[POST] Observe, Orient, Determine, Anticipate

My career-long version of Boyd's OODA Loop

This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.

Every once in a while I come across some old video or article that I wrote decades ago and it triggers this realization of how this concept, that I now treat as a certainty, born of evidence, began in my head as an analytic construct and how that evolution bounced around among me, people and audiences I encountered, stuff I penned in various places, and particularly my travels.

Check out the short video below:

The clip is from a 2004 presentation I gave at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (or ICAF, as it was known then — today, it is called the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy).

The question was about metrics: basically, is it frequency of terror attacks or number of terrorists dead … what logically directs us to judging the Global War on Terror (GWOT) being successful, or progressing, or even ending?

The original seed of this concept — or the OBSERVE portion of my version of the OODA Loop — is found at the end of The Pentagon’s New Map, where I wrapped up the book with a vision of “ten steps toward this future worth creating.” Here, based more on ignorance than analysis, I placed Africa as step 10 of 10.

10. Africa comes last because Africa offers least. Saying that does not diminish the suffering that will rage on in this part of the world over the coming decades. Nor should that stop the Core [advanced Northern economies] from doing everything it can in the near term to integrate Africa piecemeal into the global economy far more than it is today. But from a practical security standpoint, the only way America will focus on sub-Saharan Africa is if the global war on terrorism becomes centered on that part of the world. When a Middle East is transformed beyond recognition, radical Muslim groups dreaming of a chunk of humanity they can break off and isolate under strict sharia may well turn to Central and East Africa out of desperation. To the extent that development pushes Africa to the top of the list, the Core is well served by moving ahead on all fronts to systematically transform the Middle East, for beyond that task Africa, in great pain, waits its turn.

Again, for me, pretty dark and dismissive, but, understand, we were just a handful of years past a mini-world war in central Africa (Second Congo War, 1997-1999), that totaled around five-to-six million dead in all. So, compared to today, that was a pretty dark time for Africa as a whole. My OBSERVATION, then, was that Africa lacked the baseline security to attract globalization’s connectivity in a manner sufficient to settle it down anytime soon.

What I needed next was to ORIENT my OBSERVATION within a more broadly framed sense of history — a process I described in my 2005 sequel to The Pentagon’s New Map called Blueprint for Action:

Last year [2004] I took my kids up to Boston, and during that trip we visited the Museum of Science. It’s a kid-oriented place, and my job was mostly to make sure my youngest son, Jerome, didn’t run off into some crowd. Near the end of the day, after the lightning show and the planetarium, we stopped by an exhibition on archaeology, where the kids got to mess around with various assembled skeletons. So while they were stacking bones in one corner, I found myself scanning the room for something to look at. I was drawn to a world map hung on a nearby wall. On it was displayed the migration of humans from our earliest origins in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly 100,000 years ago.

Now, the first thought that hit me is one that I’ve heard many times in the past: the spread of humanity around the planet was the first form of globalization. But as I stared at the timeline legend, another thought occurred to me: the spread of the current model of economic globalization is really the reverse track of that original spread of humanity. Humanity first spread from Africa to the Middle East; then to Eurasia; then to Europe, Japan, and Australia; and finally into the New World of the Western Hemisphere about 10,000 years ago. So if you were going to date civilizations, the age ranking would roughly correspond to the spread of humanity, with Africa and the Middle East being the oldest and the Western Hemisphere being the youngest.

But today’s version of globalization really began in the Western Hemisphere (the United States), then spread outward to include the West (Japan, Australia, Europe), finally conquering the Eurasian socialist bloc in the last generation, and now finding itself fundamentally stuck (no pun intended) on the oldest and least globalized parts of the world—namely, the Muslim world and Africa. In effect, modern globalization can be described as roughly a 150-year trek from the “youngest” parts of the world to the “oldest,” which is why it’s gotten harder and not easier with time, because it’s had more and more tradition and custom and history to overcome at each stage of its spread …

Modern globalization’s advance has met with consistently violent resistance throughout most of its history from rejectionists armed with exclusionary ideologies. These rejectionists, starting with the slaveholding South and extending right on through to our current enemies, have always pleaded that mankind must be saved from the machine-driven logic and exploitation of the industrial world. Typically, these rejectionists not only have sought to resist integration into this industrialized world but also have proposed competing systems of government and economics that would both avoid this outcome and do it one better by leapfrogging humanity into some idealized alternative universe of near-utopian self-fulfillment.

