MegaMullet: OODA Loops and OODA Dupes
Dynamic providers of Offensive & Defensive Loops missing in action.
FULL CONTEXT IN THE BACK: By way of comparison, before the strategic pivot to the Caribbean to attack Venezuelan speedboats, five months ago the US Navy had dozens of ships deployed in and around the Gulf and Mediterranean. This included the Nimitz-class supercarrier Harry Truman, which can carry 70-90 aircraft of various roles. There were also nine missile destroyers and at least five missile defense destroyers.
Currently, the US continues to have aircraft and capabilities staged at Qatar, and an Arleigh Burke-class missile cruiser just entered the area. This will give it some long-distance punching ability, but nowhere near what was there five months ago or what might be needed to ‘help’ anti-regime forces. But there is no aircraft carrier anywhere in the region. The US Harry Truman is now in port for multi-year maintenance; it won’t be available again until 2029. And the other aircraft carriers are engaged in the Pacific or on Trump’s adventure in Venezuela in the Caribbean.
One way to think of planning operations to support dynamic uprisings in Iran is through an offensive and defensive OODA loop. An OODA loop is a military concept (later exported to other scenarios) that talks about the time and actions across Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA). You may have also heard of “kill chain” which for lay audience purposes is the same thing. (Fair warning: professionals are going to get tired of me using and overusing “OODA loop” in what follows, but consider it a proxy placeholder for all the acronym-laden specific mission packages you’re probably more familiar with. This post is designed for a more lay audience, and OODA loop is just a ‘standard unit of military work’ in this regard.)
So to understand the difficult and dilemma of supporting Iranian protests with US airpower, you have to compare both offensive and defensive OODA loops.
The kind of support protesters need is ‘close air support.’ Using the US air campaigns in Libya as an example, you might get intel from activists fighting the regime that ‘there’s a tank in Misrata hiding in the park across from Omar’s Falafel shop’. Or see that they’re advising their forces to “steer clear to the west of the First National Bank of Libya because there are sniper nests on the northeast corner.” This is the Observe and Orient part of the offensive OODA loop of close air support. You need good intelligence on the ground of things that change quickly, and then someone needs to “Decide” what to send, and the Action is the strike on target. If your OODA Loop is too slow in close air support, the tank may have left the park, and it’s now rebels in that position, or they took the commercial building, and now, at worst, you’re wasting ordnance on empty targets or worse, killing your friends. To shorten that Decide-and-Act part of the OODA loop, typically involves loitering aircraft overhead or nearby, capable of reacting quickly to new information. The more fuel they have as they are over a target, the larger the window they can update the DA based on the OO of an OODA loop and quickly respond to recent information.
This is a very different mission than that flown by the B-2s during the 12 Day War. The OODA loop on that was years in the making, over a decade. In that mission, a known Iranian nuclear weapon development complex buried deep underground had been studied and planned against (OO) for years. A hardened super bunker isn’t going to get up and move. This meant that even as Iran created insane defenses against air attacks, the US was able to learn of those defenses, use modeling & simulations to run millions of potential mission permutations, select the handful of outliers that would work (D decide), and then train on those. This resulted in perhaps one of the most spectacular air missions in human history, literally hitting the womprat on the Death Star from across the globe. Even though it was of dubious strategic value as its still unknown whether that attack eliminated, or simply delayed, Iranian nuclear capability. But that kind of strategic air strike, against a fixed known target, is an OODA Loop of years or longer; it’s not close air support.
Likewise, before you can provide effective close air support, you need to clear air defenses and establish air superiority, which is closer to Israel air campaigns during the 12-day war. The OODA Loops in air superiority campaigns are measured in hours. You send in waves of planes, drones, and missiles to remove fixed radar, communication, command, and anti-air assets. Then you send in a few more waves to get what you missed on the first. And the 12 Day war significantly degraded Iranian anti-air capabilities.
