaptability, and harmony were the requirements. Those were the ingredients of having that unified vision. That if everybody had that unified vision, then that was how they would, uh that's how they would be successful in a in uh in a in a in an operation. And another kind of anecdote, Boyd was a massive debaute of the movie Patton. And and and Patton has a great uh depiction of how he's got, and and and Quorum says this in the Boyd biography. The Germans were even baffled that the Americans stopped and slowed down when Patton had the spear right at their heart and he's ready to march into Berlin, and they showed in the movie where Bradley's like, George, I gotta slow you down. We you know, we we don't really understand what you're doing. Uh it you've had a lot of success, but we've got to slow you down and let everybody else, let everybody else catch up. And what ended up happening is that per Boyd, and it's also in the bio that like an another, you know, the war went on for X amount of months, and another X amount of guys got killed on both sides that were unnecessary because the Germans were ready to throw up, throw it up when Patton punched out. And that was that was a that was another one of the um you know sort of historical references that were coming back to that discussion of harmony versus synchronization. Like the synchronization requirement would would suggest, hey, George, stop Third Army and let everybody else catch up. We have to synchronize versus harmonize, understand what I'm doing, let's get this over with fast. We we've we've attacked the the the uh cognitive understanding of the war in the German sense is being shattered right now, and they're ready to throw in the towel. We can get Germany faster, and we don't have to wait for the Soviets, we got it, you know, and then that whole thing just kind of dissipated. I think that that was some of the historical context that was used in that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's that's an interesting one. I think probably worth further discussion. I I I agree partially. I I would probably push back historically, and we can get into it later, but but I I don't think the I don't think the German leadership uh was going to surrender with it. And so I I I guess I would not have preferred to waste lives going into Berlin, but that's a different discussion on it.

Mark McGrath:

Well, how about how about a more recent example then? Wasn't that an issue with Schwarzkopf and Fred Franks and Desert Storm with with Seventh Corps? Like he was waiting to synchronize and Schwarzkopf was was demanding get in there and hook, which by the way, Boyd was Boyd was helpful with that with with with Schwarzkopf and Cheney, the helping the devise the left hook. But what wasn't that one of the issues where where there was some internal conflict on that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think so. And and I think that's a that's probably a better example than the Berlin one, which can be argued by a number of sides, uh and and whether they can get it, whether whether unconditional surrender was a good idea. There are lots of questions in that one. You have to be a little careful not to not to extrapolate network central cooperations with the understanding of people's uh desires internally, which we can't generally see. And and when it's depressing, but one should never underestimate the ability of strong men and women to either terrorize or conform a population, which is why mass bombings generally don't break the spirit of people. Uh it didn't break the spirit of Warsaw and the 30 40,000 people were killed at Warsaw and died. Hardly got any any publicity at all. Hundreds of thousands died, of course, in in in Dresden or in or in Japan. None of those effectively broke the spirit of either of the countries. We can go on about Japan and Germany.

Mark McGrath:

Have you read Bomber Mafia, by the way, by Malcolm Gladwell? Because he he he does a really good idea. I haven't read that one, but it's what you just said that the technical bombing doesn't do anything to break the spirit. It did have the opposite effect.

Speaker 1:

