Military Strategist Explains Why Trump Leads—and Will Fail
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2016
Military StrategistExplains Why Donald
Trump LeadsAnd How
He Will FailAir Force fighter pilot John Boyd's theory about confounding opponents with a constantly
shifting battlefield applies to Donald Trump and all GOP aspirants.
No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican
presidential primary raceand there are many, many good reasons to do soyou
have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trumps
ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system.
We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his
ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president,
using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far,
the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet he is already exhibiting symptoms of
precisely the flaws that Boyd saw as fatal in combatants.
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design
engineer, is best known for the OODA Loop or decision cycle, a concept he
developed as part of a broader study of patterns of conflict in the 1970s and
1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA
stands for ObserveOrientDecideAct, and refers to the process by which soldiers
in combator humans engaged in any form of conflictabsorb information,
make decisions, and act on them. Boyd illustrated this with a graph:
Boyds theories were complex, constantly evolving, and never formally written
down in one place in his lifetimehe preferred to play Socrates, and let others be
Platoso they are often oversimplified. But for present purposes, four
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generalizations will do.
First, operational tempospeedlies at the core of Boyds theory of conflict, and
has been the most influential element of his thinking, both in the military and in
how the concept of a decision cycle has seeped into our popular vocabulary.
(Indeed, Boyd first made his name in the Air Force as 40Second Boyd, a fighter
jock with a standing bet that he could get on any opponents tail in 40 seconds.
Many took the bet; he never had to pay up.)
Boyds core insight was about the interactive and disruptive nature of speed on
human decisionmaking: success in conflict can be rapid and dramatic if one can
operate inside the OODA Loop of the opponent. Operating inside the opponents
OODA Loop means presenting him with a constantly shifting battlefield that keeps
him offbalance and disoriented so he is unable to process information and make
and implement sound decisions before the situation changes again.
Put another way, you dont just make better or faster decisions than your
opponent, you can disrupt the opponents ability to make realitybased decisions
if you can continuously change the reality before he has time to react to it.
If action flows nearly instantaneously from orientation, the quickness of the overall
loop is accelerated. This relative acceleration will shorten, or seemingly compress the
time an adversary has to reorient in response to what is happening in his
environment. Boyd contended that in competitive situation, be it combat, sports or
debate, the opponent with the relatively quicker loop will, at times, have a more
relevant picture of the unfolding situation because he or she is shaping it rather than
being forced to adapt to it. This mismatch in orientation can provide a fleeting
opportunity for the quicker side to continue to act to exploit the effects of the first
move, before the slower side understands what is happening. If the quicker side can
maintain this mismatch, the slower side will become increasingly disconnected from
the environment and their actions will become increasingly unrelated to the actual
situation. They will be driven solely by perception. As this process continues, the
relatively slower side continues to generate increasingly irrelevant observations,
leading to more disconnected decisions, and so forth. The relatively slower sides loop
will fold back in on itself as confusion and disorder increase; generating an internally
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When combined
with speed,
ambiguity plays acrucial role in the
OODA Loop in
keeping the
opponent from
becoming oriented
as a result of his
focused close loop.
Boyd referred to the concept of using your own actions to dictate what the enemy
knows, and therefore does, as implicit guidance.
But Boyd did not stress speed for the sake of speed, in the form of simply actingfaster than the opponent. Indeed, a successful Boydian approach will sometimes
lead to the opponentincreasing his tempo in a panic, thus leading to further
breakdowns in his ability to make sound decisions on adequate information and
implement them cohesively.
To use a football analogy, the point is to have a quarterback who can quickly read
the field, be prepared to make a quick release upon spotting the best opportunity,
and force the defense into a reactive mode due to the QBs ability to quickly
reshape the fieldnota quarterback who heaves the ball downfield the instant he
touches it without setting his feet and spotting an open man.
The Strategic Value of Ambiguity
Second, a crucial concept in Boyds work is ambiguity. An opponent who wishes to
counter your approach will want to ascertain your intentions, capabilities, andmovements, and respond accordingly. It becomes much more difficult to do this if
you are able to keep your intentions and actions unclear to the opponent for as
long as possible.
Indeed, the ideal Boydian approach is to keep the
opponent so confused he isnt really sure who hes
fighting, where the battlefield begins or ends, or even
if hes in a fight at all! This is not a novel conceptits
as old as Sun Tzubut when combined with speed,
ambiguity plays a crucial role in the OODA Loop in
keeping the opponent from becoming oriented as a
result of his observations.
One of the most devious and successful practitioners
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observations.
Each combatantwill orient around
the same
observations
differently based on
his own experience,
heritage, and
cluster ofpreconceptions.
of ambiguity today is Vladimir Putin. From Ukraine to
Georgia to Syria to the Baltics, Putin has shown again and again the ability to
expand his influence while using secrecy, disinformation, and incrementalism to
keep his potential opponents from becoming sufficiently oriented to make a
decision and translate it into action.
While the Wests foreign policy apparatus continues to debate what exactly Putin
wants, what he is doing, whether he is doing himself more harm than good, and
even whether he is in some ways on our side, Putin is constantly reshaping the
reality on the ground in ways that conform to his own ideas about his objectives.
Getting Enemies Into Their Unconscious Reflexes
Third, Boyd stressed that much of the OODA process occurs beyond consciousthought, and draws on things like reflex, training, memory, cultural background,
and personal experience. This is most obvious in Boyds concept of orientation as
a process that filters observations and tends to fit them into preexisting mental
models or frameworks of narrative and pattern recognition (in militaries, this
tends to include a particular militarys doctrine).
The result is that each combatant will orient around
the same observations differently based on his own
experience, heritage, and cluster of preconceptions. It
also stands out in the realm of action, especially
action in physical forms of conflict like combat and
sports. Because of the need for splitsecond decisions
at the ground level, armies fight as they train, teams
play as they practice.
For our purposes, the same thing can be true of
political candidates on the trail. They are confronted with so many situations
calling for them to address some new event, public policy argument, or cultural
divide (in debates, interviews, town halls, fundraisers, and retail rope lines) that
they could never possibly hope to respond to them all with thoughtful and
considered original answers.
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The OODA Loop
itself is a dynamic
rather than linear
process.
So they fall back on memorized texts (stump speeches, talking points, favorite
anecdotes and jokes), their ideological instincts and party platforms, and things
that have worked for them in the past. When cornered, they may retreat to their
happy placewar record, humble origins story, defeat of a despised foe, talent for
baiting hecklers or the media, agitation of economic or racial resentments,
whatever has gotten them out of jams in the past.
hen Participants Dont Evolve to Fit Reality
Fourth, all of Boyds theories center around dynamic systems, i.e., systems in which
all the elements affect all the others continuously, and change is constant. The
OODA Loop itself is a dynamic rather than linear process, as the many circleback
lines on Boyds chart illustrate.
For example, the combatant may affect the situation
merely by observing it, and decision is merely a
hypothesis that will be tested and refined based on
how additional observations are collected and how
the decisionmaker becomes oriented around them.
The ability of each combatant to affect the others OODA Loop is, of course, key to
the idea of getting inside the others Loop and using implicit guidance to collapse
his ability to make sound or realitybased decisions.
More broadly, Boyd stressed the difference between open and closed systems of
conflict and the need for open systems of OODA to deal with the former (which
are the norm in human conflict).
