OODA loop
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File:Fighter planes.png John Boyd getting inside some Russki’s OSDA Loop yesterday. (Ok this is badly photoshopped drivel)
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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)[1]
{{quote|Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased.
It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future.
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 your opponent is up to (orient),[3] figure out what to do about it (decide) and then do it (act) before she gets through her decision cycle, works out what you’re up to and changes up what she is planning to do to back.
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. By getting inside the punch, you can set up a dynamic where your are dictating opponent is never gets out of reaction mode. Hence the OODA loop. Keep the other guy off kilter.
The OODA loop 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 past, then dropping down on the attacker and giving her the full nine yards.[4]
The player who acts fastest renders the other player’s observation/orientation/decision obsolete before the slower player can act — gets “inside the opponent’s OODA loop”. As long as she can keep cycling through the decisions fast enough, she will have the opposition constantly scrambling to react: chasing the game, adjusting defence without ever getting to attack.
So, generally, having the ball, rather than chasing around after it.
It shouldn’t have taken a maverick Top Gun Actor to tell the world that combat situations — finite games — are usually won by whoever has the initiative team, but there you have it.[5]
Famously Dominic Cummings is a big fan of the OODA loop theory, and used it to great advantage during the Brexit referendum campaign to keep the Remain permanently destabilised. Whether he knows about it or not, we rather think Donal Trump is a natural OODA looper, too.
Now getting inside your opponent’s punch is all well and good as long as it is your opponent, of course. Matthew Syed has pointed out[6] that dogfighting didn’t work so well as a strategy for peacetime governance for Mr Cummings since he was no longer engaged in the finite game of defeating outright an opponent in a winner-take-all showdown, but rather 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 — results will be more variable.
Of course, part of the infinite game is to know when you are also in a finite game — opposition party lobs plenty of grenades at those committed to orderly governance — so or is it true to say OODA loops have no place in polite society. Put pick your moment.
See also
- Decision-making
- Brexit
- ISDA ninja
- Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
References
- ↑ Oh, go on:
- ↑ Finite and Infinite Games.
- ↑ “Orient” doesn’t seem as good a word to me as “synthesise”, especially as that would have made the acronym “OSDA”, which all ninjas will find pleasing.
- ↑ Speaking of dogfighting, those public-spirited kill-joys at Wikipedia tell us the legend that “the whole nine yards” originated from the total length of a Spitfire’s machine gun belt (hence, “to shoot everything you have at once”) is an urban myth. The phrase dates back to the late 19th century, before there were any Spitfires. Boo.
- ↑ You can get inside an attacker’s OODA loop by intercepting a pass, I suppose).
- ↑ “Looping the Loop”, Sideways, BBC podcast.