That's right. It certainly did. What I did do, I don't know if you have ever gone to the Bomber Museum, but those of us who returned from Vietnam were not particularly appreciated by some of the American public. Not all, but some of the American public. I did not understand that the same phenomena took place for the British bomber crews after the war. And the British Bombing Museum was the last major museum in England to be established. By the way, I also did not understand the same phenomena for German fighter pilots were not appreciated because they were seen as having failed to stop the bombers. A higher calling is the book I've read recently on that. But uh yeah, I think we have to I think we have to appreciate that that as interesting and useful as network centric operations and and the harmonization of synchronization, there are other elements that come to play. Well, you were going to go back to the Schwarzkopf and Franks example from the Yeah, yeah, I think I think in that case, that one is a is a good example of commander's intent not being agreed upon. And and there we have the situation of hierarchical versus non-hierarchical. You could argue that Schwarzkopf did not understand what was happening on the ground, and Franks did, and Franks said, no, I've got to move at this rate. These are the supply lines, these are my uh this is my artillery positioning, these are the number of weapons I have. Uh there are all sorts of things that Franks was looking at. Did Schwarzkopf have the same information? I don't know. But did did Franks understand that uh that he could have that because of the technological advantages of the M1A1, it wasn't SEP at the time, but the M1A1 and Blue Force tracking, that the Iraqi networks were in fact broken and broken fairly quickly. So I think there is a that is a classic study that ought to be uh looked at. It's hard for me to to know, because I wasn't on the ground, what the uh commanders and whether the commander's intent by Schwartzkopf was adequately expressed or not. I worked a lot with Schwarzkopf's aide, who went off to be a two-star when he was in Wanda with me. And so I got a lot of insight from Schwarzkopf from him. But that would be that's an interesting question on it, is how how quickly and and we don't I don't know what Franks was getting from his subordinate commanders either. And so was the subordinate commander saying, no, I'm not comfortable moving that quickly, and and here's why. And so we have to be, I think, cognizant of that. But it does appear to me that the commander's intent wasn't being carried out and and retrospectively could have been. Then finally, how much of the of the uh road of death did we want to carry out? How much how much how much violence can you sell to a particular populace? I think the more dead enemy, the better, and Patton had it right, but that's hard to sell to a populace. So yeah, I think you have to, yeah, I think you have to be at least cognizant of the whole picture with it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I want to switch up a little bit and kind of bring this home with you. Uh I want to talk about the the current type of warfare. Uh we have AI uh starting to, well, it's it's been around us for a little bit, it's going to start accelerating here. Uh we have this cognitive warfare, psychological warfare, information warfare. How does um the elements that you uh have in network centric warfare or operations fit into this new um realm of warfare, if you want to call it a new realm of warfare, and then uh maybe take us back through some of the highlights and uh lessons learned regrets that you have for uh what you learned in the military and so forth. So let's start with the the bringing cognitive network centric warfare to what it is today, what it means in this uh disruptive landscape of liminal warfare.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think a couple of things. I think the silos of information that exist, have existed and continue to exist, predominantly driven by security and speed. So the example on that one is ballistic missile defense people don't want to share information because they feel that their mission doesn't allow it, they don't have time, they need to engage suborbital. My feeling is engage your target, but share the information. And so there are silos of information that are either brought up because of speed necessary to execute, or because of security, phenomenal, because of security.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So we can't build on that for a second. So my background, so I do my background in fighter aviation and air and space operations. I went into ballistic missile defense, air and missile defense. I went through all the training, went through AJS BMD training over here in Dahlgren. So this is right before we created the AADC in Europe and all that, uh, the defense of Israel. So you're spot on. So an aviator coming into uh that that world, I pointed out several things where people are like, what do you mean you can I I can't get into a lot of details here, but uh you're you're taking a non-expert, bringing them into this world and saying, hey, you can't operate like this. You can't shoot missiles around aviators and just go, well, they're uh I don't want to get away, give away too much information. If I'm flying an aircraft and one of my blue ships shoots a missile through me, I'm gonna be pissed off at them, right? And and to them, that's like, well, that's okay. And we're like, no, no, no. It's there's no difference than Moose aiming a gun at me trying to shoot somebody behind me, right? It's the same thing. I'm like, I don't want that to, you know, it may work out in some instances, but yes, that information sharing is absolutely critical uh and was restricted. And I don't know where it is right now. This is many years ago when I was on that BMD side. So thanks, thanks for sharing that. You're spot on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I I so I think I think if if we move from that to and and I'm far from I'm engaged intellectually looking at it, but I certainly don't understand it. So if we move to machine learning, and I prefer that term over artificial intelligence, but if we m move to machine learning and artificial intelligence today, and we take a look at the impact on some weapon systems, it's dramatic. Obviously, we can have target acquisition of unmanned weapons without centralized control based upon the appearance, the heat signature or the physical signature, and the AI can engage the target. And we're seeing that in Ukraine today. And we may have seen it in in Venezuela, I don't know. At the same time, all of us would be interested in having the quote, little person sitting on your shoulder during the engagement saying, uh, this is the information I have, what do you think? And the and the AI agent says, Well, gosh, uh Captain, Lieutenant, sergeant, whatever, have you thought about these things? That would be useful, I think. The passage of getting beyond data to information, to information to knowledge, and then to wisdom. And at 77, that's about all that's left of that. And so wisdom is it brings in the experience. And so there's great advantages potentially to it. The disadvantages obviously are that it takes an increasing degree of information to sort out when something's wrong. My experience with that one, and I won't get too political, but I uh I do senior university classes, and I did one on uh information disinformation, then I did one on 12 decisive battles, and now I'm doing on partnerships that have changed the world. And and one of the questions was how many American Cincinnaties are there? And I'm sure your audience may or may not remember, but Cincinnatus was a was a Roman senator who was offered the chance to retain power, and he left and went back to his his uh his ranch or his farm or whatever they had.

