Foul-mouthed maverick changed the art of war

NEW YORK - The coming assault on Baghdad already has its first hero: Colonel John Boyd, a foul-mouthed, insubordinate fighter pilot who has been in his grave at Arlington National Cemetery for almost five years.

When Iraq's tyrant is brought down, that inevitable victory will be Boyd's doing. You won't hear Boyd's name being cited in Rose Garden speeches, however. Nor will the Pentagon be authorising any posthumous decorations for the man who, through 30 years of bureaucratic guerilla warfare, transformed America's military. Even though he gave them many of the tools that made Operation Desert Storm such a sweeping success in 1991, the brass continued to hate Boyd with such a passion that, as a final sign of contempt, they sent only a single general as their official representative at his funeral. But without his influence, the US would almost certainly be preparing to enter Iraq much as it fled Saigon: a vast, muscle-bound killing machine based on the assumption that big budgets and expensive weapons assured victory.

That approach didn't work in Vietnam, nor even in tiny Grenada, where a US expedition force required two days in 1983 to subdue a squad of 200 Cuban construction workers. "Thank God they have dumb sons of bitches in the Kremlin, too," Boyd fumed not long after. "If they weren't thick as ****, Grenada would prove how weak we really are." Boyd's disgust was palpable. Army units on the island couldn't call in artillery support from Navy ships because their radios worked on different frequencies. Nor could soldiers on the ground stop air strikes hitting the wrong targets. Almost 30 Americans were killed in the conflict, most the victims of friendly fire. "Grenada was confusion cubed," Boyd told me in 1985, after the Pentagon released a report whitewashing the invasion's flaws and follies. "Our top guys know the first rule of warfare: always protect your rear."

Boyd devoted the latter half of his career to catching those generals with their pants down. The first half had been spent in the cockpit, first over Korea and later as an instructor at the US Air Force "Top Gun" flight schools. Had he been just another joystick virtuoso, Boyd would have had a traditional career: step by step up the ladder until retirement, when he could have been expected to join one of the weapons companies, pitching former colleagues on the latest, gold-plated guns, planes and tanks. That's how the procurement game had always been played at the Pentagon, where a weapon's usefulness was of secondary importance to its cost. Big budgets still mean bigger staffs for the Pentagon's project-development officers - and bigger salaries, too, when they leave to work for General Dynamics, Grumman, or Boeing. To Boyd, the system produced "gold-plated **** shovels" that "hurt us more than the enemy".

So, after rewriting the air combat rulebook he began looking at the broader flaws in US military theory. They were, he concluded, the same ones that had led to disaster in Vietnam, the ultimate symbol of which he saw as the F-111. "The only good thing about the F-111," he said, "is that the dumbass Soviets believed our propaganda and built their very own piece of useless ****, the Backfire bomber." His idea of the perfect fighter plane was the F-16. Small, cheap and simple, it used only enough technology to make it a more efficient killing machine - fly-by-wire control systems to save the weight of hydraulics, one engine to keep it small, cut costs and make it hard to target.

When superiors tried to silence his criticisms by pushing him into a dead-end office job, Boyd developed the concept on the sly by "stealing" a million dollars worth of computer time, giving his brainchild a variety of misleading names and slipping the evolving concept past bureaucratic enemies before they realised what they had just authorised. It earned him a wealth of grief. There will be plenty of F-16s over Iraq pretty soon, but that won't be Boyd's greatest contribution. Of much greater impact will be the culmination of his life's work, a treatise on military tactics that he penned after retiring to Florida and seeing the F-16 accepted, against all odds, as a frontline mainstay.

"He called it Observe-Orient-Decide-Act - commonly known as the OODA loop," says Boyd's biographer Robert Coram. "Simply rendered, the OODA loop is a blueprint for the manoeuvre tactics that allow one to attack the mind of an opponent, to unravel its commander even before a battle begins."

To Coram and others, including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Boyd is "the most influential military thinker since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 2400 years ago". So why should pacifists cheer the memory of a man whose life was devoted to perfecting the use of martial force? Because, if the Iraq invasion goes even remotely according to plan, Saddam's downfall will be short and relatively bloodless. Isolated, unable to trust his generals and with his every move tracked by the cheap, plentiful, all-seeing Predator drones that Boyd also helped to develop, Saddam will have two options: surrender or perish.

