Yet again over the past ten days, John McCain seems to be auditioning for the role of "Maverick" in the film Top Gun: hoping the right mix of worn-on-his-sleeve angst, narcissism, and act-first-think-later decision-making will make him a political heartthrob.
Like Cruise's character, McCain's challenger is "Ice Man" - calm, cool, methodical, and precise: the personification of the Boyd Cycle. I'm guessing McCain's campaign would welcome that casting of Barack Obama, banking on American voters to side with the movie hero.
But the real world isn't a movie script and it seems that voters, like military trainers, want "Ice Man" rather than "Maverick."
More below the fold....
The Boyd Cycle is a decision-making method developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He theorized that successful fighter pilots were successful because of their ability to process the situation faster than their enemies. They could, in his original formulation, "get inside the enemy's decision cycle" and thus be proactive rather than reactive. In terms of impersonal events, we often call this "getting ahead of the power curve," and thus the Boyd Cycle has been adopted - and complicated beyond all utility, as evident in the Wikipedia link - by business schools and other decision theorists.
There are varying acronyms used by different Boyd Cycle proponents, but I'll stick with the terms I first learned: the IPDE Loop, standing for Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute. (The Wiki link gives OODA, for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, but IPDE is more intuitive.) It proposes a simple, four-step cycle of decision-making:
- Identify relevant information around you;
- Predict salient and likely challenges;
- Decide how to respond to those challenges; and be prepared to:
- Execute that decision if the challenge develops.
In the film Top Gun, the character of "Ice Man" (Val Kilmer) personified the Boyd Cycle-trained pilot: cool, calm, methodical, and precise. While arguably less prone to flashes of brilliance, the "Ice Man" also takes fewer risks. Indeed, Boyd argued, flashes of brilliance and risk-taking go hand-in-hand. The more risks you take, the more you rely on flashes of brilliance to escape the consequences.
And as Boyd and others before him noted: "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." Sooner or later, inevitably, brilliance fails and the risks catch up to you.
John McCain, by contrast, aspires to be Cruise's character "Maverick." He even chose and peddled it as his persona, after the film came out. The Cruise character personifies McCain as McCain likes to see himself: loud, brash, irresistably masculine, an iconoclast, a gambler, and with a massive case of worn-on-his-sleeve angst.
Like Cruise's angst-ridden "Maverick," McCain carries a chip on his shoulder: unlike his family legacy, he did not come home from war as a conquering hero. Instead, McCain came home a victim, arguably an heroic victim, but a victim nonetheless. Worse, he suffered as a POW in a war that America lost, a war McCain is still convinced could and should have been won. Vietnam is the seeping, septic sore on McCain's psyche, and he will not rest until America has won an undeniable military victory, until we as a nation have "earned back our colors," proving ourselves worthy of the McCain family legacy.
Like Cruise's narcissistic "Maverick," McCain wants to be the center of attention. Solving problems matters less than being in the spotlight when problems are solved, thus the pseudo-suspension of his campaign and rush back to D.C., not to support a plan already nearly completed, but to block it and insert one with his own stamp of leadership. Like Cruise buzzing the tower in the film, it's not enough that things go well. McCain must announce - with an ear-splitting, coffee-spilling, window-rattling fly-by - "I'm the hero!"
Finally, like Cruise's devil-may-care "Maverick," McCain wants to be seen as the gambling, edge-of-the-envelope, flies-by-pure-instinct genius who can neither be taught nor criticized by ordinary mortals. No Boyd Cycle, no methodical decision-making for McCain. That's for the lesser beings who lack his instinctive genius. It's act-first-think-later, and insist that everyone else follow as his wingman.
Thus we get Sarah Palin, played by Kelly McGillis, the "bold" choice for VP nominee, the fawning stock female character who breathlessly tells the hero outside the briefing room what she couldn't say in front of everyone else, that she sees genius in his flying. That Palin is as frighteningly unbelievable as a Vice President as McGillis was as an intelligence officer is not a problem for McCain. Palin's just the stock female, after all. McCain is the hero.
And his act-first-think-later style was never clearer than over the past ten days, when he's darted around like a panicked pilot with a MIG on his six, trying to shake the narrative-killing lock-on of events he neither understands nor knows how to engage. Small wonder that he did again what he did so often in his Navy career: yank the "Eject" handle. And if he crashes a solution-in-being - as he did yesterday - that's better than a solution in which he's not the hero.
But this isn't a Hollywood production, Senator Cruise. There's no script that inevitably leads to your glorification. And in the real world, with real problems, without a foregone conclusion and stuntmen to take the bruises for us, we don't need an angst-ridden, narcissistic, risk-taking, act-first-think-later, loose cannon of a "Maverick."
We need a calm, cool, methodical, precise, Boyd Cycle-trained "Ice Man."
We need Barack Obama.