Time as a Weapon: John Boyd
Posted Jul 07, 2007 1 comment
I've been doing some digging inspired by Jeff Well's most recent article over at Rigorous Intuition, which closed with a meditation on using time as a weapon. It brought me back to John Boyd, one of the most innovative and intelligent military strategists of the past century, and his concept of "OODA Loops."
Boyd's concept was an observation of how humans, wether allies or enemies, process reality: the 4 step process of "Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act."
Click to Elarge
"The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent while you simultaneously clarify his intentions. 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."--Harry Hillaker
In future posts, I will be exploring how "Time as a Weapon" gets applied economically. I wanted to share this because it's basically a clear blueprint for a very esoteric concept. This is something Albert Pike was discussing in Morals & Dogma, but it's vastly more understandable here. If this post seems superficial or simple, try applying the diagram above to recent events and political controversies that interest you.
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Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.1. Rashid Patch on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:03 PM permalink
You quote Harry Hillaker : “The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent while you simultaneously clarify his intentions. 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.”
I could not help recalling Abby Hoffman’s (? or was it Jerry Rubin’s?*) 1968 remark, “We’re not trying to overthrow the government, just create a situation where the government get’s lost in the shuffle.”
*Since I lived through the ‘60s, I can’t quite remember all of them… (The Official Ronald Regan Excuse: “I can’t recall having any memory problem..")