Consider a simple video game like PacMan: the game operates according toprogrammed rules and will function in a predictable way, so the more times you
play, the more you learn to process the feedback the game gives you and turn it
into actions that improve your chances of winning. The game is a closed system,
and a veteran player can beat it with a closed system of observing, orienting,
deciding, and acting, fitting each new observation into a set of preconceptions
about how the games rules and winning strategies operate.
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But most forms of human conflict are open systemsthe rules and conditions are
not only constantly changing, but also reacting continuously to how you approach
them. The opponent may be trying to get insideyourOODA Loop; the terrain on
which the conflict rages may be expanding or contracting; the available tools and
technologies and cultural presuppositions may be evolving; new combatants may
be entering or leaving the fray. Because the conditions are an open system, theOODA process must also be open and evolving, rather than falling back on the kind
of fixed expectations that come rationally with repeating conflict in a closed
system like playing PacMan:
Incestuous amplification occurs when ones preconceptions misshape the
observations that one is sensing. These misshapen observations then blur the true
connection between the individual and the environment because the brain begins to
synthesize cues and preconceived responses. Viewed abstractly, incestuous
amplification hijacks the orientation of an individuals OODA loop by overriding
actual observations to a point where the subsequent orientation induces the
individual to perceive and act on what he or she wants to see rather than what
actually is. First order effects of this disconnect may be initially too small to measure
thanks in part to luck, chance, or ambiguity. However, if the cycle continues unabated,
subsequent actions continue to induce dysfunctional behavior back into the entire
OODA loop, which then folds back on itself to magnify the mismatchthe effectis a
little like placing a microphone next a speaker when recording, only much more
dangerous.This kind of positive feedback loop essentially forms a closed system. Left
uncorrected, the individual exhibiting an incestuously amplifying OODA loop becomes
increasingly disconnected from his or her environmentIncestuous amplification has
the effect of closing off the system from its environmentwithout a correction or
change that opens the deciders OODA loop to an effective communication with the
real world, the only uncertainty in the outcome is how long an OODA loop driven madby incestuous amplification can last before it degenerates into chaos, confusion, and
disorder.
Chaos, confusion and disorder sounds like a lot of what we have seen thus far in
the Republican primaries.
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Unable to discern
Trumps intentions
in May, June, and
July, his opponents
were tentative inreaching decisions
and putting them
into action.
June 2015: Enter Trump
So, what does this all have to do with Donald Trump? Quite a lot. Few candidates
in recent political memory have been so effective at altering the reality around
them in a way that crashes their opponents OODA Loops.
mbiguity: Freezing The Opposition
Lets start with ambiguity. Trump has been flirting with electoral politics so long,
he was asked in an interview with Rona Barrett in 1980 about his possible interest
in running for president someday, and Larry King asked him at the 1988 GOP
convention if he would have accepted an invitation to be George H.W. Bushs
running mate. He joined H. Ross Perots Reform Party in 1999and even ran
briefly in its primaries for the 2000 electionbefore bowing out and watching thenomination go to Pat Buchanan.
Trump ziggedhe declared that he identified as a
Democrat as recently as 2004, donated significant
sums of money to Hillary Clintonand other
Democrats despised by rankandfile Republicans,
and had glowing words for Hillaryand President
Obama. He zaggedhe confronted Obama so directly
over his birthplace in 2011 that Obama felt compelled
to finally publicly release his Hawaiian birth
certificate, and he endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012
primaries, saying that ifRomney were the nominee, Trump would not stage his
own thirdparty bid in 2012.
Given his long and erratic history, loose party loyalty, and propensity to bluff,
Trumps competitors for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination were quite
reasonably conditioned to view talk of a Trump 2016 campaign, and even his June
16 announcement, with uncertainty: was it another publicity stunt? A runup to a
Perotstyle third party campaign? A stalking horse for some hidden agenda? A
personal vendetta against Jeb Bush? Or a real effort to win the Republican
nomination?
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-announces-2016-presidential-campaign-make-country/story?id=31799741http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/02/politics/campaign-wrap/http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/trump-on-obama-in-2009-i-think-hes-doing-a-really-good-jobhehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/17/trump-2007-hillarys-very-very-capable-her-health-care-plan-is-very-good/http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/donald-trump-donations-democrats-hillary-clinton-119071http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/21/politics/donald-trump-election-democrat/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Party_presidential_primaries,_2000#Trump_enters_racehttp://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/10/25/trump.cnn/index.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usb0iE5WiZIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5VEjF1uhYo -
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Jeb was
conditioned to feara Trump third-party
run as a larger
threat than a
Trump run as a
Republican.
Unable to discern Trumps intentions in May, June, and July, his opponents were
tentative in reaching decisions and putting them into action. To the extent that he
maintains the thirdparty threat to this day, it provides him a screen of ambiguity
that protects him against attacks other candidates would have to face. Nobody
worries that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush will leave the party in a snit and
launch a thirdparty bid; Trumps credible threat of doing so makes primary
opponents think twice about attacking him in ways they would not hesitate to
attack loyal Republicans whose intent to abide by primary outcomes is clear.
Subconscious Orientation: The Giant Sucking Sound
As Boyd would predict, personal history formed the mental models that figured
into the candidates assessments of the thirdparty threat. For Jeb Bush, 1992 hadto loom large: a populist billionaire fond of ranting against trade with Mexico
barges into the race as a thirdparty candidate, splitting off the Buchananist chunk
of the GOP base and handing a national election from the Bush family to the
Clinton family.
So, from the outset, Jeb was conditioned to fear a
Trump thirdparty run as a larger threat than a
Trump run as a Republican. In the early going,
therefore, Jebs natural orientation was to back away
from conflict that might further antagonize Trump.
Three GOP contendersMarco Rubio, Rick Perry,
and Chris Christiehad a different history. All three
had faced down thirdparty challenges and won: Christie knocked off a sitting
Democratic governor despite a thirdparty challenge from the Right (who was
suspected of being a stalking horse for the Democrats), Rubio beat a sitting
Republican governor for a Senate seat in the primary and beat him again when he
ran thirdparty; and Perry won his second reelection in a wild fourway affair
with two independents, one of them celebrity author Kinky Friedman. Perry had
also survived a moderate primary challenge in 2010, but in 2012 he lost to the
establishment favorite, Mitt Romney, in part because Perry was blindsided by
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A key weapon in
2012 was Romneys
SuperPAC, which
delivered barrages
of negative
advertisingconcentrated
against whichever
rival threatened
him most at any
one time.
attacks from his right (mainly by Michele Bachmann) on immigration.
It was therefore Perrypredictably, in hindsightwho disregarded Trumps
shield of ambiguity, seeing him as a threat to be neutralized no matter what he
was up to, and moved first against Trump in August. Perry challenged Trump
directly on immigration and hoped to use the confrontation to shore up his own
credentials on the issue. The Texas gunslinger would find himself walking into a
fatal trap.
Dynamic Systems: Toto, Its Not 2012 Anymore
Perry, himself a former Air Force transport pilot, correctly assessed his
adversarys intentions, but not the way the terrain had shifted from 2012 and how
his opponent was reshaping it to his advantage.
The central dynamic of 2012 was a fairly
conventional one for a Republican primary: a lavishly
funded establishment frontrunner trying to keep
conservative and antiestablishment sentiment
divided among an assortment of insurgents (and one
moremoderatethanthou gadfly) rather than unified
behind a credible headtohead opponent.
