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The Generations of War in the Context of the OODA Loop
Whether you view reality as land, or as a sea, or even a mystical body, one thing is clear: you exist with it.
More specifically, you can effect the world and the world can effect you. Action flows from you to the world, and information flows from the world to you. Whether you kick a rock, pet a dog, or eat a snack, the your flow of action and the world’s flow of information make life what it is.
This is true no matter what you are. If you are a fighter, process remains the same. The fighter acts on the world, and the world blowbacks to the fighter. Blowback is the residue the only thing that remains of the fighter’s action after the action. A happy and lucky fighter gets easy and pleasant blowback. Fighters to choose poorly have less pleasant experiences.
The above three charts show the individual and the world as entities, and the lines are their relations. The graphics are called Entity Relation, or E R diagrams, and are commonly used to understand databases.
Another way to look at things is with flowcharts. Let’s take a look at the same fighter / world system, but with flowcharts. Here, a process called “fighting” effects a direct access storage device called the “world.”
Remember, this is exactly the same thing as before:
But what is this fighting? What sub processes make up this process called “fighting”? Or for that matter, what sub processes make up the process we called “being human”?
Air Force Colonel John Boyd invented something he called a “decision loop,” made up of four sub processes called “observing,” “orienting,” “deciding,” and “acting.” While his original graphic was rather ugly, we can expand our “fighting world” flow chart to show his decision loop:
Because the four stages start with O, O, D, and A, the decision loop is sometimes called an “OODA” loop. In the model.
We observe reality. We take that observation and make sense of it. We oriented new things we see against what we already think we know.
After we oriented new facts, we may go back into observing. This may Nike Air Foamposite One happen if we are confused, or we just want to “wait and see.” Alternatively, we might decide what to do.
When we make decisions, two things happen. Obviously, the first thing is that we observe that we made Air Jordan 23s a decision. We might then orient that with thinking that our decisions have often been bad, and paralyze ourselves with doubt.
The other thing that happens when we make a decision is we go on and act. Action effects the world, like when we chase a cat or rob a bank. Actions are implicitly guided by our orientation too. For example, you go through the entire OODA loop to decide to walk to the store, but many individual actions (how to move your legs to walk) are guided by your orientation without any decision to do so.
With this introduction of John Boyd’s out of the war, read on to see how it explains the many generations of modern war.
Orientation and Action, a tdaxp series
1. The OODA Loop
2. The OODA PISRR Loop
“In the panel proper, Bruce explained how the trench warfare of World War I was enabled by the large gun factories created by the British and French for a naval war against each other that never happened. Nonetheless, the ability to mass produce lots of very large guns remained after the English Channel Threat had passed. So when a new problem (German aggressiveness) came up, warfighters reached for the tools they already had: in that case, including large artillery pieces.”
Is this right? Or is something missing? My recollection of WWI was the French went into WWI with virtually no heavy artillery. They relied almost exclusively on their Air Jordan Future 75 mm guns. The British Army of 1914 was also deficient in heavy artillery. The Germans relied in part on Skoda heavy howitzers, non German, in 1914. Didn’t trench warfare break out before large numbers of heavy guns made it to the western front? I am not an Engineer but I get the impression that a factory that builds 12 inch naval guns is not easily converted to 6 inch guns for land warfare. Prior to the war my father trained on a French 75mm piece while in ROTC at Iowa State.
He served in the 75mm half track platoon on Iwo Jima, and it was the low trajectory, excellent direct fire capability of the weapon that made it so effective on Iwo Jima (it was also capable of very accurate indirect fire.)
It was, I think, the last time the USMC used it in combat. When they returned to Hawaii it was replaced in their unit by Priests. I don’t think the 75mm saw duty on Okinawa, and they had to improvise to replace its effectiveness.
The defining conflict of WWI was not between nations, but between the mechanization and mass unit tactics. That is what mired armies in trench warfare. Machine guns and repeating rifles made mass infantry and even cavalry charges little more than mass suicides. With no alternative strategic theories, old European commanders dug in and not until more resourceful players and more Air Jordan 2011 mobile mechanization (airplanes, tanks) came into play could trench stale mates be broken. Watch the movie “Sgt. York” and you can get a simplified picture (and an only slightly romanticized intro to one of the greatest citizen soldiers ever). Artillery was and is very important in ground and naval ops, but it is only a part and necessarily a preliminary, “softening up” or “structure clearing” part in most contexts. The idea that heavy artillery somehow dictated trench warfare seems to me remarkably silly.
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