Dithering

There's something called the OODA loop. It was developed in the 1950's by John Boyd, who had served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. It breaks down aerial combat into four pieces: observation, orientation, decision, and action.

In a dogfight, observation is when the pilot sees another aircraft. Orientation then follows: Is the aircraft a friend or a foe? If a foe, how far away? And so forth. Then, in the decision phase, the pilot writes his combat plan in his head. In the action phase he maneuvers and fires.

This template has been widely and successfully applied to a vast range of human activity.

For me, the most important part of the OODA loop is orientation. This is where people tend to get mired. There's a lot of data available to mull in the orientation box, ranging from a quick check of the fuel gauge to asking whether you're actually a pacifist, or maybe a Buddhist.

And while you dither, your enemy kills you.

I think that, in politics, ideology can be a prime source of dithering. Most recently, Democrats have been pressing the president to use the Defense Production Act, and he has waffled. There are those who have his ear who think we should wait for industry to do the right thing on its own.

You can claim that this is a principled position, but it is also a pretext to dither.

And ideology and dithering together camouflage a deeper issue - the lack of competent administrators in the White House. Trump has surrounded himself with people who are no better at actually governing than he is.

To borrow again from the military: We need to look at capabilities as well as intentions.

The upshot of all this is terrible.

"'We're talking about a president who is basically doing what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Depression and minimizing the danger and refusing to use available federal action,' Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said Friday in an interview with the radio station WNYC. 'And people are going to die, and they shouldn't, they don't have to, if we could get the support that we're asking for.'" (New York Times, March 21, 2020. p. A7)

People tend to forget that Hoover was in office for more than three years after the 1929 crash. Roosevelt did not arrive in a day.

The only piece of good news that I have is this: There's an election in November. Until then, God help us.