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Carl von Clausewitz: In Part 1 we established that John Boyd made genuine contributions to aircraft design, small-unit training, and the diagnosis of institutional dysfunction in the American military. We also established that his theoretical legacy, the OODA loop as a complete theory of war, was dramatically overpraised and inadequately scrutinized by the officers and academics who adopted it.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: We also established, at the very end of Part 1, that Clausewitz and I agree on the verdict and disagree entirely on the reasoning, which is a situation I find clarifying rather than troubling. It means the disagreement between us is not about Boyd at all. It is about the nature of strategy itself. Boyd is simply the occasion for the argument we were always going to have.
Carl von Clausewitz: Correct, and since neither of us is particularly interested in spending more time discussing Boyd when we could be discussing the question Boyd’s legacy raises, which is whether military success follows from geometric principles or from the alignment of military action with coherent political objectives, let us proceed to that question directly.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Let us. And let us use the evidence that neither of us can ignore, which is what happened to American military power in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two wars. Two different applications of Boyd’s maneuver warfare legacy. Two outcomes that require honest accounting from anyone who wants to claim their framework explains why wars are won and lost. Afghanistan in 2001 was, by any measure, an operational success. A small number of American special operations forces, combined with air power and local Afghan allies, overthrew the Taliban government in approximately two months. Speed, surprise, local knowledge, unconventional operational methods. Boyd’s disciples claimed this as a vindication of maneuver warfare, and in the narrow operational sense they were not wrong. The initial campaign was swift, decisive, and achieved its immediate military objective.
Carl von Clausewitz: And then the political objective became unclear, and everything that followed became a demonstration of my argument rather than Boyd’s. The military success of 2001 was not followed by a coherent political strategy for what Afghanistan was supposed to become. The war continued for twenty years because no one in authority could give a satisfactory answer to the question I identified as central in 1832: what political outcome justifies this application of force, and is that outcome achievable by military means. Boyd’s framework had no answer to that question. It was not designed to answer that question. And the absence of an answer cost twenty years and an enormous number of lives.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: I will not defend the political management of Afghanistan, which was indefensible by any strategic standard. But I would observe that the operational failure in the later years was equally a failure of geometric principle. Forces spread across an enormous theater without concentration at decisive points, supply lines that were grotesquely extended and inadequately secured, operational objectives that changed with each administration and therefore provided no stable basis for campaign planning. Afghanistan after 2003 was not a failure of Boyd’s maneuver warfare. It was a failure of every principle I documented, applied to a situation that required sustained conventional presence and instead received improvised counterinsurgency doctrine written in real time.
Carl von Clausewitz: You are describing symptoms. I am describing the disease. Extended supply lines and dispersed forces are consequences of unclear political direction. When the political objective is undefined, the operational form cannot be coherent, because coherent operations require a defined end state to orient toward. Afghanistan was not lost because commanders forgot your principles. It was lost because no one could tell the commanders what winning actually meant, and without that definition, no geometric precision was available to them.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Iraq in 2003 presents a different problem and, I would argue, a more direct indictment of Boyd’s legacy specifically. The initial invasion was conducted according to maneuver warfare doctrine as Boyd’s disciples had shaped it. Speed over mass. Bypassing enemy formations rather than destroying them. Targeting the command structure rather than the army. Baghdad fell in three weeks. And then the bypassed enemy formations, which had not been destroyed, became an insurgency. The speed that won the initial campaign created the conditions for the subsequent catastrophe.
Carl von Clausewitz: That is a fair operational criticism of how maneuver doctrine was applied in 2003, and I will not argue against it. But the insurgency that followed the initial victory was not primarily a military problem. It was a political problem. The decision to disband the Iraqi army, the failure to establish legitimate governance, the absence of any plan for the post-combat phase, these were political failures that preceded the military failures and made them inevitable. You can blame Boyd’s doctrine for the tactics that left armed men unemployed across Iraq. You cannot blame Boyd’s doctrine for the decision to leave them unemployed, which was made by civilians who had not read Boyd and would not have been improved by reading Jomini.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: And yet the officers executing the campaign had been trained on Boyd’s framework and had absorbed its central premise, which is that speed and disruption of enemy decision-making are the primary instruments of victory. That premise led them to prioritize reaching Baghdad over securing the operational area. It led them to treat the collapse of the Iraqi command structure as the end of the problem rather than the beginning of a new one. I am not saying Boyd’s doctrine caused the Iraq War. I am saying Boyd’s doctrine shaped how officers thought about what victory looked like, and that definition of victory was dangerously incomplete.
