Compass Points - Boyd Still Battling
John Boyd is still challenging Marines
Compass Points - Boyd Still Battling
John Boyd is still challenging Marines
July 14, 2026
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As the US hits targets in Iran for the third night in a row, what is the best path forward in this conflict? Furthermore, what is the best approach to future military conflicts?
Any military leader and any military force that wants to find an advantage in armed conflicts should take time to learn from a former US Air Force fighter pilot and renowned conflict expert, John Boyd.
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“During the 1950s, John Boyd dominated fighter aviation in the U.S. Air Force. His fame came on the wings of the quirky and treacherous F-100; the infamous “Hun.” Boyd was known throughout the Air Force as “Forty-Second Boyd,” because he had a standing offer to all pilots that if they could defeat [him] in simulated air-to-air combat in under 40 seconds, he would pay them $40. Like any gunslinger with a name and a reputation, he was called out many times. As an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School (FWS) at Nellis AFB, he fought students, cadre pilots, Marine and Navy pilots, and pilots from a dozen countries, who were attending the FWS as part of the Mutual Defense Assistance Pact.
He never lost.”
Colonel John Boyd flew in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He retired from the USAF in 1975 and during his career was known as Genghis John, The Mad Major, and The Ghetto Colonel. “He is remembered as one of the great war strategists of his time. “His manual of fighter tactics changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. He discovered a physical theory that forever altered the way fighter planes were designed. Later in life, he developed a theory of military strategy that has been adopted throughout the world and even applied to business models for maximizing efficiency.”
-- Super Sabre Society
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How did Boyd win again and again? Boyd had a powerful method of finding advantage in any conflict. Although Boyd’s thinking cannot be easily summarized, he placed great importance on decision making. Boyd argued that anyone involved in armed conflict must make better decisions faster.
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NEED FOR DECISIONS
Against such a background, actions and decisions become critically important. Actions must be taken over and over again and in many different ways. Decisions must be rendered to monitor and determine the precise nature of the actions needed that will be compatible with the goal. To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change.
The concepts can then be used as decision-models for improving our capacity for independent action. Such a demand for decisions that literally impact our survival causes one to wonder: How do we generate or create the mental concepts to support this decision- making activity?
-- John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation”
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Several Compass Points readers recommend the thinking of John Boyd as a way to both understand the Marine Corps’ controversial Force Design, and, more importantly, as a way to find a better path forward.
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Polarbear
When I read about the constant and rapidly changing military technologies that seem to be showcased daily, I feel like FD2030 is leaving the US Marine Corps in a cloud of dust at the starting gate. For this reason, I re-read Col. Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” paper thinking it provides a framework of the preventative medicine for bad strategic thinking. In one of the paper’s opening sections, “Creating Concepts,” Col Boyd states concepts can basically be created or changed two ways: “deduction” or “induction” reasoning. “Deduction” is related to thinking from the general-to-specific, and “induction” is related to thinking from the specific-to-general. Going from general-to-specific relates to deduction, analysis and differentiation. While going from specific-to-general relates to induction, synthesis, and most importantly, integration.
In the next six paragraphs Boyd makes the case that the specific-to-general method is the better way for creating and adjusting concepts. In my opinion, General Berger (and Smith) used misguided deductive thinking to go from a bad 1950s political “Island Chain” containment strategy, to FD2030. They went from the general to the specific and that left the Marine Corps standing in a dry corner on painted floor holding a wet paint brush.
If Col Boyd had known of FD2030, he might have yelled “Bad General” like he was scolding a puppy for a mess on the kitchen floor. Boyd’s method would be to inductively break down the current concepts into small pieces or segments, keeping what is good and throwing out the bad. Then synthesizing what is the old good with the new and integrating these ideas into a new concept, a concept, most likely, much closer to the global, crisis response, Marine Corps MAGTF (Think Boyd’s snow mobile here.).
Col Boyd is not done with the word “deduction” when he introduces “destructive deduction” defined as:
Step 1 is un-structuring a concept by separating its constituent elements from the whole.
Step 2 is “creative induction” the synthesis of “new patterns from the liberated parts.”
Both “destructive deduction” and “creative induction” are important for Boyd’s OODA Loop. During the “Orient” part of the LOOP, the decision maker is creating destructive deduction in the enemy’s mind, while implementing “creative induction” in your own strategic or operational thinking.
If I were a “Den Daddy” or the MC Command and Staff College Commander, I would implement a full course on Boyd’s briefing paper, “Destruction and Creation.” I remember Col Boyd stating that “Destruction and Creation” is the most essential part of his briefings. If the Maine Corps University had given Col Boyd’s paper the attention it deserved, particularly when certain future General Officers attended MCC&S, the Marine Corps would be much stronger today. Instead, today it seems the Marine Corps is sitting in a cloud of dust, left at the starting gate. S/F
-- Polarbear
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Another reader, Samuel Whittemore, adds his own insight.
