OODA Versus ASDA: Metaphors at War
Abstract
This articles examines the provenance and utility of two metaphors commonly used to help describe the dynamics of contemporary combat. It argues that, although it shares the weaknesses of all metaphors in being partially inappropriate and incomplete, the ASDA cycle has greater contemporary relevance than the earlier Boyd or OODA cycle.
In 2006, the first edition of the Australian Army’s concept Adaptive Campaigning, capturing the lessons of nearly a decade of Army experimentation, introduced the ‘Adaption’ Cycle. The proposition made was that success in solving complex problems relied on progressive interaction with them and that this interaction could be described by iteration of the sequence: Act-Sense-Decide-Adapt, which was reduced to the acronym ASDA. Most conceptual abstractions pass through the alimentary canal of the Army without either providing nourishment or provoking an immune response, but ASDA has proven exceptional in this experience. Since its inception, the ASDA cycle has prompted an unexpectedly polarised response attracting both fierce proponents and opponents.
Taken broadly, two schools have emerged: the ASDA-ites and the OODA-ists, with the latter subscribing to the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act Cycle described by Colonel John Boyd of the USAF and proselytised by manoeuvre warfare enthusiasts in the 1980s. The Boyd Cycle has represented received wisdom for many years and has become a foundation of the way we think about tactics, spawning doctoral theses and many adornments. In its origin, it is a simple abstraction and so clearly reflective of reality that it has become axiomatic. Its success has spread beyond the military and, like Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, it has become something of a staple in the diet of business schools around the world.1 Despite the authority enjoyed by OODA, the authors of this article remain firmly convinced of the righteousness of ASDA. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to explain ASDA’s origins and importance so that others, who are not yet convinced, might be brought into the light.
Before proceeding, a word of caution is necessary. Both OODA and ASDA are metaphors: they are representations of some aspects of conflict that are incomplete and only partially appropriate. The practice of using metaphors to describe aspects of warfare is long and honourable. Sporting metaphors are presently disreputable, although sport is itself a metaphor for warfare, and scientific ones now have the upper hand. Clausewitz was a keen user of scientific metaphors and the dangers inherent in using them are exemplified by concepts such as the ‘centre of gravity’. This was intended to help clarify a simple idea by reference to physics but discussion of it, its disassembly and adornment, has filled the arid wastes of staff college years ever since.
It is in the nature of the modern world that no good idea can be left unadorned. The processes that elevate, refine and adorn simple ideas bring employment to academics and military theorists and are often beneficial—at least to them—but there is a danger that the power and immediacy of the underlying ideas can be diluted or lost. This is especially true when dealing with metaphors and, for both OODA and ASDA, their simplicity and accessibility is their true strength. It would be wrong to try to stretch these metaphors to make them something they are not: comprehensive and accurate representations of warfare or the art of command.
The Boyd Cycle
The Boyd Cycle originated from a study of air-to-air combat in the Korean War and is well described by Frans Osinger2 amongst others. In this conflict, the USAF enjoyed a 10:1 exchange ratio over the opposing air forces. This impressive result occurred despite the superiority of the principal communist aircraft type (the MIG-15) over the F-86 which was the backbone of the US fighter fleet. The MIG could climb, accelerate and turn faster than the F-86 and, based simply on the characteristics of the airframe, should have been more competitive. Boyd’s analysis concluded that the F-86, however, enjoyed two decisive advantages: it had a bubble cockpit affording excellent all-round vision when compared to that possible from the faired cockpit of the MIG, and its hydraulically assisted controls enabled it to transition between manoeuvres faster than its opponent. As a result the pilot of an F-86 was better able to perceive the threedimensional arena of aerial combat, was therefore able to make better decisions, and having decided what to do could shift more quickly from manoeuvre to manoeuvre. So, although the MIG was arguably more competent within any single manoeuvre, the F-86 enjoyed marked superiority in any succession of manoeuvres.
From this platform Boyd developed the concept that combat involved successive cycles of Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action and that advantage accrued to the side that was able to achieve consistently faster cycle times. This was because the side with the faster cycle time set the conditions for the start of the next cycle; it had gained the initiative. If these start conditions were more favourable than those prevailing at the beginning of combat, and the advantage gained was developed through further cycles, the actions of the enemy began to lag further and further behind reality until they were sufficiently inappropriate as to create a fatal weakness.
Of course, while elegant, the Boyd Cycle did not describe anything that was new. Benjamin Whorf noted that language is not simply a reporting device for experience but its defining framework and, in this context, the Boyd Cycle provided to us the language to define what was already a shared experience. Having had it described to us, we can see the Boyd Cycle in action everywhere from children’s games to international relations. Its power lies in its simplicity and familiarity.
Within the military, the Boyd Cycle has helped us understand the dynamics of historical battles and provided a framework that made otherwise abstract concepts— such as Liddell-Hart’s ideas on manoeuvre for example—accessible. As a result, it provided the foundation for the manoeuvre warfare theory that arose to help Anglophone armies capture some of the fairy dust that made the Wehrmacht the model for industrial age prowess. For example, it helped explain why auftragstaktik was important, how ‘surfaces and gaps’ and ‘reconnaissance pull’ worked; and helped translate the Soviet concept of tempo into English, shifting it from the earlier idea of moving fast to the much more complete idea of cycling fast.
Despite these great strengths, the Boyd Cycle remains a necessarily incomplete and only partially appropriate description of conflict. This should not surprise us. Clausewitz, for example, took over 600 pages to describe the dynamics of war. Even if we make allowances for a good edit of On War, and the exclusion of the bits about defending swamps, we should not expect Boyd to achieve the same sophistication and completeness in a four-letter acronym.
For the purposes of describing contemporary conflict, the weaknesses of the Boyd Cycle lie in its origins. It grew from the observation of the specific case of aerial combat in Korea and has been extended to cover all of war, conflict, business and librarianship. The process of arguing from the specific to the general is induction. In formal logic this is fallacious but, more importantly, the further the argument is removed from its original context the more it relies on additions and elaborations to make sense of it. Used to describe one-on-one aerial combat, the Boyd Cycle is a reasonable summary of the most important dynamics; but applied to Kursk, Kapyong, Tet or Baghdad, it becomes progressively less directly applicable without qualification or adornment.
For example, the simple act of observation is, especially in war, fraught with difficulty. Except in one-on-one combat in the air, there can be no certainty that all of the important elements of the situation are, or even can be, observed. As Clausewitz pointed out: ‘War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.’3 Of course, the failure or inability to observe all the critical factors influences the succeeding steps—only luck enables us to make good decisions on the basis of bad information. There is a role for the intuition, coup d’oeil, or experience that enables the observer to discern the patterns of regularity that enable the blank spaces to be at least partially sketched in. The interplay of these ideas is certainly not excluded by Boyd—but nor is it described by OODA.
Even if Observation proceeds smoothly, Orientation—understanding what it is that is being seen actually means—is not without its difficulties. Philosophy and psychology are professions dedicated to understanding understanding. Even when grappling with objective facts, each individual processes them in unique ways, combining cultural and social conditioning and precedent with the passions and aspirations of the moment to create idiosyncratic interpretations which may or may not be comprehensible to another bystander. Those readers who are married will understand this most clearly. This means that, in human interactions, there are no stable cause-effect relationships and individuals are prone to becoming victims successively of the mendacity of hope or the hopelessness of despair. Again, these contingencies of observation do not invalidate Boyd, but to understand reality requires the study of other sources and other thinkers.
As well as this kind of problem with each step in the Boyd Cycle, there is the problem of managing the cycle as a whole. Warfare is more than the aggregation of one-on-one combats. Action does not build on action remorselessly and continuously, and is often suspended for various reasons. Chance, uncertainty, friction, danger, politics, perseverance and boldness ... the list goes on, all play a part. Clausewitz for example, defined military genius in terms of an individual’s ability to exert intellect, determination, judgment and courage both to discern what needed to be done and then to do it in the face of all the difficulties that the enemy and fate could place in his path. The Boyd Cycle can accommodate these layers of meaning, but to do so it needs to be read in conjunction with empiricist philosophy, theories of knowledge, military history and the rest. In short, the Boyd Cycle is not a theory of war; it is simply a metaphor which, like all metaphors, is an incomplete and only partially appropriate representation of the phenomenon it purports to characterise.
