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The author when discussing command style introduced a really key term very relevant
to the shift from sequential to simultaneous air operations:

“The need to refer back to Guderian was, however, limited by the entrepreneurial cul-
ture he fostered: German officers were expected to make up their own minds on how to
achieve the objectives Guderian set and how to act in a crisis.” (Ibid, 101.)

A third lesson was the importance of getting inside the enemy’s OODA loop. The
French command structure was too slow to use information and to act on that informa-
tion on a timely manner. The German commanders were allowed significantly greater
freedom of action and could act in minutes, whereas the French operated in terms of
hours:

“The rapid German response to the threat posed by the counter-attack only serves to
underline the slowness of the French . . . In other words, the Germans began their own
counter-attack within 10 minutes of identifying their target, whereas it had taken the
French more than 12 hours to launch their troops into the attack.” (Ibid. 105)

A clear advantage of the new aircraft is their technical capability to get inside the ene-
my’s OODA loop; but without change in how command structure works, no clear ad-
vantage can be realized.

A fourth lesson is the challenge of the enemy exploiting your weaknesses for which he
has trained to exploit. The German tankers confronting superior armor in the advanced
French tanks were able to exploit weakness in those tanks because of intelligence about
the weaknesses and training to exploit those weaknesses.

From the diary of a German survivor with regard to meeting the superior French tanks:

The tanks’ silhouettes were getting larger, and I was scared. Never before had I seen such huge
tanks. . . .

My company commander gave clear instructions over the radio describing which targets to aim
at, and the enemy tanks were just 200 meters away before he gave the order to fire. As if they had

Second Line of Defense Lessons Learned at Pax River
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