The odd thing is that as globalization has progressively advanced in its technology and modernization, the rejectionist ideologies have been forced to retreat farther back in time to attempt to build their alternate universes. When Marxism began in the mid-nineteenth century, the assumption was that socialism would naturally be achieved at capitalism’s pinnacle of development, or at the point of the superabundance of goods. This ideology actually sought to extend the capitalist model of development beyond what were perceived as its logical limits. But since that ideology proved wrong in its diagnosis of capitalism’s weaknesses, it fell to Vladimir Lenin to turn Marx on his head at the start of the twentieth century and argue that socialist revolution was far more likely to succeed in a largely precapitalist society, meaning not industrial Germany but Russia just as it was approaching what would have been its industrial phase of development.

Later in the same century, Lenin’s great ideological successor, Mao Zedong, took his theory farther back in time, arguing that socialist revolutions made even more sense in largely agrarian societies like China, meaning a revolution led by rural peasants and not by an urban proletariat. Cambodia’s subsequent Khmer Rouge Communist movement later took Mao’s ideology to its logical extreme, not just engaging in “cultural revolution” against largely city-based “enemies of the state” but literally emptying the cities and forcing millions to endure “reeducation” (marking the revolutionary Year Zero that would reboot the system completely) and eventual genocide in the most backward rural areas of the country.

Meanwhile, with the fall of the Portuguese empire in sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union’s leadership, despite the complete lack of revolutionary spirit back home, nonetheless deluded itself into thinking that successful socialist states could be constructed in some of Africa’s most backward economies, generating Moscow’s brief but ultimately failed ideological fling with the so-called Countries of Socialist Orientation (e.g., Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia). When the bankruptcy of that approach was made apparent in the failure of the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1980s, the great collapse of the socialist bloc began in earnest, fueled in Asia by China’s rapid turn toward market economics under Deng.

It was at this point in history that many political theorists began speaking of the “end of history,” a phrase made famous by philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who, not accidentally, began his career as an expert on the Soviet bloc and its relations with the Third World (the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation as well). What was meant by that was the notion that no feasible alternative to democracies and capitalism seemed to exist anymore, signaling the historical supremacy of each in combination. As a great wave of democratization swept the planet in the wake of the socialist bloc’s retreat and collapse, the judgment appeared warranted.

And in many ways this historical judgment does remain valid, for what has arisen in the years since the Cold War cannot be described as a full-fledged alternative model of development, since the Salafi jihadist movement promises no economic development whatsoever, but rather a strange sort of retreat into the past, with the utopian promise of somehow not only getting it right this time (i.e., returning to the golden age of the first several centuries following Muhammad’s life), but doing so in such a way as to become far superior to the current perceived alternative (“Westoxification” at the hands of a corrupt capitalist world system). Indeed, the world witnessed this back-to-the-future outcome in the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan across the late 1990s, right down to its pointless destruction of all symbols of foreign religions, the banning of television and music, and severe restrictions on the education of females (the quintessential disconnect). In all, the Taliban’s definition of the “good life” was almost prehistorical in its quality, demonstrating the absurd lengths to which the violent resistance to globalization has traveled in the current age.

Back to the Q&A clip: my DETERMINE answer was one I had just developed a month prior in an experience I later likewise described in Blueprint for Action:

In the spring of 2004, about a month after The Pentagon’s New Map came out, I was contacted by long-term planners in the policy and plans division (J-5) of Central Command down in Tampa. Central Command is the U.S. combatant command responsible for the Middle East. The J‑5 people said they were revamping their long-range political-military planning for the region as a whole in light of the unfolding global war on terrorism and were using my volume as a sourcebook for concepts, language, and rules.

Now, you might think these “action officers,” or those middling-rank officers given the actual task of writing up the plan to be approved by the command’s senior admirals and generals, would approach me like some “great mind” whose blessing is needed for their particular employment of his ideas. And yeah, they’re quite respectful in their interactions with you. But it’s not like you have a veto or editorial control over anything. They’re just asking for your “roger this” and “check that” and “you might want to consider using this term instead of that one”—that’s all. In the end, these guys know fundamentally what their bosses are looking for, because their bosses know what their political masters are looking for. If a command picks up your material, it’s because it seems accurate in the opinion of its senior officers, not because it’s visionary or cool or way “out of the box.” It has to fit the world within which they find themselves working.

So it starts with a phone call, then a slew of e‑mails, and then you’re reviewing documents and offering advice, here and there at the margins. You play Oracle to their Neo from the Matrix movie series. They’ve already made their decision. Your job is simply to help them understand why they’ve made this decision. So the strategist’s role is not one of power, or really even influence, but one of informing. You don’t make decisions, and you don’t influence them directly, because—remember—they choose you, not the other way around. But once you’ve laid out your vision and these officers decide it’s accurate for their particular purposes, then you get to shape their employment of your lexicon and concepts, albeit only in the most initial sense. Because you’re working with the “worker bees” at the commander and lieutenant colonel levels, and in the end, the policy will be enunciated, day in and day out, by the admirals and generals located far above them in rank. So at times, this “informing” process can seem like Telephone, that children’s game where you whisper a phrase into the first kid’s ear and by the time that act is repeated throughout the long chain of friends it comes out sounding quite different at the end.