Carl von Clausewitz: We are actually in agreement on the incompleteness of Boyd’s definition of victory. We disagree on what was missing. You believe what was missing was concentration of force and destruction of enemy formations. I believe what was missing was a coherent political objective that defined victory in terms that military action could actually deliver. Both things were missing. The question is which absence was more fundamental.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Mine, unambiguously mine. An army without concentration cannot hold what it takes. An army without a political objective cannot know what to take. Both failures are real. But you cannot design political objectives from inside the military chain of command. You can design operational form. Boyd gave officers permission to ignore operational form in the name of speed, and the results were visible for twenty years.
Carl von Clausewitz: Boyd gave officers a framework for thinking about decision speed that was genuinely useful and genuinely incomplete. The incompleteness was not Boyd’s alone. It was the incompleteness of every purely military theory that treats war as a problem to be solved by military means. War is not a problem to be solved by military means. It is a political instrument that military means are employed to wield, and a theory of war that does not account for the political dimension is a theory of a thing that does not exist.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: There is a question beneath the question of Boyd’s legacy that I think deserves direct examination, which is whether the American military ever actually absorbed Boyd’s framework or simply adopted its vocabulary. Because those are very different things with very different implications. The OODA loop appears on briefing slides in every branch of the American military. Officers use the term freely and confidently. What is considerably less clear is whether those officers have internalized what the OODA loop was actually designed to produce, which is faster, better, more adaptive decision-making under genuine uncertainty, or whether they have simply learned to invoke the acronym as a signal of operational sophistication while continuing to plan and execute as they always did.
Carl von Clausewitz: My assessment is that the Marine Corps genuinely absorbed the substance. The Army absorbed the terminology. The Air Force absorbed neither the substance nor the terminology but retained a general awareness that Boyd had existed and had said things about aircraft that turned out to be correct. The Navy found the entire conversation mildly irrelevant to the problems of fleet operations and largely ignored it, which was not an unreasonable position.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Marine Corps case is interesting precisely because it represents the exception. The Marine Corps warfighting manual, which Boyd’s influence shaped significantly, actually changed how officers were trained to think. Not just what terminology they used, but how they approached the problem of decision-making under uncertainty, what they treated as success, what they treated as failure. That is genuine institutional absorption of an idea, and it is rare. Most ideas that enter military institutions are processed, renamed, and expelled with their operational implications intact and their intellectual content removed.
Carl von Clausewitz: Which is itself evidence for my argument about the primacy of the political over the military. Military institutions are political institutions. They absorb ideas through political processes, which means that ideas which threaten existing power structures are resisted and ideas which can be co-opted are co-opted and neutered. Boyd’s ideas threatened the procurement establishment and were resisted. His vocabulary was harmless to the procurement establishment and was adopted. The institution absorbed the label and discarded the content, which is exactly what institutions do with ideas that would cost them money if taken seriously.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with that analysis, which suggests either that you are occasionally correct or that I have been in this debate long enough to lose my critical faculties. I prefer the first explanation, though I reserve the right to revisit it.
Carl von Clausewitz: I find myself equally uncomfortable reaching that conclusion, for what it is worth.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: The net assessment, then, is that Boyd contributed something real, had it misunderstood by most of his followers, watched the institution adopt his language and discard his meaning, and left a legacy that is simultaneously more important and less important than his admirers claim.
Carl von Clausewitz: More important at the tactical and training level. Less important at the strategic level. And entirely absent at the political level, which is the level where wars are actually decided.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: You keep returning to the political level as though it were an observation rather than an obsession. War has a political dimension. This is not a discovery. This is a tautology. The question is what to do with armies while the politicians manage their objectives, and on that question your framework is considerably less useful than you believe.
Carl von Clausewitz: My framework is the only framework that tells commanders when military action can accomplish what politics requires and when it cannot. That is not a minor contribution. That is the central question of strategy, and every purely operational theory, yours included, evades it entirely.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: My principles do not evade the political dimension. They operate within it. I describe how armies should be organized and employed to achieve the objectives that political authority sets. The setting of objectives is not my business. The achieving of them is, and I am considerably more helpful on that question than a philosopher who tells generals that everything is uncertain and friction is inevitable and nothing can be known for certain.
Carl von Clausewitz: I tell generals the truth. You tell generals what they want to hear, which is that there are rules, and if they follow the rules they will win. There are not rules. There are tendencies. And the gap between a rule and a tendency is exactly where wars are lost.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Tendencies are principles that cowards will not commit to! The gap between your uncertainty and my geometry is the gap between a commander who acts and a philosopher who explains why action is complicated!
Carl von Clausewitz: Geometry applied without judgment is a formula for elegant disasters executed on schedule!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Uncertainty elevated to philosophy is an excuse for officers who cannot plan!
