WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

Air Force Colonel John Boyd, “the father of the F-16,” introduced the term OODA loop (“Observe-Orient-Decide-Act”) to describe why agility is more important in combat than pure firepower. Both fighters are trying to understand the situation, decide what to do, and then act. If you can think more quickly, you can “get inside the OODA loop of your enemy” and disrupt his decision making. “The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent while you simultaneously clarify his intentions,” wrote Boyd’s colleague Harry Hillaker in his eulogy to Boyd. “That is, operate at a faster tempo to generate rapidly changing conditions that inhibit your opponent from adapting or reacting to those changes and that suppress or destroy his awareness. Thus, a hodgepodge of confusion and disorder occur to cause him to over- or under-react to conditions or activities that appear to be uncertain, ambiguous, or incomprehensible.”