Military Strategist Explains Why Donald Trump Leads — And How He Will Fail

By Published on December 18, 2015

No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican presidential primary race — and there are many, many good reasons to do so — you have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trump’s ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system.

We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president, using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far, the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet he is already exhibiting symptoms of precisely the flaws that Boyd saw as fatal in combatants.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design engineer, is best known for the “OODA Loop” or “decision cycle,” a concept he developed as part of a broader study of “patterns of conflict” in the 1970s and 1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, and refers to the process by which soldiers in combat — or humans engaged in any form of conflict — absorb information, make decisions, and act on them. Boyd illustrated this with a graph:

Boyd’s theories were complex, constantly evolving, and never formally written down in one place in his lifetime — he preferred to play Socrates, and let others be Plato — so they are often oversimplified. But for present purposes, four generalizations will do.

First, operational tempo — speed — lies at the core of Boyd’s theory of conflict, and has been the most influential element of his thinking, both in the military and in how the concept of a “decision cycle” has seeped into our popular vocabulary. (Indeed, Boyd first made his name in the Air Force as “40-Second Boyd,” a fighter jock with a standing bet that he could get on any opponent’s tail in 40 seconds. Many took the bet; he never had to pay up.)

Boyd’s core insight was about the interactive and disruptive nature of speed on human decision-making: success in conflict can be rapid and dramatic if one can “operate inside the OODA Loop” of the opponent. Operating inside the opponent’s OODA Loop means presenting him with a constantly shifting battlefield that keeps him off-balance and disoriented so he is unable to process information and make and implement sound decisions before the situation changes again.

Put another way, you don’t just make better or faster decisions than your opponent,you can disrupt the opponent’s ability to make reality-based decisions if you can continuously change the reality before he has time to react to it.

 

Read the article “Military Strategist Explains Why Donald Trump Leads — And How He Will Fail” on thefederalist.com.

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