A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror by Ford Daniel

Author:Ford, Daniel [Ford, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Warbird Books
Published: 2013-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Defeating a guerrilla campaign

Boyd then segues into the problem of how to combat an insurgency – indeed, in Patterns of Conflict, he treats counter-guerrilla operations under the same heading as counter-blitz. He argues that blitzers and guerrillas both use infiltration tactics to confuse and defeat their adversaries, and that they in turn can be defeated by applying their own tactics against them.

Fortunately for those who would reconstruct his thinking, Boyd by 1986 has strayed far from the U.S. military model of a briefing slide. A single slide about waging a counter-guerrilla campaign runs to 300 words ... plus a footnote. The object of such a campaign, he begins, is to “Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.” And the footnote: “If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides!”[109]

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that, in developing this thought over successive versions of the brief, Boyd is thinking of the Saigon regimes to which the U.S. was shackled during the Vietnam War. And likewise with the solutions he offers: as counter-guerrilla, he says, we should “root out and visibly punish corruption.” Next we provide “new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal.” Finally, we must “Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.” All very true, of course, and excellent advice for Spanish authorities in their struggle against Basque separatists, but scant guidance for American troops patrolling Helmand province, if only because the Afghan leaders are not ours to provide. Marginally more useful is Boyd’s advice that we should infiltrate the guerrilla movement, employ locals for intelligence gathering, and “Seal-off guerrilla regions ... by diplomatic, psychological, and ... other activities that strip-away potential allies as well as by disrupting or straddling communications that connect these regions with outside world.”[110]

Alas, it is precisely those insurgencies with access to a safe haven that are most difficult to root out. In the 1960s, the U.S. found it impossible to seal off South Vietnam from infiltration through Laos, Cambodia, and the South China Sea. Even with help from the Pakistani military, American and NATO troops face much the same problem in Afghanistan.

Boyd seems to take the law enforcement rather than the military approach to counterinsurgency: “Deploy administrative talent, police, and counter-guerrilla teams into affected localities,” he says, so that we can “inhibit guerrilla ... movement; minimize guerrilla contact with local inhabitants; isolate their ruling cadres; and destroy their infrastructure.”[111] Only that last verb – destroy – reminds us of the U.S. military that stormed into Iraq in March 2003. And there is some evidence that Boyd has changed his thinking over the years. In an earlier variant of this same slide, the next point begins with the words: “ Take and keep initiative by relentless pursuit.”[112] No longer: by the time of the published brief,

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