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I'm reminded of Amazing Military Infographics [0], particularly one of the kickers: "The United States Military is operating at a conceptual level beyond every

I'm reminded of Amazing Military Infographics [0], particularly one of the kickers: "The United States Military is operating at a conceptual level beyond every other school of thought except perhaps academic philosophy, because it has a much larger budget." 0: https://medium.com/message/amazing-military-infographics-1ba60bdc32e7 https://medium.com/message/amazing-military-infographics-1ba...

beckingz 5y ago
This is incredible. " After a while you realize that this image could be used anywhere in any paper or presentation and make perfect sense. This is a graphic that defines a way of describing anything that has ever existed and everything that has ever happened, in any situation."
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Except it’s not novel and it came from strategy consulting decades ago (the Zachman framework in particular, which was popular at IBM in the 80s). In fact it’s one of the main methods of describing an architecture framework, and a methodology I use daily doing EA / strategy consulting. Consultants are everywhere in the military. Especially the business / strategy / org behavior types. Anything the military does will have been done a hundred times before in industry — the military just needs it at goliath scale.
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    Yes. Many of these graphs reminded me of stuff I was producing as a strategy consultant. In some cases you wonder if organizations that have too much money spend it purely on philosophical questions, unrelated to any business reality.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I think it's more of a "We're acting on some philosophy, even if it's just our own personal one." And if you're making million+ dollar bets on the basis of that philosophy, wouldn't it seem reasonable to pay six figures for a set of alternative philosophies to consider? Or, in concrete terms, the CEO who is successful once because they were lucky vs the CEO who has decades of success in wildly different environments, because they learned alternatives and chose the most apt at any time.
- philwelch 5y ago
  I'm going to dramatically oversimplify things and just blame John Boyd for this. John Boyd was an Air Force officer who came up with the OODA loop theory. Basically, a pilot in air combat loops through the stages of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, and if a pilot is capable of iterating through this loop faster than their opponent, they win. Some people realized this same theory could actually explain combat more generally (particularly maneuver warfare) as well as business and everyday life. John Boyd's magnum opus was a slide presentation of several hundred slides, which took several hours to present, which he never allowed to be abridged or summarized in any way. John Boyd was influential and I don't even think he was a complete crackpot, but the military's tendency to overuse PowerPoint and develop vague theories-of-everything as their operational doctrines reminds me of him. I don't think they pull it off as well as he did.
  - otoburb 5y ago
    >>John Boyd's magnum opus was a slide presentation of several hundred slides, which took several hours to present, which he never allowed to be abridged or summarized in any way. I think you're referring to Patterns of Conflict[1] which is/was 187 slides plus around 9 slides of sources. The funny thing is that Patterns is mostly comprised of dense text, not diagrams or pictures. It was a lot of fun trying to absorb Boyd's ideas if one can find the presentations online. They are quite a contrast to (publicly available) military briefings and papers these days given the lower text-to-visuals ratio. Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards worked with Boyd, as did Ginger Richards, on various major briefings. To your point, most of them are 40+ pages/slides each. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict
    - vageli 5y ago
      It seems to be available online [0] (found a link in the linked wiki page). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210414195621/http://www.ausairpower.net/JRB/poc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210414195621/http://www.ausair...
    - aspenmayer 5y ago
      Remastered audio combined version, no captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpFQuBY8E0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpFQuBY8E0 Nearly 5.5 hours! Standalone modern slides, almost 200 pages: http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20conflict.pdf http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20c... Alternate modern slides with PiP presentation of same presentation as above, but in separate parts, but best audio IMO, with auto-generated captions, typos included: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4pmLxkc7CTcukIlpD0UThT7Y_K09oxXe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4pmLxkc7CTcukIlpD0UThT7Y... The story behind the original uploader getting the source videos which were uploaded in separate parts, which have been remastered and combined since: https://medium.com/@jasonmbro/uploading-john-boyd-4264b82d73ed https://medium.com/@jasonmbro/uploading-john-boyd-4264b82d73... Original slides: https://geekboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/patterns-of-conflict.pdf https://geekboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/patterns-of-... via https://geekboss.com/boyd-patterns-of-conflict/ https://geekboss.com/boyd-patterns-of-conflict/ Which seems to link to an alternate version of the talk in four parts, but which is not exhaustive or complete as above versions.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  While this is a 4D framework of description, it fails to account for non-local action and seems to assume absolute simultaneity, so this is still thinking inside the box.
neither_color 5y ago
>Part of what makes military diagrams so fascinating is that they look a lot like the images civilians use to do their regular workaday jobs. It’s just software and hardware, after all, and there are only so many ways to draw a network diagram. Yet the scale of these systems is immense; the lines being drawn are between jets and satellites, not between a couple of web servers...No matter how abstract they are, these pictures describe systems that the U.S. military uses to make optimal, efficient decisions about killing other humans. Great article, despite the sardonic tone I found the graphics actually interesting, like something that would be read out loud and discussed on Jocko's podcast. That last line, however, reminded me of just how far we've taken it with systems that stalk targets from the sky for weeks to be used as evidence to authorize drone strikes. https://www.wired.com/story/palantirs-gods-eye-view-of-afghanistan/ https://www.wired.com/story/palantirs-gods-eye-view-of-afgha...
axguscbklp 5y ago
This reminds me of the mixed anger and surprise that I felt during the Snowden revelations when I realized that internally, the NSA was using a bunch of goofy-looking crude slides to communicate about the Stasi-like domestic spying apparatus that they had built using taxpayer money.
graderjs 5y ago
I had such a good laugh with this. This was so good. Thank you!

