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.

Duh! The F-16 was supposed to be a fighter but was so poor in that role the only thing to do with it was make it a tactical bomber, something the A-7, a much older aircraft was much better at. It's essentially a plane without a mission, an ill conceived throwback to the time of WWII when the concept of a fighter was one man, one cockpit, one engine, duking it out mano a mano with some other fighter pilot. It's an idea that passed with the advent of advanced radar and missile systems. The F-16 was a bad idea when it was conceived and hasn't proved its worth since. The F-15 is superior in the air to air role and the F-15 Strike Eagle is a far more effective bomber.

There's always a bubbling undercurrent of ideas in the armed forces. Among the officer corps of all services, this is most common in the mid-grades, O-3 thru O-5.

Make no mistake, most "soldier on" and do their duty. But the few; envision, develop, and advance the art of war. They almost always do this behind the scene without official sanction. Rarely do they make it to Flag rank. But the changes they make are seismic.

John Boyd was one of the best of them.

"Almost 30 Americans were killed in the conflict, most the victims of friendly fire."

I had the honor to know one of them. In fact, this kid, SP/4 Kevin Lannon wouldn't have been there were it not for me. And, yes, that knowledge still haunts me a little bit.

SP/4 Lannon was my platoon medic when I was a Lieutenant in the now defunct 9th Infantry Division. His lifelong dream was to be an AIRBORNE RANGER. I had a buddy from college who was the Ranger Bn S1 and my own S1 was a good guy, so I did some talking to my best friend from high school was the HHC Ranger Bn CO and we worked some paperwork magic and got the kid transferred.

The day I handed him his orders (about six months before his died in the air assault on the medical school from ENEMY FIRE) he looked like a five year old about to get a ride on the town fire engine. He was thunderstruck. He wanted those orders more than anything in the world and that is my solace. To die doing something you love is not so bad is it?

F-15's, way more expensive per unit, to maintain, to man and to fly, even for America to afford. You don't need F-15's to shoot down transports, helicopters, strafe truck convoys and massed third world land units, regular costal shipping and a variety of hum drum targets that bulk out an enemy's war making abilities. Using, wearing out and losing high cost, sophisticated assets on low value targets shouldn’t, and isn’t done.

"There is a quality to quantity, all it's own" Stalin. Along your line of thinking, such that it is, we should have an entire army of multi lingual Special Forces. Nice wet dream. Not now, not ever going to happen. All services have their elites, until attrition wears down their small numbers. The Nazis loved the super weapons, but never produced enough of the next tier below them, the “good enough” weapons. For instance, German tanks were very much better, when they ran, and were available on the field. However the Shermans, were plentiful, affordable, reliable and with greater numbers and flexible tactics ate the superior German tanks up.

Anyways, the topic isn’t an aircraft; it is about Boyd and his thoughts.

Buy in large, unequalled by me before or since, I have never been in a organization that as much as humanly possible, supported each other from supply to triggerpullers as much as the Green Team. It was always my feeling and observation that if you were in trouble, be it enemy, or alcohol or money, somehow, someway the Army would help you through it provided you helped yourself. I saw great effort by NCOs and Officers at cost of time and effort to themselves to help young men get through tough professional and personal problems. Even to the point of significant out of pocket cash money on a promise. Often done outside of official channels and disregarding of rules. Other than that we entertained ourselves by fighting amongst ourselves.

You did right Sir, and I am sure there is some Grenada trained MD, with his family this day, who every now and then thinks of those young men with awe and fondness. How, where and when that gratitude will manifest itself, of which I have no doubt, is know only to time and God.

I had to come back to this:

"Almost 30 Americans were killed in the conflict, most the victims of friendly fire."...(and)..."I had the honor to know one of them. In fact, this kid, SP/4 Kevin Lannon ..."

Granada was a tactical joke, it's hard to say otherwise.

But as a Vietnam veteran (non-hero type) it was just about the first boost I/we got following such absurdities as the great hostage screw-up and goat-rope conducted by Carter and the overhanging sense of weakness imposed by the post-Vietnam left.

In fact, it took that victory, small as it was, and the nifty night shots of troops and hilos in Panama to re-legitimize the role of military to the American public.

The success of those two very minor campaigns was in the reaction to Clinton's crimes in Somalia. "Blackhawk Down" would have been an anti-war Fonda epic had not the earlier two dust ups been conducted and used, intentionally, to restore some luster to what democrat administrations from and including JFK had managed to foul.

No eason to feel remorse ExSoldier, everybody knows what the wings imply and very few would go there without the will to follow through.

End of rant, thank you.

Too bad the F-16 is really ineffective. It proved to be a poor bomber, it's primary role, in the Gulf War and received one of the lowest ratings of any weapons systems after that war. It seems from this article that Col Boyds largest contribution was the F-16 and if that's so, his legacy won't be that of a great innovater. I think there must be more to his story though, just not brought forth in this article.

You are correct on this one. The F-16 was probably the least effective aircraft used during Desert Storm.

This article reminds me of what the media was doing in the early 80's. They had a bunch of ex-Carter flacks (particularly one under sec of defense whose name I have forgotten) complaining that our weapons were too complex. The guy I mentioned didn't even want radar in the F-16. As it turns out, the smarter our weapons get, the easier our wins become and the fewer casualties we suffer.

It's always more economical to hit the target and destroy it on the first pass. The F-16 in the Gulf war was "blessed" with an iron bomb sight reminiscent of something from WWII. Basically, they couldn't hit the broadside of the proverbial barn. Ask any TacAir guy how many passes he wants to make. My guess is one is the # one answer. The -16 has since been upgraded but it's still not as effective as the -15 or even some older planes. Sometimes it makes more sense to spend more money and get the job done right the first time( pass ).

"Sometimes it makes more sense to spend more money and get the job done..."

The money's gone, and it isn't coming back and there will never be enough and never has been enough under any circumstances. All warfare is about dealing with shortages. "What if's and wouldn't it be's" are for dreamers. All wars are come as you are affairs. Otherwise we would of moved all the SF units to Colorado and been ready for Afganistan, of course then a war would of sprung up in equatorial Africa....

As a Navy man, I never had the bittersweet honor of pounding the ground for Uncle Sam, so maybe my opinion doesn't matter.

But I can say, without any reservation whatsoever, that I have never met a warrior who would assign one iota of blame to you for helping SP/4 Lannon achieve his lifelong dream! Once the orders were cut and he left your charge, your moral and legal responsibility for his well-being ended. Period.

It is good that you have a conscience, but it can be a curse, too. Anyone who would fault an officer for sending warriors to fight has no business giving an opinion, because sending warriors to fight is exactly what officers are supposed to do. It has always been that way, and for good reason. You know it, I know it, and anyone with their head screwed on straight knows it.

So my sincerest and most heartfelt advice is to not let the consequences of any action you took in good faith as an officer haunt you, regardless of what they might be.

And do this confident in the knowledge that there isn't a true warrior alive or dead who would want it any other way, including Specialist Lannon.

The F-16 was designed by Boyd and his gang as a pure air to air fighter. and that's what it would have been until the boys and girls in the 5 sided wonderland started putting hard points on it.

This is an on going problem with the way and type of aircraft we buy. The pentagon has a real hardon for multi-purpose aircraft. F/A 18 comes to mind as an example.

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