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Many of the current debates around FD2030 (versatility vs. specialization, divestment speed, Pacific focus) would benefit from officers who can explicitly apply destructive deduction to the assumptions baked into the plan and creative induction to build the next iteration. The Marine Corps has a long tradition of intellectual adaptation. The question Polar Bear raises is whether FD2030 was a genuine act of creative induction after thorough destruction—or more of a deductive leap from one set of premises. That debate is still very much alive, and Boyd’s framework remains one of the best tools for navigating it. S/F.
-- Samuel Whittemore
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One senior author and Marine recalls his discussions with John Boyd and encourages Marines to learn more about Boyd.
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Compass Points commenters frequently mention the noted military theorist, John Boyd. I am surprised and disappointed how often these references contain significant errors. The most common reference is to John’s observe, orient, decide, and act approach to gaining situation awareness and making decisions. Commenters regularly appear to know little more than that one is to work through the OODA loop faster than an enemy. They commonly write of his contributions to the development of maneuver warfare but seem to know little more than the bare essence of his work.
I was very fortunate that John mentored me in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He spent many hours schooling me about war and warfare. Ours was an ongoing and intense discourse that never really ended. There were phone calls at all hours of the day and night that could last for hours. This relationship proved very beneficial and certainly aided my professional development, especially operationally. It was also of considerable value when in retirement I spent time in the Marine Corps Archives located in the Gray Research Center going though John’s papers and his small. personal library as I prepared to teach an elective on his theories in a Command and Staff College seminar elective course.
I urge those who truly want to understand Boyd’s theories to read in the following order these books:
(1) Ian T. Brown’s, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, The U.S. Marines and Maneuver Warfare [the seminal work];
(2) Frans P.B. Osinga’s, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd [the most scientifically informed];
(3) Grant T. Hammond’s, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security [the only author who knew and worked personally with Boyd];
(4) Robert Coram’s, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War [the most vivid and entertaining though factually flawed in places].
Marine leaders should read and understand Boyd. While it is useful to be familiar with Boyd’s critics, pay them little heed; they are all lesser lights.
-- P.K. Van Riper
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Compass Points thanks all readers who are still studying the briefings of John Boyd so the best of Boyd can help all Marine leaders today and tomorrow make better decisions.
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Super Sabre Society
40-second Boyd
By MB Barrett
https://supersabresociety.org/legacy_stories/40-second-boyd/
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Mises Institute
Destruction and Creation
By John R. Boyd
https://cdn.mises.org/destruction_and_creation_by_john_r_boyd.pdf
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Concluding post on Boyd, EABO, and FD2030:
Some Concluding Thoughts:
The points I raised in my previous two posts cover a lot of ground, on purpose. The intrinsic "logic chain" involves multiple timespans and geographical scales. It includes operational, strategic, and grand strategic thinking -- not just weapons and tactics.
I have deliberately used acronyms and historical references without explaining them. They ought to be obvious to any field grade officer or higher. Anyone at any level of command or on any planning staff should know them like the back of his hand. From Mahan and Corbett, 1917 reverse slope, and War Plan Orange to Grozny and Mariupol, each word or phrase should conjure up images, sounds, sequences of actions as if in a motion picture, and, above all, consequences that do not require explanation.
Who teaches this now? How will the CSC students learn case studies? Will they conduct Clausewitzian Kritik? Will they read Clausewitz? Will they know what Kritik means?
How will they develop operational thinking? What experiences, actual or vicarious, will teach them its meaning and importance? Will they distinguish its purpose-driven progress through time and space from a Big Bang approach to JADO? Will they know how to orchestrate a coalition to impose our will on the enemy?
I fear I know the answers: Unless we take a second look at CSC at MCU, no one will teach history. Students will not conduct case studies. They will not read and understand Clausewitz. They will not know the word Kritik, nor will they practice it under any other name. They will not think operationally. They will not learn JADO independent of a crippling dependency on EBO. (Not a typo; look it up.) They will be unable to command and direct coalitions to accomplish US objectives because they will not learn to connect simultaneous, synchronized tactical actions to such objectives, let alone understand the gravity of not clarifying those objectives in the first place.
They will not know Boyd. They will not understand OODA. They will not study the enemy as a true system, from his historical political culture to his present coalition partners, but only as a collection of infrastructure.
But they will know grand tactics!
And they will know defeat.
Can we change this trajectory now, and bend the arc of future history in our favor?
A. L. Antonoff, PhD
Part 2 of my post on the absence of operational art for EABO:
John Boyd has sometimes been called a tactical thinker, but in fact he understood war as few others did. He knew the need to impose one's will by confounding enemy thinking.
I fear we have been engaged in confounding our own thinking.
