Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

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. Coalition forces operated at a much higher tempo than the enemy. The resulting crises happened so fast that opposing forces could not keep pace with them. The one-hundred-hour ground war blitz against Iraq is a splendid example of maneuver warfare, a first-rate instance of cheng/ch’i, the conventional and the unconventional, all done so quickly the enemy was disoriented and collapsed from within. The brilliance of Cheney’s plan was proven in its success. But there were failures in execution, particularly by the Army, whose famous left hook simply stopped in the desert for three nights because a general was afraid to expose his flanks—in other words, he wanted his forces to be synchronized. This so slowed the Army that the retreating Republican Guard and much of the Iraqi Army escaped. Schwarzkopf and several generals have since spent much of their time blaming each other, but it was the slavish adherence to an outmoded attrition-warfare doctrine that allowed the Iraqis to escape. Boyd’s earlier predictions about synchronization in the Army were proven true.