It's okay, Brad. C-SPAN has run several of his talks any number of times and undoubtedly will again. The ones I've seen pretty much all cover the same ground.

C-SPAN does have his old shows, but he constantly updates his script.

It is a great presentation, sorry you had to miss it.

Brad,

I'm going to repost the following under this thread in hopes that it will catch your attention. Yes, it's Pentagon related, but the broader application is the issue as it's being used by the Administration on legislative matters.

This is an important consideration. Worthy reading for anyone trying to develop an effective counter strategy for ongoing activities by the Administration and Congressional majority leadership.

MG

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http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000466.html#comments

Understanding the Administration's Application of John R. Boyd's OODA Loop Theory to Social Security and Other Legislative Matters

I have concluded that many people may not understand the Administration's master strategy. A general failure to grasp the overall strategy is a sign of potential weakness that can be exploited.

What you are observing is John R. Boyd's version of "highly irregular warfare" being applied to general administration practices by the Bush team. More specifically, Boyd's OODA Loop Theory.

Yes, I am serious. Just study their strategy and compare such to the following references. It's obvious.

As a point of illustration, let me refer to the most important message in the Washington Post article, 'Bush Rejects Delay, Prepares Escalated Social Security Push'.

Main point: "the White House announced plans to step up its effort to pressure lawmakers into action by dispatching Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials to 60 events in 60 days. Cheney, in particular, will assume a larger role in the effort, including attending town hall meetings with GOP lawmakers."

Think about the significance of that. Sixty events in 60 days. (and no one on the blog even mentioned it)

The Strategy: John R. Boyd's OODA Loop Theory

Strategy Elements: Observe, Orient, Act, Decide

The OODA "Loop"

The analytic/synthetic process by which our mental orientation interacts with the external world is an evolving, open-ended, far-from-equilibrium process governed by control loops embodying positive as well as negative feedback

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Boyd's OODA Strategy

Transients:

- "Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act more inconspicuously, more quickly, and with more irregularity...

or put another way

- Operate inside adversary's Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action loops or get inside his Mind-Space-Time.

(this) Permits one to

- Probe and test adversary to unmask strengths, weaknesses, maneuvers, and intentions.

- Employ a variety of measures that interweave menace-uncertainty-mistrust with tangles of ambibuity-deception-novelty as basis to sever adversary's moral ties and disorient...

- Select initiatve (or) response that is least expected.

- Establish focus of main effort together with other effort and pursue directions that permit happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives.

- Move along paths of least resistance (to reinforce or exploit success)

- Exploit, rather than disrupt or destroy, those differences, frictions, and obsessions of adversary organism that interfere with his ability to cope...

- Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary's vulnerable, yet critical, connections, centers, and activities...in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for mop-up or absorption.

- Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos...to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse."

John R. Boyd
chart 132 from "Patterns of Conflict"

http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/boyd/page_132.htm

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Boyd and Military Strategy

http://www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm

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DESTRUCTION AND CREATION

by John R. Boyd

September 3, 1976

http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/boyd/destruction/destruction_and_creation.htm

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War, Chaos, and Business
Theory of Maneuver Conflict

http://www.belisarius.com/theory_of_mc.htm

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Evolutionary Epistemology

A Personal Interpretation of John Boyd's Destruction and Creation

by Franklin C. Spinney

July 31, 1997

http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/spinney/ev_epis/evolutionary_1.htm

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A Short Tutorial on the Moral Essence of Grand Strategy

September 11, 2003

http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c491.htm

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Conditioning the Masses in the Hall of Mirrors (II)

The ubiquitous practice of Front Loading

April 10, 2004

http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c508.htm

"But Front Loading is the political art of producing unreliable information by downplaying or misrepresenting the future consequences of a current decision in order to bring about approval of the desired course of action by the ultimate "decision makers," the people."

"Front Loading is an art, because it requires creating a rosy vision connecting an unpleasant (present) reality to a pleasant (future) unknown in order to induce the "decision makers" to suspend their disbelief and buy into the vision. But the operation also requires the creation and evolution of powerful vested political interests to shore up that decision's real evolutionary pathway (or more popularly, to stay the course), once its painful consequences become apparent."

"...there is one universal, highly visible requirement that must accompany all Front Loading operations: for the practice to thrive and grow, the front loaders must always escape accountability, while those who object to their deception are always held accountable and punished for their objections."

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Loopy OODA Loops:

The Triumph of Faith & Interests Over Facts & Reason

May 30, 2004

http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c513.htm

"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.

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."

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Who is well schooled in Boyd's OODA Loop Theory? Cheney. Why? He was briefed by Boyd, prior to Boyd's death.

