Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

He ordered Leopold to recompute everything as a “best case,” that is, to give the B-1 advocates the benefit of every doubt. Every time Leopold had a choice of numbers, he was to use the most conservative. This meant that under scrutiny, and the Air Force would indeed subject the study to the most rigorous scrutiny, the numbers would only get worse; that is, any adjustments would show only higher costs.

This shows amazing thinking when presenting critical information that will not be well received.

He talked of “paralysis by analysis” and said Washington was a city of ten thousand analysts and no synthesizers. “They know more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing”

The briefing begins with what was to become Boyd’s most famous—and least understood—legacy: the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, or O-O-D-A Loop. Today, anyone can hook up to an Internet browser, type “OODA Loop,” and find more than one thousand references. The phrase has become a buzz word in the military and among business consultants who preach a time-based strategy. But few of those who speak so glibly about the OODA Loop have a true understanding of what it means and what it can do.

He later went to work for Lockheed and began studying the fabled Toyota production system, which he found “frighteningly familiar” from his study of maneuver conflict.

Tom Peters published Thriving on Chaos, a book that revolutionized management theories in America. Peters talked of creating and exploiting chaos—the essence of maneuver conflict—of shaping the marketplace and of mutual trust. Richards wrote Peters and said the book sounded very much like the theories of Boyd. Peters said he had read James Fallows’s book and knew Boyd’s work. He was embarrassed that he had not given Boyd credit, because his book had been shaped by Boyd’s ideas. He later wrote a newspaper column in which he corrected the oversight.

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

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.”