OODA loop

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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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Last Blitzkrieg of WWII

The person on the far right is my late father, then-Captain Grover C. Richards, Jr. He and a fellow POW posed for this photo with two Red Army soldiers who had just liberated Camp Hoten in Mukden, Manchuria, (now Shenyang, Liaoning province) in mid-August 1945.

The Soviets invaded Manchuria on August 9, 1945, exactly 80 years ago as I write this. Boyd considered that operation as one of the two examples of a blitzkrieg that was superbly executed, highly successful, and overlooked outside a small group of students of military history and strategy. The other was the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula (December 1941 – May 1942).*

It was an enormous operation, involving over 2 million troops from both sides. The Red Army alone employed over 5,000 tanks, many of them them modern T-34s, nearly 30,000 artillery tubes and Katyusha rocket launchers — the famous “Stalin’s Organs” — and nearly 4,000 aircraft. Although the action took place in an arena of war the size of western Europe, the battle was over in 11 days.

If you are familiar with Boyd’s terminology, we can describe the Soviet strategy simply as: They operated inside the Japanese OODA loops. Although outmanned, outgunned, and often surrounded, many Japanese units fought tenaciously to the last. But if your opponent is inside your OODA loops, it is ultimately to no avail.**

One of the factors that made this campaign so interesting was that the bulk of the Soviet forces had to move from western Europe, where they had participated in the defeat of Nazi Germany, to far eastern Siberia, a distance of roughly 6,000 miles. This was accomplished in the space of three months. As described by Wikipedia:

They (the Japanese) had estimated that an attack was not likely before the spring of 1946, but the Stavka (Soviet high command) had in fact been planning for a mid-August offensive, successfully concealing the buildup of a force of 90 divisions. Many Soviet units had crossed Siberia in their vehicles to avoid straining the rail link.

The Japanese were caught completely by surprise upon receiving the Soviet declaration of war an hour before midnight on 8 August, now facing a simultaneous invasion on three fronts that began just after midnight on 9 August.

Here is a YouTube video that gives an overview of the campaign (only the first half is on Manchuria). Although the quality is uneven, you should be able to pick out many of the elements of blitzkrieg strategy: Deception and surprise; high tempo of operations; bypassing and isolation of strong points; and advance via multiple thrusts to probe and test the opponent and generate ambiguity:

* On Boyd’s chart of “Blitzkrieg Results,” Patterns 89, under “Successful,” Kerch is “Summer 1942.” The Manchurian operation is also listed.

**As described in glorious detail on slide 132 of Patterns of Conflict.

My father retired from the Army as a LTC on June 30, 1961, became a college professor, and retired the second time as Chair of Psychology of what is now Georgia Southern University in 1981. He died in Jacksonville, FL, on September 29, 1996, and is buried in Arlington. His military awards included the Silver Star for actions on Bataan.

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What are the chances of that?

Wellington had considered the relative probability of a French attack at various points; he concluded that the sector from Torres Vedras to the Atlantic was the least likely and could be left mainly in the hands of his static force. Jac Weller, Wellington in the Peninsula, 145.

Deep into Patterns of Conflict, John Boyd finally got around to defining (more or less) the phrase “operating inside the OODA loop”:

Second Impression

To me, though, the most intriguing thing about this slide is what’s not on it: No mention of probabilities or likelihoods. In fact, the words “probability” and “likelihood” don’t occur in Patterns of Conflict, and you’ll find “likely” just twice, both times as paragraph headings, (“Likely result”).

Why is this? Why wouldn’t you put most of your preparation into what the opponent is most likely to do? Why would you waste time, men, and machinery preparing against something the opponent is highly unlikely to do?

I was reminded of this question again while reading Laurie R. King’s latest, Knave of Diamonds. Sherlock Holmes is passing time practicing his card handling skills dealing three card monte. In that game, the dealer shows the other player three cards, one of which is special — the Ace of Spades, for example — and the other two can be anything, say a couple of minor hearts.

The dealer shuffles the three cards and places them face down. The player, then, wins by picking out the ace. Win and you get back twice your bet.

What is the probability the player wins?