The Baghdad campaign will reflect Boyd's greatest insight, the one he borrowed from Sun Tzu. The sweetest victory, said the Chinese sage, is the one that does not demand a battle. Even if you have the weaponry to win it at a canter.

Col. John Boyd: The Most Influential Unknown Hero

By Ed Offley

Look up the official U.S. Air Force fact sheet on the F-16 Falcon, and you will read in clear but understated terms this description of what aviation experts agree is the most successful fighter aircraft ever built:

"The F-16 Fighting Falcon is a compact, multi-role fighter aircraft. It is highly maneuverable and has proven itself in air-to-air combat and air-to-surface attack. It provides a relatively low-cost, high-performance weapon system for the United States and allied nations."

First conceived in the mid-1960s, the F-16 is flown today by military pilots in 23 countries from Bahrain to Venezuela. Over 2,200 of the single-engine Falcons have been built, and the U.S. Air Force operates more than 1,380 of them. It has performed with distinction in Operation Desert Storm, Kosovo and the long-running twilight air war enforcing the Iraqi "no-fly" zones.

But nowhere in the official Air Force archives will you find the fascinating and gripping story of how this military aircraft came to be - how the F-16 was conceived and designed by a maverick Air Force pilot leading a tiny cabal of military officers and DoD civilians without the Air Force's knowledge or approval. Nor will you find how once the lightweight fighter plane left the drawing boards, the collective leadership of the Air Force waged a fierce - and ultimately unsuccessful - bureaucratic guerrilla war to have the project killed and its supporters destroyed.

Thanks to author Robert Coram, the full story of this astonishing rebellion within the corridors of the Pentagon comes to life in the informative and entertaining biography of its ringleader, Air Force Col. John Boyd.

When you read Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2002), you will be amazed to learn that Boyd's involvement in the struggle to field an effective new fighter aircraft constitutes only one chapter of his distinguished, controversial and often contentious life.

The most amazing aspect of John Boyd's record of achievement is not that it is so profound, but rather that the pilot and his record remain unheard of to most Americans. "Boyd was one of the most important unknown men of his time," Coram writes. "He did what so few men are privileged to do: He changed the world. But much of what he did, or the impact of what he did, was either highly classified or of primary concern to the military."

Born and raised in the working-class city of Erie, Pa., Boyd was determined at an early age to succeed, and discovered the U.S. military as the vehicle for his growth. After a brief period serving as an enlisted man at the tail end of World War II, he won an officer's commission and became a fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Korea. Later, while serving as an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School in Nevada, he became known as "Forty-second Boyd" who could defeat any other pilot in mock aerial combat in that amount of time.

As a young captain, Boyd became the first military aviator to codify and formally break down the mysteries of air-to-air combat in a hand-typed memorandum, the "Aerial Attack Study," that soon became official Air Force doctrine. As a 33-year-old graduate engineering student at Georgia Tech, he pioneered a new theory of aircraft performance - the "Energy-Maneuverability Theory" - that would revolutionize the design of all future combat aircraft.

Brash, insightful and profane, Boyd outflanked the generals, cursed the defense industrialists and nurtured a small band of disciples who would grow to form the Military Reform Movement, an unofficial but influential group dedicated to fielding weapons and equipment that would enable America's military to survive and win on the battlefield - not merely line the pockets of the defense industry and its toadies in Congress and the Pentagon.

Coram's book is crammed with hilarious, outrageous and jaw-dropping anecdotes of Boyd's encounters with the brass and his own people. A chain-smoker, Boyd once set a general on fire with his cigar. Another time, Boyd so flummoxed a colonel with his masteries of the facts that the officer foamed at the mouth and fell out of his chair in a fit, prompting them to announce the invention of the Air Force "air to rug maneuver." He gleefully stole more than $1 million in computer time from an Air Force unit so that he could refine a theory on aircraft design - and bragged about it to a senior general. He tormented his supporters with late-night telephone calls that would drag on for hours. One junior aide who lived 25 miles from the Pentagon would tear himself away from Boyd's late-evening office disquisitions and drive home, only to have the phone start ringing the instant he turned the key in his door - Boyd had timed his subordinate's commute to the second.

