Support for the guerrilla cause can quickly dry up:

The continued agonizing over the May 5 killings was apparent during Greece’s latest general strike on Thursday. Roughly 20,000 union members marched through Athens, a fraction of the more than 100,000 who took to the streets the day of the murders. In the end, the anarchists also took part in Thursday’s protests, but turnout was modest, and those who did participate were peaceful.

“It’s a shock. We always thought of ourselves as people who are victims, not people who create victims,” says Panagiotis, an edgy 30-year-old who helps organize cultural events within the anarchist scene and condemns the killings. Like most members of the movement, he would only gave his first name.  “In Greece, Anarchy Yields to Soul-Searching,” Marcus Walker, Wall St. J., 22 May 2010.

As I noted in COIN, tight integration of guerrillas and people is critical if the cause is going to survive.  Otherwise, the public will — correctly — view the guerrillas as thugs and criminals.

Boyd first used the term in his briefing “New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat,” which he completed in August 1976.  He defined them in terms of the ability to “both lose energy and gain energy more quickly while outturning an adversary.” (18)  The significance of this statement was that until about the late 1960s, fighter aircraft designers had concentrated on the ability to gain energy — fly higher and faster, for example — but not to lose it.  Boyd was suggesting that you needed both, and more important, the ability to transit between the two states quickly.

Fine, but limited, it would appear, to dogfighting — air-to-air combat with short-range weapons.

But on the next chart, he began to generalize: “The idea of fast transients suggests that in order to win or gain superiority, we should operate at a faster tempo than our adversaries or inside our adversaries’ time scales.”  He concluded that if we can do this, we will appear ambiguous to our adversaries and “thereby generate confusion and disorder.”

Confusion and disorder. Wow. Between these two charts, Boyd has somehow transitioned from the Red Baron to a theory of combat, if not conflict, from the mathematical to the psychological, from engineering to strategy.

He concludes with “He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives,” in air-to-air combat and in waging war.

There are still plenty of unanswered questions, of which the most important is what does “quickest rate of change” mean if you’re not in air-to-air combat, where Boyd gives a precise definition?

However, even at this point, Boyd has uncovered the essence of what he would later call “operating inside the OODA loop,” and it wouldn’t be too much to say that the next 11 years, which took him through Patterns of Conflict, Strategic Game and Organic Design, were elaborations of this basic theme.

As told by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to the cadets of the US Air Force Academy on April 2, 2010:

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1443

Scroll down about half way.  The “to be or to do” speech is a few paragraphs before the end.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that John is finally receiving recognition from the Defense Establishment.  Now you may think it’s pushing things a little to call Bob Gates a member of the defense establishment, and perhaps you’re right, considering that he spent nearly his entire career as an intelligence professional.  But he’s been SECDEF for going on four years now and was also an Air Force officer, commissioned from OTS in 1967. That ought to do it.

I think John would be delighted, also, although (curmudgeon that he was) he’d try to hide it.