{"id":91066,"date":"2016-03-23T16:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91066"},"modified":"2016-03-23T16:00:53","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:53","slug":"the-fighter-jock-doctrine-that-explains-why-trump-is-winning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91066","title":{"rendered":"The Fighter-Jock Doctrine That Explains Why Trump Is Winning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jack Shafer writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Like the Republican candidates before her, Clinton was already caught inside Trump\u2019s OODA loop.<\/p>\n

OODA loop? What\u2019s that? I had never heard of the OODA loop until Wednesday morning, when one of my editors, Blake Hounshell, introduced me to the concept. Originally formulated by fighter pilot and military theoretician Col. John R. Boyd to describe the mental cycles a successful dogfighting pilot navigates in bagging his prey, the thinking behind the OODA loop has since been applied to the world outside air combat by businessmen, athletes, diplomats and competitive types everywhere.
\nOODA stands for observation; orientation; decision; action\u2014the four steps an individual goes through when reacting to an event. The key to military victory, Boyd preached, was to cycle through your OODA loop faster than your foe. In his June 2002 Fast Company feature about the OODA loop, Keith H. Hammonds explains that to win a dogfight, a pilot must find a way to operate \u201cinside\u201d his foe\u2019s OODA loop, \u201cacting quickly to outthink and outmaneuver rivals.\u201d
\n\u201cAn effective pilot explodes his rival\u2019s comfortable view of the universe,\u201d Hammond writes, a statement that couldn\u2019t be a better description of the way Trump has run his campaign. He\u2019s rejected most of the etiquette that accompanies political campaigns, taunting and name-calling his opponents (\u201cLyin\u2019 Ted Cruz,\u201d for a fresh example) to instigate publicity-attracting feuds. But feuds are only a part of Trump\u2019s OODA loop strategy. Upsetting opponents\u2019 OODA loops with unexpected and rapid emanations from his own gives Trump the constant advantage of surprise. His ability to change mental course inside a media moment\u2014from \u201cperhaps there are two Donald Trumps\u201d to \u201cI don\u2019t think there are two Donald Trumps\u201d\u2014would sound like a contradiction coming out of any other politician\u2019s mouth. But Trump has been normalizing contradictions since the beginning of the campaign, with no loss of political support.
\nWho before Trump convinced TV hosts to accept lengthy phone-ins from a candidate? The practical advantage of doing phone-in interviews is it affords him maximum exposure with a minimum of physical effort. It also conditions TV bookers to call him when news or controversy breaks: He\u2019ll be there to take the call. By making himself more available to the news media than almost any candidate, he\u2019s got an edge in determining the terms of the debate, and his media ubiquity also makes him look like the leader and the other candidates like followers. While other candidates are composing expensive TV ads about their plans to solve the political crises of yesterday, Trump is on television screens across America, at no expense to his campaign, talking about how he will address today\u2019s catastrophe. He\u2019s already made his move. He\u2019s inside their airspace.
\nWhere did Trump come by these OODA loop skills? Although he owns a fleet of aircraft, including a Boeing 757-200, a Cessna Citation X corporate jet, two Sikorsky S-76B helicopters and, for a short time, owned Eastern Airlines\u2019 shuttle service, he\u2019s no fighter pilot. Maybe he learned the art of quick thinking at his developer father\u2019s knee, or in military school dorm fights, or in New York real estate deal making, or while divorcing his first two wives. (I suspect all of the \u201cwit\u201d displayed on his TV show was scripted.)
\nThere\u2019s something Zen about one source of Trump\u2019s power. He\u2019s able to maneuver faster than the other candidates because, unlike them, he\u2019s unencumbered by the polls and important advisers that slow the OODA loops governing other candidates. In this sense, his famously unplanned, unstructured campaign operation is a huge advantage. He\u2019s a one-man fighter jet; his opponents are lumbering bombers, still painstakingly running through a weapons checklist while they\u2019re viciously strafed from behind.
\nUnlike your average candidate, Trump doesn\u2019t require facts to make an argument. He doesn\u2019t even need an argument to make an argument: He possesses the confidence to shoot straight from the lip on any topic at any time, filling the air with chaff. For every critic who tut-tuts, \u201cTrump doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about,\u201d four or five people in TV land nod their head in agreement with him. By the time the fact-checkers arrive to assess the damage Trump has done to the truth, he has skipped on to several new subjects. He\u2019s inside the fact-checkers\u2019 OODA loops, too, moving too quickly for them to catch him.
\nIt\u2019s anybody\u2019s guess which of Trump\u2019s observations, acts of orientation, decision making and action are conscious and which are intuitive. Cartoonist Scott Adams of \u201cDilbert\u201d fame writes of Trump\u2019s great skill at simplifying the complex, which, when you think about it, is as sharp a time-saving tool as exists in any politician\u2019s OODA-loopbag: Where other candidates devote whole speeches to how they\u2019ll get things done, Trump merely states he\u2019ll get the best people on it and they\u2019ll finish on time and under budget. \u201cTrump is talking directly to people\u2019s subconscious. Everything else he says is just a carrier signal,\u201d Adams writes.
\nAdams also calls Trump a master of the \u201clinguistic kill shot,\u201d citing the candidate\u2019s ability to take out other candidates with a word or two that contains a resonance of truth. For Jeb Bush, the phrase was \u201clow energy.\u201d For Carly Fiorina, the word was \u201crobotic.\u201d For Ben Carson, \u201cnice.\u201d For Marco Rubio, \u201clittle.\u201d (For Ted Cruz, the word is shaping up to be \u201cLyin\u2019.\u201d)
\nDid any of the vanquished candidates see Trump rocketing up from behind just before he shot them down?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jack Shafer writes: Like the Republican candidates before her, Clinton was already caught inside Trump\u2019s OODA loop. OODA loop? What\u2019s that? I had never heard of the OODA loop until Wednesday morning, when one of my editors, Blake Hounshell, introduced … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91066"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91068,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91066\/revisions\/91068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}