If you said “one third,” you are wrong. The correct answer is zero, which is why in the trade, the other player is called the “mark.”

And which is why my book is called Certain to Win (quoting Sun Tzu), not, More Likely to Do Better.

Wellington, incidentally, virtually always operated inside his opponents’ OODA loops. This explains why, even when outnumbered, he was able to defeat all of the marshals that Napoleon sent against him, and finally defeat Napoleon himself. In the process, he indeed became an extraordinary commander.

We really don’t know what Wellington was thinking in October 1810 when he was disposing his forces at the Lines of Torres Vedras. What I’ve quoted are Jac Weller’s reconstructions a century and a half later for a non-specialist audience. My guess is that instead of rolling the dice, Wellington was thinking something like: If they want to come that way, more power to them. I can hold them with my less capable units while I shift my better forces to deal with them. Wellington was a master of mobile defense, a tactic he often used against the French.

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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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Tom Barnett’s OODA Loop

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, who is probably best known for his 2004 best-seller, The Pentagon’s New Map, gave a presentation last November featuring an OODA Loop. Because it is not the traditional circle, or John Boyd’s own sketch from my last post, I thought you might be interested in it. As an extra added attraction, he uses it to build a snowmobile a la Boyd*.

Question for my audience: Does what Barnett has constructed satisfy the purposes of an OODA loop (or “loop”) in Boyd’s sense? The link goes to my presentation “The Essence of Winning and Losing — Deconstructed,” and the roles Boyd prescribes for OODA loops (any OODA loops) are on slide 9.

Very Important Note: This is not a blog on geopolitics, so I am not going to comment on the specifics of Barnett’s conclusions. I know some of you have strong feelings on these issues, but this is not the place.

On a personal note, I have known Tom for many years and can attest he is quite familiar with Boyd’s work. His second book, Blueprint for Action, mentions me on p. 10. I have great respect for his curiosity and intellect, although we have had, over those years, spirited discussions on some of his recommendations. His latest book is America’s New Map, and he maintains a website and posts daily on substack.

*For those unfamiliar with Boyd’s snowmobile analogy, please download his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ? from our Articles page. He introduces his snowmobile starting on slide 6.

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Deconstructing The Essence of Winning and Losing

If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. Duns Scotus

Download my new presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing — Deconstructed. Or, where did the OODA loop come from, and what is it supposed to do? 505KB PDF

A pencil draft of the OODA loop arrived in the mail one day in early 1995 with a note from John Boyd asking me to turn it into a computer graphic. We went back and forth several times — I’d mail him updates, and he’d call up and want to talk. As I recall, the big bone of contention was the shapes of the arrows within the Orient block: which should be solid and which dashed, and in which directions the arrows should point.

He was particularly worried about the arrows from new information and previous experiences into genetic heritage. In the end, though, he decided not make any distinctions and just connect each of the bubbles to each of the others with solid arrows. Over the next several months, he added three more slides explaining what he wanted the OODA “loop” to do. Again, lots of back-and-forth.

By January 1996, Boyd had finished his revisions to The Essence of Winning and Losing. It was his last work, significant because in it he defines for the first time on paper what he meant by an OODA loop. Although he had been using the term since his first major presentation, Patterns of Conflict (created 1977 – 1986), It was virtually always combined with the preposition “inside,” in phrases like “operating inside their OODA loops.”

In fact, in the 319 slides that he created before TEoWL, he used the phrase “OODA loop” by itself, whether abbreviated or spelled out, on only 5 pages. On none of these did he actually define it

Portrait of the philosopher Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308), artist unknown, c. 1650. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

If it meant “Observe, then orient, then decide, then act,” there would be no need for further explanation, other than defining the terms. The fact that we’re talking about TEoWL suggests Boyd had something else in mind.

To guide us through Boyd’s process of constructing the loop, TEoWL begins with the concept of an “implicit repertoire.” These are the practices we need to “make intuitive within ourselves” as Boyd put it, in order to deal with those urgent and unpredictable requirements that the situation, including opponents in a conflict, throws at us. TEoWL asks where this set of practices comes from and how we add to it as circumstances change.