A key weapon in 2012 was Romneys SuperPAC,
which delivered barrages of negative advertising
concentrated against whichever rival threatened him
most at any one time. Insurgents like Newt Gingrich
and Rick Santorum also used SuperPACs to funnel a single wealthy supporters
donations into enough TV oxygen to stay on the air despite a narrow donor base.
But the 2016 terrain is different in a number of significant ways. Four involve the
structural dynamics of the field.
First, with 17 candidates who could be described as at least vaguely serious
including eight multiterm governors and five multiterm or sitting senatorsand
no initially dominant frontrunner, the field was inevitably going to involve a
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The field was
inevitably going to
involve a Hobbesian
scramble forresources,
attention, and
support.
Political scientists
have noted the
correlation between
media coverage and
Hobbesian scramble for resources, attention, and support.
Second, the importance of SuperPACs in 2012
concealed their limitations: they can be used for
offensive or defensive TV advertising, but not to keep
a candidates own staff and organization in the field.
Third, the debate system had been overhauled to
limit the number of debates (making them bigger
media events) and put polldriven strictures on who
could be on the main stage, which interacted with the size of the field to mean that
many real candidates would not even make it to the main debate, and that low
early poll standing could become a selffulfilling prophecy, thus accelerating the
tempo needed to survive.
Fourth, the primary season has been compressedvoting starts a month later but
ends at the same time, while the convention is a month earlierso there will be
comparatively little time to raise money and build infrastructure after Iowa and
New Hampshire, putting a premium on early hiring and spending, which in turn
means high burn rates for candidates organizing along traditional lines.
Free Media For the Win
Trump seems to have shrewdly assessed both the terrain and his own capabilities
and realized that the crowded nature of the field meant that the most valuable of
all resources in this context was the one he was most accustomed to commanding:
free media. Trump accumulated a massive advantage in press coverageover the
summer, especially on cable news, with networks often covering his speeches in
their entirety.
One emblematic late August analysis found CNN
giving Trump 78 percent of its GOP campaign
coverage. Hes still at it: an analysis of news in the
days following his proposal earlier this month to ban
Muslim immigration found Trump getting 25 times as
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/11/edge-trump-gets-25-times-more-media-mentions-than-gop-field-combined.htmlhttp://www.redstate.com/2015/09/16/cnn-spent-78-gop-primary-coverage-trump/http://www.redstate.com/2015/09/01/donald-trump-shows-money-politics-good-thing/ -
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polling, especially
early in a primary
campaign.
Trump has the
deterrent effect of a
potentially large
self-funded war
chest at the ready,
but he has neverneeded to spend it.
many media mentions as the other 13 Republican
candidates combined.
Political scientists have noted the correlation
between media coverage and polling, especially early in a primary campaign, and
this was bound to have an even larger impact when such a large field meant voters
knew comparatively little about the various contenders. Trump, of course, has
(like Romney) the deterrent effect of a potentially large selffunded war chest at
the ready, but he has never needed to spend it. Hes spent only $217,000 on
campaign ads, compared to $28.9 million by Jeb and between $2 million and $11
million by each of Rubio, Christie, John Kasich, and Ben Carson. No candidate in
recent memory has exploited such an opportunity, and Trumps ability to do so
has altered the battlefield.
Taken in combination, these factors conspiredupon Trumps dive into the deep
end of the pool and initial poll surgeto put immediate stress on all the other
campaigns ability to balance their need for longterm organizational spending
with their fundraising capabilities (which can be limited when a candidate is
polling in single digits in a crowded field) and their need to pay for the kind of
publicity Trump could command for free.
Perry and Scott Walker were the first victims of this.
Unlike leanly staffed campaigns designed for a
candidate who is running to build name recognition
or send a message, Perry and especially Walker were
running to win, and had spent accordingly.
But the early polls kept Perry off the main debatestage, hampering his fundraising. The long game he
played successfully in Texas in 2006 and 2010 wouldnt work. He needed a
successful confrontation with Trump. While his move to denounce Trumps ham
fisted immigration rhetoric was brave and principled, it meant going up against
Trump when he was at the peak of his media saturation.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/47-5-million-cant-buy-these-candidates-love-least-so-n472166http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-boom-or-trump-bubble/http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/11/edge-trump-gets-25-times-more-media-mentions-than-gop-field-combined.html -
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The manner ofRomneys loss and
the paucity of
policy
accomplishments
from the
congressional GOP
exacerbated anti-establishment
sentiment in the
GOP primary
electorate.
The standards of
public mores and
public discourse
have been changing
2016 Is Vastly Different From 2012
It wasnt just timing, however. Four other factors had changed on Perry, and
Trump exploited all of them. Three were in the mood of the voters themselves.
One, the manner of Romneys loss and the paucity of
policy accomplishments from the congressional GOP
exacerbated antiestablishment sentiment in the GOP
primary electorate, spreading to a general distrust of
the whole system and everyone in it.
Two, President Obamas unilateral executive actions
on immigration, and the sensational killing of Kate
Steinle by an illegal immigrant on July 1, dialed up theintensity of the immigration issue, which had never
been a decisive factor in GOP primaries before 2012.
Three, as best symbolized by the shockingly rapid
progress since 2012 of the samesex marriage
political movement, the standards of public mores and public discourse have been
changing in ways and at a pace that is disorienting to a lot of older, more
traditional voters (even voters who may not themselves be especially religious or
socially conservative).
As a result, a chunk of the electorate (at least, people polled as being GOP voters)
was not in a mood for the kind of grownup leadership that traditional Republican
nominees like Romney, McCain, Dole, the Bushes, and Reagan embodied. Instead,
they responded positively when Trump was deliberately outrageous, repeatedly
saying things that werent politically correct.
So when asked to choose between Trump (who had
catered to this type of audience with a similar style in
his years of association with pro wrestlingand who
now barged onto the scene calling Mexicans rapists)
and Perry (who had won six statewide elections in
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Cable TV news
networks are facinga downward trend
in ratings. Theyre
not the only ones
under stress.
in ways and at a
pace that is
disorienting to a lot
of older, more
traditional voters.
Texas by carefully balancing toughness on the border
with a welcoming approach to Texas Hispanics),
many were willing to choose confrontational rhetoric
over experience.
Of course, that Buchananite strain has always existed
in the party, and insurgencies like Bachmanns had failed in the recent past. But
for Perry, the financial and structural realities of the new battlefield meant that he
was squeezed out before the fight could go on for long.
The Media Is As Desperate as Base Voters
Thefourthfactor was the media itself, and its susceptibility to being bribed or
bulliednot with cash, but with the currency of Trumps talent for spectacle.Cable TV news networks are facing a downward trend in ratings. Theyre not the
only ones under stresstalk radio has also been facing declining ratings and
advertising rates, in part due to assaults from leftwing socialmedia campaigns
against its advertisers.
Enter Trump, whose theatrical antics are ratings gold
and who is not shy about throwing around the clout
that gives him. He has repeatedly used the high
ratings generated by his appearances to jawbone the
cable news networks over debate formats, including
the unprecedented step of negotiating the CNBC
debate down to two hours, and it seems unlikely hed
be above using similar tactics against talk radio hosts.
