Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals
John Boyd's Vision for Thriving in Chaos
Ian T. Brown and Frans P. B. Osinga
DOI: 10.56686/9798987849163
ABOUT THE BOOK
John Boyd is well known to have formally written down very little of his own theories on war and conflict, making researching his concepts challenging and leading many to infer meanings based on their own interpretations—or others’—of what little easily accessible evidence of his thinking remains. In Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, his thoughts are revealed in his own words delivered during his lectures on his strategic concepts through the painstaking archival work of Ian T. Brown and with supporting analysis by Frans P. B. Osinga. Original presentation slides, transcriptions of audio recorded during lectures, marginalia, hand-drawn conceptual sketches, and other archival documents present Boyd’s unfiltered intellectual contributions to the body of thought on winning and losing in battle. This work is intended to remove as many barriers as possible to accessing Boyd’s vision of success in conflict.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ian T. Brown is a retired Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter pilot with multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pacific region. He has written dozens of articles, reviews, and short stories for a variety of defense-related publications, covering topics of military history, military theory, future war, and wargaming. His book A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (Marine Corps University Press, 2018) was added to the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ Professional Reading Program in 2019. He currently works as a wargame analyst for Group W and has designed several wargames independently.
Dr. Frans P. B. Osinga is an air commodore in the Royal Netherlands Airforce and a professor of war studies at Leiden University. A former NF-5 and F-16 pilot, Dr. Osinga has authored or edited more than 70 articles and books on terrorism, geopolitics, and modern military affairs. He is the author of Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (2006), a unique intellectual biography of Boyd that traces the development of Boyd’s ideas in their scientific, historical, and social context. He is also co-editor of A Transformation Gap? American Innovations and European Military Change (2010), Military Adaptation in Afghanistan (2013), Targeting the Challenges of Modern Warfare (2015), and Defence Planning for Small and Middle Powers: Rethinking Force Development in an Age of Disruption (2024).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Note
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Essence of Winning and Losing: A Primer on John Boyd’s Strategic Thought
Chapter 1. “A Discourse on Winning and Losing” and an Abstract for “Destruction and Creation”
Chapter 2. Patterns of Conflict
Chapter 3. The Strategic Game of ? and ?
Chapter 4. Organic Design for Command and Control
Chapter 5. Revelation
Chapter 6. The Conceptual Spiral
Chapter 7. The Essence of Winning and Losing
Chapter 8. The OODA Loop
Appendix: Omitted Presentation Slides
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors