Strata Lucida

Closed loops

Chuck Spinney, writing for DNI, worries that America is about to become trapped in a closed loop of decision-making. Working from Colonel John Boyd's "OODA" schema (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action), Spinney writes:

Observations feed into the organism's Orientation activity. Boyd showed how Orientation exhibits a shaping pressure on what is seen and on the interpretation of what is seen. Decisions and actions flow out of this two-way interplay of Observation and Orientation. He showed why the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system—and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.

The power of Boyd's intellectual achievement is that he showed why the inevitable result of such an inwardly focused OODA Loop is a build up of internal confusion and disorder (entropy). He showed why, when such loops are put under menacing pressure, the confusion and disorder naturally expands into panic and chaos, which in turn can generate overload, paralysis, and even collapse. Boyd's entire strategy of conflict centered on the idea of inducing his opponent's OODA loop to turn inside itself.

Now, of course it's tempting to observe the blogospheric tendency to become a closed loop that amplifies its own non-adaptive templates. But I don't want to dwell on that. Instead I want to open my own loop a bit by going beyond my usual group of blog references, and point to a post by Andrew Sullivan in which he considers the precarious security situation in Iraq and the difficulty of implementing a democratic government under such conditions:

I know Paul Wolfowitz has read Hobbes. Did he forget it? CPA adviser Larry Diamond hasn't: "You can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." As John Burns has written - again no sympathizer for Saddam or cynic - that simply isn't the case in Iraq. Our predicament is that you cannot have democracy without order and you cannot have a new order without democracy.

But American triumphalists from Wolfowitz to President Bush are stuck in an Orientation system that presupposes democracy as the condition of security. It's why Bush was able to say, in his inaugural speech, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." It's why David Brooks was able to claim that the ideals are more real than reality itself. It's a framework that is exactly backwards: disconnected from the reality of the situation, it is becoming a closed, self-sustaining feedback loop. And, if Boyd is right, when you prod such a loop, it degenerates into paranoia and chaos.