Larry Kummer*
August 25, 2025
Perhaps Chuck is over-conceptualizing the D-Day operations. The whole D-day deception – Operation Fortitude – is the stuff of legend. But there is little evidence that it affected German deployments in a meaningful way. A bigger advantage of the Allies was Hitler’s bizarre command structure for the defense.
As for D-Day, the accounts differ in their key details. Hitler was by then a meth-head, possibly sedated around 3 am by his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. When the call came at roughly 6 am about activity at Normandy, it is uncertain if he could have been awakened. Perhaps his aids didn’t try. He got the news at roughly noon, along with his generals’ request for permission to move the tanks. Sometime that afternoon Hitler ordered the tanks unleashed.
How long did Fortitude’s deception ops delay Hitler’s response? If the tanks had been released at noon – a few hours earlier, in full daylight, fully exposed to Allies’ air power – how would it have affected the outcome? We can only guess.
I said that perhaps Chuck “over-conceptualized” those events. He described them as a very high-level abstraction – and, like all such, of value to the extent it is useful. Here, I’ll offer another perspective that is simpler and, in my opinion, equally useful. As Boyd said, you have to slice the problem from many different directions.
Another example of conflating OODA loops with a simple action is Operation Mincemeat, intended to confuse the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Like Fortitude, it was wildly complicated. But with a different twist in the ending, the story of which doesn’t require OODA loops.
Mincemeat had excellent results. A key part was “The Man Who Never Was,” a fake British officer whose corpse washed up on the Spanish coast with secret documents in his pocket. But the two key Germans in Spain who forwarded this hot info to Berlin saw through the trick. Desperate to justify their cushy jobs, however, they reported their actions as a valuable opportunity. If they had been more honest and loyal, this might have alerted the Germans to Sicily as our next target.
History is contingent: The German’s D-Day alert did not reach the Normandy zone; two corrupt Germans did not blow the whistle on Mincemeat. These are factors that move history.
In the present day, discussions of 4GW (and 5GW and 6GW) that center on OODA loops show the decay of the military arts in America: bizarrely abstract and very complex. Suitable for a nation that tied in Korea and lost every significant war in the following 70 years.
Oddly, the winners in those wars did so without such awesome PhD-level theories.
Part of our problem stems from a focus on the wrong aspects of Boyd’s theories, like Paleolithic hunters given a telescope – who then use it as a microscope. I recommend we broaden our approach to Boyd. For example, we should take to heart his description of grand strategy in Patterns of Conflict, slide 139:
- Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
- Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
- Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
- Attract uncommitted states to our cause. End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts.
It’s worth pointing out that this section culminates in his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” slide 144, whose purpose is nothing less than to “Improve fitness as an organic whole to shape and expand influence or power over the course of events in the world.” The acronym “OODA” doesn’t appear anywhere on that slide.
In fact, my candidate for Boyd’s greatest insight applies at all levels, from building a strong society, to grand strategy, to building a military, to tactics:
“People, Ideas, and Hardware. ‘In that order!’ the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.”
Ideas spread best when in their simplest (or core) form. Christianity had its fastest rate of growth of converts before the Gospels were written, telling people little more than ‘Christ died for our sins and rose again.’ Another way to say this: The passages I quote are Boyd 101. Only when those are mastered should his disciples attempt to teach Boyd 201. That time might be many years in the future.
*Larry Kummer is the editor of the Fabius Maximus website, writing about these matters since 2003 (often presciently). [Editor’s note: His description. I am not prone to disagree, although one must contend with the blind hog syndrome.]
Here are some listings of posts on his site:
On OODA Loops (warning, Chuck and I are both featured, more prominently than we deserve):
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ooda+loop%22+site%3Afabiusmaximus.com
On 4GW:
Slightly East of New 
William Lind responded to this comment. He is, as always, insightful. Posted with his generous permission.
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Larry Kummer was kind enough to send me a short piece by Chuck Spinney and his own comments on it – in the manner God intended. On paper, not by sodomizing electrons.
Spinney’s essay is quite good. I would add that I have wondered for some time if a very slow OODA loop, one that is hardly perceptible, can beat a fast one.
Afghanistan offers an example. As slow as the US military’s OODA loops generally are, the Taliban’s was much slower, almost geologic. The reason theirs prevailed was that they did not need closure and we did. In Pahstun culture, all that is required in opposing an invader is that this generation fight and so do the next, the one after that, etc. As some point, we had to go home (much too late, but eventually we did). So they won, not by shortening their OODA loop but by stretching ours out to infinity.
I must dissent from something Larry said in his commentary on Spinney. “{D}iscussions of 4GW (and 5GW and 6GW) that center on OODA loops show the decay of the military arts in America: bizarrely abstract and very complex. Suitable for a nation that tied in Korea and lost every significant war in the following 70 years. Oddly, the winners in those wars did so without such awesome PhD-level theories.”I would argue to the contrary, the simplicity of American military theory, then and now, played a large role in our defeats. Our theory, taken directly from the inter-war French army, is that whoever can pile on the most firepower wins. The French simply said “Fire kills.”
In contrast, the NVA had the sophisticated guerrilla warfare theory of Mao Tse-tung as their guide. In Afghanistan and Iraq, our enemies had military theory embedded in their culture, theory that fit their nature and the terrain where they fought. Much of what we faced in Iraq, and more broadly in Islamic terrorism, is classic Arab light cavalry warfare, now carried out at the operational as well as the tactical level, and again embedded in their culture.
As to 4GW theory, at its core, it is simple and has nothing to do with the OODA loop. As Martin van Creveld says, what changes is not how war is fought but who fights and what for. At its core is the loss of legitimacy by the state and its replacement by a wide variety of other entities, tribes, gangs, religions, etc. Where Body comes in is with his stress on the moral level of war as the most powerful level. That is where 4GW, the struggle for legitimacy, is mostly fought. The American (really French) way of war is most vulnerable there, because our massive use of firepower destroys us at the moral level.
If you want an example, look at what Israel is doing to itself in Gaza. David has become Goliath.