Stoked about spending the next few days praying not to see some version of this play out in the Gulf.
I thought I was perhaps overly cynical in 2020. I wasn’t nearly cynical enough.
So maybe I’m not school smart on ends-means-ways but even if Iran wants to remove mines, how will they do so when we’re blowing up all their boats
Available at CGSC 🎉
It’s stuff like this that makes my heart glow! @osinga.bsky.social
Any ship can be a minesweeper once.
Yeah, that one.
Oh it’s from the dark corner of the Internet where he still hangs his hat:
Two weeks ago on the 4th anniversary of #Russia’s full invasion of #Ukraine I got to attend the “Games of War” #wargaming conference. Here’s what I learned H/T @armchairdragoons.bsky.social:
armchairdragoons.com/gamesofwarfe...
Had a bunch of exciting news from @thedietzfoundation.bsky.social yesterday and this was part of it! Can’t wait to break it out!
About the only thing I’m enjoying from all this is that it’s made Bill Lind very very sad.
Connections Online 2026 - Wargaming Soft Factors - 20-25 April
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This is one of those "wargaming fundamentals" topics, because if you don't get morale and the other intangibles right, it's hard to meet the objectives. —— Chris Weuve, Conference Chair
wp.me/pae4WL-e2P
The kids have it tough these days. I remember as a 2ndLt when my biggest concern was writing a good squad patrol order to set up an ambush against those pesky Centralians.
The OODA-ful cards of #Maneuver Warfare
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#Maneuver Warfare is unique in that it was originally designed by a wargame practitioner for training military members which then made the conversion to the commercial wargame sector.
wp.me/pae4WL-dSN
My thanks to @armchairdragoons.bsky.social for letting me write at length about the recent “Games of War” hybrid conference hosted by University of Gdansk. Lots of great takeaways along with a good dose of humility #wargaming
Yup.
We said help is on the way before, they believed us, and they got slaughtered by the tens of thousands. I doubt they’ve finished burying the dead from that. Were I them, I wouldn’t believe us this time either.
Embedded in the places where Boyd referred to them. It’s definitive with a capital D.
While it was useful at the time for Air University to collect Boyd’s slides in a sanitized packet, their publication is frankly obsolete since it only has half the material Boyd presented.
The only thing I would add for the benefit of your readers is that if they want Boyd’s words, along with the slides, for “Strategic Game,” the transcript for the entire presentation with slides embedded is now available in “Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals” as chapter 3:
www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/...
Maybe cost for BAH or other big guys is ruinous but a lot of beltway wargaming professionals are more than happy to support wargames at a personal loss in time & money because they believe in it. The real problem is there aren’t enough of these people around & no consistent path for building more.
Finally if you haven’t read my co-author @osinga.bsky.social’s “Science, Strategy, and War” book you should, because he deconstructs in detail the influences that shaped each one of Boyd’s presentations.
a.co/d/09Cs0xwE
Hart’s book “garbage.” He dismissively says he doesn’t recommend it, then moves on to grapple with Clausewitz, whom I believe Boyd took much more seriously as a theorist than Hart, even if Boyd disagreed with him.
The video which Callahan transcribed is from 1986, and Boyd takes time to throw several jabs at Hart. By 1989, in the audio recording I transcribed and published, it seems to me that Boyd’s opinion of Hart has diminished even further, to the point that Boyd doesn’t even waste his breath calling
If you look through my review here, Boyd is much harsher on Hart in that video recording than he is in the audio recording I used:
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g9eg9...
Referred to another Boyd transcript from a different recording—the transcript from the video I shared above, which is not the source I used for my book—but Shawn Callahan of the Marine Corps History Division did his own parallel work on Boyd and built a transcript from the video source.
And by name in the presentations. He mentions Clausewitz dozens of times, Sun Tzu about the same, talks about Napoleon, Mao, Lenin, Jomini repeatedly. Hart? You can count on one hand all the times Boyd references Hart, and it’s always dismissively. In a review I did of “The Blind Strategist,” I
Hart’s thinking was virtually a non-factor in Boyd’s own framework. When someone has influenced Boyd—or if Boyd feels that a theorist has sufficient heft that that theorist’s ideas must be addressed even if Boyd disagrees, which I think is the case with CvC—Boyd refers to that person extensively
I would probably defer to @bafriedman.bsky.social and @teaandtactics.bsky.social specifically on when Boyd looked at CvC through Hart’s lens or not, again as they’ve spent more time with CvC than I. But from going through the recordings many times to turn them into transcripts, my sense is that
