Sun Tzu

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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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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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Influence strategies

c. 1900. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Once again, social science can help us understand behavior and why, or why not, certain influence strategies may be effective. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University.


What he’s talking about is leadership. Here’s my definition:

Fire up the creativity and initiative of everybody in the organization; harmonize and focus this energy to accomplish the purposes of the organization.

And here’s Boyd’s:

Implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action toward the achievement of uncommon goals. Organic Design for Command and Control, slide 37 (available from our Articles page)

If you could magically reach in and influence everybody’s mind, leadership under either of these definitions would be much easier. A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation on leadership, The Lost Arts of Leadership, (31.4 MB PDF) to the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego. My thesis was that what Boyd, Pfeffer and I are all talking about is mind control, in particular, over groups of people.

Now before you laugh too hard, note that there are performers who make a good living doing just this, as in the picture above. For a contemporary example, go to Derren Brown’s YouTube channel. If you haven’t watched any of his videos, try one. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine how these techniques could serve the purpose of leadership. And, as I tried to show in my presentation, they have been employed by effective leaders down through history (for better or for worse).

The principles that support leadership also enhance strategy, which can be thought of as leadership but over the opponent rather than within your own organization. The idea of influence strategies — controlling the enemy’s mind, rather than just reacting to his moves — goes way back. Here’s Miyamoto Musashi from 1645:

Using your knowledge of military tactics, think of all the enemies as your own soldiers. Think that you know how to make the enemy move as you wish and try to move the enemy around freely. You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command. The Book of Five Rings, Bradford Brown, et al. (1982), p. 78.

I’ve revised the presentation to feature a longer quote by Professor Pfeffer and added a reference in the accompanying notes (152 KB PDF) that provides data on the deleterious effects of picking some arbitrary percentage of employees judged to be poor performers and summarily firing them.

Speaking of the notes, which I highly recommend since they provide commentary and sources that I found interesting but would have made the presentation itself too long, I’ve gone through and (I think) reconciled the notes to the slide numbers.

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All Warfare is Based Upon …

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1850)

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

All war, Sun Tzu once observed, is based upon deception. And in keeping with Lem’s pronouncement, he knew how to do it:

The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy. The Art of War, Chapter 11 (Cleary trans)

Like so much of Eastern philosophy, this bears deep thought,  For one thing, what do we mean by “deception”?  Is it primarily camouflage, disguising ourselves so that the opponent does not recognize us? Feinting in one direction while we attack in another? Publicly making misleading statements about our intentions?  All of these are deceptive, of course, but they all focus on what we’re doing, what our intentions are.  Sun Tzu, however, talks about the intentions of the enemy.  John Boyd’s definition captures this distinction:

An impression of events as they are not. Patterns, 115

Deception: Merely a Prerequisite for Surprise?

As Boyd explained it, to deceive an opponent, you must create a view of the world in his mind — his orientation — that is logical, compelling, and validated by observation, but which is wrong.  The enemy will intend to act on this impression, allowing you to, for example, trap or ambush him or attack in an unexpected, direction.  The key is knowing what his impressions, and thus his intentions, are.

How do we know “the intentions of the enemy”? One way is through your knowledge of the opponent, your fingerspitzengefuhl of how they act in various situations.  

If I was him, what would I most want me to do? Easy, I thought. So I did it.  K. J. Parker, Savages, Kindle Ed, Loc 619.

A new approach

But there is another, more powerful and more reliable way of knowing opponents’ intentions: You be the one who put them there.

His primary target is the mind of the opposing commander … Sun Tzu realized that an indispensable preliminary to battle was to attack the mind of the enemy.  Samuel B. Griffith, in his introduction to The Art of War.

In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary.  Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson on (successful) British attempts to shape Rommel’s impressions in 1941.

The idea is more powerful than just setting up the opponent for surprise. You can use deception to control the intentions, and thus the actions, of your opponents:

You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command.  Miyamoto Musashi, Book of 5 Rings (1645) trans Brown, et al., 1982.

