OODA

Some call the late John Boyd the most original militarystrategist in 1,000 years. True or not, his influence has been profound. His ideas about “maneuverability” as the sine qua non of military effectiveness, long on the back burner (during the Cold War standoff between
sluggish behemoths), have marched front and center in the new age of instability, ambiguity, and terrorism. At the heart of Boyd’s thinking is an idea labeled “OODA Loops.”OODA stands for the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle. In short, the player with the quickest OODA Loops disorients the enemy to an extreme degree. In the world of aerial combat, for example, the confused adversary subjected to an opponent with short OODA cycles often flies into the ground rather than becoming the victim of machine gun fire or a missile. Boyd is careful to distinguish between raw speed and maneuverability. In aerial dogfighting in Korea (Boyd’s incubator), Soviet MiGs flown by Chinese pilots were faster and could climb higher, but our F-86 had “faster transients”—it could change direction more quickly; hence our technically inferior craft (by conventional design standards) achieved a 10:1 kill ratio.

(Read more in Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.)