The Enemy Diversion You’re Ignoring is Their Main Attack
Why is everything happening all at once?!
“Flood the zone.” You may have heard that expression before. It means that someone is putting so much into a space that figuring out what’s actually happening is more challenging. A former high level advisors to the current administration stated that this should be the goal after inauguration. There are a couple of possible explanations for this behavior.
The first possibility is that it’s all a distraction to keep you from finding out some larger truth. And over the last month, it certainly seems like a lot of things have been thrown against the wall. In that situation, it doesn’t all have to stick. But if we the people can be distracted with enough noise, then enough of what they want will make it through even if some of it is stopped. Or we could get so exhausted that when the time comes to respond to the real threat — the actual agenda — we’re just spent. I have to admit that it sounds very tinfoil hat conspiracy theory brained, but there’s some precedent.
Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. This is the OODA Loop. The U.S. Air Force began teaching this to pilots in the 90s as a strategy for winning an encounter with the enemy. First, take a look around you. Then, figure out how what you’ve seen relates to you current situation. Next, figure out what you can to to minimize their advantage or impose your own. Finally, do the thing you decided to do. Disrupting any point in this process will keep the enemy off balance and prevent them from completing their objective. Recognizing this can help you see when someone is trying do it to you.
Sports can be a good analogy for what’s going on here. Take football for example. Whether I’m on offense or defense, the thought process is similar: I want to disguise what I’m planning to do through alignment or movement of personnel. This either prevents observation, or keeps an observer from establishing context. In either case, the process of deciding what to do, or taking appropriate action, might be delayed enough that you can gain the yards needed to convert the down or stop them from converting. Disrupt the OODA Loop and gain the advantage.
Who might be trying to disrupt your OODA Loop? Well… everybody?
It’s not that bad, actually. But there is definitely a concerted effort by those in power right now to keep you off balance. For example, I’ve got the Associated Press app on my phone, and it pushes notifications to me throughout the day. “What now?” I think as my phone registers yet another newsworthy event. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started wearing a regular old wristwatch again. Not a smartwatch. Just an old diver’s watch that I got as a gift while I was in the military (back when I thought I was still going to be a diver) so I can check the time without having to acknowledge the bombardment of notifications on my phone. It’s not much, but it’s one step towards keeping off the interwebs. It’s a few less minutes on the smartphone, and a little less distraction I’m giving to the algorithm.
The OODA Loop. The scientific method. FAFO. These are powerful analogies for how we make decisions every day. But they can be hijacked. If someone were to “flood the zone” with an overwhelming amount of information, it might render large parts of the population unable to respond. But there is another possibility.
“The Enemy Diversion You’re Ignoring is Their Main Attack.” This idea comes from Murphy’s Laws of Combat, which has several versions that can be easily be found online. It contains many other sound pieces of advice like “Tracers work both ways,” and “Never forget your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.” And what it comes down to right now is that we have to admit there’s a decent chance that the systematic dismantling of the US government not a distraction, but that it is on purpose.
Government agencies being defunded and shuttered, with little or no thought to how this might affect people, is what those in power right now want to do. It’s not that they don’t know how the government works (although this is almost certainly true) or that they don’t people will be hurt; they just don’t care. This is knowledge is relatively public and it has been written about in much more detail than I could hope to provide. If you’ve heard the names Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin lately and wondered who they are, this is why. The cliff notes version is that there are some wealthy tech billionaires and reactionary weirdos who think that the democracy is the thing keeping them from being in charge. Because those tech billionaires absolutely think they deserve to be in charge. They’ve morphed the divine right of kings into sanctity of the free market and the blessing of the algorithm.
Hell, you don’t even need to unearth the obscene ramblings of terminally online tech weirdos to see this in action. Reagan said government isn’t the answer; it’s the problem. This idea has been popular in right wing politics for my lifetime and then some. Sometimes I think he might have been correct, but for the wrong reason. If the tools of state violence end up being used against its citizens a la Foucault’s Boomerang, I think we’ll all be wishing we had given the state a little less power to prosecute conflicts around the world in our names.
So are the activities of the current administration a series of purposefully deceptive actions meant to conceal a hidden agenda or a haphazard destruction of government function meant to drive us into the technofeudalist future envisioned by right wing weirdos? It’s both probably. But even in a cohesive and functioning government, factions and agencies will have different agendas. This government is neither, so you can be sure that not everyone is communicating effectively. There are some true believers trying to dismantle the government. There are grifters poised to take advantage of the chaos.
The fact that their goals align isn’t an accident, but it doesn’t mean they’re actually a cohesive unit. There will be times where they are not on the same page and advantage can be taken of that confusion. It doesn’t mean they can’t be interrupted in the same way anyone else can. Consider the OODA Loop again. Hide your intentions when necessary. Remove context from the situation through seemingly unconnected actions. Cast doubt on a course of action the opposition is determined to take. Gum of the works of what’s being done. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. We don’t know just how far they’ll take this yet, so don’t let them catch you by surprise.