This year-end collection of analyses provides a structured observe and orient foundation for leaders preparing for 2026 – highlighting where momentum built, where friction emerged, and where decisive action will be required next.

As 2025 came to a close, the OODA Loop team published a series of year-end reviews capturing the defining forces shaping decision-making across federal policy, cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, and emerging technology. Together, these retrospectives synthesize a year marked by acceleration, convergence, and mounting pressure to move from strategy and guardrails toward operational readiness.

Federal

2025 Year-End Review: Federal – This review examines the key themes shaping federal activity throughout 2025, including AI policy evolution, regulatory dynamics, crisis response, budget priorities, and interagency coordination. It highlights how the federal enterprise adapted to accelerating technological change and geopolitical volatility.

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Cybersecurity

2025 Year-End Review: Cybersecurity – The cybersecurity review captures a year defined by escalation and adaptation. From AI-enabled threats and supply-chain vulnerabilities to regulatory shifts and enforcement activity, the analysis underscores how cybersecurity has become a core strategic and operational concern across public and private sectors.

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Geopolitical Risk and Technology

2025 Year-End Review: Geopolitical Risk and Technology – This review explores the growing entanglement of geopolitical risk and technological acceleration. It traces how AI, cyber operations, space systems, and emerging technologies shaped global competition, alliance dynamics, and strategic uncertainty throughout the year.

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The OODA Community

The December 2025 OODA Network Meeting: Why 2026 Is the Year of Quantum Readiness – The December meeting closed the year with a forward-looking discussion on quantum technologies (computing, sensing, and communications) and their implications for security, resilience, and competitive advantage. The conversation framed 2026 as a transition point from quantum awareness to quantum readiness.

OODA Network Monthly Meetings: 2025 Year in Review – This annual recap synthesizes insights from the OODA Network’s monthly meetings, highlighting recurring themes such as acceleration, convergence across domains, organizational adaptation, and the need to operate effectively under compressed decision timelines.

OODAcon 2025: Full Session Videos and Summary Now Available

By making these recordings and session summaries available, OODAcon 2025 extends the event’s impact beyond the one-day live program, enabling the broader community to absorb insights, revisit discussions, and inform strategic planning going into 2026.

OODAcon 2025: Full Session Videos and Summary Now Available offers the definitive recap of OODAcon 2025, bringing together the event’s full session videos paired with concise summaries of each discussion. As the annual flagship gathering of the OODA Network community, OODAcon 2025 convened innovators, government and industry leaders, strategists, and technologists to explore “Accelerating Disruptive Technologies” – the central theme driving much of this year’s strategic and technological discourse.

The collection provides on-demand access to expert perspectives across a wide range of topics, from architecting the edge and quantum advantage to emerging threat landscapes and shifts in geopolitical competition. Sessions featured deep dives into how disruptive technologies (AI, cyber, space systems, sensing, and automation) are reshaping mission imperatives, competitive equilibria, and organizational readiness. The archive also includes scenario-driven briefs such as the Annual Global Threat Brief, framing near-term risk landscapes for decision-makers.

OODAcon 2025 Annual Global Threat Brief

Anchored in foresight and grounded in real-world trends, the Brief synthesized signals from around the world to illuminate where threats are intensifying and how they might interact across domains. It emphasized that acceleration of advanced capabilities—whether in cyber, autonomous systems, or quantum technologies—is redefining not only what adversaries are capable of but how resilient institutions and alliances must become to anticipate, deter, and respond.

The OODAcon 2025 Annual Global Threat Brief was a scenario-driven assessment of the world’s most urgent risks facing decision-makers today – featuring a structured framing of emerging danger vectors across technology, geopolitics, and national security – spotlighting how disruptive trends such as AI-enabled conflict, biotech dual-use challenges, microelectronics competition, and the intensifying strategic competition among global powers are reshaping risk environments.

Delivered live to an audience of strategists, technologists, and national security leaders, The Annual Global Threat Brief now serves as a foundational reference for understanding the interplay of risk, disruption, and competition as organizations prepare for the challenges of 2026 and beyond.