Put another way: From the infinite set of possible practices that we might create and train for, and given that there are only 24 hours in a day, how do we select? That is the question at the heart of TEoWL, and the answer he came up with is an OODA “loop.”

A few points to keep in mind:

  • The purpose of the “OODA loop ‘sketch’” on page 3 is to “clarify” a set of statements he makes on the first page of the presentation and the interactions among them. These statements all address how we manage our implicit repertoire.
  • He called it a “sketch.” To use his snowmobile analogy from Strategic Game (1987), you might think of it as Model 1.
  • However, we know from research into his files at the Library of Marine Corps University, he created many prototypes before he settled on this particular one. My personal guess is that if he had lived (he died on March 9, 1997), there would have been additional releases.

What I have done is to break down the elements of TEoWL into what I hope are digestible portions in a largely graphical format. My primary audience is the collection of people who are adapting Boyd’s sketch to serve their various purposes. I thought it might be useful for them to briefly review Boyd’s derivation of the “loop.” In other words, it is for those philosophical engineers who are developing Models 2, 3, etc., which is, I am sure, what Boyd would be doing if he were alive today.

This presentation, along with all of Boyd’s presentations and lots of other stuff, are all available from our Articles page.

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If OODA was a (revised) Venn diagram

Codde, Pieter Jacobsz (b.1599-12-11 – d.1678-10-12), Intérieur de corps de garde (Titre principal), 1626. Huile sur bois. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Clinton D. Pope
Chief Quality Officer
Indian Health Service, Phoenix, AZ

[Editor’s note #2: Mr. Pope has revised his Venn diagram at the bottom of this post. Kaizen for Boyd’s snowmobile.]

[Editor’s note: When people start playing around with Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch from The Essence of Winning and Losing — available from our Articles page — what usually emerges is something even more complicated than what Boyd produced. Although many of these reveal interesting insights, my personal feeling is that we need someone to come along, absorb all these various efforts, and experience an “Aha!” moment that produces a new OODA “loop” sketch as elegant as, but no more complicated than, Boyd’s. To help that process along, it might be useful to revisit Boyd’s purpose for that sketch: a framework to help us “to comprehend, shape, adapt to and in turn be shaped by an unfolding evolving reality that is uncertain, everchanging, and unpredictable.” Perhaps meditate upon and internalize this objective before we start drawing more arrows? With that in mind, here’s an OODA “loop” without any arrows.]

This will likely be lost on some as the Venn diagram doesn’t mention observations, orientation, decision, or action.

However, OODA is a model of how we interact with the environment, both shaping and being shaped by the environment.

Mental concepts and observed reality are both ever changing and expanding.

To “survive” (e.g. obtain more favorable interactions with the environment), we need better means to observe what’s really going on as accurately as possible and from multiple perspectives; we need to analyze and synthesize new and existing information to orient current state in relation to desired state with a sense of how to position for a more favorable state; we need to facilitate decision making that is timely (not the fastest, but well timed) and based on available indicators; and we need to confidently act with the intention to learn (this is to test the hypothesis or prediction of the decision).

The OODA Loop is cyclical, but not linear in nature. For instance, orientation and observation are always happening. They don’t stop so that you can make decisions and act. Likewise, in every action or inaction, in every decision or indecision, you are always interacting with the environment. You don’t exist except in the environment. The “dialectic engine” is always humming.

The difference between those who survive and those who are eliminated is the ability to effectively orient and adapt to the changing environment.

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If OODA was a Venn diagram

Codde, Pieter Jacobsz (b.1599-12-11 – d.1678-10-12), Intérieur de corps de garde (Titre principal), 1626. Huile sur bois. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Clinton D. Pope
Chief Quality Officer
Indian Health Service, Phoenix, AZ

[Editor’s note: When people start playing around with Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch from The Essence of Winning and Losing — available from our Articles page — what usually emerges is something even more complicated than what Boyd produced. Although many of these reveal interesting insights, my personal feeling is that we need someone to come along, absorb all these various efforts, and experience an “Aha!” moment that produces a new OODA “loop” sketch as elegant as, but no more complicated than, Boyd’s. To help that process along, it might be useful to revisit Boyd’s purpose for that sketch: a framework to help us “to comprehend, shape, adapt to and in turn be shaped by an unfolding evolving reality that is uncertain, everchanging, and unpredictable.” Perhaps meditate upon and internalize this objective before we start drawing more arrows? With that in mind, here’s an OODA “loop” without any arrows.]