Mark McGrath:

That was Washington's model, right? That was the Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And that was going to be the example. So I asked AI for examples of American Cincinnatus, and I expected exactly, Moose, uh, that it would be George Washington. It came up with George Washington, it also came up with a uh recent president who chose not to run for a second term. I objected to that and said, gosh, is that really an example of an American Cincinnatist? And the AI system came back and said, gee, I guess you're right, it isn't. Wait, hold on, hold on.

Mark McGrath:

Hold on, an American president that chose not to run for a second term. Hold on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I won't go any further, but we could probably guess who that might be. Calling that person an American Cincinnatist would be a a reach, in my opinion. Yeah.

Mark McGrath:

Well, I can't think of I mean, i i in modern history, I can't I'm now I'm having a stressful time thinking of what president didn't run for a second term. I can think of presidents that that lost. Like that didn't run for a second term.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Moose, there's only one in my basic lifetime here. Just happened. Just happened, dude.

Mark McGrath:

But he ran. Sorry. Sorry. But he ran for a second term, though. But he but he but he got yeah, okay, got okay. Sorry.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I'm thinking like uh we'll get the crayon job for you, Moose. I'm thinking James Polker.

Mark McGrath:

I was thinking I'm a history teaching major, Fred. I apologize, yeah, sir.

Speaker 1:

I got I got too recent with you. But anyway, his name came up, and I objected of saying that I didn't think that that constituted the uh famous farewell address that Washington.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, I think any I think most people would have been up throughout. I think most people would agree on either side of the spectrum with that. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Uh but but anyway, I so I I I I'm always kind of worried about it. And and to be honest, uh I instruct uh and I do senior university, I instruct people in using AI, and I'm gonna be thinking of writing a second book about my leadership experiences, and I'll probably dictate into a computer and I'll probably have AI correct it and and organize it, and then I'll look through it, and I think it it'll be much easier. But I wish I had more information on the use of intelligence and the way it's being done in the Ukraine. I find that fascinating, but I'm I'm not able to get very much of that one. But we're seeing, I think, some of that happening with the SEAL teams and the tracing of the of the uh maritime vessels that we've got going on now. I think that's fascinating. And of course the Venezuela operation, which we don't know much about really, but the synchronization of the air assets was extraordinary, and the ground assets and the helicopter assets, as well as the undercover assets, that didn't make the uh bin Laden affair look easy, but relatively speaking, it was a much less complicated issue by if we take kind of three examples. If we take the uh boarded rescue in in Iran, if we take the uh the bin Laden execution, and then we take the recent Venezuela one, those would be interesting case studies to run as as far as self-synchronization, speed of command, and networks. I've never seen that done, but it would be interesting.

Mark McGrath:

You mentioned uh Fred Lurk, when you talked about shipping, like in your and you're talking about Ukraine and the intelligence picture, one thing that always shocks me is what's actually available open source. One of the apps that I have is called Marine Traffic. And when you're, you know, I live in Manhattan, and when you're standing in the harbor, and I've done this in Charleston, I've done this in Savannah, and you hold your phone up and you look out to a ship, it'll tell you the flag, it'll tell you the registry of where it came from, where it's going. You can do the same thing. There's another one called Flight Radar 24, and it's the same thing. You can look up at a at a plane, it'll tell you uh what it is. It even you can you can even know when the um the doomsday plane is is moving, when it's flying out of off it. You know, I get an alert and it and it's on there. So I think that there's a lot. We we had somebody come on one time this thing that a lot of intelligence is actually right in our front of our faces. It's just it's just not in a vault. It it's people just can't, they can't piece together what what they what they see. But um yeah, look, try the marine traffic app. It's mind-blowing. But uh, I wanted to ask you, Fred, and I I wanted to ask this at the outset from my perspective, but you know, you break, you do a really good job of breaking up the the three domains, you know, the the the cognitive, the information, and the physical. And it's not enough to have, you know, in this day and age with things like AI and everything, it's it's not a you have to have all three. The the physical is not enough. And I I found in business that most people are concerned about physical capital metrics. They're not thinking that the battle's actually in the cognitive domain where the decisions are made, where the perception lives. And I I find that even in some of our advisory engagements now, you know, I'm always trying to make the case that if we're gonna wage business, wage war, yeah, you have to start in the cognitive domain, and everything has to support that. Going back to Boyd's people, ideas, things, or the fact that people fight wars and they use their minds, not machines. Can you just comment on the three levels and how you break those down in the uh in the book? Because I think it's important for if a business leader that we're advising is is going to take our advice around this concept and we recommend your book, I'd really want them to zone into the understanding of those three things and that they have to win their respective battles in that cognitive domain. It's it's so critical. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I I think you're absolutely right. The the uh the the ability, the ability to understand and appreciate that that, and and I'm not a biologist, but the synapsal relationships in the brain are not the same as the digital relationships in a computer. And they're fundamentally different. They're not right or wrong, they're different. And and that's what allows, I think, as I understand it, uh innovation to occur and ideas to to move pseudo-randomly, if you will. I'm sure they're not random, but pseudo-randomly across the synapses in the brain. And so the cognitive function it has to be understood and allowed to uh and allowed to prosper with it as well as as well as the other areas. I'm challenged when I think about, and it's gonna be slower, I think, than people appreciate, maybe not, but as we move to quantum computing and we add AI onto it, then I find it more fascinating of whether or not quantum computing is more akin to the cognitive functions than digital computing. And I don't know. I don't know enough about the spin of the electrons and how quantums and qubits work in detail. But the ability of the commander's intent to be clearly stated and therefore shared cognitive shared cognitive perceptions and values, if you will, if you wanted to get into values, I think is key within the organization. If you're going to utilize sensors and information flows, if you're going to try to de-emphasize hierarchical levels, and there will always be some of those, then the sharing of the of the intent, if you will, the cognitive intent, I think is is key. And I think that takes more time. And I'm sure you guys have done a lot more study of how to actually uh game it and and train people in it. But that's an area which I think probably needs a great deal more work on it.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, that's well, thanks for that. I mean, that's like I said, that that's for the you know, the network-centric business, the network-centric operations that you know we're advising people. I mean, that's that that's the big takeaway I'd want them to have on the is to understand the three domains and the paramount nature of the cognitive domain. So thanks for that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Aaron Powell So Fred, I just kind of curious if we can wrap this up here. Uh I know you have uh a meeting coming up here in a little bit, but can you tell our listeners uh what you're doing and maybe share some pieces of wisdom from your career and and what you've been doing since you retired?