In years past, rightleaning talk radio had treated favorably many of the people
running, and many of the leading conservative talkers were people with
movement conservative backgrounds who understood well the principles Trump
treats as fungible. Yet, rightwing talk radio haswith a few honorable exceptions
rallied around Trump, basking in the audiencedriving controversy he brings
with him. When the circus comes to town, everyone wants to be a clown.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/talk-radios-advertising-problem-1423011395https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/as-viewers-drift-is-it-past-prime-time-for-the-cable-news-networks/2015/05/06/6dbba2bc-eeb6-11e4-a55f-38924fca94f9_story.htmlhttp://www.nationaljournal.com/s/74221/return-middle-american-radical -
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Trumps operational
tempo left Jeb and
Walker disoriented
and constantly
unable to craft
workable responses.
Trumps ability to spot the medias pressure points and leverage them to his
advantage gave him a decisive edge over Perry and other opponents in the
summer. But a different aspect of Trumps modus operandiwould help him scuttle
his next targetthe no. 2 candidate in the raceand humble the presumptive
frontrunner: the tempo of his assaults on their OODA Loops.
Tempo: Culling the Slow From the Front of the Herd
After Perry, the second candidate to drop would be Walker, one of the early
favorites for the nomination. For the first half of 2015, Jeb and Walker sat first and
second in the national polls, with Walker leading in Iowa and Jeb in New
Hampshire.
By Labor Day, Jeb was in single digits nationally andin the first two states, and Walker was out of money,
dropping out of the race shortly thereafter. Trump
was not the only reason both campaigns crashed and
burned in six weeks, but he was the proximate cause
that sent both spiraling to the ground, brutally
exposing the latent weaknesses in their OODA Loops.
A major reason Trump was able to outflank Walker and Jeb was speed. His
operational tempo left them disoriented and constantly unable to craft workable
responses that kept up with how quickly Trump was reshaping reality around
them.
Traditional political campaigns, no matter how savvy and quickwitted the
candidate may be, rely on layers of political consultants, policy advisers, and
pollsters before making important decisions about their message. There are
completely rational reasons for this. Very few elections are won by a single
message or candidate statement, but a great many are lost by a single one.
Messages are the coin of the realm of politics, but the risk/reward calculus of each
individual message requires careful strategic deliberation. And deliberation takes
time.
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Trumps basic style
is BS, in which he
is interested neither
in the truth nor inlying to his
audience, but just in
riffing on a theme
without much
connection to the
facts.
Insurgent campaigns that lack this level of riskaversion can rise with astonishing
speed because they can create new and distinctive messages at a rapid pace
without the usual deliberation, but they can also implode suddenly and
spectacularly, and political pros are conditioned to wait them out and hope they
do. That gives insurgents a window of opportunity to launch damaging attacks.
But no insurgent in a national election in recent memory has moved as quickly asTrump, or lasted long enough to destroy so many other serious contenders as they
tried to wait him out.
Trumps Unity Isnt Ideas, But Himself
Trumps flingitallatthewall tempo of attacks and messages is unique. It starts
with the fact that essentially everything that comes from the Trump campaign
comes from Trump himself his rambling, streamofconsciousness speeches, his
interviews, his tweets that he clearly writes himself in his distinctive style.
This gives Trumps message approach a remarkable
thematic and stylistic cohesion at any tempo (despite
its underlying incoherence in terms of facts or
principles, neither of which concern him). It extends
to the fact thatbluntly speakingTrumps basic
style is BS, in which he is interested neither in the
truth nor in lying to his audience, but just in riffing on
a theme without much connection to the facts and
certainly without bothering to factcheck anything he
says before he says it. Trump has repeatedly shown
his willingness, to a degree unprecedented in politics,
to heave personal insults at his opponents, mocking their appearance and their
poll standing with putdowns.
These are all approaches Trump has been using for years and years. He didnt
improvise them from study of the battlespace, but just went with what he already
knew how to do. But he was also able to gain unusually rapid traction because
unlike the typical insurgenthe had already been nationally famous for three
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Experiencedpoliticians are
conditioned to see
sticking with a
message as a sign
that its working
and abandoning a
message as a signthat its failing.
decades and a fixture on network television.
(As we shall see throughout this review of Trumps M.O. while he has executed
some shrewd maneuvers, his success thus far says more about his ability to
exploit his adversaries OODA Loops than having a particular mastery of his own.)
Inverting the Campaign Rules about Messaging
Moreover, there are timetested rules for messaging that any campaign veteran
knows: if an attack is winning, you stick with it as long as it keeps delivering
dividends; if youre talking about something thats hurting you, the best approach
is to cut your losses and move on to something else.
Trump regularly inverts this rule, as well, which is
again disorienting for experienced politicians who
are conditioned to see sticking with a message as a
sign that its working and abandoning a message as a
sign that its failing. If Trump taunts his opponent and
feels like hes drawing blood, he bores in with a
rapidly shifting series of attacks.
By the time a campaign like Jebs can work out a
response, Trump has moved on and is hitting him
from a different angle, then another, then another. At least over the short term,
this follows Boyds stress on a varied approach that keeps the opponent
constantly offbalance.
On the other hand, when Trump shoots off his mouth and seems to get himself
into a lot of trouble, he may backtrack slightly or deny what he meant, butinvariably he will dig in and keep talking about it, using stray voltageto bait his
critics into giving him more free media attention (the scarce and valuable
commodity he has hoarded).
This showcases Trumps willingness to be outrageous and his refusal to back
downessential parts of his brand. Again, the mismatch between how Trump
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Jeb ran his last
campaign in 2002,
and the issue
environment and
political mood had
changed a lot since.
reacts and how experienced politicians are conditioned to expect their opponents
to react confounds their ability to process what hes doing.
Jeb and Walker Mismanage Time and Space
Why were Jeb and Walker hit so disproportionately hard by this? Partly because
they were in front and had the most to lose, partly because they had the largest
staffs and therefore potentially the slowestmoving campaigns, and partly due to
their personal temperaments. But also because of time and space.
In Jebs case, time: he ran his last campaign in 2002,
and the issue environment and political mood had
changed a lot since 2012, let alone a decade earlier.
Unlike Trump, he hadnt spent the past several yearsin the center of the public eye. He has repeatedly
proven slow to adapt his mental models to the
current reality, as well as slow to adapt to fluid
situations.
His disastrous confrontation with Rubioover missed votes (at the third debate)
was a textbook example of letting an opponent inside your OODA Loop. Jeb built
on a newspaper attack, which had allowed Rubio adequate time to prepare a
response. He then launched it at an inopportune timeas Jonathan Last wrote at
the time:
Bushs attack was almost certainly a premeditated set piece. Yet he didnt have the
political sense to see that Rubio was in a very good frame coming off of an answer
where he beat the snot out of the moderators. Bush had no ability to read the sceneand understand that it would have been better in that moment not to take the shot. He
had a plan, so he robotically stuck to it.
Finally, unlike Rubio, Jeb never saw coming the trap he was walking into, which
should have been obvious to anyone with basic situational awareness, when Rubio
asked the classic lawyers leading question about how Jeb had supported John
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/jeb-s-dead-adi-s-amigo/1055011http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/in-bush-versus-rubio-the-student-schools-the-teacher/article/2575213 -
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McCain when he was making his late2007 comeback. That allowed Rubio to drop
the but McCain missed more votes than I did crusher that left Jeb too deflated to
respond.
