Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

Then Boyd delivered what was to be called his “To Be or to Do” speech. Leopold was the first person known to receive the speech, probably because Boyd, based on his experiences over the years, was solidifying certain conclusions about the promotion system within the military.

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” he said. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. 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.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into Leopold’s eyes and heart. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”

Leopold transformed his memo into a classified briefing for top Air Force officials. Most young captains, if they ever were allowed to brief three-and four-stars, would have told the generals what they wanted to hear. Leopold was respectful but did not let the generals browbeat him into altering his findings. That made a tremendous impression on Boyd, and as a result, Leopold’s life changed. He was in an office of colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors, the junior member of the firm. But because he was Boyd’s protégé, he was number one.

“This guy is crazy,” Burton thought. Boyd was usually late to work, was slovenly, and disobeyed orders. He referred to generals as “perfumed princes” or “weak dicks” who would put their lives on the line for their country but not their jobs.

But his real life’s work lay ahead and he sensed the dangers of accepting a civilian job. Boyd knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce his needs to zero. Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him. Boyd stopped buying clothes. The cars that he and Mary drove would, over the next decade, become rambling wrecks. He even refused to buy a case for his reading glasses; instead, he carried them around in an old sock. And despite the rising anger of his children, he said the family would continue to live in the basement apartment on Beauregard.

“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes or examine its opposites,” Boyd said.

The most important part of “Destruction and Creation” is Boyd’s elaboration on the idea that a relationship exists between an observer and what is being observed. This idea is not original. One of the oldest questions in philosophy concerns the nature of reality. But Boyd presented a new explanation of how we perceive physical reality. A half-dozen people can look at the same process or the same event and each might see the process or the event in an entirely different fashion. For a simple example, a crowd streaming into a college football stadium is looked upon one way by a fraternity boy, another way by a television cameraman, another way by a beer distributor, another way by a security officer, and still another way by the college president. Atop this insight Boyd placed an idea borrowed from Heisenberg: the process of observation changes what is being observed. To continue with the simplified example, people in the crowd, knowing they are being observed by a television cameraman, might wave or shout or begin spontaneous demonstrations. The same crowd, knowing security officers are observing, might become subdued and decorous. Or it might become confrontational. If we are aware that these changes take place we reassess and recalculate our relationship with whatever it is we are observing. In other words, the process not only shapes what is being observed but feedback reshapes the observer’s outlook. The television cameraman searches out people who are not waving. Secur...

there are two ways to manipulate information gleaned from observation: analysis and synthesis. We can analyze whatever process or event we are observing by breaking it down into individual components and interactions. And from this we can make deductions that lead to understanding. Or we can synthesize by taking various sometimes unrelated components and putting them together to form a new whole.

The separate ingredients make sense when collected under the respective headings. But then Boyd shattered the relationship between the parts and their respective domains. He took the ingredients in the web of relationships and asked listeners to visualize them scattered at random. He called breaking the domains apart a “destructive deduction.” (Today some refer to such a jump as “thinking outside the box.” But Boyd believed the very existence of a box is limiting. The box must be destroyed before there can be creation.) The deduction was destructive in that the relationship between the parts and the whole was destroyed. Uncertainty and disorder took the place of meaning and order. Boyd’s name for this hodgepodge of disparate elements was a “sea of anarchy.” Then he challenged the audience: “How do we construct order and meaning out of this mess?”

In both instances the ability to transition quickly from one maneuver to another was a crucial factor in the victory. Thinking about operating at a quicker tempo—not just moving faster—than the adversary was a new concept in waging war. Generating a rapidly changing environment—that is, engaging in activity that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy—inhibits the adversary’s ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

In the beginning Boyd took an hour to deliver “Patterns.” A decade later, when Boyd put all his work into a collection titled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing,” he took about fourteen hours—two days—to deliver it.

especially in his readings on the tactics of Tank Commander Heinz Guderian and in the book Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein.

Boyd found many such instances in history, and in these victories by numerically inferior forces he found a common thread: none of the victorious commanders threw their forces head-to-head against enemy forces. They usually did not fight what is known as a “war of attrition.” Rather, they used deception, speed, fluidity of action, and strength against weakness. They used tactics that disoriented and confused—tactics that, in Boyd’s words, caused the enemy “to unravel before the fight.”

