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Ed Beakley is the Director and guiding spirit of Project White Horse and is student of the strategic thinking of John Boyd. Ed requested space to respond to criticism directed at the OODA Loop by Col. Jim Storr in The Human Face of War and assumptions made regarding the influence of aerial combat on John Boyd’s strategic thought.

Boyd, Aerial Combat and the OODA Loop

by Ed Beakley

While I’m sure most have read the basic story, it seems it might be worth recalling the details abit.  Boyd first characterized OODA, looking to understand and explain the differential in air-air kills between U.S. and North Korean pilots and realized that with the significantly better visibility from the F-86 bubble canopy than that from the MiG 15, the USAF pilot was more likely to see a MiG approaching from the rear quarter tan the other way around. (The Vietnam era MiG 17 and 21 had similar designs – narrow canopies extending straight back into the fuselage.  I can attest to this having flown a MiG 21 simulator in an air engagement with a German Col in an F-4 at Ling Tempco Vought some years ago).  This ability to see the fight early is critical and coupled with the F-86 significant advantage in roll rate meant rolling and turning into the MiG, then reverse rolling would eventually set up a misalignment in a/c attitude which the F-86 could exploit. Seeing led to the ability to exercise a  fast transient.

Boyd’s example of the F-86 and MiG 15 allowed him to address the four pieces and their impact and of having the ability to change state quicker than one’s opponent.  The fact that time wise the observation and action are nearly stacked on top of each other,  does not mean that “orientation” and decision” did not or do not occur.  One must realize that almost all engagements of aerial combat last only seconds. Data from the air war over Vietnam show that in most instances the shot down pilot never saw the shooter. Snoopy jousting with the Red Baron is a colorful idea but dogfights happen mostly only in training. Indeed, with certainly no disrespect meant, “Forty Second Boyd” is a characterization that could only come out of the training world. Forty seconds is multiple life times in actual air-air engagements.

So how then does OODA occur? Two things, one closely relating to martial arts – individuals must be completely immersed in their art. There exists no better representation of this than the fighter pilot. Any fighter pilot who wouldn’t claim he could kick your ass in forty seconds is not worthy of the name, and he trains hard to be able to back that up.  And there’s nothing worse than a guy who can back that up. (Frank ‘Whip’ Ault, the Navy Captain, fighter pilot whose report led to TOPGUN was no Ace but his call sign was well earned).  This leads to the second, that attitude, training AND being immersed with similar extremely competitive arrogant bastards, means he takes all the elements of orientation with him when he crosses the Yalu or the Red River Valley.  His observation of the enemy aircraft brings the only missing piece of the “orientation” into play – physical situational awareness and allows the quickness of decision and action. “Decision” also follows out of that training (think about the “ribbon” drawings in Boyd’s Aerial Attack Study that were and are studied and practiced).  He’s been there done that so many times, it’s truly Gary Klein’s recognition primed, but all parts of OODA are still in play. 

Indeed, if the mission and performance of the aircraft differ substantially, the OODA process may actually stretch out and be more easily discerned. By way of example would be an A-7 on a Sam suppression “Ironhand” mission attacked from below by a MiG 21.  The A-7’s performance is significantly less than that of the MiG. This is not the quick conversion to a kill of Boyd’s example where O-O-D-A are essentially stacked on top of each other time wise, rather survival of the A-7 pilot and completion of his mission to protect the strike group (i.e., survival of a number of planes), turns into a more spread out O-O-D-A process, in which working to gain proper orientation is crucial to the necessary timing of the decision and action to execute a “bug-out.”

This rolling reversal maneuver is extremely violent, involves applying negative G’s and can be disorienting to the executing pilot.  Done correctly, it creates the same misalignment of aircraft with the MiG nose high, the A-7 nose low gaining separation and running out to the MiG’s six o’clock.  The trick though is that you wanted to run toward the water.  Even with separation and 180 degrees out of phase, it’s no longer just guns, the MiG had Atol missiles.  Water meant possibility of pick-up if you had to eject.  And on top of all that, if the Ironhand a/c bugged out, the strike group was now more susceptible to Surface to Air Missile attacks.  Will anyone argue this is not a discernable example of observe, Orient, decide act?

