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FORTY SECOND BOYD AND THE BIG PICTURE (PART 1)
Bill Whittle's "Eject! Eject! Eject!" blog

This is a story about success and failure. It is a story about Iraq, and of something much bigger than Iraq. It is, perhaps, a small look into what makes victory, and defeat. It is a tale of infantrymen, of brave soldiers in dusty alleys a world away. It is a story of generals and strategies, too.

But to understand our newfound success there, to know a little of how we achieved it and most importantly, how to keep it, we need to move away from that Mesopotamian desert and those boots on the ground, and back to a different desert on the other side of the world a half century ago. For there, a vision was vouchsafed to a most unlikely warrior priest… the kind of insight that comes once or twice in all of human history.

FORTY SECOND BOYD AND THE BIG PICTURE (Part 2)

I bow to no one in my respect for the courage and integrity of the American soldier. From Bunker Hill to Missionary Ridge, from the stinking black sand of Iwo Jima to the jungles of Vietnam, these men have shown a tenacity, decency and valor unmatched in history. My respect and admiration for them all is boundless.

But with that said, there have never been soldiers like the ones we have deployed today. Never.

These men and women have been asked not only to be warriors, but also policemen, judges, marriage counselors, businessmen, administrators, referees, bodyguards, traffic cops, teachers and ambassadors. They deserve the very best that we as a nation can provide. That means not only material and spiritual support. It means they deserve the best leadership this country can possibly deliver.

Agility is not just something that a fighter plane or even an armored column can possess. Agility in this day and age can and should mean many things that may not seem obvious but which are more crucial to victory than any weapon system.

{snip}

...The problem seems not to be whether or not we know how to do this. The problem seems to be whether or not we want to.

This 2 part essay is about the discovery of the OODA loop, and how it changed American military and business strategies, and can be applied to changing America's political and social strategies. That is the simple explanation, but it is a wholly inadequate one. It's one of those fascinating pieces that ties in fighter pilot training, Sun Tsu's "The Art of War," political will, boots on the ground infantrymen, and on and on and on. It's a long read, but it really held my interest.

I most highly recommend reading both parts. Bill Whittle is an absolutely brilliant essayist.

Here's an example of OODA in politics:

McCain and the OODA Loop
The American Thinker
By Charlie Martin

Man, is this guy a fighter pilot, or what?

There are two military concepts here that explain the (absolutely spectacular) choice of Governor Sarah Palin. Both of them are important to the training of a fighter pilot, and while one of them wasn't formulated until after McCain's flying career was over, it was an observation based on what fighter pilots had to know.

One of them is the "envelope" -- which is to say the parameters within which a fighter airplane must operate.

I would even speculate that the reason that the Iraq insurgency had some initial success before the surge is that, intentionally or not, the insurgents had temporarily gotten inside of President Bush's OODA loop. The surge was the proper response and it reversed the situation. As Whittle has pointed out, General Petraeus is well inside the insurgency's OODA loop, and the results have been dramatic.

In domestic politics, Sen. McCain has gotten inside of Sen. Obama's OODA loop with the selection of Gov. Palin as his running mate. But, I believe that, in a larger sense, the Republican Party, and more specifically the conservative movement, has gotten inside the Democrat party's OODA loop. Lib/Progs keep spouting the same tired old class warfare, while the rest of America is seeing a genuine war hero with a running mate who both look like a lot of America - and I don't mean just ethnically (witness the significant number of delegates of color who were just as enthusiastic as their peers at Palin's speech). McCain even borrowed from the Lib/Prog meme with his comments about standing up to "Big Oil." It casts the McCain/Palin ticket in a very populist light, at a time when Joe and Jane Sixpack are tired and fed up with the arrogance of Harvard intellectuals telling Flyover Country how it is supposed to think.

From now until November is going to be a really interesting time, partly for the show of watching a seasoned combat veteran, who fully understands what OODA means, get inside the head and under the skin of a competitor who really doesn't know anything about the people he is trying to woo. Am I the only one who has noticed that Obama's facial expression the last few days is dominated by a look of worry?

I'll get the lawn chairs and the beer cooler. Can somebody bring some popcorn?