Top Highlights

• into a small book, A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America’s War on Terror, available both in paperback (74 pages) and as an e-book.
• stepping so neatly from Strategy to Planning to Tactics. Europe’s greatest military thinker (1780-1831) seemed to leave no possibility that tactics – the outcome of that planning – might in turn influence the military’s strategy.
• Thus, Strategy is the thesis, Planning the antithesis, and Tactics the synthesis, which should become the new thesis and be met in turn by a new antithesis.
• Boyd puzzled over the fact that the F-86 Sabre turbojet managed to compile a 10:1 victory ratio over the MiG-15 in Korea, despite the fact that the Russian fighter was by most measures the superior plane. It could fly higher and farther, turn tighter, and climb and accelerate faster than its American opponent.
• Boyd concluded that the F-86’s fully hydraulic controls, which allowed a pilot to transition more quickly from one manoeuvre to another, also enabled him to neutralize and overcome what should have been the MiG’s technical superiority.