Think Stork taking over the band in Animal House. Once you achieve this degree of mastery over the opponent, there is hardly any limit to the bad mental and moral conditions you can inflict, including ambiguity, hesitation, and destruction of the opponent’s cohesion. 

Bottom Line

Most of my readers will be familiar with these effects on the mental capabilities of the opposing side. So, here’s my main point. When we talk about creating impressions in other peoples’ minds, we’re talking mind control, or as it is often called, mentalism. There are people who do this for a living.

It seems reasonable to see if we can borrow some concepts from them.

Watch the this short YouTube video:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

Now, watch it again, and this time pay close attention to their explanation of why it works:  “We’re going to give the audience a story they can tell themselves …”  where part of that story is the intention: “You’re telling yourself that at no time will you allow your attention …”  Once they get to this point,

Penn and Teller accord deceptively with that intention. It’s important to note that Penn and Teller make a distinction between the deceptive actions we carry out and true deception, which is in the mind of the target, “That doesn’t fool anyone …”

I’ve put a few more observations on their act in the Notes to my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership, and you can download both from our Articles page.  Please do.

Here’s a more complex example involving not only the target but creating a team to exploit the target’s intention. It is one of the amazing and informative videos on the YouTube channel of the modern British mentalist, Derren Brown. Pay close attention to the first half, “The Gallery.”  It’s about an hour long, but in addition to being extremely entertaining, it illustrates the idea of what Penn and Teller call a “curating of attention,” that is, nurturing a story, an intention, in your subject’s mind, and then exploiting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWiKVAQRT4g

If strategy is deception, and deception is mind control, then strategy is mind control.

According to the Wikipedia page on the principles of war, none of them include deception.  It’s sometimes mentioned as an enabler for surprise, but as I’ve tried to show, it can be far more than that. When I establish my War College, developing fingerspitzengefuehl for deception would be the schwerpunkt. It would be taught by people who actually know how to do it.

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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.

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Boyd’s OODA “Loop”: What and why?

As Frans Osinga pointed out in his 2006 examination of John Boyd’s philosophy of conflict, Science, strategy and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd, the OODA loop is the best known but probably most misunderstood aspect of Boyd’s body of work. Even today, it’s very common to see people describe the OODA loop as a loop. However, when Boyd finally got around to producing a “sketch” of the “loop” (his terms), it was, as I’m sure practically all readers of this blog know, something entirely different.

From “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” 1996.

Why? The reason is that the OODA “loop” is an answer to a specific problem. It is not, for example a model of decision making — in fact, it simply requires you to make implicit and explicit decisions and link them to actions, all the while experimenting and learning.

On November 30, I gave a lecture on this subject to the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm. My host, Johan Ivari, arranged for it to be recorded and made available on the University’s web site. They broke it into two parts:

Part 1 https://play.fhs.se/media/The+OODA-%E2%80%9Dloop%E2%80%9D+lecture+by+Chet+Richards+-+Part+1+-+Setting+the+scene./0_bkfn6gnx

Part 2 https://play.fhs.se/media/The+OODA-%E2%80%9Dloop%E2%80%9D+lecture+by+Chet+Richards+-+Part+2+-+John+Boyd%27s+real+OODA+%E2%80%9CLoop%E2%80%9D+/0_tkvhlxsh

I had a lot of fun with this, and the students asked some great questions. I hope you enjoy it!

By the way, check out some of the other interesting videos on their site.

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Is it agility or adaptability?

I tend to think of “agility” as adaptability with a time dimension, that is, the ability to adapt more rapidly to new situations than can competitors or opponents.  That may not, however, be the only or even a very good way to think about these concepts.

Here’s an alternative view:

AQ is hot right now – but is it the Adaptability Quotient or the Agility Quotient?

