William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[bumperplate]

And you would be completely wrong according to Boyd. Let me explain why everything you have been told about this OODA loop stuff is wrong.


You and John Boyd are going to run a race around OODA Loop track. The winner Lives, the loser dies. First thing Boyd would do is attack you morally by going up to you and saying something like "Is there anything you would like me to tell your next of Kin at your funeral?" Then he would attack you mentally by saying something like " You do realize you are running the wrong direction don't you?" And finally he would attack you physically by breaking your leg instead of just trying to be out run you.

That is Boyd's version of OODA Looping the enemy. Get the tapes and listen for yourself.

What you posted is precisely why I said "on-the-street" understanding. Very simple and not convoluted with moral, mental, and physical confounders.

Also, what you posted is a caveat leading to a tactics axiom: if you find yourself in a fair fight, then your tactics suck. The mental, moral, and physical things you describe would be effective, but not viewed as being very fair. And that's ok.

Boyd stuff is like philosophy for me: we can argue all day about whether or not the chair is blue, what is blueness, etc. But, at some point we just agree that it's blue and put in the stack with the other blue chairs. So too with Boyd, we can argue about the meaning of the OODA loop as a result of parsing out details from hours of lectures. Or, we can just take it at face value, where it's at its most valuable, and put it in our tool kit.

I use it as a conceptual teaching aid for myself and others. It works, so long as I don't try to make it graduate level, which just leads to paralysis by analysis.