As always, excellent post. Love the graphics. Fascinating subject. My capabilities for abstraction are not as developed as yours, but I sort of get the essence of what you are trying to convey. I always tended to look at the OODA loop in military terms. In the Air Force we have some variations of the OODA loop; one of them is “the kill chain”: Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess or F2T2EA. The kill chain is roughly equivalent of the OODA loop with the Find and Assess portions being the Observe, the Fix, Track being the Orient, the Target portion being the Decide and the Engage being the Act. Of course, this is a very simplified explanation, but that’s roughly how we apply it, mainly to prosecute high-value time sensitive targets. F2T2EA also roughly equals Detect, Locate, Identify, Decide, Strike, Assess. We prefer F2T2EA because the acronym is easier to memorize. Keep up the good work.

Thank you for the kind words. They mean a lot to me.

Have you run across COODA [1], DOODA [2], or MOODA [3] ? It's interesting to compare different models of cognition (such as SOAR, and especially with Larry's application of PISRR to OODA I'm wondering what else is out there.

[1] http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2005/10th/CD/papers/280.pdf
[2] http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2005/10th/CD/papers/365.pdf
[3] http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2004/CCRTS_San_Diego/CD/papers/175.pdf
[4] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/12/02/soar-automating-human-thought-with-contradiction-and-analogy.html

Thanks for the cranium's up on those documents. I had heard about some of the variations to the OODA loop but had not actually seen such detailed discussions.

When you say that the PISSR loop is a mirror image to the OODA loop, do you mean that the Penetrate/Isolate correlates to Observe, and so on? I don't think that's how it works, but maybe you can clarify. Maybe I am reading it wrong. In military terms, you can Observe an adversary (for that you need some degree of Penetration, so to speak) without Isolating him. Consenquently, you can Orient without Subduing. The PISSR loop looks to me more like the stages of victory. Maybe in a later post you can include a real-world example, preferably from warfare.

I posted some practical OODA loop observations in the FX-Based blog based on my experience. From C2 perspective, we need to improve our Decision stage. The good news is, in my view, potential adversary nation states are likely to have an even more cumbersome “D”. This does not necessarily apply to non-state adversaries, whose Decision process tends to be more decentralized and elusive to us.

Check out MCDP 6 (USMC), where they use the OODA loop as a point of departure for C2 theory.

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/mcdp6/toc.htm

Take care dude.

Think of how a mirrow distorts an image. Audience left becomes stage right. In the same way, OODA is a mirror of PISRR because the first stages of OODA correspond to the last stages of PISRR (and vice versa).

The OODA loop ends with Action. But PISRR begins with an action (Penetration).

Likewise, PISRR goes from high-tempo to low-tempo (ending with the SysAdmin-like Reharmonization, after the Leviathan-like Penetration), while OODA goes from low-tempo to high-tempo (Observation to Action).

The revised social cognition loop [1] is an attempt to show how this mirroring works.

I took a look at the Command and Control paper, though it seems to make a mistake that is extremely common in analysis of the OODA loop. Take a look at the chart under “Point of Departure: The OODA Loop” [2], or the following text:

“Based on our orientation, we decide what to do—whether that decision takes the form of an immediate reaction or a deliberate plan. Then we put the decision into action. “

The author may be referring to the direct Orientation-Action link, implicit guidance & control, when he says “immediate reaction,” but the point of fast OODA cycling is to /bypass/ decision as much as possible. Likewise the chart ignores Orient->Observe feed-back or Decision->Observe feed-back.

As I said, this is is extremely common. It was even brought up in the first part of this series!

Nice post [4], btw.

[1] http://static.flickr.com/40/99758766_e9cb7e179b_o.jpg
[2] http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/mcdp6/ch2.htm
[3] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/02/13/ooda-pisrr-part-i-the-social-cognition-loop.html#c560632
[4] http://fx-based.blogspot.com/2006/02/net-centric-discussion-todays-wars.html