Then again, sometimes it comes out sounding just fine.

So, after a drawn-out series of virtual interactions over the Web, I finally made an in-person office call to the senior flags in charge of the whole process. This is basically the culminating point in the process, and not surprisingly, it’s still you—the “great strategist”—who’s getting blessed, not the other way around. So I eventually stopped by at the J‑5 office at Central Command’s headquarters in Tampa while I was down there on Special Operations Command’s dime for some other strategizing business. This meeting was a big deal for the younger officers, who were—in effect—showing me off to the two-star admiral in charge of J‑5, as well as his one-star Marine deputy. It was their chance to present their source to their bosses, and their bosses’ chance to thank me for my “contribution to national security”—as that old saw goes.

Now, it was a big deal for me, too, because these flags are incredibly busy, so getting a chance to just hang out and chat with them for an hour is a real opportunity to try out your thinking directly with those who sit—so to speak—on the pointy end of the policy pen. I mean, all I had to do was look out the window at the dozens of flagpoles standing in the compound, signifying all the allied nations’ liaison offices literally plunked down there like so many little vacation cabins, to realize how complicated these guys’ workdays tended to be. So if I wanted to plant any seeds in their minds regarding long-term strategic issues worth anticipating, now was the time.

I love moments like these, because in just a few minutes you can generate and/or test strategic observations of real use, meaning messages you can take back from one command and use again and again as you later explain their strategic predicaments to policymakers and politicians in D.C. and elsewhere. So you don’t just chat about the weather or how much they like your book. Hell, you dive right in like your pants are on fire.

So what I did was start waxing strategic about CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, or AOR, proposing my rudimentary theories of how its boundaries to the south (sub-Saharan Africa), to the north (Europe and Russia), and to the east (East Asia) all posed very different sets of problems to the command. Mind you, these were just my pet theories at the time, but I figured, What the hell, they might as well get shot down here so I can be done with them if they’re wrong. Remember, nobody likes a wishy-washy visionary.

Well, they’re weren’t wrong or right so much as they were reasonably accurate, but they naturally needed some real-world fine-tuning—as in, as soon as I presented them, these senior officers started spitting back all sorts of personal anecdotes confirming the basic outline of my ideas. So while it starts out with just me standing up in front of the giant wall map, within a few minutes we’re all on our feet making sweeping gestures with our arms, trading theories and concepts and anecdotes. A quick half hour later, I have a new PowerPoint slide in my mind, one that I’ve used ever since to great effect with senior audiences all over Washington and in several overseas capitals.

Thanks to this intense exchange (often called a “group grope”), I developed a way of explaining what I thought were the key tactical, operational, and strategic challenges facing the command as it sought to actualize the Bush Administration’s goal of transforming the Middle East. Again, I didn’t come up with any of these on my own but rather developed them based on what the CENTCOM planners described to me as the Command’s experiences—both good and bad—in pursuing the war on terrorism in their particular corner of the Gap.

CENTCOM’s AOR encompasses the Persian Gulf area extending from Israel all the way to Pakistan, the Central Asian republics formerly associated with the Soviet Union, and the horn of Africa (from Egypt down to Somalia). This is clearly the center of the universe as far as the global war on terrorism is concerned, and yet viewing that war solely in the context of that region alone is a big mistake, one that could easily foul up America’s larger grand strategic goals of defeating terrorism worldwide and making globalization truly global. Here’s why: CENTCOM’s area of responsibility features three key seams, or boundaries, between that collection of regions and the world outside. Each seam speaks to both opportunities and dangers that lie ahead, as well as to how crucial it is that Central Command’s version of the war on terrorism stays in sync with the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

The first seam lies to the south, or sub-Saharan Africa. This is the tactical seam, meaning that in day-to-day terms, there’s an awful lot of connectivity between that region and CENTCOM’s AOR. That connectivity comes in the form of transnational terrorist networks that extend from the Middle East increasingly into sub-Saharan Africa, making that region sort of the strategic retreat of al Qaeda and its subsidiaries. As Central Command progressively squeezes those networks within its area of responsibility, the Middle East’s terrorists increasingly establish interior lines of communication between themselves and other cells in Africa, as Africa becomes the place where supplies, funds (especially in terms of gold), and people are stashed for future use. Africa risks becoming Cambodia to the Middle East’s Vietnam, a place where the enemy finds respite when it gets too hot inside the main theater of combat. Central Asia presents the same basic possibility, but that’s something that CENTCOM can access more readily because it lies within its area of responsibility, while sub-Saharan Africa does not. Instead, distant European Command owns that territory in our Unified Command Plan, a system constructed in another era for another enemy. Those vertical, north-south slices of geographic commands were lines to be held in an East-West struggle, but today our enemies tend to roam horizontally across the global map, turning the original logic of that command plan on its head.