After retiring from the Air Force as a colonel, Boyd turned down many offers from industry in order to serve as an unpaid Pentagon consultant, continuing his revolutionary work as a civilian. His focus shifted from aircraft design to the wider issue of analyzing the reasons for success in conflict. This led to Boyd's seminal work, "Patterns of Conflict," an unpublished, two-day briefing that he gave for almost two decades throughout the military. This lecture first revealed Boyd's breakthrough, the "OODA Loop" (for Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action) a theory of how military commanders can win by getting inside the mind and outpace the decision cycle of the enemy commander.

Boyd's breakthrough theory would play a pivotal, but hidden role in the shaping of the U.S. victory in Operation Desert Storm, Coram writes. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney consulted extensively with Boyd and credits the retired fighter pilot with helping him resist an initial Army plan that would have employed the coalition ground forces in a pitched battle with the Iraqi army. Instead, the Army used the now-famous "Left Hook" flanking movement to encircle and destroy the foe.

The U.S. Marine Corps also embraced Boyd's theories of "Fourth Generational Warfare" and today honor him as one of their own.

As impressive as Boyd's intellect and his drive for self-improvement stands out, one comes away from Coram's biography with an even greater respect for the fighter pilot's ironclad integrity. He set generals on fire and outflanked the bureaucrats because he saw that they were enemies of his solitary mission: To give America's fighting men and women the best tools to attain victory.

His friends and former subordinates all recall a standard Boyd speech that distilled the moral dilemma that sooner or later confronts every person working in the Pentagon: "Tiger (he called all of his favorites that), one day you will come to a fork in the road. And you are going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments. Or you can go that way and you can do something - something for your country and for your Air Force and yourself."

There is no doubt in which direction John Boyd headed.

Boyd died of cancer in 1997 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But his rich legacy is preserved in two ways: Several of his longtime supporters, including Thomas P. Christie and Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, still work in the Pentagon on procurement issues. Several Boyd colleagues have also compiled a collection of his essays and briefings at their website, Defense and the National Interest, for anyone interested to read about this dedicated officer and his revolutionary theories.

Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com.

http://sftt.org/dwa/2003/1/1/2.html

11 March 1997

To the Editor:

I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Colonel John Boyd, USAF (Ret). How does one begin to pay homage to a warrior like John Boyd? He was a towering intellect who made unsurpassed contributions to the American art of war. Indeed, he was one of the central architects in the reform of military thought which swept the services, and in particular the Marine Corps, in the 1980’s. From John Boyd we learned about competitive decision making on the battlefield—compressing time, using time as an ally. Thousands of officers in all our services knew John Boyd by his work on what was to be known as the Boyd Cycle or OODA Loop. His writings and his lectures had a fundamental impact on the curriculum of virtually every professional military education program in the United States—and on many abroad. In this way, he touched so many lives, many of them destined to ascend to the highest levels of military and civilian leadership.

Those of us who knew John Boyd the man knew him as a man of character and integrity. His life and values were shaped by a selfless dedication to Country and Service, by the crucible of war, and by an unrelenting love of study. He was the quintessential soldier-scholar—a man whose jovial, outgoing exterior belied the vastness of his knowledge and the power of his intellect. I was in awe of him, not just for the potential of his future contributions but for what he stood for as an officer, a citizen, and as a man.

As I write this, my mind wanders back to that morning in February, 1991, when the military might of the United States sliced violently into the Iraqi positions in Kuwait. Bludgeoned from the air nearly round the clock for six weeks, paralyzed by the speed and ferocity of the attack. The Iraqi army collapsed morally and intellectually under the onslaught of American and Coalition forces. John Boyd was an architect of that victory as surely as if he’d commanded a fighter wing or a maneuver division in the desert. His thinking, his theories, his larger than life influence, were there with us in Desert Storm. He must have been proud of what his efforts wrought.

So, how does one pay homage to a man like John Boyd? Perhaps best by remembering that Colonel Boyd never sought the acclaim won him by his thinking. He only wanted to make a difference in the next war … and he did. That ancient book of wisdom—Proverbs—sums up John’s contribution to his nation: " A wise man is strong, and a man of knowledge adds to his strength; for by wise guidance you will wage your war, and there is victory in a multitude of counselors."* I, and his Corps of Marines, will miss our counselor terribly.

Sincerely,

* Proverbs 24:5-6

C.C. Krulak General,
U. S. Marine Corps
Commandant of the Marine Corps¹

http://www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/hammond/essential_boyd.htm

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