Speed versus Quickness
Drawing by French artist Théodore Fort c. 1845. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence....
View ArticleWhat are the chances of that?
Wellington had considered the relative probability of a French attack at various points; he concluded that the sector from Torres Vedras to the Atlantic was the least likely and could be left mainly...
View ArticleInfluence strategies
c. 1900. Library of Congress Digital Collection. Once again, social science can help us understand behavior and why, or why not, certain influence strategies may be effective. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas...
View ArticleAll Warfare is Based Upon …
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1850) The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem...
View ArticleConfusion and disorder
Even if you’ve seen this, it’s well worth a second look. Even if you know what the OODA loop is — especially if you know what the “loop” is — watch this video. Chuck was present at the creation, and...
View ArticleBoyd’s OODA “Loop”: What and why?
As Frans Osinga pointed out in his 2006 examination of John Boyd’s philosophy of conflict, Science, strategy and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd, the OODA loop is the best known but probably...
View ArticleIs it agility or adaptability?
I tend to think of “agility” as adaptability with a time dimension, that is, the ability to adapt more rapidly to new situations than can competitors or opponents. That may not, however, be the only...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, Alice
Sun Tzu was a great fan of intelligence and spies in particular — check out Chapter 13 if you need a refresher — because it’s much easier to operate inside opponents’ OODA loops if you already know...
View ArticleCoherent, Credible, and Wrong
The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy, but the one who knows how to do it. Polish SciFi master Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006) We often think of Soviet doctrine as tanks...
View ArticleFear of planning
Another post on research into the physiology of orientation. “Planning may start in brain’s amygdala, study says,” reporting on research conducted at Cambridge University. The amygdala is most...
View ArticleFormlessness in space and time
In chapter six of the Sun Tzu text, we read: Therefore, when you induce others to construct a formation while you yourself are formless, then you are concentrated while the opponent is divided. (Cleary...
View Article