Most of Jebs failures to read the scene and react faster have happened offstage
(although this is hardly the only example from the debates). His slow reaction
times contributed mightily to his failure to adjust and formulate an effective
response to the Trump barrage over the summer.
Walkers problem was one of space. Walker had been in elective office for 25
years, and had faced the voters of Wisconsin three times in the past five years,
most recently November 2014, so he was much fresher from the fight than Jeb.
But the depth of his local experience turned into a liability. Boyd was fond of citing
four interlocking concepts favored by the German military:
1. Fingerspitzengefhl, which translates more or less as fingertipsfeel, a
commander s ability to hold in his mind a map of the whole battlefield, not
just its fixed terrain but its fluid, shifting movement of forces;
2. Auftragstaktik, the ability to give orders at a fairly high level of generality and
have them carried out faithfully by subordinates focused on the objective,
rather than direction by micromanagement;3. Einheit, an animating unity of purpose that keeps the whole organization
focused not only on a single goal but on a common way of doing things (the
more einheit an organization has, the more it can trust in management by
auftragstaktik); and
4. Schwerpunkt, or the point of decisionthe crucial concept of focusing on the
opponents point of maximum vulnerability (or in some cases, the maximum
point of resistance that needs to be defeated) and concentrating as much of
ones forces and efforts on that particular target as possible at once.
Walkers long and remarkable success in Wisconsin, including victories in
Democraticleaning Milwaukee County and statewide wins in a Democratic
leaning state, derived in large part from his mastery offingerspitzengefhl.
Walkers natural voter base in Wisconsin was economically or educationally
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Walker almost
literally knows the
political geography
of the Milwaukee
and Wisconsin
general electorates
like the back of hishand.
Trump swiftly
cannibalized
Walkers targeted
downscale white voters, like bluecollar workers and voters with no college
degrees, who saw him as one of their own, an aggressively normal beerand
brats Harley rider, Midwestern to his core, who never finished college after
leaving to take a job, married a widow 12 years his senior, and was fond of using
his Instagram feed to display his brownbag hamandcheese lunches.
Walker almost literally knows the political geography
of the Milwaukee and Wisconsin general electorates
like the back of his hand (but not so much Republican
primary electorates, having dropped out early from
the 2006 gubernatorial primaryand backed his
opponent, clearing the field for his own mostly
uncontested 2010 nomination). He has long been hisown chief strategist, notorious for a nearobsessive
attention to the details of his message and strategy.
Hes the guy who knows the terrain better than the experts.
Given this background, Walker did not hire a national strategistfor his otherwise
heavily staffed campaign, preferring to retain personal control over strategy. In a
vastly larger campaign than his usual statewide operations, that raised concerns
early on about micromanagement, which of course could slow down the speed of
the rest of his campaign, the opposite of an organization run on principles of
auftragstaktik.
It was worse than that: the very local mastery at the center of Walkers mental
models is impossible at the scale of a national campaign, like Eisenhower trying to
oversee the whole European theater on horseback. Even before Trumps entry in
the race, Walker had stumbled several times by reversing course on issues and
aspects of his message as he struggled to figure out what would resonate with the
national and earlystate electorates.
Time also became a factor. Walker had counted on
having time in the summer and early fall to work out
the kinks of his message, get his rookie mistakes out
http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/25/scott-walker-has-a-micromanagement-problem/http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415889/scott-walker-his-own-best-political-operative-and-thats-problem-eliana-johnsonhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/us/politics/a-political-lifer-scott-walker-has-long-been-his-own-strategist.html?_r=0http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/the-crushing-defeat-that-shaped-scott-walker-116490 -
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voter base, even
though he was a
candidate far
removed from one
of us.
of the way, and prepare for the progressively more
serious stages of the campaign to follow.
Instead, Trump swiftly cannibalized Walkers
targeted voter base, even though he was a candidate
far removed from one of us: a New York City
billionaire who was born to wealth, loves to brag about his Wharton School
degree, and is on his third wife, a Yugoslavianborn fashion model. Yet Trumps
unP.C. way of talking resonated far more with the shifts in national Republican
voter sentiment than Walkers lowkey, niceguy Wisconsin general election
persona.
The Washington Post, writing at the end of August, described a combatant whose
opponent was well inside his OODA Loop:
Walkers backers see a campaign discombobulated by Trumps booming popularity
and by his provocative language on immigration, China and other issues. They see in
Walker a candidate who in contrast to the discipline he showed in state races
continues to commit unforced errors, either out of lack of preparation or in an attempt
to grab for part of the flamboyant businessmans following.
When Walker ran short on resources, he did what his 2006 experience and its
aftermath had conditioned him to do: cut his losses and drop out long before the
voting.
Trump Photobombs the Republican Field
With Walker and Perry sunk at sea and Jeb driven on the shoals, the remainingfield mostly divided into three groups: candidates nimble enough to keep up with
how Trump was shifting the landscape, and reorient themselves accordingly (such
as Cruz and Rubio); candidates who were never really competing for voters who
might listen to Trump (mainly Kasich), and candidates far enough removed from
the central theaters of operations that they could stick safely to their original
plans or make adjustments that had no effect on the race anyway.
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Jindal sometimes
ruefully joked that
he should drop
Trumps name at
random intervals in
his speeches just to
get media coverage.
Paul seemed on the
verge of dropping
out until he
reoriented hiscampaign away
from pursuing
victory towards
giving voice to the
principled remnant
of his movement.
But some were also adversely affected by Trumps
alteration of reality around them. For example, Bobby
Jindala major victim of how Trump sucked the free
media oxygen from the field, drove the debate away
from nonimmigration domestic policy proposals,
and made less room for dark horse candidates on themain debate stageran short of money and dropped
out in November rather than run up a bunch of
campaign debt. Jindal sometimes ruefully joked that he should drop Trumps
name at random intervals in his speeches just to get media coverage.
Rand Paul had hoped to inherit his fathers oddly constructed coalition (consisting
of principled libertarians, national security doves, and racist, neoConfederate, orconspiracyminded cranks) and expand it by being more moderate, more
charismatic, and less odd than his father.
That strategy had already been unraveling for some months before Trumps
arrival, but the third and least savory segment of the old Ron Paul movement
seems to have decamped more or less en masseto Trump, as it turned out that
they were never really in it for the libertarian principles but for the newsletter
crackpottery that always embarrassed Pauls more thoughtful supporters and
sympathizers.
Paul seemed on the verge of dropping out until he
reoriented his campaign away from pursuing victory
towards giving voice to the principled remnant of his
movement, the segment that was always least
attracted to Trump. It remains to be seen how long
Paul will stay in the race, having unsubtly threatened
to quit if he didnt make the main stage for the
December 15 debate in Las Vegas.
Chris Christie, already known for being blunt and
loud, has gotten progressively blunter and louder,
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An opponent who is
deceived by
ambiguity must
simply be made to
await the
consequences of
reality intruding on
him.
and is now picking up enough in the New Hampshire polls that he is headed
towards an inevitable collision with Trump.
The Closed Loop: The Doctor Is Not Listening
Before you can use speed to disorient your opponent and induce panic decisions,
the opponent must first notice what you are doing. An opponent who is deceived
by ambiguity or simply oblivious to his surroundings must simply be made to
await the consequences of reality intruding on him.
