When a retired Admiral who had been the head of NATO writes about the OODA loop in the Wall Street Journal, you might expect tactical gold. Instead, according to strategist Mark McGrath, it was “complete trash.” McGrath, chief learning officer at AGLX North America and author of The World of Reorientation, has made it his mission to correct four decades of OODA loop misunderstanding that has reduced John Boyd’s revolutionary framework to what McGrath calls “a dog chasing its tail.”
McGrath teaches Boyd as Boyd intended, focusing on the component most tactical professionals miss: orientation as the human operating system. His clients use this understanding to cut through chaos, avoid freeze responses, and create mismatch advantages against stronger opponents. For tactical operators who have been taught OODA as a simple four-step circle, McGrath’s insights represent a fundamental shift in how to process information, make decisions, and maintain operational tempo.
This matters because the circular OODA loop many operators learned may actually make them more predictable and vulnerable. As McGrath notes, “That’s exactly what you would want your enemies to operate on. You want your competitors to have this limited linear understanding of the OODA loop because you’re going to beat them every time.”
## The Foundation Most People Never See
John Boyd never drew his famous loop until 1995, just two years before his death. What he created was nothing like the circular tactical model that appears in most training materials. Boyd’s actual sketch places orientation at the center, highlighted in blue, with arrows showing how genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, new information, and the ability to analyze and synthesize all fire simultaneously.
“If they have not read Destruction and Creation, it’s very clear,” McGrath explained, referencing Boyd’s foundational 1976 paper that fuses entropy, uncertainty, and incompleteness into a theory of human adaptation. “You tend to view it in a linear orientation. It’s so linear and mechanical and it’s so template.”
This linear thinking creates exactly the vulnerability Boyd sought to exploit. McGrath points to the Six Day War as a perfect example: “The Israelis knew exactly what their patterns were, knew exactly what time they wake up, exactly what time they had breakfast, exactly what time they get in their planes and they never deviate from it.” The result was the destruction of the entire Egyptian Air Force because their OODA process had become predictable.
### Orientation: The Human Operating System
Orientation, according to Boyd’s actual framework, consists of five components working simultaneously: genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, new information, and most critically, the ability to analyze and synthesize. “Think of this as your internal operating system,” McGrath teaches. “You have to update and revise it just like you would your iPhone.”
This orientation implicitly guides and controls how you take in reality. McGrath uses a simple example: “I can look at the Steelers-Browns game this past weekend and the outcome was good. Why? The Steelers won. People from Cleveland with a different orientation will look at the same set of facts and come up with a completely different conclusion.”
For tactical operators, this has profound implications. Your orientation, shaped by training, experience, and cultural background, determines not just what you see but how you interpret what you see. Two operators observing the same tactical situation may reach completely different conclusions based on their orientations.
### The Constant Reorientation Requirement
Boyd’s insight was that orientation must be constantly updated to match reality. “Everything is in a constant state of flux,” McGrath emphasizes. “If I don’t understand that, that in and of itself requires the need to constantly be adjusting, constantly be adapting, constantly reorienting.”
This is where most tactical applications of OODA fail. They treat it as a one-time cycle rather than a continuous process of updating your internal model of reality. McGrath compares static orientation to a deer in headlights: “What would a deer do when you’re shining the headlights? They don’t know what to do. What happens? They wind up a hood ornament of a Mack truck.”
## Case Study: When Orientation Fails
McGrath references the September 11 attacks to illustrate how orientation can become a trap. In the second tower, after the first had been hit, many people returned to their offices. “Why though?” McGrath asks. “Think about what’s your orientation in a busy city like New York. Maybe I’m so used to chaos and things happening. Oh, Christ, that’s really bad. But it didn’t happen in our building. I got this meeting coming up.”
This represents not a failure of the individuals, but rather an illustration of how orientation can become mismatched to reality. In New York, the baseline for anomaly is extraordinarily high. McGrath describes an Instagram account where a woman stands near St. Patrick’s Cathedral and makes noise: “She says, anybody who looks is not from New York. If they didn’t look, they’re from New York.”
The tactical lesson is clear: environments that normalize high levels of chaos can degrade your ability to recognize genuine threats. Your orientation, adapted to filter out constant urban anomalies, may fail to reorient quickly enough when a true emergency emerges.
McGrath witnessed similar orientation failures in the financial world during the 2008 crash: “People jumping off skyscrapers or jumping in front of traffic. I remember standing there like, I mean, there’s no kids with suicide vests. There’s no shooting at us. What’s really so bad?”
His military background provided a different orientation that allowed him to reframe the crisis as opportunity rather than catastrophe. “Actually, now is probably a really good time to reframe and rethink while everybody else is going insane.”
The challenge for tactical operators is similar: maintaining an orientation that can rapidly distinguish between routine chaos and genuine threats, then reorient quickly enough to respond effectively. This requires what McGrath calls “constantly looking for mismatches, constantly looking for anomalies.”
### Recognition and Response
Effective orientation requires active scanning for things that don’t match your current model. McGrath uses the example of driving on a dark Alaska highway: “Because I live in the country, because I’ve seen moose on the highway, my brain immediately says, that’s a moose. Because I think it’s a moose, I make the decision to slow down.”
Someone without that orientation might not recognize the threat until too late. The key insight is that orientation precedes and shapes all other OODA functions. “Orientation is everything,” McGrath states flatly. “If you don’t understand that, the rest of it doesn’t make any sense anyway.”
## Practical Applications
1. **Build Recognition Cues for Reorientation**
Create specific triggers that tell you when your current model may no longer match reality. Write them down and keep the list short: a new type of resistance appears, civilians behave unexpectedly, or communication patterns change. Train your team to voice these observations without requiring full analysis.
2. **Practice Rapid Model Updates**
Regularly run scenarios where the initial briefing proves incorrect. Start with one set of assumptions, then introduce information that should trigger reorientation. Measure how quickly teams can shift from their initial model to a new understanding. Make it safe to abandon the original plan when new information emerges.
3. **Diversify Your Orientation Inputs**
Deliberately expose yourself to different perspectives and experiences that can expand your orientation. Study failures from other domains, work with operators from different backgrounds, and examine how other professions handle similar problems. The goal is building a more robust internal operating system.
4. **Create Mismatch Awareness**
Train teams to actively look for things that don’t fit the pattern rather than focusing only on confirming expected behaviors. During debriefs, specifically ask what seemed out of place or unexpected, even if it didn’t affect the outcome. These observations build pattern recognition for future operations.
## Conclusion
The circular OODA loop taught in many tactical courses represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Boyd’s work. Real tactical advantage comes from understanding orientation as your internal operating system and maintaining the discipline to constantly update it based on new information and changing circumstances.
As McGrath puts it: “Speed helps only when it is aimed by correct orientation.” For tactical professionals, this means the fastest OODA loop is worthless if your orientation doesn’t match reality. The teams that win are those that can recognize mismatches quickly and reorient faster than their opponents.
Boyd’s true gift to tactical thinking wasn’t a four-step process but rather a framework for maintaining mental agility in chaotic environments. McGrath’s final insight captures this perfectly: “You’re constantly being surprised, but it’s really quick reorientation when you live there. You do have to adapt to that.”