A Europe on alert
On 11 November 2026, as messages announcing the presence of explosive devices began arriving at Italian schools, thousands of headteachers were called upon to assess a threat whose reliability remained unknown but which, given the gravity of the consequences it described, required the involvement of the relevant authorities. According to ministerial figures reported by news agencies, the messages reached around 6,300 schools and more than three hundred were evacuated; on the same day, similar emails arrived in Northern Ireland, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, affecting hundreds of other school buildings. Subsequent checks led the authorities to classify the threats as unfounded, by which time precautionary measures had already disrupted lessons, occupied law enforcement agencies and involved pupils’ families.
The wave of 11 November followed a series of incidents that had affected other European institutions and services in the preceding weeks. On 19 October, the Police Service of Northern Ireland had launched an investigation into threatening messages received by around three hundred schools, while on 2 November a further series of communications had reached approximately 280 Italian schools. Over the following days, the alerts had spread to air transport, with 35 flights affected on 3, 5 and 6 November according to EUROCONTROL, and to television broadcasters including RTÉ, Sky and NOVA, which were required to arrange checks and, in some cases, temporarily suspend their activities. For schools, airports and newsrooms alike, the need to establish the substance of the threats had triggered exceptional procedures whose duration depended on the investigations and on the possibility of resuming services safely.
The frequency of the alerts makes the relationship between the messages received and the decisions they prompted particularly significant. Each message introduced a possible danger that had to be assessed before it could be ruled out, while any distribution of the same threat to numerous recipients multiplied the locations in which that assessment had to take place. The identity of the senders and possible connections between the campaigns were still under investigation on 12 November; the operation of the disruptions, however, can be observed in the work demanded of institutions, the time needed to establish their causes and the difficulties encountered in restoring normal services.
The weight of a threat
For a headteacher, receiving a message about the possible presence of an explosive device means determining which measures are justified by the available information, while bearing responsibility for protecting pupils and staff. Such an assessment requires consultation with law enforcement and, if an evacuation is ordered, the organisation of exits, assistance to pupils and communication with families. At the same time, the necessary checks must establish whether the danger actually exists, while the resumption of activities remains subject to the authorities’ instructions. The gravity of the announced consequences thus gives the message immediate weight in decision-making, even when its credibility appears doubtful.
Statements from local authorities allow this sequence to be reconstructed in practical terms. In Fiano Romano, the alert prompted the precautionary evacuation of school buildings, the activation of assembly points and inspections by the Carabinieri, while families were informed of the measures taken. In Riano, the headteacher arranged for pupils to leave in coordination with the commander of the local Carabinieri station, allowing them to return only after the checks had been completed. The threatening message had therefore involved people and services far beyond its initial recipients: decisions taken within schools affected family arrangements, staff activities and the deployment of security forces.
The serial distribution of such messages exploits a readily recognisable imbalance. An electronic communication can be reproduced and forwarded to numerous recipients with relatively little effort, whereas the checks required upon its receipt must contend with different buildings, people and circumstances. The possibility that its contents were copied from a common template does not complete the work of those deciding whether precautionary measures are necessary, because each school retains its own responsibilities and needs sufficiently reliable guidance to act. During the time required to gather that information, the alert occupies resources normally devoted to running the school.
Repeated threats introduce a further difficulty when new demands reach the same organisations while earlier checks are still under way. School offices must relay messages and updates, headteachers consult the authorities, and law enforcement decide which checks take priority, while each decision may require further instructions for staff and families. The work generated by the first alerts then continues to shape the response to subsequent ones through commitments already made, information still being verified and measures whose implementation must be followed through.
The accumulation of demands
Whether a campaign of false alarms causes overload depends above all on the relationship between the demands reaching a particular organisation and the resources it has to process them. The total number of schools affected measures the extent of the distribution, while the actual workload must be reconstructed by considering how many checks were assigned to the same offices, which information required centralised comparison and how much time was needed to complete the investigations. If alerts continue to arrive faster than they can be examined, unresolved problems accumulate alongside new ones, requiring priorities to be continually revised.
A substantial part of this work concerns the interpretation of information. Authorities must establish whether apparently different messages share a common origin, whether they concern places already checked or contain additional details, and how much weight to give reports circulating through different channels. When the same communication is forwarded repeatedly or relayed by numerous recipients, its circulation may create the impression of multiple corroborating reports even though they derive from a single source. Tracing the messages’ provenance then becomes essential to assigning each piece of information its proper weight, preventing the volume of communications from unduly influencing the assessment of danger.