Boyd, borrowing from Sun Tzu, said the best commander is the one who wins while avoiding battle. The intent is to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse of the adversary by generating confusion, disorder, panic, and chaos. Boyd said war is organic and compared his technique to clipping the nerves, muscles, and tendons of an enemy, thus reducing him to jelly.

All these small stitches, and hundreds of others, made up the tapestry that became “Patterns of Conflict.” The briefing begins with what was to become Boyd’s most famous—and least understood—legacy: the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, or O-O-D-A Loop. Today, anyone can hook up to an Internet browser, type “OODA Loop,” and find more than one thousand references.

For a time, Boyd and Spinney were reluctant to fully explain the OODA Loop; it was far too dangerous. If someone truly understands how to create menace and uncertainty and mistrust, then how to exploit and magnify the presence of these disconcerting elements, the Loop can be vicious, a terribly destructive force, virtually unstoppable in causing panic and confusion and—Boyd’s phrase is best—“unraveling the competition.” This is true whether the Loop is applied in combat, in competitive business practices, in sports, or in personal relationships. The most amazing aspect of the OODA Loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.

The OODA Loop is often seen as a simple one-dimensional cycle, where one observes what the enemy is doing, becomes oriented to the enemy action, makes a decision, and then takes an action. This “dumbing down” of a highly complex concept is especially prevalent in the military, where only the explicit part of the Loop is understood. The military believes speed is the most important element of the cycle, that whoever can go through the cycle the fastest will prevail. It is true that speed is crucial, but not the speed of simply cycling through the Loop.

The best drawing of the OODA Loop was done by Spinney for Boyd’s briefings. It shows a very large orientation part of the cycle. Becoming oriented to a competitive situation means bringing to bear the cultural traditions, genetic heritage, new information, previous experiences, and analysis / synthesis process of the person doing the orienting—a complex integration that each person does differently. These human differences make the Loop unpredictable. In addition, the orientation phase is a nonlinear feedback system, which, by its very nature, means this is a pathway into the unknown. The unpredictability is crucial to the success of the OODA Loop.

to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative.

A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

A crucial part of the OODA Loop—or “Boyd Cycle,” as it has come to be known—is that once the process begins, it must not slow. It must continue and it must accelerate. Success is the greatest trap for the novice who properly implements the OODA Loop. He is so amazed at what he has done that he pauses and looks around and waits for reinforcements. But this is the time to exploit the confusion and to press on. Patton knew this intuitively. He ignored his flanks and kept his armored spear pointed at the heart of the enemy.

Spinney gave his briefing to anyone who would listen. When the give-and-take of the briefing revealed that Spinney’s presentation had flaws in logic and gaps where more data were needed, he went back, talked to Boyd, and fine-tuned the brief. The presentation had to be bulletproof. If Spinney were hosed one time—that is, if someone stood up during a briefing and delivered chapter and verse where he was wrong—it would be a devastating blow to the fledgling reform movement. Finally the brief seemed flawless, a seamless gathering of facts that came to an inescapable conclusion. Then Spinney briefed Sprey. As Boyd had predicted, Sprey found dozens of flaws not seen by anyone else. Spinney revised the brief and presented it again. This time Sprey nodded in approval. If the brief could stand against the Pierre Sprey buzz saw, it was monolithic, impregnable against the blasts of heaven and Earth and all that the Air Force might throw at it.

In early 1981, the Reform Movement received another big boost, both in public awareness and credibility, when Jim Fallows published his first book, National Defense, to an extraordinary reception. The book was an elaboration of the articles he published in the Atlantic Monthly. It was a damning indictment of the Pentagon and the defense industry, and it portrayed Boyd and the Reformers as men who might have the solution to all that was wrong. One of the strongest sections of the book dealt with how Boyd originally had perceived the F-16 and what it had become in the hands of the Air Force—how “enhancements” had converted the once-nimble fighter into an all-weather bomber. The buttonhook turn was something of the distant past.

The aircraft that Jimmy Carter killed because its cost had risen to $167 million a copy was at last going into production… now at a cost of $287 million per copy.