Key Risk Themes from the OODAcon 2025 Annual Global Threat Brief

• Acceleration of AI-Enabled Conflict: Rapid advances in AI are lowering barriers to entry for sophisticated cyber operations, information warfare, and autonomous systems, compressing decision timelines and amplifying escalation risk.
• Geopolitical Fragmentation and Strategic Competition: Intensifying rivalry among major powers is reshaping alliances, supply chains, and norms—driving a more contested, less predictable global operating environment.
• Cyber, Space, and Infrastructure Vulnerability: Critical digital and physical infrastructure face growing exposure from state and non-state actors, with cyber and space systems increasingly intertwined with national resilience.
• Dual-Use Technology Proliferation: Technologies such as biotech, advanced semiconductors, sensing, and quantum research are diffusing faster than governance frameworks can adapt, complicating risk management and control.
• Compressed Decision Cycles and Institutional Strain: Speed itself has become a threat vector, stressing legacy institutions, governance models, and crisis-response mechanisms that were designed for slower-moving environments.

OODA Almanac 2025 – Whiplash

Grounded in OODA’s decision intelligence lens, the Almanac combines trend analysis, signal interpretation, and scenario forecasting to map how discontinuities in areas such as AI, cyber security, supply chains, and global governance interacted. By documenting where disruptions intersect and compound, the Whiplash Almanac provides a structured basis for leaders to navigate complexity, anticipate inflection points, and calibrate organizational readiness for 2026 and beyond.

OODA Almanac 2025 – Whiplash presents a forward-looking synthesis of the key disruptive forces that defined 2025 and will continue shaping strategic decision environments in the year ahead. The Almanac frames the year as one of recursive whiplash—a cycle in which rapid technological breakthroughs, shifting geopolitical dynamics, economic turbulence, and societal stresses generated continuous re-orientation demands on leaders and institutions. It argues that traditional analytical cycles were repeatedly outpaced by real-time acceleration, making agility and adaptive sensemaking core capabilities for effective action.

Key Risk Themes from OODA Almanac 2025 – Whiplash

Cross-Sector Risk Entanglement: Risks no longer lived within silos—cyber vulnerabilities, geopolitical tensions, and technological diffusion interacted in ways that magnified systemic fragility.

• Disruptive Acceleration Outpacing Analysis: Rapid technological and geopolitical change outstripped traditional analytical cycles, creating strategic “whiplash” where foresight struggles to keep pace with real-time disruption.
• Volatility Across Domains: Interconnected shifts in AI, cyber, biotech, supply chains, and global politics amplified complexity and uncertainty, increasing the likelihood of compounding shocks.
• Erosion of Predictability: Traditional trend lines broke down as emerging signals—once considered fringe—became central drivers of risk, making baseline assumptions unreliable.
• Flattened Decision Time Horizons: Faster emergent threats and opportunities forced shorter decision cycles, challenging organizations to make sense of dynamic conditions with incomplete information.

Top 5 Strategic Implications from OODA Almanac 2025 – Whiplash

Leadership Advantage Depends on Sense-Making Capacity: Competitive and national advantage will accrue to leaders and organizations that can interpret weak signals, contextualize uncertainty, and act decisively amid ambiguity—not merely those with the most data.

1. Speed Has Become a Strategic Variable: Acceleration itself is now a source of advantage and risk. Organizations that cannot shorten their sense-making and decision cycles will be structurally disadvantaged, regardless of resources or intent.
2. Planning Must Shift from Linear Forecasts to Adaptive Scenarios: Stable trend lines are no longer reliable. Leaders must invest in scenario-based planning, early-warning indicators, and continuous reassessment to navigate recurring disruption and “whiplash” conditions.
3. Convergence Drives Systemic Risk: Technological, geopolitical, economic, and societal disruptions increasingly intersect, producing second- and third-order effects that exceed siloed risk models. Integrated decision intelligence is now essential.
4. Readiness Outweighs Optimization: In volatile environments, over-optimized systems become brittle. Resilience, optionality, and the ability to pivot quickly matter more than marginal efficiency gains.