Events in the Scottish Highlands also show how the effects of a precautionary decision can outlast the completion of the checks. On 11 November, according to the local authority, 196 schools received threatening messages and most adopted evacuation measures; after police classified the threats as hoaxes, some schools nevertheless remained closed because many pupils had already been taken home or collected by their parents. The assessment of danger had changed, but earlier decisions had created a situation that required further time to put back in order. In such circumstances, returning to normal operation also depends on the organisational consequences of the measures adopted during the emergency.
If new alerts arrive before those consequences have been absorbed, the difficulty may extend from the practical management of responses to the understanding of events. Those coordinating the response must continue to distinguish reliable information from misleading reports, account for checks that remain open and revise instructions already issued, while the people involved await decisions on which to organise their activities. A sufficiently intense succession can make this work increasingly burdensome, especially when available updates continually alter the picture of the situation. John Boyd locates one of the fundamental mechanisms of shock precisely in this relationship between threatening events, difficulties of interpretation and the possibility of adaptation.
Boyd and the war against orientation
Boyd’s thinking took shape through the study of aerial combat, in which an aircraft’s performance matters in relation to an opponent’s manoeuvres and the possibility of anticipating their choices. In A New Conception of War, Ian T. Brown reconstructs the path that took Boyd from energy analyses of fighter aircraft to the study of the mental processes governing the conduct of combat. An unexpected manoeuvre may force an opposing pilot to revise their assessment rapidly, while successive changes that are difficult to predict and interpret may undermine their ability to formulate adequate responses. Operational superiority thus also depends on the ability to impose a situation on an opponent that changes faster than they can understand it.
In the testimony reported by Brown, Boyd describes this deterioration through the reactions of someone confronted with increasingly ambiguous actions, eventually becoming uncertain, confused and unable to maintain a coherent picture of the situation. His attention centres on the consequences of that disorientation for subsequent decisions: when expectations are repeatedly contradicted and revising them demands growing effort, an opponent risks continuing to act on interpretations that events have already rendered inadequate.
In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd clarifies the relationship between shock and response capacity in a formulation quoted by Frans P. B. Osinga in the fifth chapter of Science, Strategy and War: “Shock and surprise can also be considered as overload caused by a multiplicity of threatening events that exceed the mental or physical capacity to respond, adapt or resist.” This English rendering follows the Italian quotation in the essay. The passage, drawn from slide 117, links the severity of the disruption to the condition of the party experiencing it, since a set of events may become unmanageable when it imposes demands exceeding the resources needed to understand and address them. The pressure placed on an opponent therefore depends on the frequency of changes, their ambiguity and the time required to reconstruct a usable representation of the situation.
In slide 131, discussed by Osinga, the argument is developed through the instruction to create repeated mismatches between the events an opponent observes or anticipates and those to which they actually have to react. Boyd describes a process in which uncertainty, fuelled by threatening signals that are difficult to distinguish, can lead to mistrust, confusion and disorder, eventually undermining the ability to understand the other party’s intentions and concentrate effort on decisive activities. The succession of disruptions acts upon judgement as it attempts to update itself, progressively leaving less room to prepare a coherent response.
False-alarm campaigns have characteristics that make this description relevant. Each communication announces a danger requiring assessment, while distributing messages to numerous recipients can impose simultaneous checks, and their repetition may reach institutions already dealing with earlier consequences. The deterioration of orientation described by Boyd is a possible outcome of pressure exceeding the available resources; establishing whether it occurred in particular incidents would also require knowledge of how coordination centres operated, how long the checks took and what difficulties responders actually encountered. The theory clarifies the mechanism through which that pressure might acquire strategic effectiveness, starting from operational consequences that are already documented.
The OODA loop and the formation of judgement
Boyd describes the processes through which individuals and organisations face a changing environment by means of the OODA loop, comprising observation, orientation, decision and action. Information gathered through observation is interpreted in the light of existing knowledge, experience and expectations; this work produces an assessment that guides choices, while the results of actions provide further evidence with which to test and correct the previous understanding. Osinga emphasises the complexity of this process, in which the stages influence one another and learning is crucial to adaptation.