beckingz 5y ago

This is incredible. " After a while you realize that this image could be used anywhere in any paper or presentation and make perfect sense. This is a graphic that defines a way of describing anything that has ever existed and everything that has ever happened, in any situation."

wayoutthere 5y ago
Except it’s not novel and it came from strategy consulting decades ago (the Zachman framework in particular, which was popular at IBM in the 80s). In fact it’s one of the main methods of describing an architecture framework, and a methodology I use daily doing EA / strategy consulting. Consultants are everywhere in the military. Especially the business / strategy / org behavior types. Anything the military does will have been done a hundred times before in industry — the military just needs it at goliath scale.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Yes. Many of these graphs reminded me of stuff I was producing as a strategy consultant. In some cases you wonder if organizations that have too much money spend it purely on philosophical questions, unrelated to any business reality.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I think it's more of a "We're acting on some philosophy, even if it's just our own personal one." And if you're making million+ dollar bets on the basis of that philosophy, wouldn't it seem reasonable to pay six figures for a set of alternative philosophies to consider? Or, in concrete terms, the CEO who is successful once because they were lucky vs the CEO who has decades of success in wildly different environments, because they learned alternatives and chose the most apt at any time.
philwelch 5y ago
I'm going to dramatically oversimplify things and just blame John Boyd for this. John Boyd was an Air Force officer who came up with the OODA loop theory. Basically, a pilot in air combat loops through the stages of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, and if a pilot is capable of iterating through this loop faster than their opponent, they win. Some people realized this same theory could actually explain combat more generally (particularly maneuver warfare) as well as business and everyday life. John Boyd's magnum opus was a slide presentation of several hundred slides, which took several hours to present, which he never allowed to be abridged or summarized in any way. John Boyd was influential and I don't even think he was a complete crackpot, but the military's tendency to overuse PowerPoint and develop vague theories-of-everything as their operational doctrines reminds me of him. I don't think they pull it off as well as he did.
- otoburb 5y ago
  >>John Boyd's magnum opus was a slide presentation of several hundred slides, which took several hours to present, which he never allowed to be abridged or summarized in any way. I think you're referring to Patterns of Conflict[1] which is/was 187 slides plus around 9 slides of sources. The funny thing is that Patterns is mostly comprised of dense text, not diagrams or pictures. It was a lot of fun trying to absorb Boyd's ideas if one can find the presentations online. They are quite a contrast to (publicly available) military briefings and papers these days given the lower text-to-visuals ratio. Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards worked with Boyd, as did Ginger Richards, on various major briefings. To your point, most of them are 40+ pages/slides each. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict
  - vageli 5y ago
    It seems to be available online [0] (found a link in the linked wiki page). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210414195621/http://www.ausairpower.net/JRB/poc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210414195621/http://www.ausair...
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    Remastered audio combined version, no captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpFQuBY8E0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpFQuBY8E0 Nearly 5.5 hours! Standalone modern slides, almost 200 pages: http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20conflict.pdf http://www.projectwhitehorse.com/pdfs/boyd/patterns%20of%20c... Alternate modern slides with PiP presentation of same presentation as above, but in separate parts, but best audio IMO, with auto-generated captions, typos included: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4pmLxkc7CTcukIlpD0UThT7Y_K09oxXe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4pmLxkc7CTcukIlpD0UThT7Y... The story behind the original uploader getting the source videos which were uploaded in separate parts, which have been remastered and combined since: https://medium.com/@jasonmbro/uploading-john-boyd-4264b82d73ed https://medium.com/@jasonmbro/uploading-john-boyd-4264b82d73... Original slides: https://geekboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/patterns-of-conflict.pdf https://geekboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/patterns-of-... via https://geekboss.com/boyd-patterns-of-conflict/ https://geekboss.com/boyd-patterns-of-conflict/ Which seems to link to an alternate version of the talk in four parts, but which is not exhaustive or complete as above versions.
formerly_proven 5y ago
While this is a 4D framework of description, it fails to account for non-local action and seems to assume absolute simultaneity, so this is still thinking inside the box.

neither_color 5y ago

>Part of what makes military diagrams so fascinating is that they look a lot like the images civilians use to do their regular workaday jobs. It’s just software and hardware, after all, and there are only so many ways to draw a network diagram. Yet the scale of these systems is immense; the lines being drawn are between jets and satellites, not between a couple of web servers...No matter how abstract they are, these pictures describe systems that the U.S. military uses to make optimal, efficient decisions about killing other humans. Great article, despite the sardonic tone I found the graphics actually interesting, like something that would be read out loud and discussed on Jocko's podcast. That last line, however, reminded me of just how far we've taken it with systems that stalk targets from the sky for weeks to be used as evidence to authorize drone strikes. https://www.wired.com/story/palantirs-gods-eye-view-of-afghanistan/ https://www.wired.com/story/palantirs-gods-eye-view-of-afgha...

axguscbklp 5y ago

This reminds me of the mixed anger and surprise that I felt during the Snowden revelations when I realized that internally, the NSA was using a bunch of goofy-looking crude slides to communicate about the Stasi-like domestic spying apparatus that they had built using taxpayer money.

graderjs 5y ago

I had such a good laugh with this. This was so good. Thank you!