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

John Boyd was America's greatest military theorist of the past hundred years. 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 rebellions 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 recommended that we turn their own tactics against them.

"A brilliant distillation" -- "Retired Reader" on Amazon.com)

This is an expanded version of Ford's graduate thesis for the War Studies program at King's College London (MA with distinction, 2010). About 20,000 words, with illustrations including reproductions of Boyd's original sketch of the OODA Loop.