Originally published in The Whirl of ReOrientation on January 13, 2026.
If you’re a paid subscriber to The Whirl of Reorientation, you’ve got early access right now to our latest No Way Out episode featuring Colonel (Ret.) Frederick P. Stein, co-author of the foundational book on Network Centric Warfare. This one hits close to home for me, and I want to share a personal connection that still fires me up.
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Now, let’s get into something interesting: the connection between Network Centric Warfare and the F-14 Tomcat.
Back in the mid-2000s, after flying F-14s in the fleet and serving as an instructor, I first encountered NCW during the big “transformation” push under SECDEF Rumsfeld. It was sold to me as a technology revolution: better sensors, faster networks, data dominance. Coming from the Tomcat cockpit, that made sense. The F-14A with its game-changing AWG-9 radar, entered the fleet in 1972, eventually replacing the F-4, giving pilots and RIOs actual target video symbols and vastly superior onboard situational awareness compared to the F-4’s limited radar returns. Ground control intercept (GCI) had dominated with the F-4 because its radar couldn’t see enough of the battlespace on its own. The F-14 changed that. Information was now readily available right in the cockpit.
But the Navy didn’t evolve doctrine fast enough. For six years after the F-14 entered service, he Navy kept using the same rigid, controller-directed tactics from the F-4 Phantom days. That superior situational awareness sat underutilized until the 1978 Beacon South exercise exposed the flaw: F-14 crews tracked real threats like aggressive F-111s, but a ship-based controller vectored them away toward non-existent targets. That failure forced the change: first “Vector Logic” for the 7th Fleet, then “Command by Negation” fleet-wide in 1979. Crews could finally engage based on what they saw unless explicitly negated. It’s the classic lesson: new tech only wins when matched by doctrinal, organizational, and behavioral evolution. Empower those closest to the information.
That story hits close to home because my background is in F-14s. It taught me early that NCW isn’t about gadgets alone. It’s about decentralizing decisions to those closest to the information and evolving behavior and doctrine at the same time. The F-14 only became truly powerful when the organization caught up to the technology.
And that same principle shows up in one of the most fascinating stories from the episode: the Wal-Mart connection.
Military leaders like Admiral Cebrowski looked to commercial giants for network-centric lessons. Fred Stein shares how he personally interviewed Sam Walton at Wal-Mart headquarters in Arkansas.
Wal-Mart was crushing Sears and Kmart not just through low prices or scale, but by building their own database and pushing real-time sales data and competitor information down to store managers and even floor staff. Walton reorganized the company to empower people at the edges to make pricing and inventory decisions on the fly. His biggest fear? Competitors who truly understood how he used data and decentralized execution. He said he didn’t fear those who saw Wal-Mart as just a retail business. He feared those who grasped the information and organizational shift.
It’s pure NCW in action: work across silos, create shared awareness, and enable decisions right at the point of action.
As Fred described the Wal-Mart connection, I couldn’t help but think of John Boyd’s own deep dive into the Toyota Production System years before he fully sketched the OODA loop. Boyd studied Shingo, Ohno, Deming, and the broader TPS framework. From Taiichi Ohno in particular, Boyd highlighted a key insight: control flows from the outside in and bottom up, while command and leadership (management) move top down and inside out.
In Boyd’s marginalia, handwritten in his personal copy of Masaaki Imai’s book Kaizen, he captured this idea perfectly:
“If looked at this way, a la Taiichi Ohno, then the customer or subsequent process controls the previous process. In other words, control is really exercised by the environment (customer). Hence control from the outside in – bottom up – not top down – inside out. Put simply, command management is top down but control is bottom up.”
This echoes exactly what Ohno and Shingo discovered when they came to America. Ohno originally came over to examine Ford’s production lines, but he found his real novelty and inspiration in American supermarkets—watching how shelves were restocked just in time based on actual customer pull. Boyd frequently emphasized the importance of going outside the system to find new information, and he even included “Outside Information” as a distinct source feeding into the OODA loop.
Admiral Cebrowski and Col. Stein did the same thing when they visited Wal-Mart and interviewed Sam Walton. They went outside the military system to find novelty in how a retail giant used information and decentralized decision-making to dominate competitors. Ohno and Shingo went outside Japan to American supermarkets (and Ford). Boyd went outside military doctrine to Toyota, Mandlebrot, neuroscience, and beyond. All of them sought novelty by deliberately looking beyond their own systems.
Boyd made this explicit in Organic Design for Command and Control. Drawing on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the second law of thermodynamics, he argued that any system turned inward, cut off from the outside world, will inevitably generate uncertainty, confusion, and disorder. He warned us directly:
“One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.”
So you have to wonder: how much more powerful and relevant would Network Centric Warfare be today if its architects had fully embraced Boyd’s real OODA loop instead of the more linear version most people (and many military leaders) still teach and use? I’m not criticizing the original NCW authors—the linear interpretation was the dominant understanding at the time. The real question is: what would NCW look like if we reframed it through Boyd’s authentic OODA loop and its modern connections to Perceptual Control Theory, the Free Energy Principle, active inference, ecological dynamics, Constructor Theory, and Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law? Under that lens, NCW gains deeper meaning and far greater applicability in today’s world. NCW isn’t wrong; what we’ve learned since then could make it exponentially stronger.
On the 10th anniversary of Team of Teams, I made this point in the episode: when I first read the book, I wasn’t blown away by the “new” concept. Why? Because having gone through JPME and earning my Joint Qualified Officer Level 2 (which Fred Stein notes is a requirement for flag officers), I recognized that Team of Teams is essentially Network Centric Warfare, Mission Command, and Boyd’s real OODA loop put into practice. General McChrystal’s team had to build a network to fight a network, and they were standing on doctrine that already existed.
We’re genuinely interested in your thoughts: How does Network Centric Warfare resonate with you today? How do you see it connecting to the rise of artificial intelligence, fifth-generation warfare (5GW), or cognitive warfare?
We hope you enjoy your early access to the recording.
Chapters
00:00 The Evolution of Network Centric Warfare
02:08 Insights from Walmart: Data and Decentralization
05:52 The Shift from F-4s to F-14s: Information Decentralization
08:49 Team of Teams: Organizational Paradigms in Warfare
09:29 Sports Analogies: Understanding Team Dynamics
13:39 Apache Warfare: Cultural Insights into Network Operations
19:03 Self-Synchronization: The Key to Speed in Command
22:29 Shared Awareness: The Importance of Information Flow
28:20 Leadership Lessons: Transitioning from Military to Consulting
34:19 The Challenge of Information Sharing in Organizations
45:28 Understanding Command Climate
48:37 Harmony vs. Synchronization in Warfare
50:38 Lessons from Historical Military Operations
55:36 The Impact of AI and Cognitive Warfare
01:03:50 The Importance of the Cognitive Domain in Strategy
01:06:53 Reflections on Retirement and Lifelong Learning