Kristopher Floyd
Founder and CEO, TeamMate AIDao-TheWay

November 13, 2018
Originally published on LinkedIn. Reprinted with his kind permission

Throughout military history, there have been winners and losers. Some of the winners have found disproportionate success due to strategic brilliance; when examining their successes, we find a golden braid that links them all together. This braid is the foundation of an underlying philosophy that dictates how military forces can survive and thrive in hyper-competitive, chaotic, uncertain situations. Continue reading →

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Happy Birthday, Alice

Sun Tzu was a great fan of intelligence and spies in particular — check out Chapter 13 if you need a refresher —  because it’s much easier to operate inside opponents’ OODA loops if you already know what they’re going to do. As luck would have it, today is the birthday of Louise de Bettignies, AKA Alice Dubois, one of the greatest intelligence operatives of all time.

To explain why, a little historical perspective might prove useful. Although the German Schlieffen Plan failed to hook around Paris and end World War I in 1914, it left the Germans occupying a fair portion of northeastern France for the next 4 years. From January to September, 1915, this area provided the theater of operations for de Bettignies, whose network alerted the British to German plans and tactical movements  and almost took out the Kaiser himself. Among other feats of derring-do.

There are several bios of her, but historical fiction might be a good place to start. To this end, Kate Quinn has written a most readable — “page turner” wouldn’t be too strong — story of her operation, The Alice Network. I recommend it highly.

Happy Birthday, Louise.

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Coherent, Credible, and Wrong

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy,
but the one who knows how to do it.

Polish SciFi master Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

We often think of Soviet doctrine as tanks lined up tread to tread, rolling forward until either they conquer or fall. Mass makes might. While there is a lot of truth to the Soviet, and so presumably Russian, respect for mass, it may surprise you to learn that the Soviets had, and so presumably the Russians have, a well thought-out doctrine of deception called maskirovka. The BBC ran a nice piece on the subject a few days back, “How Russia outfoxes its enemies,” by Lucy Ash.

Boyd had great respect for deception, “an impression of events as they are not,” as he wrote on Patterns chart 115, “Essence of Maneuver Conflict.” A person who is being deceived is not confused. He knows what the situation is. His orientation is coherent; his mental model of the world fits all the facts. It’s just wrong. Boyd’s primary vehicle for using deception was the cheng / chi maneuver, which he borrowed from Sun Tzu and reformulated in more modern terms as the Nebenpunkte / Schwerpunkt concept (see charts 78, 114, and many others). Basically, the deceiver shapes the orientation of the victim to expect (cheng) certain actions to take place. Think all of the stuff the allies did to shape Hitler into expecting the D-Day attack across the Pas de Calais. The deceiver then springs something entirely unexpected, the chi, and tries to exploit the resulting shock and confusion. Continue reading →

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Fear of planning

Another post on research into the physiology of orientation.

“Planning may start in brain’s amygdala, study says,” reporting on research conducted at Cambridge University.  The amygdala is most commonly associated with emotions like fear and aggression, so its relationship to planning comes as somewhat of a surprise.

Perhaps this neural activity in the amygdala is related to the idea that much of the activity of the frontal lobe — our higher-order thinking apparatus — is justifying and implementing actions that we decided on somewhere else. “The mind follows where the heart leads,” in other words. Perhaps it’s the amygdala and not the heart.

Early in the process, neurons in the amygdala were activated in a pattern that reflected “several trials ahead” whether the monkey would save up towards specific goals, according to the study. “These activity patterns could be used by the frontal lobe to translate goal signals into concrete action plans,” [project lead Fabian] Grabenhorst told AFP by email.

What makes this most interesting from Boyd’s perspective is that this activity is taking place in one of our primary fear centers, and in particular, one activated by ambiguity.  A key thread in Boyd’s approach is to pump up fear, menace, and uncertainty (ambiguity), which juice the amygdala.

This was a small experiment, but it does suggest a physiological basis for Boyd’s contention that one can attack not only an opponent’s plans, as Sun Tzu insisted, but his very ability to plan.