The Operational Level Of War Does Not Exist

Armies are destroyed or defeat by tactics. Wars are won and lost by strategy.

Yes but, all strategy is flawed, so to win at war you always need to keep up with the process, i.e. the OODA loop, and change, i.e. Destruction and Construction (D&C in the context of quantum movement of energy that the OODA loop represents). Strategy give war structure (the machines of war are very good against structure) between both Ends (End,Way, and Means of strategy), but the OODA loop (process) gives strategy its Means to bridge the gap between Observation/Action or Past/Future.

Meanwhile, change (D&C) gives strategy the Way to complete the process.

There is no force in the movement of mass, and when you are talking the OODA loop we are talking the movement of mass.

As Boyd would say: it’s about people stupid (I am paraphrasing here of course).

Mass (people) simply moves from where it has been (the past) to where its volume can (the future). The force developed in Observation only adds the potential of the mass. not direction, i.e. force can move in a different direction (feedforward or feedback) than the mass in a OODA loop.

The mass in the OODA loop has to keep moving forward, as it is able, unless something collapses, such as its Orientation.

An Orientation is a position of advantage in the environment Observed. The Orientation itself doesn’t need to collapse to cause problems, only its position that gives it an advantage.

I mean at the same time you are relying so heavily on strategy, one needs to be able to look at the energy not available in the system and compare it to the energy available, and decide, “how healthy are you?”

Hannibal couldn’t do it, neither could Napoleon.

Today’s military commanders can do it, because they not only have access to open-source intelligence (OSI) that are able to Observe the flaws in the narrative (its the narrative that strategy uses to build structure with), but military commanders are also able to judge what they are doing, because OSI are able to compare the narrative to a specific time/space in the future/past, and make available the entropy of the system in their judgement, or they are judged by and with the entropy of the system itself.

via The Operational Level Of War Does Not Exist.

What I Found Interesting This Week 2/2/2013

Unfortunately, many farmers markets are duds.  The prices are too high, the selection is mediocre and many of the vendors sell store brought produce/products.  In contrast, real farmers markets are run by organizations that rigorously maintain standards and recruit/scout/visit participants (to increase supply, competition, and variety).  They hum with life, variety, and are price competitive.

Yes, and this is all because we don’t have a decentralized market, ho, hum.

Well “real farmer markets” are distributive networks that each needs the other.

So while Robb’s decentralized network decentralizes into nodes towards an edge, the distributive market has no outside edges and forms a center of gravity called a community.

Where this “center” forms is any ones guess, but Robb has no clue, because he is looking for an edge, and not a community. He still thinks he is a part of the cure, i.e., a resilient community, and not the problem, too much distribution and not enough decentralization, ha!

So I guess that is what a community organizer does, he organizes all the nodes into a community without edges.

via What I Found Interesting This Week 2/2/2013.

Master sgt. says no to Chinese-made boots

“I’m troubled that the military continues to downsize because of the budget deficits — budget deficits which are in part a result of millions of unemployed American workers,” Adachi wrote in a letter to Air Force Times. “How many American workers are unemployed because military clothing is being produced in foreign countries?”

via Master sgt. says no to Chinese-made boots – Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq – Air Force Times.

Good question.

I wonder how many Americans even know how to build shoes anymore. Didn’t that industry leave this country long ago?

K.I.S.S. (K.O.S.S.)

…while President Obama’s staff prefer to emphasize to the administration’s many successes in counterterrorism operations instead of the accumulation of serious issues faced by the Department of Defense, the armed services and America’s returning veterans.

via The Coming National Defense Crack-Up – Independent Voter Network.

Yes, there is a “Coming national defense crack-up” coming, but that doesn’t mean that our national defense doesn’t have a strategy in the Global War On Terror.

The strategy is two prong.

The first prong skewers the process of “Act” that keeps the Islamist who perpetrated 9/11 from Orienting themselves, from a position of advantage. This simply means we have to  “stir” the hive to keep a plan, like that which happened on 9/11, from happening.

The second prong is one that accumulates an “Orientation” of rule-sets, which brought about an end to the Crusades. It was an Orientation of accommodation.

These condition of accommodation required the nation-state of interest to become “Islamic” instead of Christian. The Crusades ended as Jerusalem became Islamic, and the God fearing Christians existed with the Muslims.

As the US is the greatest bearer of the power of Christianity, next to the Vatican, the second prong requires the US to turn-over nations, who are under the BushII “Crusade”, to Islam, which is what happen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the nation-states most affected by the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was a civil war, but the outcome has been mostly to the advantage of the Islamist.

