Link of the Day

If you're reading this, you've probably seen the latest Batman movie, "The Dark Knight".  Why do I say that?  Because anyone with a pulse has seen The Dark Knight.

One of the interesting things about the movie, is that there are subtle references to modern day Fourth Generation Warfare.  The Joker is described as a "Terrorist" by the city police, and Alfred the Butler talks about his experiences with the British Army conducting counterinsurgency in Burma (Malaysia)--one of the topics of Lt. Col. John Nagl's book Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife.

The correlation is not lost on Dr. Chet Richards, a defense analyst and "accolyte" of John Boyd, who writes at Defense and the National Interest.

The Joker was operating inside Batman’s and Harvey Dent’s (and pretty much everybody else’s) OODA loops.  He was changing the situation and exploiting it before his opponents could comprehend.  Textbook case.

As Boyd observed in Patterns of Conflict, chart 132, if you can operate inside your opponents’ OODA loops, you can do all sorts of neat things, including:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

Should seem familiar to Batman, Dent, etc.

  

Dr. Richards provides some additional great links which discuss the latest Batman movie and counter-insurgency/counter-terror.

"Some people just want to see the world burn"

"A philosophical basis for the Batman Saga"