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm not sure there are a lot of wisdom, but I I I I I would pass along to people, you guys are much younger, but when you reach your first of several retirements, and I would argue there's probably a a series of retirements. I retired from the military and then went to work for MITRE, which turned out to be a great move. And then I retired from MITRE. If you retire totally, I I think you tend to die pretty early. And so I think when you retire, you've got to understand that you've got to keep healthy activities, whether it's golf or pickleball or running or whatever you want to do. And then you've got to combine it with metal activities. In my case, I took up golf uh pretty seriously, hated it for a while, couldn't play it, got reasonably good at it. I'm about a 12 handicapped, mostly honest. And then I, well, you know, you got foot wedges and things like that. You know, yeah, a 12-foot putt is almost close enough to call it. And then I think you have to stay mentally active. I do it by uh teaching at senior university and I I force myself to actually uh put together classes. I was always interested in battles, so I put together 12 decisive battles. Obviously, they're more than that. And now I'm doing uh 12 partnerships that have changed the world. And I gotta be honest, uh uh I'm struggling uh to get those. Uh the first two, interesting enough, the relationship between Socrates and Plato, and then the relationship between Plato and Aristotle. How about Aristotle and Alexander the Great? Actually, I I included that one in there. Oh, okay. Because I thought I thought it was so cool that I said, I really have I have three philosophers, and then we have one of the greatest generals in the world. So I actually did die. It's a very good, very, very poignant point.

Mark McGrath:

See, I told you I was a history major, it wasn't recent, so I could get that one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we don't want to be too recent. Um and then I moved to uh comparing uh Augusta and Agrippa's relationship and uh Genghis Kong and Subhoto's relationships.

Mark McGrath:

So this is like John Boyd, these are all like John Boyd things that he would really love.

Speaker 1:

Uh so that's I would I would suggest to people as they move through the uh period of life, uh health obviously is is is problematic, but you can work at it. You can keep yourself healthy. You can try to work at it. Sometimes shit happens and and it just is any of your work publicly available?

Mark McGrath:

Your your things on decisive battles or partnerships, we'd love to look at it.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting. Lifelong learners uh of Georgetown had them up for a while. I do allow them all to be recorded. So they existed. I think I think they take them down, which I wish they wouldn't. I I didn't care. I there's no money involved in it. I just do it for free, of course. In fact, I'm vice president of it, which is one of the go to the strategic planning meeting, which we'll see how that goes. We'll find a strategic planning in some cases, we'll see how it goes. Yeah, I can I have all those if anybody's ever interested in it. The the 12 decisive battles start off uh in Egypt and ancient Egypt and and go all the way forward to include the Six-Day War. And then uh the partnerships, uh I'm gonna have 12 of them. I'm completing Hamilton and Washington part one and part two uh now. And then uh I don't know whether I'm gonna do Abergowl Adams and John Adams as part one and two or not. I am gonna do, I I will suggest a book that if people want to read about an interesting partnership, I'll leave it at this one. This uh there's a book called The Partnership, how original, that does Stimson and Marshall. And I found it fascinating. I had I knew a lot more about Marshall than I did about Stimson.