This will likely be lost on some as the Venn diagram doesn’t mention observations, orientation, decision, or action.

However, OODA is a model of how we interact with the environment, both shaping and being shaped by the environment.

Mental concepts and observed reality are both ever changing and expanding.

To “survive” (e.g. obtain more favorable interactions with the environment), we need better means to observe what’s really going on as accurately as possible and from multiple perspectives; we need to analyze and synthesize new and existing information to orient current state in relation to desired state with a sense of how to position for a more favorable state; we need to facilitate decision making that is timely (not the fastest, but well timed) and based on available indicators; and we need to confidently act with the intention to learn (this is to test the hypothesis or prediction of the decision).

The OODA Loop is cyclical, but not linear in nature. For instance, orientation and observation are always happening. They don’t stop so that you can make decisions and act. Likewise, in every action or inaction, in every decision or indecision, you are always interacting with the environment. You don’t exist except in the environment. The “dialectic engine” is always humming.

The difference between those who survive and those who are eliminated is the ability to effectively orient and adapt to the changing environment.

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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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Conceptual Spiral in Boyd’s Own Words

In 1992, John Boyd released his last major presentation, Conceptual Spiral. Coming in at 38 slides and just shy of 3,000 words, it is roughly 10 times the size of his next and final presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing (TEoWL).

While his presentations through 1987 concern armed conflict, Conceptual Spiral displays 18 “outstanding contributions” to science, from Sir Isaac Newton to Chaitin and Bennett (1985), and similarly 39 from engineering.

In trying to understand Conceptual Spiral, it is important to keep in mind that although the slides can be read as a stand-alone document, Boyd generally did not give out hard copies to people who hadn’t sat through the presentation. Many of the slides are complex and present challenges to figuring out what Boyd intended.  Fortunately there is a complete recording of Boyd giving Conceptual Spiral to an audience at Air University as part of an Air Force project, SPACECAST 2020 .  The folks at AGLX have captured this presentation and transcribed it into written form, with Boyd’s slides embedded, which you can download as a PDF from their site. We also did a podcast on Conceptual Spiral.

I was heavily involved in Conceptual Spiral. Boyd would call and go over alternative phrasings for the various slides, asking what made the most sense, which alternatives read better, and so on.  Even with this, I got a lot out of the transcript.

For example, you will notice that Boyd is still describing the OODA “loop” as a real, sequential loop. If, however, you read the transcript carefully, you can detect that his concept of the “loop” is showing the first glimmers of change.  He is beginning to realize that the OODA loop he talks about here (he doesn’t use the term “OODA loop” in the text of Conceptual Spiral itself) is incomplete. As he concluded as far back as “Destruction and Creation” (1976), all theories for describing reality must be incomplete, so this fact came as no surprise to him. He takes a step in remedying this in his next briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing.

This realization, though, does not invalidate the conclusions of Conceptual Spiral. The loops of Conceptual Spiral are the engines that power the OODA “loop” sketch of TEoWL because, as Boyd explains in Conceptual Spiral, they not only “change reality through novelty,” they are also what changes our orientations to correspond with that dynamic reality. As he makes explicit on the first slide of TEOWL, their operation also allows us to create and employ the implicit guidance and control feeds of the “loop.” 

If your organization does not continuously generate new product ideas and new strategies, as well as improving the processes for introducing them to the external world, every passing day leaves you more open to competitors who will.

Even if you have read the text of Conceptual Spiral and even if you have heard Boyd give the presentation, studying the transcript will repay your investment in time.  

[Be sure and check out the Q&A section at the end. Although the recording did not capture the questions themselves, you’ll be able to infer their gist, and Boyd’s answers are clear.]