OODA Loop

"Adapt, react, readapt, act"

Iterating OODA faster is not the same as getting inside the adversary’s OODA loop. That’s a common misconception. It’s more that, you are able to drive the adversary’s OODA loop so that they start doing things in a way you control. Sometimes that means iterating faster, but if you are not controlling the adversary’s OODA loop, you are more likely to be “observe, overreact, deny, apologise”, just doing it faster. That’s something you should be doing to the adversary, rather than something you yourself should be doing.

For example, a friend told me this story. He doesn’t know OODA as a formalism, but he knows human nature and practices martial art. He was at a party and some dude hits on his girlfriend and then challenges him to a first person shooter game. He told me, he doesn’t have great reflexes, but he knew how people behave and act, and so he was able to dictate the entire engagement.

My apologies on having you do the googling for me! Huge thanks!

I fear the Wikipedia article offers only the slightest of overviews of a surprisingly deep subject. Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to start.

But I would suggest also reading the related "Patterns of Conflict" Wikipedia page:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict

Which references this 1986 version of the presentation:

  https://www.ausairpower.net/JRB/poc.pdf

I met John Boyd at Eglin when I was a kid, and later in the 80s when I was a Marine. Dude was a complete nut. But I mean that as a compliment. Preaching a brand of war-fighting at odds with the dominant narrative, I would not have been surprised to see Apple feature his image in a "think different" commercial.

The Air Force was slow to warm up to Boyd (and the OODA Loop) -- but the Marines were ready to hear something new. Here's a page with some decent info, including a link to a short video where John Schmitt, Van Riper and (my old boss) Al Gray discuss the "intellectual renaissance" in how they thought about war-fighting. If you're not a military history nut, the 5 minute video is good to give you an idea for how "novel" ideas permeated the US military in the 70s and 80s. You don't HAVE to be an Air Force pilot or Marine to make use of the intellectual underpinnings of Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict." But you MAY miss out on some critical detail if the only thing you read is about the more-generic, not-specific-to-the-military OODA loop.

Which is to say... even if you're not inclined to study military history or operations, you may get some decent context on the formation of the OODA loop by investigating the environment in which it arose. "Maneuver Warfare" is much more than the OODA loop, but it was definitely influenced by Boyd's E-M Theory, Patterns of Conflict and the OODA loop.

Here... the videos on this page total just over 10 minutes. Worth a watch.

  https://grc-usmcu.libguides.com/pme/qpme/history-of-mcdp-maneuver-warfare/context-background

And... the link to the full video seems to be broken, so here's the direct YouTube link if you're hip:

  https://youtu.be/RL4__NVYByw

Every discussion I see of the OODA loop is almost always ridiculously oversimplified to the point of being useless or just plain wrong. I watched a ~2 hour interview on YouTube with a guy who worked alongside Boyd when he was developing the idea, and the way he explained it just clicked and was one of the most beautiful ideas I've seen to date.

You mostly see it depicted as a circle, well forget that as it's completely meaningless in that formulation. Search up the original diagram of it and you see that it's actually a set of loops through which there are some different pathways.

It starts with an observation that comes from the outside world, and proceeds to the orientation phase which is about how you interpret the situation, and from the orientation phase it can go one of three ways. In one path you aren't sure what action you need to take so you form a hypothesis upon which you act, which generates a change in the external world which then becomes a new observation and the cycle starts again. Another path is that of a reflexive or instinctual reaction in which you have no need to form a hypothesis but rather you have a heuristic upon which you act, and so you are able to act quicker, and again your action generates a change in the external world which becomes a new observation and the cycle starts again. The third and most important pathway, and they key idea/realisation, is that new observations can be generated directly from the orientation phase and this can be exploited! Why? It's a positive feedback loop that is devoid of any information from the external world, so the more iterations it goes through before finally breaking out and going through one of the paths that do interact with the external world it will be more and more detached from reality and hence the action will be less effective at moving you towards your goals.

I recall the guy saying that Boyd's key insight was the exploitability of that positive feedback loop that was detached from physical reality and if one can purposely trigger it in their adversary they can make their adversary behave in a way that takes them away from their goals. To me that's such a neat observation.