Understanding the OODA Loop enables a commander to compress time—that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. ... It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent.
Tempo Gradient
Decision-making speed determines conflict outcomes.
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Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting two million men began turning automatically. ... One army corps alone—out of the total of 40 in the German forces—required 170 railway cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time.
It’s because she is struggling to operate in a system in which she doesn’t have, and can’t have, timely information and in which physical delays prevent her actions from having an immediate effect on inventory. ... When she issues an order, she doesn’t see an immediate response. This situation of information insufficiency and physical delays is very common.
The economy is, after all, chock full of supply chains, inventories, and time delays. The actual causes of macroeconomic oscillations are no doubt multifarious, but the lesson of the Beer Game is that the causes of the cycles may ultimately lie in the way in which the inductive rules people use in their decision making interact with the dynamic structure of the economic system.
The advantages of a cyberattack over other forms of attack were many. A digital bomb could achieve some of the same effects as a kinetic weapon without putting the lives of pilots at risk. It could also achieve them covertly in a way a physical bomb could never do, by silently damaging a system over weeks and months without being detected.
A fast takeoff occurs over some short temporal interval, such as minutes, hours, or days. Fast takeoff scenarios offer scant opportunity for humans to deliberate. Nobody need even notice anything unusual before the game is already lost.
If you’ve read Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, which details the ultrafast, high-frequency trading that takes place on the stock exchange, you’ll recall his prefatory riff on a hedge fund that ran a fiber-optic cable from New York to Chicago. The goal was to shave a few milliseconds off the regular Internet route between the two financial hubs, and gain a split-second advantage over other high-frequency shops. The cost was reputedly $300 million, which indicated the stakes involved.
But time is a relative thing, and it really is possible to slow it down. Consider: there are 1000 milliseconds in every second. ... Alertness is a measure of how many nows you are alert to in a given period.