How military leaders use OODA to build battlespace knowledge

This article is based on the white paper
Lifting the fog and friction of military operations: Why secure communications matter.

The rise of network-centric warfare has helped to reduce casualties and build the use of secure communications in modern conflicts. Having a solid, secure communications vision and strategy is key to thwarting or limiting gains made by adversaries.

One well-known military decision making framework is known as OODA, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. Created by Colonel John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force in the 1970s after his dogfighting experiences during the Korean war, OODA is an iterative feedback model for decision making employed by modern militaries.

Sometimes known as the Boyd Loop or OODA loop, OODA can be described as a way to understand what an adversary is doing and how to take action to seize a competitive advantage. It boils down all of the information about a given military situation and frames it in a simple, accessible format.

Explaining OODA

In military terms, observe refers to the ability to “see” the battlespace and gain awareness of information that doesn’t normally require much interpretation, such as position and speed of movement of forces, offensive and defensive capabilities, terrain and sea conditions or predicted weather conditions.

Orient is the ability to “understand” the battlespace to gain a greater depth of knowledge and that would require interpretation. For example, information about force location and movement patterns would help military commanders to interpret an enemy’s intent, action plans, capabilities and limitations.

The next stage, decide, pertains to the commander’s ability to generate different courses of action and decide on the most viable. The actual outcome of command and control reflects the commander’s perception of the battlespace, the decisions he or she makes, and the intent that is shared among the forces.

The final stage of act in the OODA loop is where the military executes on the mission. One can view the decide stage as choosing a hypothesis and the act stage as testing out the hypothesis. The results would indicate whether the decision taken was correct or not, and this cycles back to the first stage of the OODA loop to generate new battlespace observations.

It is very rare for anyone to go through the loop in a linear cycle, as OODA is more of an ongoing iterative process. Changing circumstances generate new battlespace awareness, which in turn produces new battlespace knowledge and before decisions can be made or actions acted upon, new information may emerge which forces the whole process back to the first stage.

Fog and friction:
sources of uncertainty

All military operations suffer from the fog and friction of war. Fog hinders commanders from seeing the battlespace accurately, and the reasons for it could be attributed to one’s own capabilities – personnel and technology limitations – and an adversary’s capability and intent.
Friction happens as a result of impediments to the execution of a commander’s intent and results from the interaction of chance and action, and factors contributing to it include one’s own actions, an adversary’s actions, and the environment.

OODA helps to reduce fog and friction by providing a framework for the exchange of secure information relating to the battlespace, then the issuance of command and control orders. But how does it work in practice?

The observe stage is largely about sensors and falls within the realm of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). There is a real benefit to be derived from networking sensors in generating battlespace awareness. Standalone sensors inherently have limitations in terms of coverage, accuracy and target identification properties.

These limitations can be alleviated by the creation of sensor networks and data fusion from different sensors on battleships, airborne radar and ground-based radar. The ability to, for example, network radar sensors extends the area of surveillance coverage, enabling military commanders to not only see better but to see further.

In the orient and decide stages, network centric capabilities such as video conferencing and collaboration applications enable different elements of the military ecosystem such as commanders and subject matter experts to interact and collaborate virtually to gain battlespace knowledge and work out courses of action.

Had this interaction and collaboration been carried out with a physical presence, much precious time and opportunity would have been wasted. The key to this is that it is all about moving information not people.

In the final stage, act, network centric warfare provides opportunities for command and control and execution of missions to improve as decision makers and shooters gain battlespace knowledge. The networking of knowledgeable shooters has the potential of increasing combat effectiveness by better coordination of their actions.

Just as any large corporate can make better decisions for commercial success if it has access to rich, accurate and real-time data sets, so a military commander can improve his or her effectiveness if they have the best insights into what is happening on the ground. But the key point is that for information gathering to be effective, it must also be secure and protected from interference, including cyber-attacks, by an adversary.