The Adaption Cycle
The British general Rupert Smith coined the phrase ‘war among the people’ to highlight one of the defining trends underlying the evolution of warfare. Although wars have always been about seeking shifts in the distribution of political power, in the past this was done principally through winning the clash of arms in order to impose a peace on a belligerent state. Since the First World War, theorists have been seeking ways to achieve the desired political shift by acting directly on the population rather than through the intermediary of fielded armed forces. This ‘new’ theoretical approach was initially manifested in air power theories that saw strategic bombing campaigns intended to terrorise a population into acquiescence to a political proposition which was less unpalatable than the continuance of bombing. Through half a century of Cold War military academia, doctrine and practice this thinking subsequently flowed into the conceptual cul de sac of effects-based operations and the more fruitful directions described in the 1999 Chinese publication Unrestricted Warfare, the Australian Army’s Complex Warfighting, followed by Adaptive Campaigning and Hoffman’s Hybrid Wars. All of these attempt to strengthen the connection between the military actions envisaged and political shifts being sought. To this end, war is seen as imposing costs on, and offering benefits to, a belligerent population in order to cause them to withdraw their consent to continued resistance.
In this context, success in battle is likely to be essential but not, of itself, sufficient for victory. In the contemporary context, how you fight has assumed much greater importance because the unintended consequences of battle can provide strength to the enemy. This last point lies at the heart of Adaptive Campaigning.
As a conceptual snippet, the Adaption Cycle is no better than the Boyd Cycle and shares many of its weaknesses—it is, however, different in some important ways. In the next few paragraphs the sources of those differences and the reasons they are important will be explained but, at the outset it should be emphasised that the Adaption Cycle is not intended to replace the body of theory on which it rests. Like the Boyd Cycle, it is simply a metaphor for conflict—albeit one that emphasises certain aspects of conflict which are particularly important in our contemporary setting. In particular, ASDA takes a systems view.
The theory of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) is increasingly being used to describe the dynamics of war, and many other things (it is left as an exercise for the reader to decide if this is yet another metaphor or a more comprehensive descriptive theory). It is sufficient to note here that one is dealing with a system when:
• a set of units or elements are inter-connected so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in other parts of the system, and
• the entire system exhibits properties and behaviours that are different from those of the parts.4
Put simply, an adaptive system is one in which some or all the elements can change their usual behaviour in response to novel challenges. Because any new behaviour has an impact on the other elements of the system it, in turn, may develop new and previously unexpected behaviours of its own—which are called emergences. As a result of their ability to respond to circumstances, CAS are constantly evolving: they are dynamic. Ideally, this dynamism moves them towards some relatively stable state. However, because the relationships between the elements are nonlinear, tiny changes in the behaviour of a single element may cause huge changes in the behaviour of the system as a whole—hence the famous simile of a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a hurricane in the Caribbean. Therefore, occasionally CAS lose coherence and collapse into chaos. The more interconnections there are between the elements of a system, the more dynamic it is. The more elements there are in a system, the less predictable its total behaviour. War systems have a large number of elements that are intensively interconnected, which gives them extreme and unpredictable dynamism.5
It is not possible to learn about or understand a CAS except by interaction with it. To understand its dynamics it is necessarily to push or prod it sufficiently to trigger a response.6 The range of responses is probably very broad and the relationship between the weight of the probing action and the vigour of the response will be uncertain and possibly disproportionate. CAS are therefore essentially unknowable by remote sensing. In the world of tactics, this characteristic impenetrability is reinforced by the tendency of forces to seek shelter from stand-off surveillance and precision attack by operating in urban or other complex terrain and in force packages that are beneath our detection threshold. This is the fundamental problem for today’s tacticians. In the terms offered by the OODA Loop, you can OO at this problem until you are blue in the face and it will not help you understand it any better. A veil of uncertainty lies between the protagonists. To pierce it, and begin the process of learning, requires that a gambit be made—that sufficient energy be injected into the system to force it to respond.7
The necessary interaction, however, presents further complexities. By interaction, the system being prodded is joined with that of the prodder to create a new, much larger, more complex and more dynamic system. In a typical tactical encounter this new system might include: the immediate combatants, the many layers of their military organisations and the individuals that comprise them, their political organisations, their immediate families and larger ethnic groups, weather, terrain, and logistic and offensive support structures. Because of the presence of media there are multiple connections between the tactical encounter and the wider world which allows populations remote from the event to form a view on the tactical means applied and the costs being borne by the local population. This, in turn, will connect debates about the provenance or motivations for the war with events on the ground. Today, the systems engaged in a minor tactical encounter are as globalised as the Internet. This is why the ‘strategic corporal’ is strategic.
