page_title: Intelligence cycle management
section_title: Boyd OODA loop
hierarchical_section_title: Intelligence cycle management / Other cycles / Boyd OODA loop
caption_attribution_description: Interaction of Boyd OODA loop with command
context_page_description: Intelligence cycle management refers to the overall activity of guiding the intelligence cycle, which is a set of processes used to provide decision-useful information to leaders. The cycle consists of several processes, including planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and production, and dissemination and integration. The related field of counterintelligence is tasked with impeding the intelligence efforts of others. Intelligence organizations are not infallible but, when properly managed and tasked, can be among the most valuable tools of management and government.
  The principles of intelligence have been discussed and developed from the earliest writers on warfare to the most recent writers on technology. Despite the most powerful computers, the human mind remains at the core of intelligence, discerning patterns and extracting meaning from a flood of correct, incorrect, and sometimes deliberately misleading information.
context_section_description: Military strategist John Boyd created a model of decision and action, originally for air-to-air fighter combat, but which has proven useful in many areas of conflict. His model has four phases, which, while not usually stated in terms of the intelligence cycle, do relate to that cycle:
  Observe: become aware of a threat or opportunity.
  Orient: put the observation into the context of other information.
  Decide: make the best possible action plan that can be carried out in a timely manner.
  Act: carry out the plan.
  After the action, the actor observes again, to see the effects of the action. If the cycle works properly, the actor has initiative, and can orient, decide, and act even faster in the second and subsequent iterations of the Boyd loop.
  Eventually, if the Boyd process works as intended, the actor will "get inside the opponent's loop".  When the actor's Boyd cycle dominates the opponent's, the actor is acting repeatedly, based on reasoned choices, while the opponent is still trying to determine what is happening.
  While Boyd treated his cycle as self-contained, it could be extended to meet the intelligence cycle. Observation could be an output of the collection phase, while orientation is an output of analysis.
  Eventually, actions taken, and their results, affect the senior commanders.  The guidelines for the preferred decisions and actions come from the commanders, rather than from the intelligence side.
caption: Interactions between commanders and the Boyd loop
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