But the OODA loop for offensive actions launched from Qatar (the closest US air base) and an even longer haul from Diego Garcia or other military air bases (including staged in the US.) Technology has solved the speed of OO – so even planes in flight, and increasingly missiles, could be retargeted on new information in flight. But the DA time delay from rolling down a runway (or aircraft carrier deck) to the A of launching ordinance is the key delay. If your 5,000 person protest column is being approached at speed by a bunch of Toyota Hilux’s armed as improvised fighting vehicles (IVF) – you don’t need much to take them out – but you need to be able to do it in an OODA loop of ~15minutes to matter. Likewise several thousand Basji operating on motorbikes being deployed to harass, capture, and kill protestors both in the main movements and in their homes and staging areas are not going to be the best targets for B2 stealth bombers and a 10-year OODA loop. You’re going to want loitering assets that can react to hundreds of minutes-to-hour OODA loops with cheap ammunition. Flights sent from Qatar (or further afield) may certainly be able to reach targets in Iran, especially with tanker support. But it’s going to be very hard for them to loiter. Meaning the window they have to Act (A in the OODA Loop) is very narrow. And if something’s changed, the tank’s left the park or the Basji motorbike patrols have dispersed, and there’s nothing to shoot at you either fire at the ‘next-best-thing’ you can find or head home.
With an aircraft carrier, you can loiter assets as close as you can get off a coastline, and they are designed to send repeating waves in and over for what amounts to continuous coverage in key areas.
That’s the offensive side. But the defensive OODA loops matter as well. The US has to protect its military bases, Gulf allies, and support the defense of Israel against Iranian retaliation. Each with its own defensive OODA loop. The time from Iranian launch to impact of a ballistic missile, or of a naval incursion across the Gulf, is measured in single-digit minutes to hours at the longest. And just like Midway, if you’ve sent all your capability forward in an offensive OODA loop measured in multiple hours to launch and recover, and in that time they launch a 15minute OODA loop attack…that’s going to be a bad day operationally. I’m not saying Iran can “win the war” strategically becuase over time, if we wanted, we could bring all seven of our super carriers and have them hold hands around the entire coastline and there’s always the option that rhymes with ‘nuclear retaliation.’ But still…if you’re a Gulf ally, that’s scant comfort if your cities are getting struck by missiles because the US protective shield is elsewhere. Or they close the Straits of Oman by sinking a few ships.
This is why US planners have traditionally benefitted from having a plethora of fixed AND mobile assets deployed in the eastern Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and/or Indian Ocean. An aircraft carrier group is able to add to your offensive OODA loop options while also covering its own, and nearby area defensive OODA loop as well via the assembly of ships that sail with them and their capabilities. The OODA loops, combining regional bases with well-positioned carrier groups, defensive and offensive, give you the right mix to protect what you need to while still providing close dynamic support to rapidly changing conditions. And then on top of that – you add the strategic B2 capabilities coming from overseas, using those to strike high-value, heavily hardened targets like underground bunker command centers, etc.
None of this is surprising or new. Gulf states, no fan of Iran, are quietly warning the US to be cautious in its military engagement of Iran. They see that potential gap in the defensive OODA Loop. Now maybe something remarkable happens, like Israel forward-stages its air force into GCC states – cementing normalization and the Abraham Accords with an explicit recognition of the mutual defense pact Israel and the GCC have been coordinating against Iran for years. That mitigates the defensive OODA problems of defending US bases and gulf allies, and still has a net for long range Iranian attacks on US military bases and Israel itself.
But that’s just the defensive OODA loop. To help the protestors to “seize” institutions either requires somehow getting them significant light and medium arms (which requires airpower) or conducting offensive OODA loop operations against Iran.
Now the US has other options than kinetic strikes of the “OODA loop” I’ve described above. Cyberattacks may be a thing (if only complicated because CYBERCOM and NSA have been a mess of leadership rotations on the offensive OODA Loop and DOGE decimations of CISA have left our defensive OODA loops weakened against cyberattacks.) There’s information warfare, but oops, we deleted Voice of America and other soft power projections.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I almost always am by US foreign policy. We often risk ourselves getting entangled in foreign adventurism that won’t ultimately help US national security interests (coughs in Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela) and then pay the price when we do have a strategic national security interest.
