Chet Richards

By Chuck Spinney

Opining about Obama and Iowa, Bob Hebert, NYT, 5 Jan 2008, said

The Clintons, especially, have seemed baffled by the winds of change. They mounted a peculiar argument against Senator Obama, acknowledging that voters wanted change but insisting that you can’t achieve change by doing things differently. Senator Hillary Clinton has had a devil of a time trying to cope with the demand for change while shouldering the legacy of an administration that defined the 1990s.

I doubt if Obama or his handlers know anything about John Boyd’s strategic theories, but, if accurate, this passage in Hebert’s op-ed is a splendid example confirming the universality of John’s theories, because it reveals inadvertently the strategic effects — i.e., emerging confusion and disorder — of those theories in an unfolding conflict situation. And in this case, it is quite unlikely that Boyd’s basic ideas on conflict are being deliberately applied.

So, we may be witnessing how internally-generated, self-referential, logical nonsense, intended to cope with an emerging threat, is actually corrupting the Orientation portion of Hillary’s Observation - Orientation - Decision - Action (OODA) loop.

Such a contradiction, if not nullified quickly, could very well evolve into a fatal flaw. It will be fun to see if Obama senses it, or if he intuitively exploits it to sharpen it, perhaps even raising it to the moral level, or if Hillary can re-Orient in time to evolve a more coherent OODA loop.

If she fails, this spectacle could evolve into a classic example of how an increasingly self-referential OODA loop folds back onto itself, and thereby creates confusion and disorder, and perhaps even metastasizes into panic and chaos.

While we may not get a Happy New Year, given accumulating damage to our republic from another year of incompetent governance, we might, at least, have an Entertaining New Year.