The way the enemy system responds to our pressure helps us understand it better but, critically, because of the new system that has emerged as a result of the present interaction, neither side is fully in control. The larger system will dynamically constrain or create opportunities and make actions productive or unproductive based on criteria that are not a part of the local tactical logic. As a result, both sides are riding a tiger and are forced to cobble together the next decision and action based on where it has taken them. The fight for the initiative, which remains critical and which is so clearly captured by Boyd, actually occurs in many places and at many levels, all of which are intimately connected and all of which need to be acknowledged. The way we fight therefore should be modulated in accordance with the demands of the wider system. Winning remains essential, but winning well may be quite different from winning easily.8
The ASDA Cycle begins with ‘Act’ in order to capture the need to begin interacting— that is to highlight the need for a bias for action, despite having only a rudimentary understanding of the enemy system being faced. Surveillance and deep thought will most likely not provide useful knowledge unless they are teamed with positive actions to provoke a response from the enemy. Take, for example, a force that is looking at the outside of a village it has been tasked to clear. We used to rely on signature equipment and doctrinal templates to help colour in the missing pieces of the jigsaw but modern enemies, both regular and irregular, no longer work within templates. So, eventually someone has to move into the village in order to develop some knowledge of the enemy’s strength, layout and scheme of manoeuvre. This person or group is a gambit and is being placed at risk—but it is an unavoidable risk.
Given that a stationary force normally gets first shot at a moving one, we need to be prepared to absorb the first shot and respond to the information that we expect it to provide. This is the ‘Sense’ of the ASDA Cycle.9 Importantly, as well as sensing what is happening at the point of contact, it is necessary to remember that we are trying to learn about the enemy’s entire system both locally and more broadly. The intention is that by engaging all of the accessible elements of the enemy system, we can inhibit its functioning in order to allow us to progressively seize the initiative. This means that tactical encounters need to be characterised not as simply two forces grinding away at each other at the point of contact but as opportunities to learn about, and grapple with, much larger portions of the enemy’s wider system.
Attempts to establish practical control over CAS are futile and the best that can be hoped for is to damp undesirable behaviours and reinforce desirable ones in order to sustain the system in an equilibrium band that is, if not acceptable, at least recognisable. In a recent article in Military Review, Wass de Czega described the difficulty of attempting to realise some idealised condition within the dynamism of real wars and compared the existing doctrinal approach of setting an objective and ‘going for it’, with
the foundational discourses of the Confucian and Taoist east [which] do not frame life experience in terms of idealized ends or ‘visions’. Chinese sages thought it impossible to know what an idealized end could be. They did not trust the mind to have a mirror-like correspondence to external reality. Instead they thought that distinguishing ‘better’ from ‘worse’ was the best one could do. Life experience, in their eastern perspective, was a perpetual and ever changing flow of events. Intellectual energy, in flowing with the way of the world, should ideally focus on understanding the forces, tendencies, and propensities of the contextual situation. In their understanding, one harmonises with existence by enhancing the forces tending to flow toward ‘better’ while subtly diverting and blocking those tending toward ‘worse’.10
Because of their indeterminate boundaries and the fact that we cannot control CAS, the Decide and Adapt steps of the ASDA Cycle seek to prompt decisionmakers to take a mental step back from the immediate problem. As well as recognising the demands of the tactical battle, decisions need to accommodate both the higher-level system interactions and the need to acquire more knowledge and to deepen understanding. Modern combat can therefore be characterised as competitive learning in which all sides are constantly in a process of creating, testing and refining hypotheses about the nature of the reality of which they are a part. The resulting adaptations might need to be extensive, extending beyond forms of tactical action to possibly encompass previously sacrosanct areas such as the force’s mission. The underlying premise being that the original mission, objectives and plan were based on conjecture about the enemy system’s elements and internal relationships, and subsequent action will have modified the applicability of that conjecture.
