Chuck Spinney

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The OODA Loop and Lean: What John Boyd Wrote in the Margins

By Chet Richards and Brian “Ponch” Rivera

“Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” by John Guerriero, Erie /Morning News, 1992. Boyd explains just-in-time. The article credits Taiichi Ohno with the system, and Boyd credits Shigeo Shingo with quick die changes. John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3).

In 1992, John Boyd went home to Erie, Pennsylvania, to give the commencement address at Strong Vincent High School, where he had graduated in 1945. Before the ceremony, he told a Morning News reporter what American manufacturers needed to learn from the Japanese.

“We’re taking cues from the Japanese. Now we’re going to have to learn from them, and we are. You can’t be arrogant in this business. There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.””We got too comfortable with our methods. It’s like a weatherman. Every once in a while, you’ve got to look out the door and find out what’s going on.”

To people who know Boyd only as a fighter pilot, a tactician of air-to-air combat or a philosopher of conflict, it may seem strange to hear him talk about manufacturing. His interest in business and manufacturing, however, went back many years. His first college degree was in economics, and in the early 1960s the Air Force sent him to Georgia Tech for a second degree, in industrial engineering.

By 1992, Boyd had studied the Toyota Production System in depth. Material in his papers, now held by the Marine Corps History Division at Quantico, Virginia, shows that this interest grew out of his earlier work on the theory of conflict and competition. In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd’s advice was to “operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops.” He wanted to understand how the Toyota Production System let Toyota do that to American competitors that were much larger and better financed.

Chet laid out a business example in his June 1989 briefing for Lockheed, “War, Chaos, and Business,” using what George Stalk called the H-Y War. In 1981, Yamaha announced that it would become the world’s largest motorcycle maker, a position Honda held. Honda counterattacked. Over the next eighteen months it introduced 113 new models against Yamaha’s 37, and Yamaha gave up: “We want to end the H-Y War. It was our fault.” In Boyd’s terms, Honda was operating inside Yamaha’s OODA loop.

The same briefing listed how to tell the approach is working against a business competitor: “His new products are consistently late,” “Turnover is high throughout his organization,” “He constantly blames his customers,” and “He launches witchhunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for The Cause of His Problem.” These are the business cousins of what Boyd described in war, where the aim is to “generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos.” As we read it, Boyd saw the same symptoms in American industry, and that is the warning behind his Erie remark about the weatherman.

Then, as books on the Toyota Production System (TPS) appeared in English during the 1980s, he got a close look at how the Japanese actually did it.

He explained one of the primary elements of the TPS, just-in-time, in one line: “What it really is, is you get what you want, when you want it and in the amount you want it.” The Japanese, he said, studied American mass production after the war and “took it to the next level up.” A Toyota took 17 man-hours to build, Boyd said, against 30 hours for a similar General Motors car. The article says the system “was invented by the late Taiichi Ohno, an engineer and later vice president in charge of production at one of the Toyota automobile plants.” Ohno’s consultant, Shigeo Shingo, developed quick ways of changing dies, so model changes took minutes instead of hours.

As Ohno himself explains, he did not “invent” the Toyota Production System. It evolved over many years, starting with the invention of the auto-activated loom, which would stop “should any one of the many warp threads break or the weft threads run out.” As Chet recalls, the TPS material Toyota gave prospective suppliers in the early 1990s credited three people as its primary creators: Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno. Ohno gives them generous credit in his own book.

That distinction matters, because what interested Boyd most about the TPS was how it evolved. It struck a personal note. In the early 1960s, Boyd and the mathematician Thomas Christie had built energy-maneuverability theory, a way to compare the performance of two air-to-air fighters across their entire ranges of speed, altitude, acceleration and turn rate. Fighter pilots still learn it. It changed the design of modern fighters, away from higher, farther and faster and toward maneuverability and agility.