Mark McGrath:

Speaking of Wall Street guys, and he and he was and he was the Secretary of War in in in two different administrations.

Speaker 1:

Two different administrations. Very powerful, very interesting individual. And if you study the partnership prior to the American entry into World War II, and then the partnership during the Secretary of War and uh and Marshall as the chief of staff, fascinating partnership and the way they worked off of each other. People know Marshall much better, obviously the Marshall Klan. But uh, I don't know.

Mark McGrath:

Is Grant and Sherman too cliche? That's what I think it did. Is Grant and Sherman too cliche or Lee and Jackson?

Speaker 1:

You could do that when I think Lee and Jackson might be more. Both of those are very interesting ones because uh I'll leave it with this one. I I uh at war college I had the chance to work with Shea Lubos, who's past now.

unknown:

J.

Speaker 1:

Lulf was a wonderful historian and took us on battle walks. And you could walk civil or battlefields from the tactical all the way to the strategic. And I remember, I was interested in whether or not the operational level war existed or whether it was just an American interpretation of the Soviet concepts and didn't really exist at all. And I remember Jay Lua standing at the edge of the wilderness area and pointing out that Lee was already planning his next series of campaigns, or or I guess it was Antietam, planning the next series of campaigns. So there was the operational level war does and can exist separate from tactical and the strategic level. And so, and I did used to do a lot of walks, uh battlefield walks, uh, of Gettysburg and Antietam in particular, and the wilderness to some extent.

Mark McGrath:

We've we've done that as well uh to take leaders to Gettysburg, which has been great. But no, I'd love to look at those. So send those over. I'd love to see those. Those would be cool.

Speaker 1:

I have all those. Uh I'll give you one last story at Gettysburg. I ran a tour with uh Soviet set of officers back when the Soviet Union existed. Wow. And we uh we went through Gettysburg and I said, this is a good place to stop and use the restroom because there aren't any ones further uh along the battlefield. And the Russian general said, we don't need to do that. And I could sort of see the colonel is thinking, no, I we really do need to do that. So I took a P and nobody else did, and watched them suffer. That was sort of a strange for now.

Mark McGrath:

How Soviet, how higher? Yeah. That might be worth a little at least a little vignette, like a little book, you know, about taking Soviet generals to Gettysburg. That's really cool.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Fred, hey, we really appreciate your time. Uh, this has been a treat because, like I said, we've been studying network centric warfare for a while, looking at it. It really influenced my thinking inside the flow system anyway. Uh and of course, when you make the connection between, or anyone makes a connection between like team of teams or anything of good command, mission command, anything like that. I think you have to pick up the book Network Centric Warfare. And I just want to call out uh to you. I don't know if you know it's gonna get his name correct here. Uh Steve um let me get his name for you. He's Herzberg. Steven Herzburg. Yeah, yeah. So I don't what's your relationship with him? And and by the way, thank you, Steve, for the recommendation.

Speaker 1:

Steve and I met on on LinkedIn and then have have done some uh and and he's he's a great guy and very, very good at at uh at organizational theory and that sort of stuff. He took part in in trying to help the nation understand a better way of repping itself through the voting process, and we got involved with that, whether regardless of what side you're on, uh each vote should count. I don't think anybody seriously would argue that. And uh that's where we got together and we talked about how to help organizations organize themselves uh along, if you will, back to the very beginning, along the Apache sort of approach one, and having a very uh democratic organization, which I hesitate because all organizations become hierarchical at some point, and so that's a combination. But how do you how do you a uh free-flowing organization in an in a uh in an information rich environment, if we can say it that way, uh and how do you allow how how do you pass information, how do you pass command of intent, how do you uh how do you do that and allow uh the richness of an organization to uh uh to carry off like that? Steve's Steve's very, very good at that, and we still communicate. I don't do any social networking except uh I do watch LinkedIn, which I generally like to do. Sometimes it gets a little weird, but everything gets a little weird.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Well you delivered one hell of a podcast episode with us today, so we really do appreciate that. Uh so you are now officially on social media. Uh I think you know that what happens. But thanks again for joining us, and uh we'll keep you on here for a few moments. All right, well, thank you.

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