As a post-script on post-conflict stabilization, in the outlier hypothetical the protestors (with or without US support) manage to topple the regime: what comes next? If you classify civil wars into their factions and modes, you have ‘clean’ two-party conflicts where a unified opposition non-state actor with an established command and control and forces/expertise sufficient to govern defeats the state actor, and you have what amounts to a ‘clean’ transition. Think of the American Revolution or, more recently, the Vietnamese War after America pulls out. The non-state actor becomes the state actor, there are reprisals to be sure, but stability follows. A second mode is when the non-state actor factions opposing the regime coalesce into a binary or trinary system, 2-3 main factions. Unfortunately, even after the regime falls, you may have a second (or serial) civil war between these two formerly allied factions now fighting each other for control of the ‘new’ state. This is the Libyan model, where the country, geographically and military, remains largely split in half with constant warring of the successor factions that toppled Gaddafi even over a decade later. A third mode is the ‘worst’ for post-conflict stabilization. And that’s when many factions, either political or ethnic, emerge, each with sufficient capabilities to punch above their weight and hold territory, but not enough to unify the country and pacify the other factions. This is where you get a bloody mess of the Syrian Civil Wars and its dozens of factions lasting years.
Iran has some significant ethnic splits: Armenian and Kurdish Iranians in the northwest, Balochi in the southeast, and some of these groups have their armed equivalents like MEK. There’s also the royalist faction, which has the benefits of nostalgia for people who didn’t live under the Shah but not much else. None of these factions, or any that emerge during the violence of a regime overthrow, are likely to be strong enough to go into the second, let alone the first, mode. That means even if the regime topples, absent some kind of negotiated solution or massive foreign military intervention (which I see no appetite for) Iran may suffer from years of ongoing instability as the country splits into feral cities and regional powers, but struggles to coalesce into a form of a nation state we are more familiar with.
Discussion
Q: This looks like data. 3 days ago the same open-source info account said there will be no immediate attack because there is no carrier strike group in position. Now the same account says one is making its long journey to get there. Of course, we can put one in position and not use it. We just can’t use it if it’s not in position.
A: Unfortunately, as we discussed last night the duration of such a trip, would be longer than the period the protesters would need support in to sustain an uprising. By the time the Lincoln gets on station, the uprising will likely be crushed. It may come back later, and assets may be in position then. Key dates to watch will be at the 40th day of mourning, chehellom. These rememberance rites and cultural tradition were used as timing mechanisms during the Iranian Revolution to coordinate waves of uprisings without needing to necessarily coordinate calendar dates. Of course the Islamic Repubic arises from the Iranian Revolution and you have to imagine the regime knows about these timing events as well as anyone so they’ll be ready with the Basji.
Sources:
Gulf allies are warning the US not to attack Iran because they are not feeling well defended. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/irans-gulf-rivals-warn-u-s-against-strike-on-iran-1388236e
And since that’s going to be behind the paywall for most a Jerusalem Post recapping of the article:
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-883275
US Navy open source of current carrier and Marine fleet locations:
https://news.usni.org/2026/01/12/usni-news-fleet-and-marine-tracker-jan-12-2026
US bases that, in addition to Gulf allies and Israel, also have to be defended by ‘defensive OODA loops’ in the region. https://www.wionews.com/photos/from-qatar-to-bahrain-us-military-bases-iran-could-attack-in-case-of-war-1768393403698
Deployment of Arleigh Burke class missle destroyer. Note this is the DD-80, the successor model to this was classified as the DDG-X, which was rebranded as the “Trump Battleship”. So think of those more as heavy missile cruisers or destroyers, not quite an ‘arsenal ship’ like China is deploying (which is literally just a platform to launch a ton of missiles from). But something with more capabilities to provide than just shooting everything at once. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2026/01/13/us-navy-guided-missile-destroyer-now-operating-in-arabian-gulf
US Harry Truman in port at Norfolk VA and will be offline for a bit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2026/01/01/this-us-navy-supercarrier-will-be-out-of-service-until-2029-or-later
12 Day war summary for a view of what an air superiority campaign OODA loop (Israel) and strategic strike OODA loop (US) look like in Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Day_War
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