As to Boyd’s stature and competence to analyze the air-air world in regard to a true Ace (5 confirmed kills):

1.      World War II was unique in air-air combat in light of the technical capability, the number of aircraft in the air and in a fight at the same time.  Many kills came without one pilot seeing the other.  Kills were achieved by pulling the trigger at the right time as planes crossed your nose chasing someone else.  To be sure there were some great deeds of derring-do and some great pilots and certainly intuitive actions played a significant part. Does Col Storr’s interviews with Aces indicating the falsity of the OODA in air-air combat counter Boyd’s analysis?  Hardly.  Boyd was not trying to expound a theory on OODA and Air-Air Combat, he used an example he knew well, which is appropriate in many instances, but certainly not all.  He simply intended to show that if you could move through the OODA flow at a better tempo than your enemy, you could create a mismatch that could be exploited.

2.      Was not being a true Ace important?  No matter how good the pilot, luck and mission assignment plays a huge part.  Ask any fighter pilot, anywhere this one.  Some of the best never even get a look.  True story ( I was in the same area earlier and it wasn’t nice) – one of the senior F-4 Commanders who’d been involved with all the early TOPGUN stuff, was so frustrated because he, unlike some of that group, did not have a MiG, hoping a MiG would come up, went “trolling” along the DMZ, the very last day of the war and got shot down and lost.  Good pilot? Former commanding officer of the Blue Angels.  Boyd’s work as an ACM instructor and developer/writer of the Aerial Attack Study at Nellis tells you all you need to know.  One of his best students was Ev Raspberry, one of General Robin Olds’ MiG killers who credited his success over Route Pack Six to John Boyd for what he taught him at Nellis.

One final note, Seydlitz questions anything following from Boyd, if the original thinking is flawed.  As noted above, the view of an Ace doesn’t necessarily contradict Boyd’s analysis.  This is an extremely situationally dependent context.  Would he dismiss my own experience in combat?  The first time I read Boyd’s analysis, it made perfect sense.  The fact that the flow can be almost unobservable due to speed of process is irrelevant.  If Boyd’s OODA is to be discarded, then one must dismiss a whole process and body of work coming out of the Naval Electronic Systems Command in the eighties stemming from Dr. Joel Lawson’s research and writing on command and control.  Boyd’s work  seems to fall prey to “if it’s not perfect for all situations then it’s all bad”????

As to Storr, I turn the question, how can one now trust his writing, given his pretty obvious shoddy research on Boyd.  One must go no further than page 12 and the critique of Boyd’s loop.  Poor form no matter what he thinks of Bill Lind and 4GW.

Colonel David Maxwell, who has probably forgotten more about North Korea than I ever knew in the first place, has an insightful analytical piece up at SWJ Blog:

Irregular Warfare on the Korean Peninsula

….This paper is written with the concepts of “military misfortune” in mind. In Eliot Cohen and John Gooch’s seminal work on military failures, they determined that militaries are generally unsuccessful for three reasons: the failure to

learn, the failure to adapt, and the failure to anticipate. This paper will recommend that the ROK-US alliance learn from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, adapt Irregular Warfare concepts to the security challenges on the Korean Peninsula and anticipate the collapse of the Kim Family Regime and the complex, irregular threats that collapse will bring.

The conventional wisdom would postulate that the worse case situation would be an attack by the north Korean military because surely the devastation and widespread humanitarian suffering as well as global economic impact would be on a scale that would far exceed any crisis that has occurred since the end of World War II. While that could very well be the case, there is little doubt about the military outcome of an attack by the north on the South and its allies and that would be the destruction of the north Korean People’s Army and the Kim Family Regime. Victory will surely be in the South’s favor; however, this paper will argue that the real worse case scenario comes from dealing with the aftermath; either post-regime collapse or post-conflict.