Why, Boyd wondered, was he able to build it when many people with far more knowledge of aerodynamics, propulsion and even basic physics could not? According to Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, as he told it to Chet, Boyd thought about that question for years. His answer became his first paper after retiring, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). As Chet reads Boyd’s later work, Boyd applied that answer to everything he did for the rest of his career.

The OODA loop and PDCA do different jobs

Boyd, in his usual voracious manner, did not stop with the TPS. He read Shewhart and Deming closely, and there he met the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle. At that point the OODA loop had not yet been sketched. It was described as a cycle of observation, orientation, decision and action. Chet’s 1989 Lockheed briefing drew it that way, as four words in a cycle, credited to Boyd’s “Patterns.” Lockheed was doing a lot with Deming and PDCA at the time, so later in the same briefing Chet set the Shewhart/Deming cycle under the heading “THIS SHOULD LOOK FAMILIAR.” In that early form, the two did look alike. Chet’s manuscript from the late 1980s called the Shewhart/Deming cycle “a final example of the O-O-D-A loop in business” and gave it its job: “The purpose of this cycle is to get your act together internally so that you can compete externally.”

The sketch Boyd produced on 28 June 1995, in “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” looks very different from PDCA. Orientation sits at the center, shaped by genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences and new information. Feed-forward and feedback paths run through it, and implicit guidance and control runs from orientation straight to observation and action.

We see PDCA and the OODA loop doing different jobs. PDCA is a method a team uses to test and improve a process. The OODA loop represents how a living system, whether a person, a team or a company, interacts with a changing environment full of other adaptive agents. Run well, PDCA improves OODA loops.

Boyd saw the limit of any cycle that runs only inside a process. On a legal pad dated 5 May 1992, under the heading “Unstated Message derived from Shewhart & Deming,” he wrote:

“We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system unless we reach out beyond that process/system. … or put another way … We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system from within that process/system.”

As we read it, improvement needs information from outside the process, and the OODA loop is how that information gets in.

What Boyd was reading

On another page of the same legal pad, dated 15 July 1992, Boyd wrote out a reading list. It includes Rafael Aguayo’s book on Deming, Deming’s Out of the Crisis, Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, Ichiro Majima’s The Shift to JIT, three books by Ohno, two by Shingo, Stalk and Hout’s Competing Against Time, and The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos. The source list for his briefing cycle, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, carries the same three Ohno books and the same two Shingo books.

Boyd’s “Reading Outside” list. Ohno and Shingo sit in the same list as Gödel, Heisenberg and Bohr, Shewhart and Deming, and the MIT team of Womack, Jones and Roos. An arrow runs down to “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …” John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 111469, p. 54 (Box 17, Folder 10).

Another page shows where Toyota sat in his thinking. Under the heading “Reading Outside,” Boyd listed the people he drew from: Löwenheim and Skolem, Heisenberg and Bohr, the Hawthorne Study, Gödel, Gentzen and Tarski, Shewhart and Deming, Jay Forrester and E.T. Hall. Then come “Taiichi Ohno & Shigeo Shingo (1978-1992),” the MIT team, and Stalk and Hout, on the same list as the mathematicians and the physicists. An arrow runs from the list down to a box: “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …”

That reading came before the 1995 sketch, and we believe the Toyota system influenced it, through Toyota’s continuous interaction with its environment and its emphasis on orientation. In the margin of Imai’s Kaizen, next to a figure that sets “Innovation” against “Kaizen,” Boyd wrote: “They’re not necessarily true. Both Taiichi Ohno’s & my own work blow these juxtapositions apart.”

Beside one of his OODA loop sketches, on a page from a telephone conversation in the 1990s, Boyd wrote that the loop “can be used to represent how we deal with this world around us, regardless of our profession.”

Ponch has done Lean work for many years, Toyota included, and this is the thread he kept pulling in Boyd’s papers and in Boyd’s personal library at the Marine Corps History Division. Here is what he found in the margins.

Boyd thought the MIT team missed Ohno

The Machine That Changed the World (1990) made the word “lean” famous. John Krafcik coined it two years earlier, in a 1988 article in the Sloan Management Review. Krafcik also served as the MIT team’s assembly plant survey leader. Boyd’s copy of the book is full of his notes. On the blank page that closes chapter 3, facing the Part Two title, “The Elements of Lean Production,” he wrote:

Boyd’s note on the blank page before Part Two of his copy of The Machine That Changed the World. Handwriting only. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0101.

“It is clear from reading chapter III (3) that the authors did not come to grips with Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. Furthermore there is no mention of Shigeo Shingo and his contributions. (Why is this so) Because, in reality, they do not understand how to make snowmobiles which in turn permits one to ‘leapfrog’ the competition. And leapfrog is the name-of-the-game if you want to survive and grab in an evolving, competitive reality.”

Snowmobiles are Boyd’s image for creation, from “Destruction and Creation.” You take skis, an outboard motor, bicycle handlebars and tank treads, pull them apart from the things they belong to, and recombine them into something new. His complaint, as we read it, is that the MIT team described the parts Toyota had built and skipped the creative process Ohno used to build them. Inside that same chapter, on page 62, Boyd says kanban “is only part of the JIT system,” and the authors “have not captured Ohno’s reverse ‘thinking.'”

In other words, unlike Boyd, the MIT team did not dig into the thinking behind how the creators of the TPS evolved the system. Ohno covers this in detail in his book, and we think it struck a chord with Boyd as he reflected on how he had evolved energy-maneuverability and then the rest of his work. To be fair to Womack, Jones and Roos, that does not appear to have been their aim.

He was just as hard on the managers the book describes. Early in Part Two, the authors recount their first interview with the senior managers at General Motors’ Framingham plant, who had just returned from a tour of NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint venture. Boyd wrote above the passage: “Folded back inside themselves, possessed mental images that could neither appreciate nor cope with what’s really going on.”

GM had a front-row seat. NUMMI opened in 1984, and yet, as Frank Langfitt reported for This American Life, “It was 15 years before GM took the lessons of NUMMI seriously.”

Boyd saw Toyota inside Detroit’s OODA loop

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 65 of The Machine That Changed the World, shown in four strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0100.

Where the book explains how the West misread Japanese success, Boyd wrote across the top of page 65:

“Japanese totally inside Detroit OODA loop; why? We read Japanese thru our orientation while Japanese exploit our orientation & theirs by knowing both. Therefore with their wider focus or wider orientation they understand us we don’t understand them. Shades of Sun Tzu: Know your enemy, know yourself.”

What Boyd credits is a wider orientation, and as we read it, speed follows from orientation. Boyd said as much at a 1988 Defense Department conference on agility, where he defined agility as “the ability to shift from one unfolding OODA loop pattern to another by being able to transition from one orientation to another.” Chet quoted that definition in his 1989 briefing, and his manuscript makes the same point: “your ability to cycle rapidly through O-O-D-A loops (old definition of agility) depends on your ability to change your orientations (new definition).”

Boyd read pull as control from the outside in

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 18 of Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, shown in three strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. His last words, “is bottom-up,” run across the printed text and are cut from the image. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0203.

In his copy of Kaizen, next to a passage on the manager’s role, Boyd wrote:

“If looked at this way a’la Taiichi Ohno then the customer or subsequent process controls the … previous process. [In] other words control is really exercised by the environment (customer). Hence control is outside-in—bottom-up not top-down—inside-out. Put simply command may be top-down but control is bottom-up.”

He came back to the idea at Imai’s section titled “The Next Process Is the Customer”: “Tie this idea with Taiichi Ohno’s Kanban and we see control is exerted upstream (one more time).” In TPS terms, that is a pull system, in which the next process draws work from the one before it and the customer sets the pace.

Boyd held other authors to the same standard. In his copy of Aguayo’s book on Deming, beside a passage on the meaning of control, he wrote: “These comments while nice do not really address the … nature of control. If he had read Ohno, Shingo, and others he would appreciate the idea of control much better.”

Why does this matter now?

In Ponch’s experience, most Lean programs took the vocabulary from that 1990 book and left Ohno’s thinking behind. They install kanban boards, count waste and drive results from the top. In the same Deming book, Boyd wrote the warning plainly: “Once again, you must get outside the system!”

Military doctrine did the same thing to Boyd’s own sketch. It turned the sketch into a linear, four-step version and lost the orientation that drives it. Lean and the OODA loop suffered the same loss for the same reason: people copied the visible parts and left out the thinking that made the parts work.

Back to Erie. “You can’t be arrogant in this business,” Boyd told the reporter in 1992. “There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.” That still holds for anyone running a Lean transformation.

Listen and read further

Sources

John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division (MCHD), Quantico, Virginia: “Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” John Guerriero, Erie Morning News, 1992, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3); Boyd’s handwritten notes, MCHD 111469, pp. 17, 38 and 54 (Box 17, Folder 10); Boyd’s OODA loop sketch page, MCHD 111475, p. 1 (Box 17, Folder 15); A Discourse on Winning and Losing outline and notes, MCHD 110119, pp. 16 and 18 (Box 7, Folder 10); Chet Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business,” Revision 5, June 1989, PDF pp. 7, 15, 29, 30 and 41, MCHD 110311 (Box 12, Folder 2); Chet Richards, untitled manuscript (late 1980s), pp. 144 and 150, MCHD 110312 (Box 12, Folder 3).

Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division, photographed by Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Womack, Jones and Roos, The Machine That Changed the World (pp. 62, 65, 77, and the blank page before Part Two); Imai, Kaizen (pp. 18, 32, 51); Aguayo, Dr. Deming (pp. 75, 138). Book images are cropped to Boyd’s handwriting. The printed book text is left out, and two running heads and a page number that sat between his lines are painted out.

John R. Boyd, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, ed. Grant T. Hammond (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2018): “Patterns of Conflict” (1986), pp. 152-153; introduction, p. 2, for the date of “The Essence of Winning and Losing” (28 June 1995). John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). John R. Boyd and Thomas P. Christie, Energy-Maneuverability (March 1966). Boyd, remarks at the DoD Agility Conference, Los Angeles, 26 January 1988, as quoted in Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business.”

George Stalk Jr., “Time: The Next Source of Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review (July-August 1988). George Stalk Jr. and Thomas M. Hout, Competing Against Time (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 58-59. Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988), p. 77 and pp. 75-92. John F. Krafcik, “Triumph of the Lean Production System,” Sloan Management Review 30 (Fall 1988). Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). Frank Langfitt, “NUMMI (2015),” This American Life, episode 561, Act Two, 17 July 2015.

Personal communications: Franklin “Chuck” Spinney to Chet Richards, on Boyd’s question about energy-maneuverability. Chet Richards’s recollection of Toyota’s TPS material for prospective suppliers, early 1990s.

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Leadership is (could be) magic

I just posted a new version of my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership. This is an editing of my first YouTube video, which adds a new intro and removes some of the extraneous noises and distractions from the original posting.

I gave the original of this presentation as a keynote to the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in August 2022. This version is a moderate revision of that address.

By the way, this is my third YouTube video. It’s taking me a little while to develop fluency in iMovie — a long way from fingerspitzengefuehl — but they say that as you get older, you should keep learning new things. I’ll let you know.

The Penn and Teller video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

PDF of slides: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/leadership-is-magic-youtube-final.pdf

Notes to accompany the lecture: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/notes-to-accompany-tlaol-youtube.pdf

Original presentation at the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcSg-gEFhA&t=2s

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Changes to Patterns of Conflict

I’ve posted a short (17 min) YouTube video on a couple of major changes John Boyd made to Patterns of Conflict after its “final” publication date of December 1986.

(my second ever YouTube video)

Here are links and references included in the description box of the video:

Reference to the Fortune article: “How CEO Larry Culp pulled off the turnaround of the century,” by Shawn Tully, Fortune, posted July 23, 2026.

Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals: https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press/Books-by-topic/MCUP-Titles-A-Z/Snowmobiles-and-Grand-Ideals

Grant Hammond’s book, the Mind of War

AGLX: https://www.aglx.com Click on “Podcasts” for the “No Way Out” collection of podcasts on subjects related to Boyd’s work. Lots of interviews, including me.

Mind control in leadership and strategy. Download “The Lost Arts of Leadership” and its accompanying notes from the Articles tab at Slightly East of New: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/439-2/

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Deep Dive into the OODA Loop

Mark McGrath of AGLX has just done a really deep — 1 hr 40 min — dive into the heart of John Boyd’s OODA Loop:

Mark brings a unique set of qualifications:

  • He’s a former US Marine
  • He has spent years working with the OODA loop in his own businesses
  • He also researched Boyd’s original notes at the Boyd Collection in the Marine Corps University Library in Quantico, VA.

This last part is important because the “loop” didn’t spring fully formed from Boyd’s brow like some modern day avatar of Athena. Boyd first used the term as part of the expression “operating inside the OODA loop” at least as early as the mid-1970s. But he never wrote down what it actually was. As recently as 1989, he was still describing it as a linear observe-then-orient-then-decide-then-act process, which would make further elaboration superfluous.

But in the early 1990s, when he was working on his last briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing, he needed a sketch of the OODA loop. As he started fitting the pieces of that presentation together, he realized that the simple circle wasn’t going to do the job. After many, many, MANY iterations (I was involved with a few of them), he settled on the version that appears in that presentation. It is this collection of iterations, and many other hand-written sketches riddled with arrows and acronyms (some of which have yet to be deciphered), that Mark studied.

It’s a long podcast, so I’d recommend you take it a little at a time.

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A few thoughts on “Speed versus Quickness”

Credit: Oxford, Bodleian Library, LP 186

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:

Military theory & practice

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Speed versus Quickness

Drawing by French artist Théodore Fort c. 1845. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Editor’s note: One often hears that Boyd insisted that the side with the faster OODA loop wins. Here’s what one of Boyd’s closest associates, Chuck Spinney, says about that.

Aide Memoire

It seems to me that it is important to appreciate that the difference between speed, quickness, and initiative is crucial. When it came to the OODA loop, Boyd, after considerable thought, came to view “quickness” as the crucial factor related to what many people confuse with raw speed. That is because he is describing the interaction of multiple opposing OODA loops in conflict and cooperation, and a focus on absolute speed can lead one astray. 

Perhaps a simple (and over-simplified) example can help to illustrate the point. You can not generalize from this, because it is very extreme example to illustrate the point (a more general version of working on an adversary’s orientation is given by Boyd in his “Counter Blitz a la Sun Tzu”). [Editor’s note: Slides 146 – 155 of Patterns of Conflict.]

Imagine two adversaries in conflict, call them A and B. A has an insight into B’s Orientation and decides to set up a trick based on a deception. A plans to strike at point 1 but wants to convince B the attack will be at point 2, before the battle or operation is joined. A prepares this trap over a long period of time, e.g., by setting lures and deceptions, to reinforce the pattern in B’s mind. All this takes place over months.

Moreover, A can monitor the degree to which B is buying into the deception and can reinforce the false impression by feeding carefully tailored information (which is based on the monitoring). Finally, assume B does not appreciate the extent to which his Orientation is being shaped and monitored by A. Now assume further that B has a higher speed OODA loop than A in normal circumstances.

A strikes object #1 but B’s orientation is that the real objective is #2, so B moves faster (in the wrong direction) than A can possibly move (remember B has a speedier OODA loop). Result B, is blindsided when it dawns on him that his Orientation was wrong, and coupled with the presence of menace, the sudden eruption of surprise events cause the speedier OODA loop of B to over- and under-react and degenerate into confusion and disorder, which by the presence of lethal menace is magnified into panic, chaos, and maybe even collapse.

So, who really has the quicker OODA loop? A laid out an elaborate deception, methodically over a long period of time, but A could also monitor B’s orientation and therefore reinforce B’s mistaken impression of unfolding events. B acted speedily but in wrong direction and played into A’s hands, and the unfolding, menacing events suddenly loomed out of nowhere to threaten B, causing anxiety, confusion, which if exploited properly could be magnified into chaos, panic and collapse. Boyd would argue that A had a quicker OODA loop than B because A controlled the pace and shape of action. In other words, A had the initiative, even though B’s OODA loops were inherently faster.*

Now perhaps B’s speedier OODA loop could enable B to recover the initiative, if A did not or could not press its Orientation advantage in such a way as to prevent B’s OODA loop from operating effectively at its natural tempo and rhythm.  

Basically, Orientation is by far the most important part of the OODA loop because it not only shapes Decision and Action but it also shapes (or misshapes) Observations — in this artificial example A had a better Orientation (by definition because it could monitor B’s Orientation whereas B could not monitor A’s Orientation). In the example I just described, A had a better appreciation of what it was Observing whereas A’s deception operation, coupled with A’s monitoring capability, caused B’s Orientation to misshape its Observations, and indeed amplify B’s disconnect from reality, assisted by A’s reinforcing action on B’s Orientation. 

Bear in mind, this is an artificial example, but the reader might have recognized that its essential attributes loosely paralleled those surrounding the Allies advantages over the Germans leading up to the D-Day invasion and its immediate aftermath. 

At the strategic level of conflict, the Allies contrived an elaborate deception plan aimed at convincing the Germans they would invade France at Pas the Calais instead of Normandy. They even created a phony army under Patton, who the Germans considered our best operational commander, complete with a phony signals net. 

The Allies also had Bletchley Park’s Ultra Secret and an effective spy network. They had duplicated the German Enigma machine and could read the most secret German codes, while the Germans had no idea their codes were broken. So the Allies could monitor the extent to which which Hitler and OKW were buying into the Allied deception plan and their judicious use of spies could feed in formation that reinforced the pre-conceived beliefs and observations that contributed to the mis-orientation of the Germans. 

The Allies used a variety of ruses thereby creating false Observations — creating a kind of confirmation bias — that reinforced the German’s Orientation that the invasion would take place at Pas de Calais. This all took place over a period of months, and even though the Germans knew an invasion was imminent in June 1944, the allies could verify that the German Orientation was causing them to focus on the wrong place.  

In the event, Hitler and OKW withheld the Panzer reinforcements from counter attacking at Normandy long enough for the Allies to establish a secure beachhead.  Allied control of the air compounded the German Orientation problem by slowing the Action part of the German OODA loop. But the operational level OODA loops of the German ground forces enabled them recover somewhat and eventually extract a large number of troops before we closed the Falaise Gap (even though, the allies captured a large number Germans as well). 

The Allies were able to maintain the initiative at the strategic and operational levels of the conflict, even though their tactical level OODA loops were slower and more methodical that those of the Germans, because they were inside the German loops at the operational and strategic levels of the Normandy operation. 

Conversely, the Allies, who had come to depend on their Orientation advantage, were taken by complete surprise six months after the successful Normandy landing in the Battle of Bulge because the Germans used secure land lines to organize their offensive. 

OODA loops in guerrilla war are also display a similar speed/quickness dichotomy in this regard … guerrillas maintain links to local populations gives them a similar Orientation advantage.  In fact the North Vietnamese had a telling saying with respect to the issue speed versus quickness — the Americans may control the clocks, but we control the time.

