Col John Boyd Quotes

Western people today may have acquaintances, but few have relationships that even remotely approximate the honest, vulnerable, committed, covenantal relationships that weave the body of Christ together in the New Testament. Related to this, while the New Testament views the church as a community of people who unite around a mission, who spend significant amounts of time together in study, worship, and ministry, and who help one another become “fully mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28; cf. Eph. 4:13; James 1:4), most Westerners assume church is a place they go to once a week to sit alongside strangers, sing a few songs, and listen to a message before returning to their insulated lives. So too, whereas the New Testament envisions the bride of Christ as a community of people who convince the world that Jesus is for real by the way our unity reflects and participates in the loving unity of the Trinity (John 17:20–23), the Western church today has been reduced to little more than a brief gathering of consumers who are otherwise unconnected and who attend the weekend event with hopes of getting something that will benefit their lives. From a kingdom perspective, this individualistic and impoverished consumer-driven view of the church is nothing short of tragic, as is the perpetual immaturity of the believers who are trapped in it. If we are serious about our covenant with Christ, we have no choice but to get serious about cultivating covenant relationships with other disciples. There are no individual brides of Christ. Jesus is not a polygamist! There

Through this book we will introduce you to the works of COL John Boyd, USAF, whose brilliant work forms the basis of what we do.  Col. Boyd passed on in 1997, but his legacy continues to grow, particularly on how to develop leaders of character to out-perform their opponents. Fred and I have spent a good part of the last decade developing ways to teach people how to practice Boyd’s OODA loop (more on this in the book).

One of Col. John Boyd’s most important insights we need to make a greater effort to understand is, “Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds.” How this applies to law enforcement is to understand what technologies, processes, policies and procedures work on the street, one must first understand how people think and act in the uncertainty, fear and chaos of dynamic encounters and what creates friction in decision making as a cop interacts with a suspect bent on getting his way or in a crisis situation such as a multiple car accident with mass casualties, a blizzard, hurricane, tornado, or fire etc.2

It also incorporated the military philosophy of Col. John R. Boyd (USAF, ret.) and the reliance on the Marine Corps’ own former strategies and tactics found in its “Small Wars” DNA. 5 American history and its foreign relations helped to forge the Marine Corps into a military institution that has the unique characteristic of being the only waterborne fighting force in the American military experience. This can be seen in the very DNA of the Marine Corps from its inception and its concomitant history. In foreign actions, both bellicose and humanitarian, from the American Revolution to its present participation in the Global War on Terror, the Marine Corps has transformed itself into a force-in-readiness capable of employing maneuver-type tactics, casting aside the attritional defensive-offensive way of war.