Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

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. His new way turned conventional military wisdom on its head. The military believes most of all in hardware. But Boyd said, “People should come first. Then ideas. And then hardware.”

Wyly was leading a guerrilla movement within the Corps, and sometimes he recalled a line from his lectures: “Guerrillas win wars but they don’t march home to victory parades.”

A Marine officer fired from his job is considered wounded. He is prey for all predators.

When intelligence reports told of a large building flying a curious flag, ranking officers assumed the building housed one of the Grenada revolutionary organizations. A Navy admiral ordered Smith’s Marines to attack. Historically, a Marine commander receiving such orders would have done so without a second thought. But a fundamental tenet of maneuver warfare is to give the officer on the scene the authority to make tactical decisions. A young captain under Smith’s command was not sure the building housed revolutionaries and suggested sending out a patrol. Smith had confidence in the captain and agreed. He could always call in naval gunfire to level the buildings. As the patrol approached the building, a civilian came out to welcome them. Dozens of guns were trained on the man. If he had twitched, if he had reached into a pocket, he probably would have died. He waved and said, “Gentlemen, I am glad to see you. I am the ambassador of Venezuela.”

Smith’s overall performance in Grenada was even more illustrative of how a maneuverist works. Elite Army rangers were pinned down at the airport, largely by Cuban construction workers, and could not move. But Smith’s Marines, a much smaller group, ripped around Grenada as if they owned the island. They bypassed enemy strongholds, put strength against weakness, and moved like water flowing downhill. They created such confusion and uncertainty that hundreds of enemy soldiers surrendered to Smith because, as one of them said, “The Marines are everywhere.” 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?” It was maneuver warfare. And in a few more years, the Marines would demonstrate, with far more force and clarity, the efficacy of this new-old concept.

Wyly continued to think hard about reform. After he wrote an article about how generals need to study tactics, his boss came in and shut the door—always a bad sign—and said, “Mike, this kind of article is not going to help your career.” He was right: Wyly never had a command after he began publishing. Passed over for general, he began to think seriously about retirement.

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.” Boyd paused a moment and added a final thought. “And keep the goddamn thing simple so generals can understand it.”

All this time, Wyly continued sending drafts of the campaign plan to Sullivan. He said the first thing the Marine Corps should do was clean up the personnel system and stamp out careerism. He wrote of the need to provide professional education for all Marines, to instill a greater sense of ethics, and to promote for unit cohesion. He stressed the importance of maneuver warfare. Every idea was rejected. Sullivan slashed and edited and kicked back draft after draft for rewriting. He even wrote “Shit” on one version. He summed up his feelings toward Wyly with the greatest insult a fighter pilot can muster: “I don’t think I’d want you for a wingman.”

When the elephants are fighting, it is best to keep your distance.

“So you got your reward; you got kicked in the teeth. That means you were doing good work. Getting kicked in the teeth is the reward for good work.”

It was also a matter of considerable pride to Wyly that during the 1980s the Marine Corps evolved from being knuckle draggers who take the hill to the most intellectual branch of the U.S. military; even enlisted men were reading Sun Tzu.

The job of military assistant is one of the most sensitive in the military—so sensitive that those who fill it often last only for a year or so. Almost never do they go from one administration to another.

A military aide rarely is loyal to his civilian boss because he knows that in a year or so he returns to regular military duties. If he has been loyal to his generals and protected the interest of his branch of the military, he usually is promoted. Some three-dozen military assistants work in the Pentagon. Their ostensible purpose is to act as a liaison between their civilian boss and their branch of the service. But in reality they are spies, there only to protect the interests of their generals and their branch. Every meeting of their civilian boss, every relevant phone call, even the areas of interest the civilians have, are all reported back to their generals.

Civilians unacquainted with the ways of the Building have only vague ideas about what it is the Pentagon does. They think the real business of the Pentagon has something to do with defending America. But it does not. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons. And the military has a pathological aversion to rigorous testing procedures because in almost every instance the performance of the weapon or weapons system is far below what it is advertised to be and, thus, far below the performance used to sell Congress on the idea in the first place. Weapons development is inherently risky and the costs can be difficult to predict. But the big problem is what Spinney calls “front-loading,” the practice of deliberately underestimating the costs in order for Congress to fund the program. The weapons-buying business has few checks and balances; from beginning to end it is an advocacy proceeding. Not only do military rewards and promotions go to the officer in charge of a major program but he almost always finds a high-level job in the defense industry upon retirement, often with the company whose project he ushered through the Pentagon. This is the true nature of the Building.

He told Burton to always keep the initiative. “And you must never panic. When they surprise you, even if the surprise seems fatal, there is always a countermove.”

“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.”

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.

A brother officer, a colonel in Burton’s office, began spying on Burton. He made notes when he heard Burton talking on the telephone. He kept a record of Burton’s meetings. Every memo Burton wrote was copied and hand delivered to top Army generals. The memos were then copied and filtered down from four-stars to three-stars to two-stars and one-stars, even to colonels. Burton knew the military was building a file, the sole purpose of which was to justify firing him. Boyd was elated. He saw this as a chance for Burton to wield great influence with the Army leaders behind the plan. He told Burton to keep in mind that when he wrote a memo, it was not for the person to whom it was addressed, but rather to the generals. Boyd called this a “reverse pump.” Burton was feeding information to the people spying on him. This meant that accuracy in everything Burton said and wrote was even more critical. Again and again Boyd came back to one of his earliest admonitions to Burton. “Do your homework. If they hose you one time, they will never again respect you.”

He took a deep breath and said, “Show me where your computer models deal with fire, explosions, toxic gasses, and blast lung.” Army experts said these were not a consideration. Burton reached into his briefcase, threw a report on the table, and said, “Then how do you explain the data from World War II, England, and Israel that show these are the main reason for casualties?” The Army said, “Well, they do exist. But we can’t model them on the computer so we ignore them.”

Civilian test personnel began calling Burton at home. Almost every man called to tell Burton the specifics of how he was ordered to influence test results. 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.

“Jim, you may not win,” Boyd said to him. “But you can’t give the bastards a free ride. You’re doing the right thing. Stay with it, Tiger.”

Congress ordered hearings on the Bradley. On one side would be the top generals connected with the Bradley program. On the other would be Colonel Burton. Sprey helped organize Burton’s written statement, and when Sprey was through, Burton knew his position was unassailable. Then the Army informed Burton that everything he planned to say was classified. He would not be allowed to say anything. “If this decision is not reversed, I will inform Congress my testimony has been censored,” Burton said. “And I will also testify that Army generals have revealed classified information to the media in order to support the Bradley.” Suddenly Burton’s testimony was no longer classified.

This is a tactic used to set up an employee for dismissal: poor performance ratings over several years means an employee can be fired with no recourse. On the other hand, if the rating is proven to be retributive, it is illegal.

Boyd often had counseled Spinney to have goals but to make sure the goals could not easily be reached. He talked of the desolation a man faced when he grew older and all his goals were realized. And now Boyd’s work had come full circle. He had reached all his goals.

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.

Richards found that lean production had the same impact on American business that maneuver conflict had on the U.S. military. While the idea became a much-talked-about fad in business, very few companies actually put it into practice.

Richards found that a famous observation by Taiichi Ono, the Toyota vice president who created the Toyota system, held true: companies performing reasonably well will not adopt the Toyota system, although they may showcase isolated elements of lean production. Boyd put it more succinctly: “You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”

Hammond’s book The Mind of War was published in the spring of 2001. It is a study of Boyd’s ideas and is written for an academic audience or for an audience interested in military affairs.