Ironically, the 2016 contender whose rise concurrent
with Trump in the early fall was not affected at all by
Trump was Ben Carson. One reason for this is that
Carson himself was not only running a highlyunconventional campaign, to all appearances he
operates in such a closed informational loop that he
simply doesnt process news from outside his favored
sources at all. Trump could change the reality on the
ground all he wanted, but Carson was going to keep
doing his own thing because doing his own thing is what he does.
In time, this has caught up to him. Carson has faded in the polls as voters see his
missteps and unpreparedness on major issues, mostly independently of Trump.
But Carsons fall holds lessons for Trump as well, as we shall see. A candidate who
ignores any information that doesnt fit his implicit orientation can avoid
distraction, but will sooner or later find to his peril that he is relying on feedback
that has lost touch with the reality he is trying to affect.
2008: The Last Bombing Run
Weve discussed thus far the basics of the OODA Loop and how Trump has
exploited it. But before we get to where the Loop may begin to bend against him
(or some of his adversaries), we need to consider the concept of a subsidiary or
dependent loop. That is, a theater of operations that a combatant swoops in and
dominates, only to later discover to his grief that he has drawn his attention away
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We have another
recent example of a
national campaign
that grasped theoutlines of the
OODA Loop but still
got disoriented and
lost the main
battlefield.
from the main battlefield.
One example of this was the 2012 Iowa Straw Poll, in
which Michele Bachmann successfully drew Tim
Pawlenty into a contest of strength that drained
Pawlentys funds and forced him out of the race when
he lost to his fellow Minnesotan. But it turned out
that Bachmann hadnt actually won anything. She was
shortly eclipsed by Herman Cain in the polls, and
ended up finishing dead last in the Iowa Caucus.
We have another recent example of a national
campaign that grasped the outlines of the OODA Loop but still got disoriented and
lost the main battlefield: the last general election campaign by a combat pilot, John
McCain in 2008.
McCain, nine years younger than Boyd and a carrierbased Navy bomber pilot in
Vietnam, started his race against Barack Obama in a polling and organizational
hole, but with the advantage that he was able to lock up his partys nomination a
lot earlier than Obama. McCain had survived that far by making his team leaner,
jettisoning most of his old campaign advisers before staging a big primarycomeback. That fit with the maverick senators preferred approach and
temperamentas the old line goes, its no accident that McCain in the Navy
always flew a oneseater airplane.
McCain had a few builtin advantages over Obama: he was not just vastly more
experienced on the national political stage, a fixture on the Sunday shows with a
prior presidential run under his belt, but (unlike Obamas primary foe, HillaryClinton), McCain had long, friendly relations with much of the national press
corps. Despite his more advanced age, McCain was faster, nimbler on his feet, and
much quicker to change course than Obama.
Fighting Inside the 24-Hour News Cycle
1992 was the first election after the Gulf War had launched cable news to national
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Where 1980s
campaigns had
aimed for the good
photo-op and
soundbite for the
evening news,
1990s-2000scampaigns aimed to
control the round-
the-clock news
cycle.
prominence and the end of the Fairness Doctrine unleashed national talk radio;
2004 was the first with blogs but the last before the real spread of Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube. A central battlefield of national campaigns in the years
from 1992 to 2004 was the news cyclethe collection of stories that would
dominate a few days coverage and talk.
Where 1980s campaigns had aimed for the good
photoop and soundbite for the evening news, 1990s
2000s campaigns aimed to control the roundthe
clock news cycle. If you control the news cycle, you
set the ground of what the campaigns are talking
about. Winning campaigns like the Clinton War
Room of 1992 mastered this; losing ones like Al Gorein 2000 were constantly reactive to the news cycle,
and pushed offmessage.
Its easily forgotten now given how the campaign
ended, but once battle was joined, McCain and his
campaign manager Steve Schmidt tactically outfoxed Obama for much of summer
2008, winning news cycle after news cycle with attacks and ads needling Obamas
foreign trip, his celebrity status, and his selfimportance. McCain was moving
faster than Obama, and getting inside his head by pricking his vanity.
Then, he staged the tacticallybrilliant coup of picking Sarah Palin as his running
mate. How tactically brilliant? Operational security was airtight. The media was
totally in the dark that Palin was on her way until she arrived to be announced
that morning. The Democrats were flabbergastedtheyd posted a website with
advance opposition research on McCains potential running mates (including
people like Eric Cantor, Charlie Crist, and FedEx CEO Fred Smith) but it didnt
include a word on Palin. Palin completely dominated the news cycle for a solid
week after the GOP convention, and national polls showed McCain pulling even
with Obama.
But even before the tactical audacity of the Palin pick started to get undermined
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While McCain was
needling Obama,
Obamas digital
organizing team
was focused on themore critically
important
battlefield.
by Palins own issues, McCain and Schmidt had totally lost sight of the larger
picture McCain needed to win the election. McCains newscycle victories were
flawed in two ways.
But Social Media Had Overtaken the News Cycle
First, he was reinforcing things voters already priced into Obama (that he was
inexperienced, overpromising, and full of himself) instead of defining Obama as
having valuesout of step with the electorate. Second, while McCain was needling
Obama, Obamas digital organizing team was focused on the more critically
important battlefield of identifying potential supporters and building direct
communications with them, using the onetoone targeting capabilities of social
media to bypass the mass media news cycle in ways impossible as recently as
2004.
Thus, McCain was able to outfox Obamas rapid
response to news in a way that unsettled Obama and
his communications team, but he wasnt able to
throw off the Obama campaigns overarching
strategy. McCain had flown his bomber into a
subsidiary loop.
This made him vulnerable to being swamped by a
new, external event: the September 2008 credit
crisis. When it hit, he reacted again with speed and surprise, announcing a brief
suspension of his campaign to fly back to DC to help handle the crisis. But
McCains capacity to surprise no longer mattered. Obama and his team had,
correctly, interpreted the crisis as a help to them and any solution as unpopular.They let McCain fly off into the sun.
Collapsing Trumps Loop
If Trump has been so effective at strategy thus far in the campaign, does that mean
he would be a successful general election candidate and a good commanderin
chief? No, it doesnt, and in fact, there are significant warning signs that Trump
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They operatedinside the enemys
Loop, but without
tending to their
own, which
remained mostly
closed.
There are
significant warning
signs that Trump
may already befalling into some of
the very traps Boyd
warned against.
may already be falling into some of the very traps Boyd warned against.
In some ways, Trumps situation in the summer and
fall of 2015 is similar to that of Imperial Japan in late
1941 and early 1942. The Japanese ran wild for six
months after Pearl Harbor, using speed, strategic and
tactical surprise, and sudden, overwhelming force to
disorient their opponents and change their
surrounding reality faster than they could react.
They also compelled their adversariesin the short runto fight the kind of war
the Japanese had spent the previous 36 years planning for. The result took the
weakest combatant (the Dutch) completely out of the fight, drove most distant and
thus slowest to replenish its forces (the British Navy) out of the theater, and sent
the locals underground (the Filipinos) or deeper into their interior (the Chinese).
But the Japanese didnt apply Boyds OODA cycle as an open loop from which they
could learn and adapt. They just came in with a castinstone preexisting skillset
that was spectacularly wellsuited to their initial offensive. They operated inside
the enemys Loop, but without tending to their own, which remained mostly
closed.