Among these activities, Boyd assigns orientation a central position, describing it as the Schwerpunkt, the point on which the functioning of the entire system is concentrated. Understanding events determines which information is considered relevant, which possibilities for action appear feasible and how the consequences of decisions should be interpreted. Since each new experience changes the body of knowledge on which future judgements will draw, orientation requires expectations to be continually tested, especially when the environment produces unexpected events.
In the case of a threat directed at a school, this process begins by distinguishing the communication received from the danger it announces. The contents of the email constitute one element to be examined alongside the evidence gathered by the authorities, while the distribution of similar messages to other schools may provide indications about the nature of the campaign. Precautionary decisions depend on the assessment made at that moment, but must remain open to revision when more reliable information arrives; at the same time, the headteacher and law enforcement must ensure that instructions reach staff and families so that the measures adopted are understood and properly carried out.
The statement issued by Police Scotland after the threats of 11 November illustrates the role of a shared assessment. Once the messages had been examined and identified as hoaxes, police clarified that those communications, considered on their own, did not justify further evacuations or pupil absences. Completing the checks thus gave schools a basis for subsequent decisions, reducing the need to confront the same uncertainty separately. The effectiveness of that guidance also depended on its timely circulation, so that each school could adjust its measures to the knowledge acquired by the relevant authorities.
The centrality of orientation explains why Boyd places such importance on the ability to revise interpretations. An organisation may have established procedures and trained staff, but its response to circumstances depends on the correspondence between what it believes is happening and what events actually show. When that correspondence is undermined by ambiguous signals or information accumulating without timely assessment, the problem also affects the relationships through which people and offices must make joint decisions.
Interaction, isolation and freedom of action
In developing his strategic theory, Boyd addresses these relationships through the concepts of interaction and isolation, distinguishing the material relationships that make resources and information available, the mental relationships through which events are understood, and the moral relationships that sustain trust and cooperation. As Osinga explains, a system’s effectiveness depends on maintaining adequate connections with its environment and among its components, so that acquired knowledge can be translated into coherent initiatives. When those connections become less effective, even available resources may be deployed according to divergent assessments or priorities that are difficult to reconcile.
A succession of deceptive threats may put these relationships under pressure when information reaches different offices at different times, requires competing investigations or forces changes to measures already communicated. Each update must then be related to earlier checks and passed to the people concerned, while maintaining a common understanding of the situation may require increasing effort in consultation and coordination. If new alerts continue to arise before that work is complete, internal difficulties may aggravate the initial pressure, narrowing the time available for ordinary activities.
The different responses adopted by European schools show how the functioning of these relationships depends on the information available when decisions are made. In Marino, checks allowed teaching to continue without an evacuation; in Edinburgh, some schools were evacuated as a precaution and the measures were subsequently adjusted in line with reassuring assessments from the authorities. In both cases, the ability to adapt decisions to the evidence gathered was essential to addressing the emergency, while the practical consequences of the measures depended on local conditions and on when the information was received.
Boyd’s account connects these episodes to a broader question concerning the possibility of retaining the initiative while being compelled to respond to demands introduced from outside. Each false alarm may occupy staff, time and attention; repetition, when it reaches structures already engaged in responding, may make it harder to verify information and coordinate its consequences. If that pressure also undermines orientation, the organisation risks devoting an increasing share of its resources to reconstructing a situation that continues to change, affecting the coherence of decisions and the ability to adapt its activities promptly.
Campaigns of threats directed at schools reveal how much institutional functioning depends on the ability to assign the right meaning to the information received. A report may require checks and precautionary measures even when the investigations will ultimately rule out the danger it announces; a succession of reports may occupy the same resources and make it harder to reconstruct the overall picture. Boyd identifies the loss of orientation as one of the conditions through which pressure on opposing organisations may translate into disorganisation, because difficulty in understanding events affects the ability to decide, coordinate people and retain freedom of action.
References
John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, slides 117 and 131, quoted in Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, chapter 5, notes 103 and 113.
Ian T. Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare, Marine Corps University Press, 2018, chapter 4, p. 94.
Frans P. B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Routledge, chapters 5–7.
For the reconstruction of events: statements from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Police Scotland and Highland Council; communications from the municipalities of Fiano Romano, Riano and Marino; reports by Reuters, Associated Press and ANSA of 11–12 November 2026; EUROCONTROL figures on the alerts of 3, 5 and 6 November.