Despite its many strengths, the ASDA Cycle is not without its weaknesses. The principal of these is that to work as intended it requires that individuals, fighting for their survival against highly competent and well-equipped enemies and in the face of chance, uncertainty and friction, be able to lift their heads (while keeping them down) and think big thoughts. Unless things can be arranged to facilitate such an objective view then, in practice, the ASDA Cycle will simply align with the limbic stimulus and response of the OODA Loop. Similarly, having placed people at risk in the initial gambit, there is no guarantee that this risk will generate the information being sought and the risk might need to be replicated at a number of places and times before useful knowledge can be developed. The only defence against this accusation is that at least it is more realistic than the OODA Loop’s expectation of starting with actionable knowledge—in the air war of yesterday, this might have been a fair call but today, on the ground, it is not.
Conclusion
This article opened with the proposition that both OODA and ASDA are metaphors: representations of conflict that are incomplete and only partially appropriate; and that all they could hope to do was prompt a decision-maker to access a much deeper and wider body of theory. Because they both deal with war, they both rest on the same theoretical foundations. The differences between them are therefore ones of approach rather than understanding.
Indeed, the further one burrows into the underlying ideas, the greater convergence. For example, a close associate of Boyd’s, summarised the essence of the Boyd Cycle Theory:
In conflict, each participant, from the individual soldier trying to survive to the commander trying to shape strategy, must make decisions based on his orientation to reality—his appreciation of the external circumstances which he must act on. Boyd argued that one’s orientation to the external world changes and evolves, because it is formed by a continuous interaction between his observations of unfolding external circumstances and his interior orientation processes that make sense of these circumstances. These interior process take two forms of activity: analysis (understanding the observations in the context of pre-existing patterns of knowledge) and synthesis (creating new patterns of knowledge when existing patterns do not permit the understanding needed to cope with novel circumstances).11
The analysis and synthesis described in this excerpt—the creation and testing of paradigms to arrive at new ones—reflects the hypothesis-test-refined hypothesis or model-test-model process that underpins ASDA suggesting that, at least in the view of Spinney, Boyd also saw conflict as a learning process. The fact that both OODA and ASDA stem from the same roots makes areas of overlap more substantive than areas of difference—which are principally ones of emphasis. Therefore, because metaphors are by definition incomplete and partially inappropriate, in deciding whether one is an OODA-ist or an ASDA-ite one should not look for ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but rather whether the chosen metaphor emphasises the right things. Both OODA and ASDA are models of the ‘problem’ of conflict—neither proposes a solution. Choosing between them should be based on which description of the problem is more likely to lead to appropriate solutions. That is, which metaphor is more likely to prompt decision-makers to search the right places in the underlying body of theory.
The OODA Loop is a powerful, accessible and widely applicable model of combat, whereas the ASDA Cycle is intended to capture systems thinking without resting on the jargon and formal analysis of systems theory. ASDA is deliberately couched to highlight the importance, and difficulty, of acting in the absence of actionable intelligence and the need to approach conflict as competitive learning. Depending on the importance the reader places on these emphases, the ASDA Cycle is either merely OODA but starting at ‘A’ instead of ‘O’, or is a novel and quite different metaphor for conflict.
Continued adherence to OODA will not necessarily and in all cases lead to military failure or irrelevance. If the underlying theory is understood, if a sufficiently broad perspective is attained and if the necessary adaptations are identified and made it may be possible, on occasion, to achieve a modest measure of success. Similarly, acknowledgment of the essential truth of ASDA does not guarantee success. However, because it describes the problem in a way that is particularly pertinent to contemporary conflicts, ASDA is at least prompting right-thinking.