Central Command’s challenge, then, is to figure out how to connect these two regions in such a way as to avoid having Africa become the off-grid hideout for al Qaeda and others committed to destabilizing the Middle East. By definition, such a goal is beyond CENTCOM’s pay grade, or rank, because it’s a high-level political decision to engage sub-Saharan Africa on this issue—in effect, widening the war. And yet solving this boundary condition is essential to winning the struggle in the Middle East. What the Core-Gap model provides Central Command is a way of describing the problem by noting that transnational terrorism’s resistance to globalization’s creeping embrace of the Middle East won’t simply end with our successful transformation of the region. No, that struggle will inevitably retreat deeper inside the Gap, or to sub-Saharan Africa.

Why is this observation important? It’s important because it alerts the military to the reality that success in this war won’t be defined by less terrorism but by a shifting of its operational center of gravity southward, from the Middle East to Africa. That’s the key measure of effectiveness. Achieving this geographic shift will mark our success in the Middle East, but it will also buy us the follow-on effort in Africa. You want America to care more about security in Africa? Then push for a stronger counterterrorism strategy in the Middle East, because that’s the shortest route between those two points.

Ultimately, you’re faced with the larger, inescapable requirement of having to connect Africa to the Core to run this problem to ground, otherwise today’s problem for CENTCOM simply becomes tomorrow’s distant problem for EUCOM. When you make that leap of logic, the next decision gets a whole lot easier: America needs to stand up an African Command. Now, I know that sounds like a huge expansion of our strategic “requirements,” but when you consider the boundary conditions in this way, the discussion shifts from if to when.

Understand, for me, that 2004 meeting, at just under an hour, was one of my greatest brainstorming sessions ever — thanks in no small part to the quality personnel with whom I was interacting. With this breakthrough, my previous OBSERVATION and ORIENTATION suddenly merged into this DETERMINISM within the construct of the Global War on Terror — thus yielding my weirdly predictive answer to that officer’s question at that 2004 presentation.

Understand, this was before I encountered Howe and Jackson’s book, The Greying of Great Powers, about which I’ve recently written here:

---

So, at that point, 21 years ago, I was still years away from tying any analysis of the GWOT to the demographic dividend per se — analysis that ultimately yielded my Follow the Demographic Dividend slide.

That slide likewise placed Africa as the end point of a long, world-restructuring historical process. But, again, back in 2004, during my Pentagon’s New Map book touring, I remained fairly pessimistic about Africa, as reflected in my designating Africa as Tail End Charlie for my future worth creating.

To wrap this up: I got my ANTICIPATION logic three years later in 2007, when Esquire, where I served as a Contributing Editor, sent me to East Africa (Djibouti, Kenya) to embed with US National Guard and Special Operations personnel for a week, which resulted in my “The Americans Have Landed” piece (which you can read here).

---

In the piece, I predicted there would be two dozen US bases spread across Africa by 2012, which was too aggressive an estimate on my part. Today, however, I will note that America has two-dozen such facilities/bases on the continent, even with the recent losses in West Africa.

For those of you who track such things, the jihadist center of gravity has indeed moved from the Middle East to the Trans Sahel. This transition is driven by the rapid expansion and consolidation of al-Qaeda affiliate jihadist groups.

According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel now accounts for more terrorism deaths than both the Middle East and North Africa combined, with 43% of global terrorism deaths occurring in the region in 2022, compared to just 1% in 2007. The Islamic State’s operational “epicenter” has moved from the Middle East to Africa, with sub-Saharan Africa-especially the Sahel-experiencing a surge in attacks and fatalities

To sum up: this is a good example of what my career has been like:

• Pessimistic OBSERVATION made a quarter century ago …

• That coalesces into an ORIENTATION with regard to globalization’s spread and its opponents

• That morphs into this DETERMINISM regarding the unfolding success of America’s Global War on Terror, which tracks nicely with the DETERMINISM of the migrating demographic dividend within the global economy

• That begat this long-term ANTICIPATION of heightened jihadist terrorism across the Trans Sahel (documented ad nauseam), which has attracted a certain US military commitment, that is now under review, along with Africa Command itself, by the Trump Administration as it seeks to dramatically downgrade US government and military presence across the continent, which I came to recognize in America’s New Map as lying beyond our natural sphere of integration in an increasingly North-South evolution of global trade and global order.

When you seek to think in grand strategic terms, this is a good example of how your major pillars are constructed over time. I share this example of one of my career OODA Loops here because it’s just been something I have found myself wanting to get firmly established in my memory.

So let it be substacked, so let it be done.

---

---