I decided to wait until after we got through with our OCA sims to really have a good grasp on how we thought about conducting a full air war. Turns out, there’s not much actual thinking involved. It’s still the same 2nd generation attritionist mindset: destroy everything the enemy has and he’ll stop fighting you. There’s little to no discussion at the tactical level as to what the best course of action may be, and if there is, it doesn’t really matter since the ATO comes out long before the mission takes place anyways.
Granted these were only sims, and designed to give us just an idea of what an actual OCA mission would be like, but I’m still irritated by the lack of consideration of the mental and moral aspects of war. It’s all about getting bombs on target on time, hey diddle diddle straight up the middle. The worst indication that our OODA loops are consumed by the ATO was on the last day, where in this particular scenario, our “intel report” declared our communications compromised and that the enemy was aware of our incoming strike. In my head, this was a great opportunity to be unpredictable (heck, maybe we leaked the info to make the enemy think we were striking) and do exactly the opposite of what the enemy thought we were up to. Hey, we could throw up all kinds of feints and deceptions to make them react inappropriately and then take advantage! Unfortunately, I found myself once again correct about our mentality. The word from above was basically, “deal with it, we’re not changing anything.”
…
I wanted to pull a Boyd and start poking people in the chest and yelling my lungs out about how stupid this was. We had the knowledge of what the enemy was expecting, what they were planning to do about it, and we did nothing about it! I calmed myself down for a short while thinking that this may have been a sim-ism and they were just using this as an excuse to challenge us until our instructor informed us that this sometimes happens in the real world.
I just don’t know what to say anymore.
