How to zip through the OODA Loop

As I discussed in The OODA Loop: A simple concept for modern combat strategy, there are two ways to take the offense away from our opponent. One is to overtake him in the cycle by being faster, the second is by slowing him down.

Here are some common ways police officers can speed through the loop faster than their opponent.

Run through mental scenarios

As you approach a call, traffic stop, or suspect, take whatever information you know about the situation and come up with a few possible scenarios and prepare for them. If the suspect becomes aggressive or attempts to ambush you, the scenarios in the front of your brain will allow you to quickly orient and react to the situation.

Anticipate Danger

Similar to the mental scenario, if you anticipate danger you can quickly orient yourself to it. Many officers get stuck in the loop when an action surprises them. Seeing a gun or knife shocks them because they anticipated cooperation rather than resistance. It takes them longer to re-orient to the situation, giving their opponent an opportunity to take the initiative.

Prearranged decisions

Figure out how you will personally react to a situation before it occurs. This allows you to instantly move from orient to act in the loop, speeding up the process.

Here are some examples of situations that you can prearrange decisions for:

• A suspect points a gun at your head within your arm span, do you talk to him or grab for the gun?
• You roll up on an officer being shot and the suspect flees, do you chase the suspect or help the officer?
• Someone robs the restaurant you are eating at off duty, do you confront the suspect or be a good witness?
• You roll up on an unreported burglary in progress, do you confront the suspects or hide and wait for other units?

One of the great things about prearranged decisions is you can take plenty of time to decide. Discuss the situations with your friends, trainers, and supervisors and get their input. Use your imagination to come up with new scenarios. The more scenarios and prearranged decisions you think about, the more likely you will anticipate a similar real life situation.

Have a plan

When you approach a location, suspect, or situation with other officers, talk with each other and have a basic plan for contact. Come up with the suspect’s most likely response and plan a counter amongst yourselves. Similar to prearranged decisions but with more people, it allows everyone to have a decision already made.

For example, in a car chase with three occupants in the suspect vehicle, decide who will chase each suspect when the chase ends. If one suspect bails out early, everyone knows who will stop to chase him and no confusion occurs.

Improve your skill level

In general, skills are perishable and practice will keep them quick and effective, especially those skills which involve several movements like drawing and firing a gun.

When you find yourself in a gunfight, you want to be fast and accurate. Speed comes from economy of movement. Accuracy is more important than speed because misses make you go through the loop again. Practice will improve the skill of both.

As Paul Howe says in his article Training for the Real Fight, you would rather be in a shooting than a gunfight. A shooting is a one way event where all the shooting is done by the officer. In a gunfight, the suspect gets to fight back. The difference comes from putting yourself in a tactically superior position and anticipating the fight. He emphasizes scanning and discrimination skills to see first and shoot first.

In his book,Leadership and Training for the Fight, Howe advocates a scanning and discrimination exercise where you go unarmed into a room with 50 targets in it. You have to scan them systematically and quickly identify which ones are good guys and which are bad guys. You can’t just look at the ones holding guns because your fellow officers are holding guns too. You have to look at the whole person before deciding to fire. If you do this exercise several times, you will find that you will become faster and more accurate.

A couple of relevant questions about other skills:
Have you trained with your stick, spray, or TASER lately?
Have you practiced your defensive tactic skills in the last year?
When is the last time your practiced drawing your backup weapon while someone was trying to get your duty weapon from your holster?

Other Ideas
These are only some ways to speed through the OODA loop. If you think of some other ideas, feel free to use the comments of this article to share your thoughts.

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