The story said that, taking out the effects of inflation, the Army was spending the same amount of money in 1983 on new tanks as it had thirty years earlier, but the number of tanks produced declined by 90 percent. In 1951 the Pentagon spent $7 billion to buy 6,300 aircraft. Now the United States was spending $11 billion to build only 322 aircraft, or 95 percent fewer than in 1951.

Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, the classic book on the French in Vietnam, and stood on a platform and told Marines passing through Pendleton, “If we go to Vietnam, we are not going to make the mistakes the French made.”

In his book About Face, retired Army colonel David Hackworth quotes an Army general as saying, “We have two companies of Marines running all over the island and thousands of Army troops doing nothing. What the hell is going on?”

War is ever changing and men are ever fallible. Rigid rules simply won’t work. Teach men to think.” Boyd paused a moment and added a final thought. “And keep the goddamn thing simple so generals can understand it.”

Burton, with Sprey in the background, came up with the idea for a live-fire test program—that is, actually shoot live Soviet rockets and cannons at U.S. tanks to test their vulnerability. Such a program seems to be common sense, but in fact it was a radical departure from current practice. Boyd predicted that the Army would rise up in opposition.

first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no explosion would result. “What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.” Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion and logic with Army officials, but to no avail. When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them and without allowing them the time to develop lung lesions, as had happened in other tests. The Army surgeon general’s office then reported the animals had suffered no serious aftereffects.

Time after time the Army lied about the realism of its testing. But even the spurious tests were so damaging that the Army decided it wanted to postpone completing the live-fire tests for two years. This would insure that the contractor received a big portion of his money and would put the Bradley too far into its production run to discontinue, no matter what the tests revealed.

Boyd gave Burton three guiding principles. The first was the most difficult and most familiar to anyone who had worked with Boyd. “Jim, you can never be wrong. You have to do your homework. If you make a technical statement, you better be right. If you are not, they will hose you. And if they hose you, you’ve had it. Because once you lose credibility and you are no longer a threat, no one will pay attention to what you say. They won’t respect you and they won’t pay attention to you.” The second thing Boyd told Burton was not to criticize the Bradley itself. “If you do, you are lumped in with all the other Bradley critics. It is the testing process you are concerned with.” While Boyd and Burton might make such a distinction, the Army could not. To them, criticizing the testing process was the same as criticizing the Bradley. But the difference in the two approaches is not at all subtle. By staying focused on the testing methodology, Burton was protecting the lives of American soldiers; he held the mental and moral high ground. Finally, Boyd counseled Burton not to talk to the media or to Congress, to stay inside the system. If you go outside the system, he said, you will be viewed as just another whistle blower. And whistle blowers get no respect; they get others to help them do something that they can’t do themselves.

“Do your homework. If they hose you one time, they will never again respect you.”

Burton ran his trapline one last time and discovered that in the latest Bradley tests the Army had replaced internal ammunition boxes with cans of water in order to give false test results about what happened when a shell penetrated the inner compartment. An honest test would have destroyed the Bradley. Army officers were actually promoted for coming up with a way to provide better test results. In response, Burton wrote his most famous memo. He harshly accused the Army of cheating on the tests. He said the Army was not conducting tests in order to save the lives of American servicemen, but rather in order to buy weapons. Faced with such accusations, the army chief of staff stopped the tests and the House Armed Services Committee called for hearings. But Burton’s victory was, as he probably knew it would be, Pyrrhic. He received another notice saying he was about to be transferred to Alaska. If he did not accept the assignment, he would be forced to retire. He had seven days to decide.

About that time Tom Peters published Thriving on Chaos, a book that revolutionized management theories in America.

James Fallows’s

“You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”

Hammond’s book The Mind of War

Burton wrote a book called The Pentagon Wars that, on February 28, 1998, aired as an HBO original movie starring Kelsey Grammer.

Burton learned from Boyd that if a man does the right thing, it does not matter how overwhelming the odds against him. There always is a way to victory. “No matter what the situation is, no matter how bleak or how dark things appear, how scary, there is always a way out,” Burton says. “It works every time. And it all goes back to Boyd’s ideas on maneuver conflict.”

Every morning when Wyly arises, he asks himself, “What is my Schwerpunkt today?” And every morning he misses not being able to put on his Marine Corps uniform.