When two competitors face each other - no matter the arena - one of them has to do three things better than the other guy in order to emerge victorious: they must understand, decide, and act.
This is called the UDA loop.
Its a loop because as long as there are problems to solve (and there always are), it doesn’t end. Once one set of problems has been solved, another set invariably emerges, and the loop begins anew.
Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you are running some personalized version of this loop. We are slaves to the loop until we die. So we want to keep them useful to us.
Some people have leaky, shitty UDA loops, and so things don’t go their way. People with better loops can dunk on them as they please.
You’ve probably met the leaky ones. Their ability to take in information from a given situation is slow, or they miss its most important parts. This in turn leads them to make the wrong decision, and then take the wrong action. They are punished as a result.
Others have tight, quick, and clean UDA loops. You’ve probably met them. It seems that they are able to grasp any problem at a glance, quickly form a decision about it, and then put that decision into motion.
Loops aren’t limited to individuals. Groups and organizations are running them, too, whether consciously or not.
And in the same way that two guys can pit their loops against each other in, say, the octagon, so do angry tribes of jihadists, communists, private military companies, and nation states scrap it out on the world stage. Each of their respective UDA loops have pro’s and cons, and each of those in the arena rise or fall by virtue of whether or not their UDA loop is kept in good working order.
In particular, these loops must be fine-tuned for a purpose that will ensure their success. Some organizations have good UDA loops, but they are built for the wrong things, and so fail.
So if a competitor wishes to succeed, they must pay their due in the form of training their loop against specific thing they are trying to do. The more specific the better. Ambiguity leads to failure. Too many objectives leads to failure.
Specificity is king.
When we’re trying to get good at a particular trade, training exposes what we aren’t good at, and thus what we need to work on more. It exposes vulnerabilities in each stage of the loop, thus allowing error-correction and fine-tuning to happen. Shooters walking their rounds onto a target are an explicit example of this.
What are you failing to understand? How is that failure impacting clean decisions and actions?
Error-correction over a long period of time is the only way in which mastery can be obtained over a craft or objective.
But the threat environment is constantly changing, and so whoever is coming up against it needs to be constantly changing, too.
But how does a singular individual or element constantly change and train for new and evolving challenges? The answer is that while they may be able to address a large chunk of threats, they’ll never address all of them. He who chases many rabbits goes hungry, as they say.
But structural innovations in force distribution can remove the need for elements to train for every conceivable security scenario, so they can instead focus on whatever they are best suited for, and where they are best suited for.
More tomorrow.
-LH
PS: Growing this newsletter is part of a broader effort to grow my company, ARBR.
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