In their initial incarnation, EABO and SIF emerged in an institutional vacuum, devoid of strategic guidance other than "the pacing threat." However, no concept can take shape in an intellectual vacuum. Art Corbett did his best to fill in the blanks.
Art told my students that we needed to understand from the outset what kind of war we would fight; he believed it was defensive in purpose and positional in character, like a reverse of War Plan Orange. This time we (as Japan once did) would be defending in depth, behind the South China Sea, while China (as we once did) would be launching an amphibious/naval drive to impose its will on home islands. Will US Marines alone deter or stop that charge? Can they?
I asked Art, shortly before he died, whether he had thought about what EABO would look like in joint terms. He gave me a weary look and said not yet. Ditto for my question of whether EABO would work in other maritime theaters (I asked about the Baltic and Arctic as an example), or how the concept might have to be altered or the force supplemented to do so.
But Art's own conception of EABO also was evolving. The night before he died, after co-teaching a wonderful Gray Scholars seminar on sea-power strategy in history, he emailed me to say that I had persuaded him EABO entailed not a revolution, but an evolution in warfare. As a defense in depth, he had always said, EABO was reverse slope tactics, modeled on Germany's 1917 thinking. Who were the big guns a mile back from the front? Legacy naval forces, the very ones that we could not risk close in. And what would be enforcing the blockade meant to be accomplished by the Marines on the islands? What if China did what Mahan advised, concentrating forces at our weakest point to force a break in the line elsewhere? The legacy fleet.
So, as a naval concept, EABO was not a displacement of but rather a supplement to traditional naval operations.
This was as far as our conversation got. I meant to explore his new way of thinking -- supplementing rather than displacing older capabilities -- and pursue it with him to its logical conclusions. Alas, we were interrupted by life.
We are now at the mercy of other people's thinking.
I have heard our EABO posture described as a force/fleet in being. For God's sake, read and understand Julian Corbett. His fleet in being operated throughout British history on several key conditions:
1) to defend the North Sea and Channel -- i.e., to blockade the enemy in the European theater, close to home -- deterring invasion with an active defense while readily supplied and maintained from home ports,
2) all while supplemented by what Nick Lambert has called flotilla defense, and
3) only temporarily, while a squadron detachment dealt with an emergency in, say, North American waters, South Africa, or elsewhere, and then returned, with the result that
4) the full fleet for most of the time was superior to the enemy.
Absolutely not one jot of the above applies to US Marines in the South China Sea. They are to be a permanent deployment, stretched thin, many many thousands of miles from home ports, within a WEZ denying ready resupply even given a long logistical tether, on the enemy's front doorstep, facing a nation of 1.6 billion and an industrial base that has displaced much of Western manufacturing and occupies a critical place in Western supply chains, while purporting to inflict cost on that behemoth with a marginal increase in its missile expenditure (see above.)
I explained this Corbettian confusion in a revised naval warfare lesson card and lecture at CSC over a decade ago. It did not bubble upward. There may be good reason still to have sn EABO capability, but let's not drag Corbett into it. Know Thy History -- and as CSC's Dr. DiNardo says, be ready to throw the BS flag. Lives depend on it.
Finally, what might the justifiable EABO capability be?
I go back to Art's teaching.
He originally understood the SIF to be Marine logisticians and planners, putting a host-nation face on everything they did. Logistics problems grew more complicated, but the point remains: EABO presupposes intense training and cooperation with island chain nations. In fact, the locals must do it. THEY man the missiles, break up the invading force's coherence and momentum, and maintain the blockade.
Marines go ashore and wage combat. We don't need them as a new tripwire at a new Fulda Gap, forever stuck in place because withdrawing them signals loss of resolve, lack of commitment, change of heart --all the psycho-political folderol that kept US forces stuck in Europe for over 75 years after a two-year commitment. (We always meant Europe to grow the capacity and capability to defend itself within NATO.) The fact that we never did fight in Europe owes less to the tripwire and more to the Reagan strategy, a comprehensive approach using genuine cost imposition, psychological warfare and political subversion, information operations, and a very carefully planned and well informed economic warfare. All of this was backed by the operational artistry of AirLand Battle, which led Soviet generals invited to observe maneuvers at the new NTC to comment ruefully that their soldiers could not do what ours were doing. All of this together, from samizdat to Solidarity, from the Big Five to Brilliant Pebbles, constituted a mutually reinforcing joint/inter-agency/interallied, all-domain, operational campaign, peace-time and grey-zone, that imposed our will without a shot.
Above all, the campaign to end the Cold War took place in global fashion, using the appropriate domains for local conditions. It built on solid allied and partner support from Thatcher to Kohl to John Paul II. It almost defies belief now, but it happened. It worked.
EABO and the SIF will not work without a regional agreement of some kind. All for one and one for all. Blockade chains, even when they are archipelagoes, cannot work any other way.
John Boyd recognized patterns and lessons in history. Are we allowing officers in PME today to do the same?