Bad news if you’re an antelope, but in that case, probably something you already knew.

It isn’t just speed. Sure, the cheetah is the fastest mammal, but its 60 mph dash capability primarily gets it into position, into the envelope. If speed were all there was to it, there would be a lot of overshoots.

The key to the endgame is agility. As the New York Times explains it in “Cheetahs’ Secret Weapon: A Tight Turning Radius“:

But it turns out that speed is not the secret to their prodigious hunting skills: a novel study of how cheetahs chase prey in the wild shows that it is their agility — their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly — that gives those antelope such bad odds.

In Boyd’s framework, a tight turning radius per se would be “maneuverability,” not agility.  But terms like “abruptly” certainly add a flavor of agility, which more properly is the ability to transition from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an opponent.

But are cheetahs operating inside antelopes’ OODA loops? Are they changing the situation more rapidly than antelopes can comprehend, thereby achieving the intention of Patterns 132:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to wait for more research.

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These two briefings are elaborations of themes that Boyd introduced in “Destruction and Creation” and Patterns of Conflict:

• Strategic Game includes a long section on how operating at a faster tempo than an opponent can cause him to collapse. Frankly, I think Boyd made a mistake by devoting so much space to this topic (six pages) because it has fixed the notion of rapid tempo in people’s minds as the essence of Boyd’s strategy. Worse, some people confuse “rapid tempo” with “rapid OODA loop” (which appears in none of Boyd’s briefings).  It’s worth pointing out that he entitled this section “Illuminating Example,” not “essence of my theory” or some such. In fact, the very next chart explains the purpose of the “illuminating example,” which is the justification for building snowmobiles (and which is the essence of his theory as made clear in his “Revelation”):

We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. If we can do this, we will be able to surface new repertoires and (hopefully) develop Fingerspitzengefühl for folding our adversaries back inside themselves, morally-mentally-physically—so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s happening—without suffering the same fate ourselves.

This is, incidentally, the only mention of the German word Fingerspitzengefühl in any of Boyd’s material.

• Organic Design is an ode to implicitness, continuing a theme he began back in charts 78 and 79 of Patterns. The word “implicit” occurs some 20 times in this short presentation, including in his definition of “orientation” (chart 15) and in discussions of the inherently implicit nature of human beings (charts 2, 19, 21, 22, etc.). It’s worth pointing out that Boyd did not draw a clear distinction between the concepts of “intuitive” and “implicit.” The briefing concludes with his re-conceptualization of command & control.

Deletes references to d-n-i.net and belisarius.com. These URLs have been taken over by someone else and have no relation to the original sites.