A Generalist in a World of Specialists

LtCol Dave “Sugar” Lyle recently wrote a great rebuttal piece in the Armed Forces Journal addressing the Oct AFJ article “Goodbye, OODA Loop” which Lyle says, “…should have set off alarm bells across the U.S. defense community.”

As has already been commented on by several in the Boyd community, the oversimplified OODA diagram and corresponding straw-man argument presented in the Benson and Rotkoff article takes an elegant and fairly sophisticated framework and cuts it down to the equivalent of a kindergarten finger painting, turning OODA into a linear decision-making checklist of which Boyd himself would have likely lit on fire with his cheap cigar.

Adam Elkus points out in his own rebuttal piece,

The OODA is neither linear nor prescriptive. One doesn’t, as the article implies, sit down and think “What does my OODA say about ordering lunch today?” It’s simply a model of decisionmaking that more or less occurs automatically. As the “full OODA” shows, it’s significantly more complex than simply a tactical model built on speed

It’s often our initial tendency when dealing with things or ideas that are complex to quickly simplify them to something more manageable or familiar. In certain cases this makes sense as it allows us to filter through a infinite variety of options without getting bogged down in irrelevant details. The full OODA Loop however, it is itself a simplification of a lifetime of Boyd’s work, so by creating an OODA lite one is actually simplifying a simplification…to the point of irrelevance.

Lyle puts it much more eloquently,

Studies by cognitive neuroscientists have demonstrated that as a basic human trait, we are stressed more by uncertainty than unpleasant certainties. But in our efforts to achieve parsimony and the false cognitive ease often associated with it, we sometimes cut out too much detail and end up building expensive empires on theoretical foundations of sand.

Boyd’s work is no different than that of many great theorists of the past in that it requires a good deal of mental wrestling and time to understand. It is not intended to provide straight-forward answers as much as it is better questions.

Here are a few other sections from Lyle’s piece I found of great value,

Ironically, the popularity of Boyd’s ideas has created the largest cognitive trap in which much of the defense community still finds itself. As people absorbed the wisdom of the OODA Loop, they absorbed the simple version as a decision loop, but not the deeper insights of the adaptation engine that Boyd actually offered. While emphasis on the decision-loop aspects of OODA is absolutely appropriate in tactical situations, large parts of the defense community became obsessed with the idea that paralysis — collapsing the adversary’s OODA Loop while maintaining your own at a faster pace — was the ultimate goal of warfare. Network-centric warfare advocates promised that we could achieve “decision dominance” and gain victory through the right combinations of kinetic and nonkinetic effects if we only had the right interconnected systems to remove the fog of war. Under Transformation, we designed light, agile forces designed to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to respond to our higher operations tempo and assumed that this would collapse our enemies’ wills to resist us.

But this approach, just like the simple OODA Loop that it invokes, fails to consider the longer and more important adaptation loops that describe the long-term interactions needed for lasting conflict termination. We focused on short, fast races, forgetting that the race never really ends. The ability to cause paralysis through combat is vitally important to our national security, but paralysis is irrelevant or even counterproductive if it is not serving as a temporary stepping stone on the way to creating lasting, nonviolent, long-term patterns of complementary adaptation between two societies. In the strategic sense, victory does not come from paralysis — it comes from its opposite.

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We’ll never be able to accurately predict the future in a complex world, and we’ll never be able to completely control what happens in it, but with a better understanding of the universal process of adaptation, we can organize what we already know from various disciplines of study, and find new ways to leverage the entire process of adaptation — in the physical, cognitive and moral domains — with comprehensive approaches that go far beyond paralysis. The “better peace” we’re looking for on the other side of war comes when societal patterns of adaptation favor nonviolent methods of competition and cooperation over violent ones. If we don’t understand what drives and sustains mutually beneficial adaptation, how can we ever hope to create the conditions for it using military force?

We don’t need to get rid of the OODA Loop; we need to rediscover it. The universal description of adaptation in OODA can serve as the foundation for a unifying theoretical framework of a more interconnected grand strategy. If Boyd were here today, he would probably tell us to get moving on something better than what he left us.

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