Mindology Gems - US Air Force Colonel John Boyd on Situation Awareness

Quick post to share an excerpt of a book that has some interesting content about "situation awareness". I previously wrote a piece about Awareness in the context of sports. When I stumbled upon that excerpt, I felt like it tied up nicely with my post (in all humility).

It is taken from the biography of John Boyd by Robert Coram. A former US Air Force Colonel, Boyd had a profound impact not only on fighters' approach to air combat (with his "Aerial Attack Study" manual) but also on military strategy as a whole during his time at the Pentagon.

(The book is terrific by the way, highly recommended read).

But their own closed-mindedness blinded them to Boyd’s staggering accomplishment. Before Boyd published the manual, fighter pilots thought the game of air-to-air combat was far too complex to ever fully understand. They believed the high-stakes death dance of aerial combat was too fluid to master. The “Aerial Attack Study” showed this was not the case. When a pilot goes into an aerial battle, he must have a three-dimensional picture of the battle in his head. He must have “situation awareness”; that is, he must know not only where he and each of his squadron mates are located, but also where each enemy aircraft is located. In a swirling furball of jet combat, which can range from 40,000 feet down to the ground and back again, this seems almost impossible. But situation awareness boils down to two things: first, the pilot must know the enemy’s position, and second, he must know the enemy’s velocity. (Boyd would later change “velocity” to “energy state.”) The amount of airspeed or velocity or energy available to the enemy dictates what that enemy is able to do, which maneuvers he can perform. Boyd was the first to understand the cognitive aspect of aerial combat, that it was possible to isolate not only every maneuver a fighter pilot could perform but also the counters to those maneuvers. And the counter to the counter. This meant that when a fighter pilot bounced an enemy pilot, he could know, depending on the altitude and airspeed and direction of the attack, every option available to the enemy pilot. And he knew the counter to each option. And if an enemy pilot bounced him, whether it was a high-side or low-side or head-on attack, he knew every available counter and every available counter to his counter.

In my post about awareness, I talked about Xavi and how he built his game upon great awareness of his environment. Another great football player came to mind when reading Boyd's biography: Zinedine Zidane. Zidane wasn't the most athletic, the fastest or the quickest with his feet. But he used his awareness (and his great touch with both feet) to dribble away from defenders and create space for himself. When he executed his dribbles, he would often do so by outsmarting his opponents (as opposed to just being quicker): understanding their movement + speed (i.e. their "range") and dribbling away based on those parameters.

Najib

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