Free Republic

In McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama, Michael Barone suggests that McCain has gotten inside Obama's OODA loop:John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop. That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. "The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes....

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop. That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. "The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather...

John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop. That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. "The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather...

Business is a dogfight. Your job as a leader: Outmaneuver the competition, respond decisively to fast-changing conditions, and defeat your rivals. That's why the OODA loop, the brainchild of "40 Second" Boyd, an unconventional fighter pilot, is one of today's most important ideas in battle or in business. The F-16 fighter jet is, as supersonic military aircraft go, a modest machine. It measures just 49 feet long and 31 feet wide from wingtip to missile-capped wingtip, and it weighs about half as much as its U.S. Air Force predecessor, the F-15. With a top speed of 1,350 MPH, it lags...

What strategy caused the Iraqi regime to collapse? What must the United States and Britain do to consolidate the fleeting gains of a historic military victory? PISRR: penetrate-isolate-subvert-reorient-reharmonize. In the final years of his life, retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) invented PISRR as a complement to his now famous OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop. Some PISRR elements describe what has happened so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom; others suggest what must come next. From the outset of the 2003 Iraq war, Coalition armor, infantry, and special forces and constant pressure from the air quickly penetrated and isolated major portions of...

In January in this space I wrote a book review of Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed History, the story of the late Air Force Col. John Boyd, the maverick (vast understatement) self-taught military thinker who in the 1980s completely revolutionized American military doctrine, strategy and tactics. In a tour-de-force briefing called Patterns of Conflict that contained some 180 PowerPoint slides and which took two days to present, Boyd laid out a completely new theory of modern warfare, shorthanded as "4th generation warfare" or just 4GW. At the heart of this theory was what Boyd called...

NEW YORK - The coming assault on Baghdad already has its first hero: Colonel John Boyd, a foul-mouthed, insubordinate fighter pilot who has been in his grave at Arlington National Cemetery for almost five years. When Iraq's tyrant is brought down, that inevitable victory will be Boyd's doing. You won't hear Boyd's name being cited in Rose Garden speeches, however. Nor will the Pentagon be authorising any posthumous decorations for the man who, through 30 years of bureaucratic guerilla warfare, transformed America's military. Even though he gave them many of the tools that made Operation Desert Storm such a sweeping...