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

John Boyd was America's greatest military theorist since Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the 20th Century. Best known for his formulation of the OODA Loop, Colonel Boyd was an original thinker in air-to-air combat, warplane design, and the fluid, mobile style of combat known to the Germans as blitzkrieg and to the US Army as "maneuver warfare." But what of the costly, drawn-out insurgency that baffled America in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq? In this short book, Daniel Ford applies Boyd's thinking to the problem of counter-insurgency. Boyd found many similarities between "blitzers" and insurgents, and he suggested that we turn their own tactics against them.

This is an expanded version of Mr. Ford's graduate thesis for the War Studies program at King's College London (MA with distinction, 2010).