OODA loop

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown File:Fighter planes.png John Boyd getting inside some Russki’s OSDA Loop yesterday. (Ok this is badly photoshopped drivel) In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

AIR CONTROLLER MACIAS: Maybe we ought to turn on the search-lights now?
REX KRAMER: No. That’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do.

—Airplane! (1980)

When in direct, bilateral conflict — you know, dog-fighting, chess, cricket, in/out referendum on membership of the European Union — an “OODA loop” is a player’s decision cycle: “observe, orient, decide, act”.

The idea is that you must take in what is happening (observe), synthesise a theory of what the other guy is up to (orient), figure out what to do about it (decide) and then do it (act) before your opponent gets through its own decision cycle works out what you’re up to and changes up what it is planning to do to back. Whoever changes tack first spoil’s the other one’s clever plan.

Hand-to-hand combat is a wicked environment. You can’t just execute on your plan ignoring how the other guy will react and adapt.

The OODA loop concept was invented by contrarian US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd’s classic dog-fighting manoeuvre, when being pursued, was abruptly to fly straight up, stalling his plane, catching his pursuer off-guard, and forcing her to fly straight under him, then dropping down on the attacker and giving her the full nine yards.

The player who can do it faster — thereby rendering the other player’s observation and orientation= obsolete before it can decide and act — is “inside her opponent’s OODA loop” and, as long as she can continuously keep her OODA loop cycling fast enough, will have the opposition constantly reacting to what she is doing, chasing the game, having to change tactics without ever getting onto the front foot.

So, generally, having the ball, rather than chasing around after it.

It shouldn’t really have taken a maverick Top Gun Actor to tell the world that in combat situations — finite games — are usually won by the attacking team, but there you have it.

Famously, the Brexit side of the Brexit Referendum was marshalled by a chap, Dominic Cummings, who remains a big fan of the OODA loop theory, and used it to great advantage to keep the Remain side permanently destabilised.

Now getting inside your opponent’s punch is all well and good so long as it is your opponent, of course, and Matthew Syed has rightly pointed out that dogfighting as a strategy for peacetime governance didn’t work out so well for Cummings since the idea wasn’t the finite game of defeating utterly an opponent in a binary, winner-take-all showdown, but the infinite game of keeping as many people happy for as long and often as possible.

Throwing OODA loops is an exhausting, destructive, destabilising business. It works best for zero-sum, short-duration fixed-rule games where keeping other players at a disadvantage is the optimal outcome. But if your game is “keepy uppy” — which in the broadest sense most of political and social life is —

See also

• Decision-making
• Brexit
• ISDA ninja
• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility