OODA loop

by

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.

by

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

by

Reality or simulation? Is there a difference?

The Endorian Sorceress Causes the Shade of Samuel by Dmitry Nikiforovich Martyanov, 1857. Shutterstock image.

About a month ago, German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder ran a YouTube video “Physicists Prove That Universe is not a Simulation.” As I understand the argument, they showed that if the universe were a simulation, it would have to obey the conclusions of Gödel’s Theorem, but that the real, observable universe doesn’t.

Dr. Hossenfelder wasn’t entirely convinced, and I’m certainly not qualified to judge, but check it out for yourself.

Then, just a few days ago, Mark McGrath and Ponch Rivera posted a No Way Out podcast, “Beyond the Linear OODA Loop: Jon Becker on Authentic Boyd Strategies,” where their guest maintains that we are living in a simulation. So what gives?

The difference is that Becker is not addressing the entire physical universe but is echoing John Boyd’s observation that:

To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change. The concepts can then be used as decision models for improving our capacity for independent action. “Destruction and Creation,” p. 2.

In other words, what we are living in is a simulated world generated by our mental models, and so our (simulated) world is indeed governed by Gödel’s Theorem. Becker, then, draws some interesting conclusions about how to live and operate in this environment.

Recognizing that we are living in a simulation, there are things we can do. We can not only mitigate the effects on ourselves by following Becker’s suggestions — e.g., recognize the effects of our egos, incorporate a range of perspectives (including those from the external environment), and always remember that orientation is a process and not a picture — but also exploit the fact that our impression of the unfolding situation is a simulation. We can do this in at least a couple of ways: internally to our organization as leadership and externally to it, as strategy. With John Boyd, everything is about mitigating and exploiting, with the latter providing the schwerpunkt.

Back in 2022, I did a presentation on the internal implications — that is, on leadership — of living in a simulation. After watching Jon’s podcast, I made a few updates to the notes accompanying that presentation. The fundamental conclusions, though, haven’t changed. For millennia, there have been people who recognized that what we regard as reality is actually a mental construct. Over the centuries, some of these folks evolved tools for manipulating this fact. So it stands to reason that leaders and strategists today could benefit from exploiting these tools. We refer to many of these as “magic.”

Think of them as the chi to the cheng you find in most management, leadership, and strategy tomes. Serious leadership gurus and strategists have dismissed them as tricks or “slight-of-hand.” Entertainment but good for little else. But the deeper question is, “Why do they work?” And why do they work even though you know the performer on stage is trying to fool you? It’s just like in a conflict: Your opponent knows you’re trying to deceive them. But you have to do it, anyway. If you look carefully, you’ll find that many of the most successful leaders down through history have found these techniques and made good use of them.

You can download the presentation here, and the notes, which I strongly recommend because I don’t think the presentation by itself will make a lot of sense, here. The Witch of Endor, by the way, makes her appearance on slide 53.

[The links in the paragraph above go to the versions that were current when this column was published in December 2025. Any more recent versions are posted on our Articles page.]

by

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.

by

Boyd in his own words

Boyd gave Patterns of Conflict several hundred times, and many of these were recorded on video. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of them on, for example, YouTube. If you know of one, please put a link in the comments. A complete version of Patterns would be around 8 hours.*

However, we do have a complete audio recording of Boyd presenting not only Patterns but also Organic Design for Command and Control and Strategic Game of ? and ? Boyd gave these at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia (just south of Washington DC) on three evenings from April 25 – May 3, 1989.

Ian Brown and Frans Osinga have just published a transcript of these briefings, along with their own analyses, in their new book, Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals. Everyone with even a passing interest in Boyd, including those who are thoroughly sick of him (perhaps especially those), must read this book. Even better when you can get it for free.

As fascinating as Boyd’s own words are, you should pay careful attention to Brown’s and Osinga’s own sections. Each has published major works on Boyd, and they provide deep insights into Boyd’s presentations and the mighty shoulders Boyd stood on.

Brown and Osinga have done a masterful job, and their book deserves a substantive review, which I will try to do at some point. For now, though, here’s a couple of short quotes from Dr. Osinga’s introduction to tide you over:

Thus, he introduced into strategic theory the concept of open complex adaptive systems struggling to survive in a contested, dynamic, nonlinear world pregnant with uncertainty, constantly attempting to improve and update its schemata and repertoire of actions and its position in the ecology of the organization. (32)

[I]t is basically only necessary to create an initial advantage and prevent the opponent from compensating for it. (34) [Editor’s note: As good a definition of “operating inside the OODA loop” as I’ve seen.]

*The three briefings together run around 281 slides. There is a complete video of Boyd giving Conceptual Spiral, 38 slides, at Air University in 1993. The book also includes a transcript of this presentation.

by

The Manchurian Blitzkrieg: A Japanese Perspective

“The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi” print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)

This post publishes a comment by LtCol Hiro Katsura, Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force. Colonel Katsura is completing a Ph.D. dissertation that focuses on the internalization of mission command in the U.S. Marine Corps, particularly examining how competence is cultivated among NCOs who are expected to operate with delegated authority.

[Editor’s note: This is a follow-up to my post on the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945.]

As you mentioned, this campaign is an extremely important case study in strategic history.

The surprise attack at midnight on 9 August caught the Kwantung Army completely off guard. This was the result of several overlapping factors: the inability to anticipate the Soviet redeployment of mechanized forces across more than 9,000 km from Europe in only three months; Japan’s continued hope that the USSR might mediate a conditional peace settlement; and the simultaneous three-front offensive, which created defensive chaos—further compounded by inadequate communications.

At the time, the Kwantung Army still had over 700,000 men on paper, but most of its elite units and equipment had already been siphoned off to the Pacific. What remained was qualitatively weakened: undertrained troops, shortages of ammunition and fuel, and outdated armor—mainly Type 95 light tanks with 37mm guns, plus a handful of Type 98s. These conditions greatly amplified the effect of the Soviet surprise. Even so, the discipline of the Japanese Army is striking—reports say that even after the commander announced Japan’s defeat and the order to disarm, many officers and staff still argued for continued resistance.

Taken together, this explains why Boyd described the Soviets as moving inside Japan’s OODA loop. It was not only a matter of operational tempo, but also a fatal mismatch between Japanese perceptions and reality, which paralyzed decision-making.

I am reminded of a lecture I once attended in Tokyo by David Glantz.* He also described the Manchurian operation as a classic Soviet blitzkrieg. One anecdote he shared was particularly memorable: the name “August Storm” came from an offhand comment by his eight-year-old daughter at the dinner table. Years later, one of his former students—by then a SAMS graduate and a planner for the Gulf War—remembered that story and suggested the name Desert Storm. Glantz laughed that the true origin traced back to a little girl’s imagination—a curious thread in the tapestry of military history.

On a personal note, one of my mentors had been in Manchuria at that time. After the surrender he was captured and spent eight years in Siberian detention. Knowing his story gives this campaign a very human weight for me. And of course, your own father’s presence there makes this history resonate all the more strongly.

*Colonel, US Army, ret., historian who has published extensively on Soviet military history and doctrine, including:

He is probably best known for When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995, revised 2015), which he co-wrote with Jonathan M. House.

by

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