So, if there needs to be a debate in America, I suggest we debate the thought that we are  “turning” the US military power in the South Pacific. I don’t think it is happening, we are simply creating a line in the sand.

My thought is that there hasn’t been a turning of the power of the USA towards the Pacific. The real strategy has been that the USA has formed two fronts–one that crosses Australia and the other front that crosses Jerusalem.

Jerusalem marks the line, that America will not cross, in regards to Islam and the Middle East, as much as Australia marks the line that America will not cross in the South Pacific, and China.

To bring the war in the Middle East, fought by the nation of the Great Experiment, to a conclusion, we need to keep our strategy simple folks.

The Coming National Defense Crack-Up

…while President Obama’s staff prefer to emphasize to the administration’s many successes in counterterrorism operations instead of the accumulation of serious issues faced by the Department of Defense, the armed services and America’s returning veterans.

via The Coming National Defense Crack-Up – Independent Voter Network.

Yes, there is a “Coming national defense crack-up” coming, but that doesn’t mean that our national defense doesn’t have a strategy in the Global War On Terror.

The strategy is two prong.

The first prong skewers the process of “Act” that keeps the Islamist who perpetrated 9/11 from Orienting themselves, from a position of advantage. This simply means we  “stir” the hive to keep a plan, like that which happened on 9/11, from happening.

The second prong is one that accumulates an “Orientation” like that created to take advantage of the conditions, which enabled the Crusades to end, an Orientation of accommodation.

These condition of accommodation required the nation-state of interest to become “Islamic” instead of Christian. The Crusades ended as Jerusalem became Islamic, and the God fearing Christians existed with the Muslims.

As the US is the greatest bearer of the power of Christianity, next to the Vatican, the second prong requires the US to turn-over nations, who are under the BushII “Crusade”, to Islam, which is happening.

So, if there needs to be a debate, I suggest we debate the thought that we are  “turning” of the US military power in the South Pacific.

There hasn’t really been a turning of the power of the USA towards the Pacific. The USA has formed two fronts–one that crosses Australia and the other that crosses Jerusalem.

Jerusalem marks the line, that America will not cross, in regards to Islam and the Middle East, as much as Australia marks the line that America will not cross in the South Pacific, and China.

To bring this war, fought by the nation of the Great Experiment to a conclusion, we need to keep this simple folks.

Strategy: Winning or Calculation?

Mark asks, on my twitter feed, a good question. I presume he made it after reading the post to the link in the tweet Critt also made on my feed:

Here is the post:

“What is strategy? A mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.

John Boyd

This quote comes from Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Frans Osinga. Pg.13.”

Via: http://crittjarvis.com/2012/06/boyds-elegant-epitaph-what-is-strategy/

While Boyd describes the essence of strategy, he does leave it open to Mark’s question. Is the essence of strategy about winning or is it in the calculations?

I don’t know Boyd that well to quote him accurately, but in essence he said that if you are not willing to take the steps to winning, then you should think about joining the other side. Clearly to Boyd winning is everything.

From Boyd’s quote: strategy is a bunch of steps structured as a mental tapestry that is mentally changing at different tempos and focus. At the end of the structuring process clarity is found in the forms created.

As the three domains of war are Honor, Interest, and Fear, out of the “many contending interests”, Boyd was building the structures for  the center domain “Interest”. Strategy builds a structure of form where none was before. Boyd was building interest out of human morality, and his Ends, Ways, and Means was through the OODA loop.

So the essence of strategy is not about winning, but about the calculations needed to create (build). In Boyd’s definition of strategy he is creating interest through calculations.

However, Boyd is not building a structure or domain to go to war on. To Boyd winning is everything which also means losing According to Boyd, winning might mean joining the other side, which, like the son of Genghis Khan found out, is losing.

With interest, the possibility of losing is taken out of the “bewildering events”, because a structure is created in the past (the beginning of the “End”) to build Honor on; and there is less to Fear, because a structure is also created in the future (the end of the “End”) that can be seen.

While building interest where interest was not before is a simple thought, I am sure that strategy is, in essence, simple.

Top Scientific Discoveries of 2011

For years, anthropologists suspected that Homo sapiens cross-bred with Neanderthals before our closest ancestor went extinct.

via Top Scientific Discoveries of 2011 | Wired Science | Wired.com.

One story I got from the Open-source Intelligence side of things was that Humans mated with the Neanderthals, and one of the genetic outcomes was a super-large brain. My assumption at the time was that these mutated-Neanderthals killed off the guys pictured here.

As this story may suggest, they probably killed off the other Humans as well, ha!