Patterns of Conflict
| The works of |
| Works of John Boyd |
|---|
OODA WIKI Edition
Quantico Transcription
Let’s get into that. Let’s pin this down a little bit more. Knowing that, we start pinning these things down, what do we see here? One, fire at all levels. Artillery, mortars, machine guns, army level, [15:00] division level, various heavy artillery. What you do is you grab the guy’s attention and pin him down. All that stuff going on around him, he’s not going to stand out there in an artillery barrage and all that debris.
So in other words, you’re clouding his what? His ability to observe what’s going on. Okay. Then in behind him, not only that, the fire, the gas and smoke. What you do is you’re cloaking the follow-on movement, the infiltrators’ movement. Now the infiltrators, instead of coming through in these nice line-abreast formations, they’re squeezing their way forward, dispersed and irregular character. They’re actually little swarms, little tiny swarms working their way forward.
Okay. They permit them to blend against the terrain so they’re also very hard to pick out. Plus all the other crap going on, the smoke, the gas, the fog. They came out of the fog. That helps out. So you take all that together, what you do— the defenders, then, since they’ve never experienced this before, they got a view they’ve never seen before and they just don’t know what the hell’s going on, scared of you.
So the result’s pretty simple. In fact, I read some reports when these Australians were captured. They said next thing they know— they couldn’t figure out what had happened. All of a sudden,
they’re being marched off as prisoners. Game’s over. Being marched off as prisoners, the game’s over. Totally confused. Totally out of it. Never seen anything like this. Note the key word. They were disoriented.