What Japan was not prepared for, or able to handle when it inevitably developed,
was the expansion of the battlefield that was necessary to actually win the war.
From mid1942 on, the Americans launched 16 new warships for every one Japan
produced the rest of the war.
Japan had expanded to its maximum limits. It could
not win another inch of territory, and bled its navy
white at Midway and its army dry in Burma, having
exhausted the lowhanging fruit while the enemys
available ground troops were multiplying. A war
spanning the whole of the Pacific, China, Southeast
Asia, and all the islands in between was far beyond
Japans manpower capacity, and Japanese high
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While hes very
shrewd and swift in
observing,orienting, deciding,
and acting when
hes on familiar
terrain, Trump
draws information
from a fairly closed
command was slow to learn and adapt to a new and different war than the one
they had started.
Trump has been winning by forcing the other contenders to the battlefields on
which he has been training the past 35 years: massmarket free publicity, pro
wrestlingstyle smashmouth reality TV, and collectiveaction negotiations of the
type Trump knows well from multiple realestate bankruptcies.
But, like Imperial Japan, this does not mean hes an evolving combatant who can
handle opponents shifting the battlefield and upsetting hisability to process
reality. It just means that he has seized the initiative and planted his flag on all the
territory his initial surge could reach by using the same approach hes been
honing for decades. He is just as much a creature of his own experiencebased
mental models as Jeb or Walker. The only difference is that his entry in the race
was so unplanned that his opponents had to watch him in action before they could
plot a counterstrategy.
The Gold-Plated Closed Loop
Winston Churchill once described the essential attributes of a great commanderas
having massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but
also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the
enemy puzzled as well as beaten. Trump may have the legerdemain, but he sorely
lacks the rest.
The signs we have seen so far of Trump suggest that,
while hes very shrewd and swift in observing,
orienting, deciding, and acting when hes onfamiliar
terrain, he draws information from a fairly closed
loop, and is not wellsuited to expanding to a broader,
less familiar battlefield. Therein lies his vulnerability
in a primary or general election, as well as his
deficiency as a potential commanderinchief despite
his natural grasp of the basic precepts of strategy,
tactics, leverage, speed, and ambiguity.
https://books.google.com/books?id=6l6Fgnz8fXIC&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=massive+common+sense+and+reasoning+power,+not+only+imagination,+but+also+an+element&source=bl&ots=ht2w4uATa_&sig=11W4wcM2iezrH3AD-QJPebqI4dY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit8LzSzt7JAhXKHT4KHTAAA9MQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=massive%20common%20sense%20and%20reasoning%20power%2C%20not%20only%20imagination%2C%20but%20also%20an%20element&f=false -
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loop.
Trump has
repeatedly made
statements that he
and his team had
clearly made no
effort to verify inadvance, drawn
from sources whose
credibility should
have been huge red
flags.
The way Trump has dealt with facts in his public
statements is a tipoff. Political speech routinely incorporates assertions of fact
that range from debatable to unverifiable to provably false, and sometimes this is
a sign of shrewd cynicism rather than selfdeception.
But Trump has repeatedly made statements that he and his team had clearly made
no effort to verify in advance, drawn from sources whose credibility should have
been huge red flags, even though they were outside the common cultural and
media conventional wisdom and therefore likely to be challenged.
In political debate, that represents a vulnerability waiting to be exploited; in
international affairs, where presidents must routinely cut through misinformation
and direct their staffs to do the same, it can be fatal.
The recent dustup over Trumps claimwhich was,
at best, severely exaggeratedthat he had seen video
of thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey
City is a classic example of this. So is the fact that
Trump cites Infowars reporting in campaign
speeches based solely on having clicked a link on the
Drudge Report, and has gone on Alex Jones
conspiracytheorysoaked show to trade praise with
Jones.
Trumps willingness to pitch public battles on the turf
of things he reads on the Internet without even
remotely credible confirmation suggests thatdespite his savvy in evaluating
information when dealing with the U.S. national media environment and the
economic bargaining tables hes excelled atTrump is vulnerable to psyop
disinformation campaigns once he gets outside his comfort zone.
As Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden summarized his impression of
Trumpfrom spending a weekend with him in 1996 for a Playboymagazine profile:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/donald-trump-mark-bowden-playboy-profilehttp://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-praises-9-11-truther-alex-jones/http://www.infowars.com/donald-trump-mentions-infowars-report-at-campaign-stop/http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abc-news-footage-shows-911-celebrations/story?id=35534125 -
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Time after time the stories he told me didnt check outApart from the comical ego,
the errors, and the selfserving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace
ideas pronounced as received wisdomThe ideas that pop into his head are the same
ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone
who cant be bothered to think them throughcant be bothered to ask not just the
moral questions but the allimportant practical one: Will doing this makes things
better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you dont question your own
flashes of inspiration.
Trumps speeches and Twitter rants frequently focus on his poll standing, yet
cherrypick only those polls that are favorable, and his view of which pollsters are
reliable is laughable to anyone who has followed the polling business in recent
years.
Unlike successful campaigns of the pastin particular contrast to the massive Big
Data and proprietary polling projectthat was crucial to President Obamas 2012
reelectionTrump brags about having no polling operation of his own. He
believes what he reads in the papers, if he likes it, and discards the rest. Nate
Silver has noted how the shortterm feedback loop in which Trump has been
operating only encourages Trumps confidencethat he can keep prospering by
doing the same things without adjusting his sources of information:
[I]tspossible that the Republican reluctance to criticize Trump stems from a surfeit
of shortterm thinking combined with a possible misreading of the polls. Several
times so far in the campaign, weve witnessed the following cycle:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-republicans-and-polls-enable-donald-trump/http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-the-new-machinehttps://datafloq.com/read/big-data-obama-campaign/516 -
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The battlefield will
expand, and he
1. Trump says something offensive or ludicrous.
2. Some pundits loudly proclaim that it could bring about the end of
Trumps campaign.
3. Instead, Trumps position remains steady or even improved in ballottest
polls.4. The same pundits therefore conclude that Trump is indestructible and
impervious to criticism.
[One] problem is that in a field that still has 14 candidates, more media coverage
even negative media coverage potentially helps a candidate toimprove his
position on the ballot test. In general, there has been a strong correlationbetween
how well a candidate is performing on the ballot test and how much media coverage
hes receivingTrump seems to understand this; indeed, he seems to issue his most
controversial remarks and proposals precisely at moments of perceived
vulnerability.Republicans are afraid to criticize Trump in part because it rarely
produces instant gratification in a winthemorning political culture that keeps score
based on polls. Without seeing any repercussions, Trump goes farther out on a limb
If this dynamic correctly describes the rest of the primary and general elections,
then Trump does not need to learn and adapt in order to win. But most likely, it
does not.
Making Trump Fight A Land War In Asia
The challenge Trump now faces is that the conditions of the summer and fall are
not the same conditions under which the nomination will be decided. The
battlefield will expand, and he must adjust his approach or meet the same fate as
Imperial Japan.
The most obvious reason is the size of the field. We
are down from 17 candidates to 14, and if history is
any guide, more than half of those 14 should be out of
http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2009/04/winning-the-dawn-017268http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/donald-trump-is-running-a-perpetual-attention-machine/http://www.cjr.org/analysis/the_medias_trump_conundrum.phphttp://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-the-worlds-greatest-troll/ -
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A candidate who
cant break out
from 25 to 30
percent cannot win
enough delegates to
clinch the
nomination.
must adjust his
approach or meet
the same fate as
Imperial Japan.
the race after South Carolina (the third state to vote).
