J. William DeMarco
What NATO calls “cognitive warfare” is not simply information operations rebranded. It transcends land, sea, air, space, and even cyberspace. Its purpose is not to control what people know, but to shape how they know it, altering the orientation process that underpins judgment and action. Russia and China treat this as a primary instrument of power: a way to fragment societies and achieve strategic effects below the threshold of armed conflict. The center of gravity is no longer fleets or factories but the shared grasp of reality itself.
The key to navigating this battlespace lies in the work of U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Known as “40 Second Boyd” for his prowess in the cockpit, he was more profoundly a strategist of adaptation. His 1976 essay “Destruction and Creation” explained how humans adjust their mental models to a changing world. What Boyd framed as the engine of survival, adversaries today have learned to weaponize against their targets.
Boyd argued that survival depends on a relentless cycle: destroy outdated mental models and create new ones that better fit reality. He called the first step destructive deduction — breaking apart frameworks when they no longer match the facts. The second step was creative induction — assembling new connections, often from unrelated domains, into a more coherent picture. His famous thought experiment showed how pieces from a boat, a skier, a tank, and a bicycle could be recombined into a snowmobile. Adaptation, in Boyd’s view, was the decisive act of creation.
This dialectic powers his better-known OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Most focus on speed, but Boyd’s real insight was the centrality of orientation. Those who can dismantle outdated assumptions and synthesize new ones under pressure gain the advantage. Those who cannot fall into confusion, disorder, and paralysis.
To underscore the point, Boyd gestured to Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Each revealed limits on knowledge: No system can prove itself fully consistent, no observation is perfectly precise, and all closed systems drift toward disorder. The implication is clear. Any person, institution, or state that seals itself inside rigid doctrines will eventually misalign with reality. Only open systems — capable of destruction and creation — can endure.
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