Getting Inside the Enemy’s Cycle Time to Respond to Attacks
I thought of this yesterday as a dim memory in a corner of my mind about how we had a terrific advantage over the Iraqis in warfare, since we were able to act before they could complete their decision-making processes — i.e., they became sitting ducks while waiting for orders. Thanks to Hugh Hewitt today, we can elaborate on this, and learn a little more about the formalities of this process, particularly since it appears to play a role in the current political warfare. Hugh, in a particularly incisive piece:
Two years ago my Navy lieutenant cousin introduced me to Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop, and “net-centric” warfare. While I am off to interview Karen Hughes, let me point you to these links and suggest that the GOP is way inside the Dems’ OODA loop, and understands how the new information tidal wide has changed politics by making political combat much, much more net-centric, and much more fast-paced. To use a techie term, the Dems are getting their rears handed to them on the management of buzz and momentum because they believe CNN matters and nonsense like “Zell was too ‘hot’ last nigth” can somehow stop an opinion wave from following in Zell’s wake and creating even more damage to Kerry’s campaign.
One of the pioneers of the theory of net-centric warfare is John Arquilla. His article on “swarming” is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what is happening to John Kerry in the political environment of 2004, but not happening to George W. Bush:
“Swarming is a seemingly amorphous but carefully structured, coordinated way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable ‘pulsing’ of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. The aim is to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, attack it, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. Unlike previous military practice, battle management is now mainly about ‘command and decontrol,’ as networked units all over the field of battle (or business, or activism, or terror and crime) coordinate and strike the adversary in fluid, flexible, nonlinear ways.”
While Bush-Cheney 2004 is not coordinating with Swift Boat Vets for Truth, is not sending out talking points to the talkers on radio row, is not hard-wired into Brit Hume’s head, and most certainly does not run the center-right of the blogosphere, all of these forces are swarming around Kerry and delivering many serious blows to his credibility and his strategic plan. They are “inside the Kerry campaign’s OODA loop,” and the result is paralysis and recrimination within Kerry’s staff.
The Bush campaign, by contrast, has been preparing for the lefty 527s’ attacks for a year, has been reaching out to new media for longer, and has a sophisticated cyber-campaign that vastly overmatches the Kerry effort in size and complexity, though the GOP is keeping its edge quiet.
Well, on reflection, I think Hugh may be making a tiny bit too much of this. It doesn’t matter how tight your OODA loop is if the charges being levelled at you are largely true — um, unless of course you’d consider admitting a mistake, spinning your apology as well as possible, and moving on. (The OODA loop in question appears to have a duration of about 33 years.)
Anyway, as background, the OODA loop — observation, orientation, decision, action — was developed by Colonel John Boyd, USAF, in the 1990’s as a heuristic device for thinking about how to get inside an enemy’s decision-making and action cycle time. Here is the flow chart of Boyd’s idea. There’s nothing magical about Boyd’s idea, but it explains elegantly one reason the first thing you want to do when attacking is cut off your enemy’s ability to communicate with his superiors.
Net-centric warfare is way cooler, since it permits the attacker to defeat any OODA cycle time, even approaching zero, by fast, highly coordinated attacks from multiple platforms from multiple directions near simultaneously. Here’s an article by Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., Defense Information Systems Agency, in CrossTalk, the Journal of Defense Software Engineering:
Net-centric warfare combines a powerful military force with information superiority, giving American service men and women greater awareness of our own forces, the enemy, and the battlefield environment. America now has a smaller, more lethal deployed military force. Netcentric operations permit forces to focus on specific targets, protecting the lives of American and coalition forces, as well as countless non-combatants.
“With less than half of the ground forces and two-thirds of the air assets used 12 years ago in Desert Storm, we have achieved a far more difficult objective … In Desert Storm, it usually took up to two days for target planners to get a photo of a target, confirm its coordinates, plan the mission, and deliver it to the bomber crew. Now we have near real-time imaging of targets with photos and coordinates transmitted by e-mail to aircraft already in flight. In Desert Storm, battalion, brigade, and division commanders had to rely on maps, grease pencils, and radio reports to track the movements of our forces. Today, our commanders have a real-time display of our armed forces on their computer screens,” said Vice President Richard Cheney.
Geeky and lethal: today’s GOP.