I'm with Entropy on this Issue
I think Entropy is on target with respect to his comments concerning technology. I will only add a little to what he already expresses.
When I was still in the Marine Corps, my Marines and I suffered through this painful process of serving technology, vice technology serving us on numerous occassions.
This misfocus caused warfighting skills to atrophy. Misfocus kills. Misfocus kills because service members in harms way find they do not know how to quickly adapt to a combat environment because the baseline references to operate with an infantryman mindset are lost once people depart from basic training; sustainment training is set aside to follow gadgets and develop new systems when time should be focused on studying the nature of the fight, language training, anthropological and infrastructural studies of the threat environment via the use of sophisticated technologies.
Once service members deploy in theater, they lose access to bandwidth, technologies do not hold up well in indigenous weather/environmental conditions, and I spend more time maintaining the system than reading the enemy. This is ludicrous. Machines should serve me, not the other way around.
This frustration lead me to become an ardent follower of the late Colonel John Boyd when he stated the priority in preparing and execution of war lies in "people, ideas and hardware" in that order.
Warfare is about people. Warfare is about weaponizing time and space; the weaponization of time and space is best prosecuted by those who make the most effective timely decisions utilizing a tool/model known as the "Boyd Cycle" or "OODA LOOP". We need people of all ranks to be able to make rapid/effective decisions in a time of crisis. This requires increased investment in the human mind in the form of language training, cultural training, free play exercises employing technologies and w/out technologies since our adversaries know the U.S. has the technological edge and evade/exploit their gaps. General Van Riper did this in Millenium Challenge 02 and this shut down the tech based exercise. One can read more about it here... http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...0906-iraq1.htm . For those interested in learning how other countries see they can fight us best read "Unrestricted Warfare" via this link... http://www.terrorism.com/documents/T...restricted.pdf
Thank you for making a post regarding this subject and allowing people, like myself, to respond.
Cheers and Semper fi, Bob
One good thing about OODA
Quote:
Originally Posted by
OODA.LOOP
Warfare is about people. Warfare is about weaponizing time and space; the weaponization of time and space is best prosecuted by those who make the most effective timely decisions utilizing a tool/model known as the "Boyd Cycle" or "OODA LOOP".
I respectfully and absolutely disagree. Making effective decisions in a timely manner is nothing to do with the OODA loop. The OODA loop is a simplified model of one possible decision making process.
The idea of cycling the loop faster and faster means that bad decisions based on bad observations get acted on faster, and the same point of incomplete observation is revisited in a shorter time. The problem is further compounded when technology enables faster bad decisions, based on a pretence of understanding -EG: Robert's Ridge.
If the loop was merely to state the actions for which the enemy is unprepared both, temporal and spatial, are those most likely to succeed then it would be useful, and also the definition of surprise. However I have yet to see anywhere, where Boyd stated this.
Consider the implications of the fact that
You know what you know and as such you can choose to act on or not act on such things, but much the same as any interactions between humans you can and do only control you so of course you can only plan for your actions or inactions.
This is not necessarily the same as having no control over others. Anyone whos seen crowds together for one purpose or another can see that there are ways in which to produce almost certain reactions to stimuli. This is the only way I can see that one can honestly plan for enemy actions but it still comes down to a better more informed SWAG then one might generally make intuitively. The "hard" decisions still have to be made but the tools can at least help to make them slightly more informed than might otherwise happen.
Since this thread has devolved into an OODA debate
I refer readers to an earlier Boyd/OODA debate that sort of started with my post here
One good thing about OODA
In a number of currently active threads, there has been a lot of discusion about the failures and inadequacies of Boyd's OODA loop theory. I agree with most of them. However, I feel that it did bring one important fact to the table and this fact is often forgotten. OODA focuses on the "human" factor and that it is men that fight and determine the winner and loser in a conflict. For this reason alone, I feel OODA has some merit, though it is flawed as a complete model.
Reed
forgot to include this...
"If the loop was merely to state the actions for which the enemy is unprepared both, temporal and spatial, are those most likely to succeed then it would be useful, and also the definition of surprise. However I have yet to see anywhere, where Boyd stated this."
William, your comment is exactly what the Boyd Cycle is meant to capture. Boyd's works were put into writing by Dr Chet Richards.
Cheers, Bob:D