As the number of candidates narrows, the share of
the vote needed to win grows. Iowas Republican
caucus has been won with as little as 24 to 26 percent
of the vote (by Rick Santorum in 2012 and Bob Dole in 1996) and only once since
1980 has a candidate won 40 percent (George W. Bush winning 41 percent in
2000). New Hampshire has been won with as little as 27 percent (Pat Buchanan in
1996). McCain won 47.2 percent of the popular vote across all primaries in 2008;
that was the lowestwinning share of the GOP primary vote since 1976.
A candidate who cant break out from 25 to 30 percent cannot win enough
delegates to clinch the nomination. Thats what happened to factional candidates
who limited their appeal to the grievances and resentments of a
disproportionately downscale voter base, like Buchanan (20.8 percent of the vote
in 1996) or Jesse Jackson (29.4 percent in 1988).
While Trumps hold on that 25 to 30 percent of the
vote has been surprisingly consistent, national and
earlystate primary polls since Labor Day have shown
no growth in his support. Meanwhile, an increasingnumber of potential GOP primary voters view Trump
unfavorably. That suggests potential limits on his
ability to scale his current voter base upwards as past
frontrunnersturnednominee have doneunless he
can adjust his message to the needs of a changed battlefield dominated by voters
not already on the Trump Train.
Instead, he seems determined to bask in the glow of the people already backing
him, feeding them increasing quantities of what has already bound them to his
candidacy. This is where the risk of a closed loop comes in, if Trump disdains polls
and research of his own. If Trump keeps being gratified by crowd sizes, poll
standing, and tweets showing him with a solid quarter of the public on his side, he
will simply keep building a bigger wall between the voters he has and the voters
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People responding
to polls months
before the election
are not the same
universe as the
people who actually
show up to vote in
primaries.
he needs.
Bigger Voter Pools Dilute Trumps Support
The second way the battlefield is changing is who the voters are. People
responding to polls months before the election are not the same universe as the
people who actually show up to vote in primaries, and even less so in caucuses. In
November 2012, 129 million people voted (61 million for Mitt Romney), but only
18 million voted in the 2012 GOP primaries, about 12.5 percent of all registered
voters and less than a third of all GOP general election voters.
Iowa had 2.1 million registered voters in January
2012; 121,501 of them voted in the Republican
caucus, around 5.7 percent. New Hampshire hadabout 767,000 registered voters in 2012; even with a
primary open to Independents and no Democratic
primary, 248,475 voted in 2012 GOP primary, about
32 percent.
Primary campaigns are hugely dependent on their
ability to mobilize their voters to actually show up at the polls, and most every
effort that has been made to narrow the polling universe to people likely to vote
(by traditional metrics) has cut deeply into Trumps poll support. That doesnt
mean he cant turn out his voters, but it means he needs to open his OODA Loop to
observe and orient himself towards the propensity of his poll supporters to vote,
and make decisions and take action to make it happen.
The third way the primary battlefield shifts once the voting starts: the voters take
it more seriously. They pay more attention, and many decide late. There are reams
of polling and politicalscience evidence showing that voters tune in much more as
an election gets closer, especially a primary election. A candidate like Trump, who
has coasted on high name recognition, can see the electoral mood shift suddenly
as voters take a closer look at him and at the alternatives.
Fourth, one of Trumps major assets may degrade as he gets deeper into the
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A truly
sophisticated
approach might also
consider exploiting
Trumps
vulnerability tomisinformation.
A candidate like
Trump, who has
coasted on high
name recognition,
can see the
electoral mood shift
suddenly as voters
take a closer look at
him and at the
alternatives.
primaries: his ambiguity about running third party.
The more primaries he files in, the more states will
follow Ohio in forcing him off the November ballot
unless he files and wins a lawsuit challenging sore
loser laws.
Also, the more he loses, the more the potential appeal
of a Trump thirdparty run dims as he loses the
winner sheen. Between April 26 and the July 21 end
of the GOP convention, 13 states have deadlines for
filing for the ballot, including Texas, Florida, Georgia,
North Carolina, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, and Indiana.
The changing battlefield is not the only way his opponents could degrade Trumps
OODA Loop as the calendar turns. A truly sophisticated approach might also
consider exploiting Trumps vulnerability to misinformation. I remember once
watching a mid80s Monday Night Baseball broadcast where Howard Cosell, a
great boxing and football announcer who knew nearly nothing about baseball,
announced that Keith Hernandez had begged him before the game not to reveal
that Hernandez lifetime batting average was .152.
Its possible that the original statistic given Cosell was
not quite as ridiculous as that and he mangled it on
air, but it seemed pretty obvious that Hernandez had
pranked Cosell with bad information, knowing he
could take advantage of Cosells inability to
distinguish good information about baseball statistics
from bad. A candidate who will quote Infowars
stories in campaign speeches and retweet random
white supremacistsand madeup statisticsis exceptionally vulnerable to being fed
misinformation that will blow up in his face like a cartoon exploding cigar.
The two candidates best positioned to surge past Trump in the spring of 2016 are
a pair of much younger men noted for their quickness of mind and gifts as
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3329934/Donald-Trump-branded-racist-retweeting-statistics-murders-committed-black-people.htmlhttp://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-dutch-white-supremacisthttp://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/threes-company/http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/12/donald_trump_cant_run_as_indep.html -
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extemporaneous speakers: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Each has showcased a
distinct approach to expanding the battlefield and shifting the ground on their
opponents.
The Ground War: Ted Cruz and the Grassroots
Cruzs strategy to get past Trump and his other opponents seems to rely on four
prongs: (1) altering the opponents reality by using grassroots turnout to change
the electorate; (2) exploiting the sequential nature of the primary calendar to
create momentum; (3) leveraging to Cruzs advantage how Trump has reshaped
the debate; and (4) using ambiguity to leverage Trumps own ambiguity against
Cruzs unambiguously loyal Republican opponents.
First, its notable that Cruz and his oddly disorganized coterie of SuperPACs havespent almost as little money on TV ads as Trump, yet this has not stopped him
from pulling into first place in Iowa, second in national polls, and fourth in New
Hampshire. Why?
Partly due to his strong builtin brand identity as the Senates Mr. Conservative
and bte noir of DC Republicans, but also in part because he has invested his
strong fundraising haulheavily into the kinds of grassroots organizing and digital
voter targeting that was the hallmark of the Obama campaigns ability to expand
the Left end of the electorate. As a recent Washington Post profile described the
thinking behind the Cruz microtargeting and voterprofiling operation:
Cruzs campaign manager, Jeff Roeexplained the campaigns heavy investment in
data and analysis. Its critical because of changes in the nature of the electorate,
popular media, polling and campaign finance law, which make many of the old axiomsof campaigning gathering endorsements, purchasing highcost broadcast ads
less valuableThere is no handbook for this, the Missouribased political consultant
said of running a presidential campaign in 2016. The conventional wisdom has been
destroyed. What you can do is rely on data.
Cruzs psychographicsbased operation has its critics, but if it works, just as
https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/618973050160156672http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-https://ww