Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

All his life Boyd was pursued by enemies real and imagined. He reacted the only way he knew how: by attacking.

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But he also knew that a few men, only the best, could grow up and blossom and realize their potential when they were put to the fire.

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I need the right information to separate the wheat from the chaff. Those who can’t separate the wheat from the chaff don’t matter.”

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The danger—and this is a danger neither seen nor understood by many people who profess a knowledge of Boyd’s work—is that if our mental processes become focused on our internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality.

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result. Boyd showed why this is a natural process and why the only alternative is to do a destructive deduction and rebuild one’s mental image to correspond to the new reality.

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favorable firing position, and it can enable a pursuing pilot to gain a favorable firing position. The advantage gained from the fast transient suggests that to win in battle a pilot needs to operate at a faster tempo than his enemy. It suggests that he must stay one or two steps ahead of his adversary; he must operate inside his adversary’s time scale.

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Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

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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.

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He remembered what Boyd often said: “There are only so many ulcers in the world and it is your job to see that other people get them.”

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of how the vulnerability testing of tanks and armored vehicles was done largely by computer modeling. And the models were never verified by field tests. Thus, to Sprey, the model-based tests had no validity. Subject our tanks and our infantry carriers to realistic battlefield tests, he said. The lives of American soldiers are at stake.

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“And you must never panic. When they surprise you, even if the surprise seems fatal, there is always a countermove.”

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