Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

“The world is not the way you want it to be. The world is the way it is.”

Over and over again she said if people knew too much about the Boyd family they would use the knowledge in a critical manner. Never tell people what you don’t want repeated, she preached. People will seek out your weaknesses and faults, so tell them only of your strong points. No family matters must ever be mentioned beyond the front door.

Reminds me of the godfather

While Elsie had striven mightily to have people in Erie think she was as comfortable as before her husband died, inside the home she turned poverty into a cardinal virtue.

She hammered into John that as long as he held on to his sense of what was right, and as long as his integrity was inviolate, he was superior to those who had only rank or money.

Remember you have something no one else in the class has. You have principle and integrity. That means you will be criticized and attacked. But in the end you will win. Don’t let it bother you.”

One of John’s favorite stories, one he was to tell all his life, revolved around entering high school on September 2, 1942. He said he took a series of tests, one of which showed he had an IQ of only ninety. When offered the chance to retake the test, he refused. The test gave John what he later said was a great tactical advantage in dealing with bureaucrats—when he told them he had an IQ of only ninety, they always underestimated him.

Weibel was a reflection of the brick school where he coached: solid and unshakable. He was firmly grounded in the old-fashioned principles of strong work, individual accountability, and duty.

During the summers, he and Chet Reichert would paddle their canoe across the bay in all kinds of weather, and John would talk constantly of how he had to prove himself out in the world. He was determined to excel although he did not yet know in what area. He only knew that he had to do something better than anyone had ever done it before. He had to show people in Erie that he was somebody.

One of the more humbling aspects of higher education, both in athletics and in academics, is when a student finds that just because he trailed clouds of glory in high school does not mean he will do the same in college.

Aerial combat is brutally unforgiving. To come in second place is to die, usually in a rather spectacular manner. Most casualties never know they are targets until they are riddled with bullets, covered with flames, and on the way to creating a big hole in the ground.

In 1954 the Air Force was seven years old, and like most seven-year-olds it was rambunctious, determined to be heard, and always demanding new toys.

the idea of sitting down at a desk and spending hundreds of hours writing a long document brought him to the edge of panic. He was a talker, not a writer.

BIAB could have been formed right there and then

Near the end of his life, he confided to a close friend that when he was faced with the burden of sitting down and writing, he was afraid he would “spin off and lose control.” Spradling came up with the solution. “John, don’t make this a big thing. We have some good Dictaphones. Why don’t you dictate the damn thing?” Boyd paused and thought. “You dictate it and I’ll have my secretary transcribe it,” Spradling said. “Then I’ll edit it for you.” For a month Boyd worked on an outline. Two or three days each week, he moved into the bachelor officers’ quarters and worked far into the night. He slept two or three hours, taught in the morning, flew in the afternoon, and worked on his outline until almost dawn. Then one morning about 3:00 A.M., Spradling’s phone rang. “Spradling residence.” “Sprad. John.” “Hey, John. What is it?” “Sprad, it’s time to get that mechanical monster in operation.” “What mechanical monster, John?” “The goddamn dictating machine.” Several hours later, one morning in September 1959, Boyd began dictating.

He would show graphs of the differences between each American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas represented where the differences favored the American fighter, red where the Soviet fighter had the advantage. Blue is good. Red is bad. Even a goddamn general can understand that.

It is a matter of delicious irony that one of Boyd’s duties at Eglin was supervising the graphics shop. The purpose of the graphics shop was to provide services for every harried officer who wanted briefing charts or lettering placed on photographic slides or a fancy graph. Managing the graphics shop was one of those menial and embarrassing jobs no pilot wanted, but for Boyd it would pay off.

Boyd and Christie went over the calculations again and again and the numbers came out the same. Perhaps the data from Foreign Tech was wrong. U.S. aircraft could not be inferior to Soviet aircraft in so many areas. Boyd returned to Wright-Pat and went over the data with intelligence specialists. A few corrections were made, but Soviet aircraft were still superior. “If I brief this and someone calls you to check it out, will you stand by this data?” Boyd asked. “Of course,” the officer said. Boyd and Christie rewrote the computer program at Eglin and recomputed the data. Still the Soviet aircraft were superior. They brought in an outsider, a mathematician who had no connection to E-M, and said, “Find where we made mistakes.” The outsider crunched the numbers, checked them, recrunched them, and announced he could find no mistakes.

Like any fighter pilot he turned into the fight, confronting every question head-on. And because he knew his material better than any other person in the room, no one touched him.

Boyd was deeply affected. This was a pivotal event in his career, as well as a personal epiphany. Often, when a man is young and idealistic, he believes that if he works hard and does the right thing, success will follow. This was what Boyd’s mother and childhood mentors had told him. But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system. Those who do not conform will one day realize that the path of doing the right thing has diverged from the path of success, and then they must decide which path they will follow through life. Almost certainly, he realized that if he was not promoted early to lieutenant colonel after all that he had done, he would never achieve high rank. And in light of a speech he was to give in coming years to young officers, his famous “To Be or to Do” speech, he likely realized that while he might do big things, he would never be at the top of the Air Force hierarchy.

All the things that make the Pentagon so prized by careerists make it loathed and detested by warriors. The self-promotion and sycophancy and backstabbing treachery are all anathema to a warrior. A warrior wants his country to be prepared for war, to win against all enemies, to prevail at all costs. Duty and patriotism and honor are not buzz words to a warrior; they are his creed. A warrior speaks the truth to generals and congressmen. Being promoted is not the top priority of a warrior. Thus, warriors do not fare well in the Pentagon.