Maxwell’s operative assumptions are particularly good. I especially like:

….The fifth and final assumption is that while some planning has taken place to deal with north Korean instability and the effects of Kim Family Regime collapse, there has been insufficient preparation for collapse. Furthermore, in addition to planning for collapse, actiocan and should be taken prior to collapse in order to mitigate the conditions and deal with the effects of collapse of the Kim Family Regime. Unfortunately, despite some planning efforts tocounter specific irregular threats, the ROK, and the US in particular, has been distracted by the very real and dangerous threat of north Korean nuclear weapons and delivery capabilitiesproliferation of same while at the same time ensuring deterrence of an attack by the north. Deterrence is paramount and the nuclear problem is a critical international problem; however, successful deterrence over time will likely result in the eventual collapse of the regime and the associated security and humanitarian crises that it will bring.

In other words, not only are US and ROK policy makers not preparing for the most probable second and third order effects of a North Korean collapse scenario, but the status quo on the Korean penninsula represents a wicked problem that is essentially a trajectory toward a worst case scenario collapse.

At SWJ Blog:

Octavian Manea – Pros and cons on Galula model

In response to the interest raised on the relevance of the Galula model for understanding and dealing with today’s insurgencies, I conducted a brief inquiry with key experts on the topic – Peter Mansoor, Steven Metz, David Betz, and Alex Marshall.

Dr. Peter Mansoor

The Galula model applies in those cases where the population of a country is more concerned about the effectiveness and legitimacy of its government than in its sectarian or ethnic make-up. “Classic” counterinsurgency efforts to improve the legitimacy of a government are then operative. In those cases where sectarian or ethnic identity trumps other factors (e.g., Sri Lanka or Chechnya), then protecting the people will avail the counterinsurgent little in the way of gaining their trust and confidence. In these cases, other strategic or operational approaches need to be considered….

Dr. Steven Metz

To me, the Cold War/Maoist model of insurgency applied in situations where new segments of a society were becoming politically aware or mobilized and thus made demands on the state which it could not fulfill. These demands were both tangible–infrastructure, security, education–and intangible (a sense of identity). That’s why I think it has very little applicability to current insurgencies. Granted current insurgencies attempt to emulate the Maoist strategy because it worked in the past, but I think this will lead to failure.

Dr. David Betz

The work of the French officer David Galula was clearly very influential on the thinking of the authors of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency. There is certainly a lot to like. For one thing, his book Counterinsurgency Warfare is less than 150 pages long which makes it an easy read-four cups of tea and a Sunday afternoon will get you through it. For another, it’s written in a very aphoristic style which is highly memorable. So if you’re trying to get across to a large number of people a number of ‘best practices’ or paradoxes of COIN then Galula is a very good assigned reading. The truth is though that most COIN best practice would fit on a bumper sticker. In fact the new UK Field Manual on COIN comes with a laminated credit card sized aide memoire on one side of which are printed the principles of COIN and on the other ISAF’s game plan for stabilizing Afghanistan. I’m not criticizing-I think it’s a handy thing; my point is rather that Galula and his interpreters sometimes sound a bit like Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories. In practice, it’s complicated, as one sees in Galula too if you read his longer, messier, more ambiguous and more rewarding book Pacification in Algeria. Anyway, to get to the point I have three main reservations about Galula…..

Dr. Alex Marshall

My issue with the Maoist Paradigm is really two-fold.

My first reservation, as a historian, is that we lack a definitive English-language study of Maoist insurgency itself beyond some fairly stereotyped notions of a three-stage or five-stage revolutionary process (from political agitation to guerrilla conflict to regular warfare). Galula and Thompson were great generalizers, but one can scarcely call their work proper historical studies-their general view was that Maoist-style insurgencies involved a degree of mass brainwashing for example. We possess some interesting case studies of how Maoist mobilization worked in practice on the ground, in individual villages or Shanghai for example, but there is so much more that could be done. Thus Western writing during the Cold War in general generated a shorthand stereotype, when in reality insurgency practice was often more diverse. The reason was simple I suggest-most successful insurgents aren’t particularly pithy writers (Guevara and Mao were exceptions), most unsuccessful ones are very quickly dead.

