The OODA loop

Our enemies are obsessed with jamming our OODA Loops. They do not want us to have even a moment to think. An OODA loop is a decision making process: observe–orient–decide–act. We take in information, and we make a decision on how to act to change things. Our enemies keep distracting us with constantly changing information, and we keep getting stuck in the OO stage, never making decisions, never acting to change things, because we are constantly trying to figure out the nature of the trap we are caught in. But that is the trap we are caught in! We end up stuck in endless puzzling debates, making no productive plans to achieve victory in even one small way.

When a fresh news story gets hyped up, and people say “oh oh they are just distracting us”, it is THINKING TIME they are distracting us from. A moment for the dust to settle, for even a minute of propaganda-free time, to be able to make a plan to counter our enemy’s plans. They cannot allow us this minute. We are allowed no firm place to stand. They have to bombard us with useless factoids and storylines 24/7, little rabbit holes and dead-ends and intrigue and drama, or else we might form together into something capable of defeating their psychological operations. Distraction and overload is their primary weapon against us. Unfortunately, we keep falling for this trick.

The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare.[1]

The OODA loop has become an important concept in litigation,[2] business,[3]law enforcement,[4] and military strategy. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby “get inside” the opponent’s decision cycle and gain the advantage.