Strategy for Socio-Cultural Warfare
1403 wds June 18
Section III. Boyd, Sun Tzu and Evolving Military Strategy for Socio-Cultural Warfare
Sun Tzu 101
The time in which Sun Tzu lived was a laboratory for the evolution and testing of military ideas. During the "Warring States" period, China broke into 8 major states and a dozen principalities, each attempting to subdue the others by armed conflict. Invasion by one or more neighbors posed a constant threat, so that war truly was, in the famous opening words of the book, the -- path of survival and destruction. The strategy devised by Sun Tzu fit the circumstances perfectly. It rested on two major and complementary elements, one internal and one external. Harmony on the inside is The Way (Tao) of war. All else flows from this basic idea, and without it, there is little reason to press forward into the stress of military operations. Externally, Sun’s goal was to create confusion in the opposing side and then exploit it. The focus was not on winning through superior tactics or individual fighting technique (although these are important), but, as Griffith notes, -- the enemy commanders must become confused and if possible, driven insane. His primary tool for accomplishing this was quickness, which helps create ambiguity and also increases the effectiveness of a panoply of tools, such as deception, security, and intelligence.
This strategy differs fundamentally from the core of Western military doctrine, which follows the strategy of Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz’s goal was to bring the opposing army to -- decisive battle, and then win it. Sun Tzu wanted to achieve victory in war, but preferably by causing the enemy army to disintegrate before the battle:
Therefore, those who win every battle are not really skillful -- those who render other’s armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.
Although this may not always be possible, it sets a completely different focus on how one approaches the conduct of conflict. Clausewitz, even when his strategy succeeded, invariably led to bloody battles of attrition. But large-scale battles are slower, safer, patriotism-building and more amenable to the political cycles.
Sun Tzu and Intelligence
The final chapter of The Art of War deals with use of spies. Foreknowledge enables an intelligent government and wise military leadership to overcome others and achieve extraordinary accomplishment. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
The section on spies is the culmination of the entire work. Sun Tzu makes this clear in the final passage:
-- So only a brilliant ruler or a wise general who can use the highly intelligent for espionage is sure of great success. This is essential for military operations, and the armies depend on this for their actions.
Sun Tzu’s commanders are not passive – consumers-- of intelligence. A general in the Sun Tzu tradition takes as much personal interest in employing spies as he does in issuing orders to his subordinate commanders. He is as active in intelligence as he is in operations:
Of all those in the army close to the commander, none is as intimate as the secret agent; of all rewards, none more liberal than those given to secret agents. To be parsimonious with positions, compensations, or hundreds of pounds of gold, and thereby blind to the enemy’s status, is to be extraordinarily inhumane: such a man can never be considered his people’s commander, can never be his lord’s aide, and can never be the ruler of victory.
A commander whose primary contact with intelligence is the daily coordinated, scripted, and rehearsed -- intelligence briefing-- could never be successful in the Sun Tzu school.
John Boyd
Sun Tzu is widely studied today in Japan, where Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (1645 A.D.) is an adaptation of the ideas of The Art of War. Boyd is the most recent major member of this school. Of all the strategists he considered (Jomini, Bonaparte, Saxe, and other classroom standards) Sun Tzu was the one that Boyd did not critique in his work, A Discourse on Winning and Losing.
Boyd derived a mathematically coherent theory of air combat, -- energy maneuverability, -- which for two competing fighters shows precisely which will have the advantage in any flight state (combination of airspeed, altitude, and direction). – Maneuverability-- is the ability to change flight states -- to climb, for example, turn, or accelerate or any combination thereof. He acknowledged a shortcoming in this theory and his correction proved to be more powerful than the original idea (and more applicable to other forms of conflict, such as business). There were times when the less maneuverable aircraft won. For this to happen, both aircraft had to be roughly comparable -- that is, the original theory still held in most cases -- but there were instances, such as the F-86 vs. the MiG-15 and the YF-16 vs. the YF-17, where energy maneuverability alone did not adequately explain the results. These anomalies led Boyd to the idea of -- fast transients, -- the ability to transition between maneuver states. He called this ability, -- agility. To give an example: At a given airspeed and altitude, the more maneuverable fighter could make a tighter turn, while the more agile could more quickly change from a (perhaps not quite so tight) turn in one direction to a (perhaps not quite so tight) turn in another:
The ability to shift from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an adversary enables one to win in air-to-air combat. Boyd made a critical observation, that the pilots of the more maneuverable but less agile fighters often became frustrated while trying to pin down their more agile adversaries, and this sometimes caused them to make mistakes. The pilots of the more agile aircraft could spot and exploit these mistakes to win a victory. Boyd was a student of military history and this rang a bell. This idea of discombobulating the enemy first and then -- and only then -- engaging in close combat was fundamental to earlier strategists, like Sun Tzu, General Giap and many guerrilla movements.
Boyd and Intelligence
Boyd appears to accord intelligence a lower status than did Sun Tzu. He has no briefing with “intelligence” in the title, nor is the word in the title of even one of his briefing slides. When it does appear, it is generally in a list with many other items. In “Blitzkrieg: Keys to Success,” the third point is:
Intelligence, reconnaissance (air and ground) and stratagem emphasized before and during combat operations to unmask and shape patterns of adversary strengths, weaknesses, moves, and intentions.
Boyd’s OODA Loop Sketch, however, shows that he regarded intelligence in the broadest sense no less highly than Sun Tzu. Boyd emphasizes the importance of open systems, and the only opening into the OODA loop is through Observation. If one fails by to spot mismatches between what one believes to be going on and what really is, (i.e., between Orientation and the real world), one has become “mentally isolated.” If adversaries can keep us in this state – operating inside our OODA loops – then as setback after inexplicable frustration befall us, we will become disoriented, confused, indecisive, fearful, etc. A competent enemy will create, locate, and exploit vulnerabilities leading, in the case of maneuver warfare, to envelopments, ambushes, high prisoner counts or, as Boyd put it, “phenomenon that suggests inability to adapt to change.” This explains why ill-treatment of POWs cannot be tolerated: A battlefield commander wants them to surrender, and needs to make it as easy as possible. (6.)
Role of Military Force
Although Sun Tzu is known for his admonition “To win without fighting is best,” the subject of this sentence and of The Art of War is “To win.” Whether used to fight or for some other purpose, Sun Tzu placed a high premium on the utility of military force. The opening of The Art of War simply states that:
Military action is important to the nation – it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it.
The Tao Te Ching (c. 500 B.C.), states that, “Weapons are the tools of fear. A decent man will avoid them, except in the direst necessity.” Some argue that we have now swung to the opposite extreme... or the direst emergency.