My second concern is more overarching however. The majority of discourse on COIN doesn’t take into account the strategic context, remaining locked into the operational level instead…..

Read the whole thing here.

A very productive piece by Manea and the gents above. Galula’s historiographic importance in COIN should be undisputed and his contribution to theory acknowledged and respected. Application of Galula’s framework (or, really, anybody’s) for understanding COIN, in analyzing insurgencies should be used cautiously or lightly until there is enough of an emprical understanding of the structure and motivations of the insurgents and the political deficiencies of the state, to see to what extent the model fits, before the operational assumptions of a military bureaucracy and theater command harden into place.

Lacking the reliable contingency of a superpower patron on an ideological crusade in the 21st century to impose a stamp of identity and tactics on it’s proxies, insurgencies are likely to be as diverse as La Familia is from FARC, the Taliban or the Real IRA.

By Charles Cameron 

It has been a while since I posted an entry in my “Games of War and Peace” series, but I just came across a quote in Stephen Ulph’s Towards a Curriculum for the Teaching of Jihadist Ideology that brought back memories…

The epigraph to Ulph’s Introduction quotes from Rosie Cowan and Richard Norton-Taylor’s piece, Britain now No 1 al-Qaida target – anti-terror chiefs from the (UK) Guardian of 19 October 2006, and I’ve added a couple of earlier paragraphs for context:

Even though the police and M15 have disrupted terror plots and groups influenced by al-Qaida, they describe the networks as very resilient.They say there is a frightening number of young men willing to step up and replace those who have been arrested or gone to ground.

“It’s like the old game of Space Invaders,” said one senior counter-terrorism source. “When you clear one screen of potential attackers, another simply appears to take its place.”

I don’t think there’s a deep strategic insight there, the way there may be with Mao and the game of Go, although the question of what drives the continuing recruitment of those young men is an important one.

But I’d like to ask — what other game-related insights do you find of value in understanding contemporary jihadism?

After an extended hiatus, Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books! re-starts……

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh

British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History. There is a wealth of detail about terrorists, their casual atrocities and the warped morality that terrorists habitually employ to rationalize their crimes; a nihilistic mentalite shared with their intellectual groupies in universities and political law firms that will shock and inform the reader. The scattered nature of the case studies that comprise modern terrorism though, makes Blood and Rage more of a kaleidescope than microscope.

Burleigh set out to chronicle a comprehensive examination of the evolution of terrorism in the last two centuries. There are Feinians and radicalized Russian Narodniks, murderous FLN Algerians and their pied noir OAS blood enemies, Irgun gunmen and Black September, ETA, IRA and Baader-Meinhoff gangsters consorting with Palestinian radicals and Herbert Marcuse. Burleigh dissects the psychopathology of ultraviolent degenerates like Hugh “Lenny” Murphy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Andreas Baader. Terrorists, statistically speaking, are generally not madmen in a clinical sense, but Burleigh records a noteworthy exception regarding Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang:

….With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg University, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R.D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalized patients. In the following years, about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Muller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufner and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan “Crazies to Arms”.

Blood and Rage makes for a grim read, with the recurring pattern of terrorism and counterterrorist response erupting to demoralize societies until the terrorists in question are either dead, imprisoned or mellowed by paunchy middle-age and political irrelevance as the times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.

The weakness of Blood and Rage, unlike some of Burleigh’s other works, is a lack of a strong analytical theme, focus or grand theory to explain and unite the relentless and gory march of geographically diverse case studies in terrorism, though an intelligent reader should be able to discern patterns present well enough for themselves. Given Burleigh’s stature as a scholar, one can envision him having taken the ball further down field for a deeper level of analysis of terrorism as a societal phenomena. Burleigh would probably reply that such is not the proper job of a historian, which while true enough, still leaves me wishing he had.

As a popular history, Blood and Rage makes a page turner out of rancorous destruction.