By the way, we coined a term for a situation where Orientation drives and misshapes Observations at all levels of conflict — “incestuous amplification” — it is the sine qua non of getting inside your opponent’s OODA loops. Incestuous amplification can also be a self inflicted wound, as is certainly evident in our OODA loops shaping the “kill chain” targeting decisions in drone warfare. 

Please excuse this long example, but the distinction of speed vs quickness and initiative are crucial to understanding Boyd’s ideas in the context he thought about them. 

The appendix in Coram’s book contains his short paper, “Destruction and Creation” — this is epistemological foundation of the OODA loop, although it predates his conception of OODA loop. I have a briefing explaining why this is so, if you are interested, you can download it that this link: Evolutionary Epistemology. [Editor’s note: All of Boyd’s works, including D&C, are available from our Articles page.]

Note also, at bottom, the theory of the OODA loop is about a living, non-linear phenomenon, which makes it biological in the sense that it is goal seeking, exhibits growth and decay, is evolutionary in nature (i.e., it is shaped by an unpredictable interplay of chance and necessity mediated by some kind of selection process), and is governed by a homeostatic control system embodying positive as well as negative control loops — that makes it an open, far-from-equilibrium open system prone to chaos.
 
Chuck Spinney
15 April 2015

*Editor’s note: Boyd would also describe this situation as A was inside B’s OODA Loops. See, for example, Patterns, slide 132.

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Confused about the OODA “loop”? Let AI explain

For those of you who still harbor questions, misunderstandings, even doubts about John Boyd’s OODA Loop model, help is finally here.

My colleague, LtCol Johan Ivari of the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm, fed my paper, “Boyd’s OODA Loop,” into Google’s NotebookLM. You can listen to the resulting podcast at https://play.fhs.se/media/Boyd’s%20OODA%20Loop%20by%20Chet%20Richards%20(2020)/0_9wflxxm1

Personally, I find this fascinating if not a little scary. For one thing, it wasn’t clear who was doing the talking, until my brother (who also uses NotebookLM) pointed out that the two interlocutors, one with a male voice and the other female, were generated by the system. OK.

They did a very good job. This podcast could serve as a useful introduction to the OODA Loop concept. However, as Colonel Ivari points out, best to use it as an accompaniment to the actual paper (which you can download from our Articles page, along with all of Boyd’s briefings* and lot of other stuff).

Colonel Ivari has posted an entire panoply of AI-generated podcasts, https://play.fhs.se/playlist/details/0_09pafeoh

They’re all fascinating, but if you’ve never read Chuck Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology, his podcast would be a good place to start.

I’m not sure why the female discussant sounds like a Valley Girl (“Totally!”), but somehow, I don’t think Boyd would mind.

*I haven’t updated the covers, yet, so please don’t try to go to dnipogo.org or d-n-i.net. These domain names are no longer maintained by either the Project on Government Oversight or myself and may contain malicious content.

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Cooking the books

Dr Ray Leopold*

Of course, defense spending numbers are being manipulated: It’s in the DNA of those most intimately involved. That type of manipulation is well beyond the natural human concept which says that if you measure something, you change it. It is far more insidious.

I daresay that most of those in-the-know never expected anything other than manipulated numbers.  They’re not really jaded, they’re just behaving as Europeans, and a few others, have dealt with one another for centuries!

In a more colloquial context, I consider myself a veteran of three wars:  The Pentagon Wars, The Spectrum Wars, and The Telecommunications Wars, and I think you may find what I’m about to write is a bit different than you’ve seen before.  Jim Burton — who used the title The Pentagon Wars — along with many of you, too, have done a great job of covering The Pentagon Wars, but IMHO they were kids’ play compared to the Spectrum Wars and the Telecommunications Wars, and these other two will probably survive the walls of the Pentagon.  (Spectrum, of course, relates to ‘wireless’ while Telecom relates to all commercial communications.) 