He was thrumming with excitement when he returned to the colonel’s office. He stacked the reports and design studies neatly on a table. He brought in no new papers, no easel to hold the flip charts, no slides, no projector, no stacks of documents. He simply returned what he had been given and said he was reporting as ordered. “Where is your report?” the colonel asked. Boyd smiled and tapped a long forefinger against his temple.

In his most earnest and sincere tone he said, “Sir, I’ve never designed a fighter plane before.” Then he paused and nodded toward the design studies stacked on the table. “But I could fuck up and do better than that.”

Boyd began showing his briefings to Sprey and asking for an opinion. Sprey often ripped the briefs to shreds. And he did it in such a calm and irrefutable manner, reason stacked atop reason, logic atop logic, that it was impossible to disagree. Boyd referred to a Sprey critique as the “Pierre Sprey buzz saw.” But he knew Sprey was making his work stronger and more focused and virtually impervious to attack. “We’ve got to do our homework, Tiger,” Boyd often said to Sprey. “One mistake and they will leverage the hell out of it.”

Boyd laughed. “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy is doing.”

This was what he called his “Grand Strategy.” Reduced to its basics, the Grand Strategy was to take on the U.S. Air Force, develop the new lightweight fighter in secret, build a prototype, then force the Air Force to adopt the aircraft.

On one hand it seemed Riccioni was a glory hound. On the other hand he was so innocent and genuinely sweet that it was impossible to be angry with him. One day Boyd went to him and said, “If you insist on getting credit for the work you do, you’ll never get far in life. Don’t confuse yourself with the idea of getting credit.”

Boyd said he called in the young officer and gave him the big picture of how many base activities depended on the good will of Thai officials. He ordered the young officer, guilty or not, to continue the relationship. “I’m giving you a direct order to screw her every night until you are transferred out of here,” Boyd said he told the officer.

It would be almost five years before this search culminated in one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, an eleven-page paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” an unpublished work that some think is his most significant intellectual achievement.

Deep work and good work takes a really fucking long time

Boyd’s ERs from Southeast Asia are close to perfect. It is worth noting that in the cauldron of a combat environment, a place where men reveal what they are made of, and a place where—as his predecessor as base commander proved—some men collapse from stress, Boyd performed flawlessly. But now he was going back to the Pentagon, back to the labyrinth of the Blue Suiters.

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 did not realize it, but Boyd was laying the ground rules, testing him. All Leopold wanted was to do his job, get a go...

Spinney watched for several minutes and then said, “Colonel, I hope you don’t mind my asking. Don’t you enjoy your food?” Boyd stopped shoveling for a minute. Puzzled, he stared at Spinney. Then, as if belaboring the obvious, he said, “It’s just fuel,” and resumed shoveling.

from that moment on, Burton had a new rule: judge people by what they do and not what they say they will do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is true that speed is crucial, but not the speed of simply cycling through the Loop. By simplifying the cycle in this way, the military can make computer models. But computer models do not take into account the single most important part of the cycle—the orientation phase, especially the implicit part of the orientation phase.

The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such fashion as to get inside the mind and the decision cycle of the adversary. This means the adversary is dealing with outdated or irrelevant information and thus becomes confused and disoriented and can’t function.

Boyd includes the “Implicit Guidance & Control” from “Orientation” with both “Observations” and “Action.” This is his way of pointing out that when one has developed the proper Fingerspitzengefuhl for a changing situation, the tempo picks up and it seems one is then able to bypass the explicit “Orientation” and “Decision” part of the loop, to “Observe” and “Act” almost simultaneously. The speed must come from a deep intuitive understanding of one’s relationship to the rapidly changing environment. This is what enables a commander seemingly to bypass parts of the loop. It is this adaptability that gives the OODA Loop its awesome power.

Understanding the OODA Loop enables a commander to compress time—that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use this temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most-effective action.

To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent. The enemy falls farther and farther beh...

Boyd says that 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.

they understand their commander’s overall intent and they know their job is to do whatever is necessary to fulfill that intent. The subordinate and the commander share a common outlook. They trust each other, and this trust is the glue that holds the apparently formless effort together. Trust emphasizes implicit over explicit communications.

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.

Boyd’s briefing, then, is an updating and affirmation of Sun Tzu and a repudiation of von Clausewitz. In fact, if the briefing could be reduced to two simple thoughts, they would be: 1) the essence of warfare is cheng and ch’i, and 2) to practice this most effectively a commander must operate at a faster OODA Loop than does his opponent.

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.

There is nothing in the past to compare with the Spinney Report. For that reason alone, it is arguably one of the most important documents ever to come out of the Pentagon.

Spinney made no recommendations in his brief, so he was said to be a nihilist, a destroyer. But the omission was deliberate. Spinney knew that if he followed the usual procedure and included a list of recommendations, the focus would shift from the problem to which chores would go to what agency. He wanted the focus to remain on the problem. He chose to be the wrecking crew. He was tearing the domain apart and creating the destructive deduction. He was proving the fundamental point of the Reformers—that the Pentagon needed an overhaul.

(Boyd’s belief in using the adversary’s information against him is the practical application of Asian writings, particularly The Japanese Art of War, in which translator Thomas Cleary talks of “swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations, and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)

Boyd never said, “This is how Marines should fight” or “This is how you should conduct an amphibious landing.” Instead he taught a new way to think about combat.

The military believes most of all in hardware. But Boyd said, “People should come first. Then ideas. And then hardware.”