The Mind of War

Bibliography:

Hammond, Grant. “The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security.” Smithsonian Books, New York. 2004.

Review: Let this be the next read in your library toward a fuller, better and more concise study of Boyd’s Cycle (the OODA Loop). Mr. Hammond fills in a lot of gaps in other efforts, not intentional but more depth toward understanding the man and how he came to create his strategic art of war or what he called, “Patterns of Conflict.” 

My Karate and Martial Arts aficionado’s will wonder what this has to do with karate and martial arts and self-defense and, “Competitions,” and I can say, “plenty.” Take the authors I often promote for study, Marc MacYoung and Rory Miller, whose works convey many valuable aspects of the OODA for self-defense and the professional disciplines like Police and Military. 

Yes, it started about fighter pilots in combat but it grew into this thing tantamount to the works of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Clausewitz. I am discovering more by this study and connecting karate and martial arts for self-defense to the OODA, etc. I find this not just amazingly interesting but a valuable data study of how we can better utilize our studies, practices and training of karate, martial arts and self-defense. It should be its own principle in the fundamental principles of defense methodologies, etc. Yeah!