When Army Headquarters coined it, the ASDA Cycle was intended to emphasise aspects of contemporary conflict that should trigger consequent changes in doctrine and training. The nature and importance of constant adaptation has since been recognised in a myriad of ways, and ‘adaptation’ and ‘adaptive’ are today’s buzzwords. Because of its systems view, ASDA has begun to appear in US Army professional journals (although the USMC remain firm disciples of Boyd) and underpins current approaches to operational design. All this is good, but the current acceptance of ASDA should not obscure its limitations. It only has utility when combined with its underlying theory. One should think ASDA and read Clausewitz, Liddell-Hart, Fuller, Tukhachevsky, Isserson, Howard, Paret and Moltke.
This article was written as part of DSTO’s Land Operations Division’s investigation of the dynamics of the contemporary battle.
About the Authors
Justin Kelly graduated from RMC in December 1977 and was commissioned into the RAAC. He enjoyed a number of regimental postings in tank, reconnaissance and armoured personnel carrier units and at the School of Armour. In 1995-96 he commanded 1st Armoured Regiment. He commanded the Peace Monitoring Group on Bougainville in 2000-01, was Deputy Force Commander of the Peace Keeping Force in East Timor in 2002-03 and Director of Strategic Operations in the Multinational Force - Iraq in 2006-07. He retired from the Army in December 2007. He bears responsibility for coining the ASDA cycle.
Mike Brennan currently holds the appointment of Director General Simulation in the Australian Department of Defence. His recent appointments include periods as Research Leader Human Systems Integration within Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation and Scientific Adviser - Army. He has a PhD in Physics from the Flinders University of South Australia and was attached to the USMC Warfighting Laboratory during 1998-99.
Endnotes
1 In researching this article it was discovered that Boyd has even penetrated the hurley-burley world of the librarian. See Karl Bridges, ‘Boyd Cycle Theory in the Context of Non-Cooperative Games: Implications for Libraries’, Library Philosophy and Practice, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2004.
2 Frans Osinga, Science Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Abingdon, Routledge, 2007.
3 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated and edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, 1984.
4 Robert Jervis, ‘Complex Systems: The Role of Interactions’ in David S Alberts and Thomas J Czerwinski (eds), Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, National Defense University Washington DC, 1997.
5 This is not a new view of war. Clausewitz described war as ‘more than a true chameleon’ because chameleons only change their skin colour, whereas war will change all the way to the bone. Beyond this, Clausewitz seems to argue that left to their own devices, wars would generally tend towards chaos instead of towards some form of stability.
6 During Operation GOODWOOD near Caen in France in July 1944, a British reconnaissance troop leader was tasked to investigate a village. In a demonstration of considerable personal courage he drove his scout car up the main street, turned around and drove back down it. He drew no fire. Consequently his parent unit drove past the village and was annihilated by the German forces occupying it. In the language of systems theory, the troop leader had interacted with the system but had not perturbed it enough to trigger a response.
7 This veil of uncertainty is demonstrated in practice. In contacts with bunker systems in Vietnam (a reasonable metaphor for urban combat) ground force casualties were concentrated into two identifiable spikes. The first occurred when contact was initially made and the individuals detecting the bunker complex were shot. Best practice at the time was to break contact and hit the (ill-defined) complex with all the indirect firepower that could be assembled. The second spike of casualties occurred when the ground force again advanced to the bunker complex and evaluated the effectiveness of the indirect fire by re-making contact.
8 This is not an attempt to trivialise the difficulties or dangers of combat but merely to state the theoretical demands that are being placed on today’s soldiers. The ‘strategic corporal’ is made strategic through sensitivity to context and the ability to modulate his or her actions accordingly. This is a relatively new demand being placed on soldiers who may be fighting for their personal survival.
9 This was the basic premise underlying the decision to acquire the Abrams MBT. It was, and remains, the best available means of absorbing the first shot and developing the battle in contact. It is a response to the need to pierce the veil of uncertainty that separates us from regular and irregular enemies in complex terrain.
10 Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, ‘Systemic Operational Design: Learning and Adapting in Complex Missions’, Military Review, January/February 2009.
11 Franklin C Spinney, ‘Genghis John’, Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, July 1997, pp. 42-47.