For better context, maybe some of you are not aware that I was in the middle of ‘making the right things happen’ at WARC-92 in Spain, which allocated spectrum for HDTV, next-generation cellular phones, and Non-Geostationary Satellite Services (NGSS), and I was also in the midst of our FCC’s 1993 Negotiated Rulemaking for that NGSS spectrum, which much of the world had then also adopted.   FYI, WARC = World Administrative Radio Conference, held by the The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is an arm of the UN.

Strategy, Tactics and Documented Warfare precede Sun Tzu, but when you get to putting numbers on resources and then get involved in planning, no-planning (in the Boyd context), counting, accounting and reporting on those things, I think we’re in the nth iteration, where n = the number of generations of humanity.

When it comes to Europe, I will tell you that these kinds of things go back at least 450 or 500 years to revenue sharing associated with the money from postage stamps among those same countries.  When the telegraph was created, some people may think that it was aligned with railroads, but I think you will find that, even though telegraph lines oftentimes went along railroad lines, the revenue side of telegraphy was assigned to the post offices.  

In Europe, they created their PTs — their national and international postal & telegraph offices.  Then, of course, those PTs evolved as PTT s when the telephone came along, and those rules they created for those postal activities, then postal and telegraph activities, and finally postal, telegraph and telephone activities are still embedded in all that is done at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland.

So, when NATO and the UN came along shortly after WWII, those bureaucrats who began to staff their offices were already well-schooled in dealing internationally with numbers and revenue streams, with all of the skullduggery of centuries of their versions of rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures for officially cooking the books to their individual likings.  They were also well aware that their different nations didn’t necessarily calculate things or interpret them in a common way, but they always got along until they didn’t!!  

(Little wonder that they had so many wars and how many searched for a New World!  What surprises me more is how many folks here in America become so enamored with that Old World.)

On a personal note, there is also little wonder how John Boyd quickly concluded that we had to focus on the budget when we launched our development planning work on The Air Staff in June of 1973.  I do still have a paper copy of that planning and budget set of charts that he and I had used together when we had first briefed our work across the Air Staff from Nov 5, 1973 to May 31, 1974, and I’m especially glad that Chuck Spinney got excited about it, too; otherwise I may have never gotten back to engineering and those other two wars.  

When he and I had done those briefings together, John Boyd (who was spending most of his own time on the lightweight fighter) used to point out how I was the only full-time AF-wide development planner on the Air Staff (until Chuck came along to become the second), then I left amidst a rather interesting battle among a couple of four stars. and caught my breath again teaching engineering at the AF Academy, and Chuck became the only one; but Boyd got me back to the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) Staff (where Chuck was, too) for the early ’80s.  I had learned much from John which then made me unusually effective in those other wars, too. 

There may now be quite enough books written about all of that, and I’m especially pleased with the books the two of you (Winslow Wheeler & Chet) have written!**

*Robert Coram included Dr. Ray Leopold among Boyd’s acolytes in Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, and provided a brief description of his career after the Air Force (p. 441). Among his many accomplishments, Ray is perhaps best known in these times for being one of the primary creators of the Iridium system, which is still going strong to this very day. You may also be interested Ray’s thoughts on Boyd, Robin Olds, and Operation Bolo included in an earlier post.

**Here are a couple of the better known: The Wastrels of Defense and If We Can Keep It, respectively. You can download a PDF of IWCKI from our Articles page.

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Confusion and disorder

Even if you’ve seen this, it’s well worth a second look.

Even if you know what the OODA loop is — especially if you know what the “loop” is — watch this video. Chuck was present at the creation, and he’s passing along nearly 50 years of experience with Boyd’s concepts.

For example, Boyd says that in a conflict, the key to success is the ability to build and effectively employ snowmobiles. Why? Which snowmobiles? How do we use them? Chuck will give you some insight.

Chuck embeds the “loop” into the entirety of Boyd’s work. As Frans Osinga points out in Science, Strategy, and War, although the OODA Loop is the best known part of Boyd’s writings, in many cases, the only known, it is not the only or perhaps even the most important.

Enjoy.