Who else understands how to effectively implement the OODA Loop Theory on legislative proposals? Bush and Rove, among others.

Who doesn't understand the significance of the Bush team's use of Boyd's OODA Loop Theory? Perhaps many of those opposing Bush's Social Security private accounts/other changes plans.

Course of Action? React accordingly. Collapse their OODA Loop before they collapse our OODA Loop.

Everthing that I read regarding Administration moves on Social Security is viewed with consideration of Boyd's OODA Loop Theory. There's no question that the Bush team is using it.

As an aside, Boyd's OODA strategy is the framework for successful actions by the Pentagon on and off the battlefield in my opinion.

Meanwhile, the Administration has taken advantage of using this same strategy for other initiatives, such as Social Security.

This consideration should be factored into the ongoing discussions and responses to Bush team proposals and courses of action. Their approach is built around the OODA Loop model.

Movie Guy:

Great post, right on message. The Pentagon's New Map is just more Heritage Foundation tripe in a New World Order, or The United World of America.

Like menudo, Barnett's global empire strategy looks good, until you find what it's made of.
He claims it's a strategy for global peace, but look where he's coming from. He's a DoD lifer.
DoD lifer's stay on-message. Global domination.
Read AF2025. Then read Barnett. All same-same.

au.af.mil/au/2025/
thomaspmbarnett.com/pnm/preface.htm

"The terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the different one we need to build, in order to secure globalization's ultimate goal - the end of war as we know it."

War is Peace, right?

"This book will provide a way to understand not only what is happening now, but also what will happen in matters of war and peace across this century. It will explain where and why conflicts will arise, and how we can prevent them. It will explain why this new strategy of preemption and this new global war on terrorism ****must be subordinated to the larger goal of spreading economic globalization around the planet****."

"We begin to see the world for what it truly is: divided into (good) societies that are actively integrating themselves into globalization's Functioning Core and (evi) those that remain trapped in its Non-Integrating Gap - that is, largely disconnected from the global economy and the ***rule sets*** that define its stability."

"It is disconnectedness that defines danger."

Ergo, kill all refusniks and flower children.
"You're either with US or against US", right?
Globalize your population, or we'll ram race-to-the-bottom capitalism up your ass ... for peace!

It follows from Barnett's OODA metric that those who oppose globalization must be eradicated, by our newly militarized police force, or better, a private militia of disappearer's and assassin's.

Hence Don Rumsfeld's new Black Op's clearance, the new head of Coordinated Intelligence, with no Congressional oversight, foreign or domestic.
Just who killed the former Lebanese PM? Yet it got the government to collapse and Syria out!

I can understand now Ted Kennedy's "Neanderthal".
Like my father with his belt and his fist.
"I'm doing this for your own good, honey."

Barnett is just publishing OODA before he dies.
Serving his DoD masters, then look how fast he got published and out on the lecture circuit!!
Giving good head, and spewing devil bile. Sweet!

"There will always be a need in the New Economy for rickshaw drivers and pleasure girls."

Dude.

Shaww.

Movie guy: Yeah, well, this seems like a kind of circular self-referential jargon for the style of management I experienced under a previous dean. He was an MBA. He used to circulate lots of management material, great steaming gobs of which came from Harvard B-school's glossy mag.

It was all about management by keeping people off-balance and afraid and divided from each other, by constantly redefining goals, and by forcing crises on the system; management must always be right by definition, information flows in only one direction, and words are not used in the way almost everyone else understands them. Very Orwellian. I called it "management by prerogative," sort of like the Stuart kings reborn.

I recognized this pattern from the moment of bush's first exploratory meeting with congressional Democrats away back at the beginning of his term. But the politicians seem only very recently to have cottoned to it.

Counteracting it in the political world is tricky because it has to be done at two levels simultaneously. The inside game has to use the intertia of institutionalized systems to bog down the headlong rush, first. That's usually enough if we're just talking about institutional managements, because these people have itchy feet and don't stay long.

But in politics there has to be a public game of counterattack, of redefining the questions and the people. Ad hominem is a necessary part of the game. This means, in current conditions, that Democrats have to separate bush the man from the office of president, and denigrate the man subtly. Cleland did it brilliantly during the campaign with his trip to the ranch. More of the same, please.

Another element of counterattack has to be simple, straightforward assertions that accuse the administration of everything short of baby-eating. No prob there, because it's all true. They mostly have to speak up for the value of work. This sales tax idea is the perfect chance to do it.

Dems shouldn't be afraid of looking mean; that was 2001's issue. They should be deathly afraid of appearing too whiny and too bogged down in details. Details are fine and are where the devil lives, but first things first: get the soundbites. Only C-SPAN junkies get into the details.