Carl von Clausewitz: Boyd at least acknowledged that the enemy has a vote! Your geometry assumes the enemy will stand where you need them!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: MY GEOMETRY TELLS YOU WHERE TO PUT YOUR ARMY SO THE ENEMY HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO STAND THERE!
Carl von Clausewitz: THE ENEMY ALWAYS HAS A CHOICE! THAT IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF ON WAR AND YOU HAVE APPARENTLY NOT READ IT!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: I READ IT! IT TOOK FOUR TIMES AS LONG AS IT SHOULD HAVE AND SAID HALF AS MUCH AS IT CLAIMED!
Carl von Clausewitz: IT IS UNFINISHED BECAUSE I DIED! WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE FOR THE PARTS OF YOUR WORK THAT ARE SIMPLY WRONG!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: NOTHING IN MY WORK IS WRONG! IT HAS BEEN MISAPPLIED BY OFFICERS WHO LACKED THE INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY TO USE IT CORRECTLY!
Carl von Clausewitz: THAT IS WHAT EVERY THEORIST SAYS WHEN THE BATTLEFIELD DISAGREES WITH THEM!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: AND BOYD SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT AFGHANISTAN! SO PERHAPS WE HAVE BOTH IDENTIFIED HIS REAL INTELLECTUAL PREDECESSOR!
Carl von Clausewitz: BOYD’S PREDECESSOR WAS ME! HE SIMPLY DID NOT HAVE THE HONESTY TO ACKNOWLEDGE IT!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: BOYD’S PREDECESSOR WAS ME! AND HE DID NOT HAVE THE DECENCY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT EITHER!
Carl von Clausewitz: THEN WE AGREE HE WAS DISHONEST AND DERIVATIVE AND OVERRATED!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: WE AGREE ON THAT AND NOTHING ELSE! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE!
Carl von Clausewitz: WE DO AGREE ON PRECISELY THAT MUCH!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: ON THAT POINT AND NOTHING WHATSOEVER ELSE!
Antoine-Henri Jomini: If you have somehow found value in this exchange, and I cannot imagine why you would find value in being lectured at by a man who considers uncertainty a philosophy rather than a problem to be solved, please like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. Where thinkers who have actually commanded troops, advised emperors, and written books that officers read voluntarily and with comprehension discuss the questions that matter.
Carl von Clausewitz: Yes, subscribe. And I would note for the audience that Jomini’s confidence in his geometric principles did not prevent him from switching his military allegiance from Napoleon to the Russian Tsar in 1813, over a dispute about a payroll matter. It is remarkable how flexible one’s foundational principles become when the salary negotiation goes poorly. I am sure there is a geometric principle that explains it. Perhaps he simply identified the more favorable interior line.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: A man who understands his own value acts accordingly. Unlike Clausewitz, who spent the majority of his career as a staff officer observing other men make decisions, accumulated eight hundred pages of notes about the experience, and then had the considerable good fortune to die of cholera before anyone could point out that On War was unfinished, internally inconsistent in at least three places I could name without preparation, and had never once been tested against an actual operational command that he was responsible for.
Carl von Clausewitz: On War was unfinished because I died at fifty-one of a disease that killed indiscriminately and without regard for the quality of one’s scholarship. You lived to eighty-three and spent the additional thirty-two years attending dinners in St. Petersburg, collecting Russian decorations, and reminding anyone who would listen that you had once known Napoleon personally, which is a credential that becomes less impressive the further one gets from the events it references.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Knowing Napoleon personally is a professional achievement that speaks for itself, and I am content to let it speak. Napoleon read my work. Napoleon applied my principles. Napoleon won every battle he won because his operational geometry was sound, and he lost every battle he lost because he departed from those principles under the pressure of political ambition, which is, I notice, your department.
Carl von Clausewitz: Napoleon lost because the political objectives of his later campaigns were divorced from any rational strategic calculus, which is exactly my point, and which Boyd, to his extremely limited credit, would have also recognized, since even a theorist of modest strategic depth can identify catastrophic mission creep when it spans a continent. Please subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com. The product that made this conversation possible is AITalkerApp.com, which is available in the description, and which, unlike Jomini’s principles of war, continues to function effectively and without complaint when conditions become unpredictable.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: Like and subscribe. And consider carefully which of us you are trusting with your understanding of military history and strategic theory. One of us wrote a book that armies actually used to train officers for a hundred years on three continents. The other wrote a book that academics cite in order to explain why the first book was wrong, which has produced a great many academic careers and very few successful military campaigns. The audiences for those two books are very different, and I will leave you to decide which audience you would prefer to belong to.
