When you call yourself the "war" president, it might be nice to have the world's top strategists on your side.
Mr. Bush, does not.
The American strategist Col John Boyd developed the theory of a continuously adaptive decision cycle -- Observation / Orientation / Decision / Action Loops -- as a means for staying connected to and for overcoming the external threats in a menacing environment. [see
Boyd and Military Strategy]
A faith-based decision-making strategy, on the other hand, is driven by a non-adaptive ideology, akin to what Boyd would have called a hard-wired Orientation. In such a strategy, staying on message means that observations are forced through a fixed filter that sees what it wants to see, and consequently decisions and actions are driven more by the internal wiring of the Orientation than by any evolving relationship to the external world. Thus the entire OODA loop turns inside itself, connected to some rigid formality, but disconnected from the environment that loop is supposed to cope with. Remember how faith in a rigid communist ideology disconnected decision-makers in the Soviet Union from events outside themselves.
Boyd's work is crucially important because he showed that the inevitable result of a decision process that loops inside itself is growing confusion and disorder. Under conditions of menace, such a decision process risks escalation into chaos, panic and overload, leading ultimately to paralysis and collapse.
The government of the United States has not reached Boyd's endgame, yet. But the loopy behavior in the attached article, viewed through Boyd's lens, suggests the presence of an incestuously amplifying, self-referential OODA Loop headed precipitously in that direction.
Loopy OODA Loops: Defense and the National Interest
So can the Left and NATO leads us from the quagmire of the OODA loopy right?
War is still not the answer Senator Kerry: Less Nam flashbacks and more LSD flashbacks, please!
"Wider still and wider"
All News is Lies
14th June 2004
By John Laughland
At the G8 summit in Georgia, the US president reaffirmed his desire to see widespread democratisation across the Middle East. Originally proclaimed at the National Endowment for Democracy in November,[i] this project has also been supported by the Democratic contender, John Kerry.[ii] It is clear not only that the American political establishment is lining up behind the idea that a radical transformation needs to occur in the Muslim world, but also that Washington has managed to get the rest of the industrialised world to support the project.[iii] This, in turn, spells the restriction of true democracy for a huge swathe of the world's population.
The French managed to insert[iv] a reference to the need for "reform in the region" to "go hand in hand with ... a just, comprehensive, and lasting settlement to the Arab- Israeli conflict, based upon U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338" (paragraph 6). Jacques Chirac also stressed his view that any such plan must be based on "a scrupulous respect for the independence and the diversity of the countries of the region", a pious wish. In both its and amended forms, the plan has met with wide opposition in the Arab world: Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two of the largest which are covered by the initiative but which are alarmed by its potential implications, declined invitations to the summit, while Tunisia, the current president of the Arab League, also refused to attend.[v]
Despite this opposition, it seems inevitable that the Americans will press ahead with the plan regardless. There have already been several statements by key NATO insiders about the need for the West to extend its influence on what is now labelled the "Greater Middle East", a term which includes the whole Muslim world from Morocco to Pakistan, and leaving out only Indonesia and Malaysia. Whether or not Western leaders resolve their differences over the deployment of NATO in Iraq, it is already clear that the Atlantic alliance is being primed to extend its influence deep into the Middle East, and that this on the agenda for the NATO summit to be held in Istanbul at the end of this month.[vi]
Wider Still Wider: Laughland
"And I dreamed I saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the sky, turning into butterflys above our nation" (Joni: Woodstock)