Chet Richards

“You know,” a colleague told me a couple of days ago, “motherhood-and-mismatches is the heart of Boyd.” I was flabbergasted to say the least: It had taken me years, many of them working with John, to come to the same conclusion. I guess this shows we’re making progress getting Boyd’s stuff out there.

At its simplest, the concept of motherhood-and-mismatches (M&M) is grand strategy at work. Recall that in Boyd’s scheme — yours may differ, of course — the purpose of grand strategy is to pump up our morale, degrade that of our opponents, attract the uncommitted to our cause, and end the conflict on favorable terms without sowing the seeds for future (unfavorable) conflict. A tall order, but if you lose at the grand strategic level — your alliances unravel, your own people lose heart, and opponents seem emboldened, even if losing on the battlefield — your chances of pulling out a victory are slim.

Boyd presented one mechanism for executing grand strategy in Strategic Game, where he suggested playing the interaction and isolation game, particularly at the moral level:

Morally we interact with others by avoiding mismatches between what we say we are, what we are, and the world we have to deal with, as well as by abiding by those other cultural codes or standards that we are expected to uphold. (49)

Morally adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well being to the detriment of others (i.e. their allies, the uncommitted, etc.) by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold. (47)

Motherhood and mismatches. If we can carry out such a program, then we can accomplish the purposes of grand strategy. The game can be played at levels other than just moral-to-moral, which I’ll discuss in future posts. For now, let me conclude with the obvious: You cannot morally isolate your opponents. You can do things like:

1. Don’t get caught violating principles you claim to uphold
2. Give your opponents all the rope they want
3. Make sure they receive full credit and publicity when they do violate their professed moral codes, although you have to be careful not to trigger a sympathy backlash. Often it’s best for somebody else to do the actual exposing, while you silently just shake your head. Patience is a virtue in this game.

You must, for example, always be seen as acting in the best interests of the organization, while your opponents pursue selfish, career-enhancing agendas.

John evolved this “candy” strategy through years of bureaucratic warfare going all the way back to his Nellis days. But it reached its height after he retired and was dueling high-ranking functionaries at the Pentagon. Robert Coram’s book relates several fine examples, particularly those dealing with Chuck Spinney (pp. 362-368) and Jim Burton (pp. 403 ff.).