Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

Boyd said, “Do not write it as a formula. Write it as a way to teach officers to think, to think in new ways about war. War is ever changing and men are ever fallible. Rigid rules simply won’t work. Teach men to think.”

“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.”

Now Burton used his reputation for asking questions as a way to protect his sources. He returned to the test site and asked question after question until he officially received the information that had been passed to him unofficially.

No matter how optimistic he is, when a man reaches sixty it is more difficult to cling to the idea that he is middle-aged. He stands at the threshold of old age and senses the increasing speed of time’s winged chariot. Intimations of mortality grow stronger.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “And there are only two options.” Still Boyd did not respond. Spinney told Boyd of his first plan, which drew only a noncommital grunt. Then Spinney told him of his second idea, which he thought was best: have the Marines feint an amphibious assault at Kuwait and then, while the attention of the Iraqi Army was diverted, make a gigantic left hook far into the desert, then swing north, envelop the Iraqi Army, and annihilate them. “It’s a classic single envelopment,” he said. “Almost a version of the von Schlieffen Plan.” For a long moment there was silence. Then Boyd said, “Chuck, I want you to forget what you just said. You are not to discuss it with anyone else. Ever.”

Spinney was sitting in the study of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, when Brigadier General Richard Neal, the American spokesman during the Gulf War, went on television to brief the press on the extraordinary success of coalition forces. He told of a confused Iraqi Army whose soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. Asked for a reason, he said, “We kind of got inside his decision cycle.” “Son of a bitch!” Spinney shouted. He called Boyd and said, “John, they’re using your words to describe how we won the war.

Everything successful about the Gulf War is a direct reflection of Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict”—multiple thrusts and deception operations that created ambiguity and caused the enemy to surrender by the thousands. America (and the coalition forces) won without resorting to a prolonged ground war. America not only picked when and where it would fight, but also when and where it would not fight.

Richards found that lean production had the same impact on American business that maneuver conflict had on the U.S. military.

Boyd put it more succinctly: “You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”

(Belisarius, the Byzantine commander, was one of Boyd’s favorite generals and was an early practitioner of maneuver conflict; he always fought outnumbered, never lost a battle, and understood the moral dimension of war.)

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.

Going back to our idea chain, it follows that creativity is related to induction, synthesis, and integration since we proceeded from unstructured bits and pieces to a new general pattern or concept.