Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

At the end of the day, the F-100s returned to Nellis, rolled into place on the ramp, and the pilots dismounted. They were drenched with perspiration, and salt rings stained their flight suits. Their short hair was pressed down tightly by the helmets. They might have lost three or four pounds during the strenuous high-G maneuvers. They were thirsty and longed for a cold beer. But first they had to catch a ride on the truck that served as the flight-line taxi. They headed back to ops for the debrief, the most important part of the mission. How well a fighter pilot conducted the debrief was one of the most important criteria in evaluating that student as a possible instructor. After the debrief the pilots charged for the Stag Bar.

Debrief

Boyd sat at the bar, the center of attention, the champion gunfighter in a room filled with gunfighters, the high priest among high priests, accepting the adulation of his students. He rarely stayed longer than an hour. He might eat fast, but he drank slowly. No one ever saw him drink more than one beer.

He entered the academic building and knocked on Boyd’s door. “Enter.” Catton stepped inside and saluted. “Sir, Lieutenant Ronald Catton requests permission to speak with the captain.” Boyd nodded. “Sir, I have a problem,” Catton began. “That’s what I hear.” Catton told Boyd his dream and asked what he could do to salvage that dream. For a long moment Boyd did not speak. He turned in his chair and held up his pencil and stared at the tip as if he were looking through a pipper. Then he spun around and looked at Catton. “No one has ever gone through this school with a perfect academic record. I don’t know if you have the smarts to do that, Catton. But if you do, you will get their attention. If you don’t, you can forget your dream.” He paused and repeated. “Nobody has gone through this school with a perfect record.” Catton swallowed hard. Nobody had jumped across the Grand Canyon either. And what Boyd was asking him to do was the equivalent. The bust-out rate at the FWS proved it was the toughest course in the Air Force. Pilots were smart guys; they had to be to master the disciplines involved in flying the Hun. But most of them considered themselves lucky to graduate from the FWS. This school had humbled dozens of college graduates, and Catton had received his commission as an aviation cadet; he had only two years of college. Boyd waggled a finger. “They will be watching you.”

But their own closed-mindedness blinded them to Boyd’s staggering accomplishment. Before Boyd published the manual, fighter pilots thought the game of air-to-air combat was far too complex to ever fully understand. They believed the high-stakes death dance of aerial combat was too fluid to master. The “Aerial Attack Study” showed this was not the case. When a pilot goes into an aerial battle, he must have a three-dimensional picture of the battle in his head. He must have “situation awareness”; that is, he must know not only where he and each of his squadron mates are located, but also where each enemy aircraft is located. In a swirling furball of jet combat, which can range from 40,000 feet down to the ground and back again, this seems almost impossible. But situation awareness boils down to two things: first, the pilot must know the enemy’s position, and second, he must know the enemy’s velocity. (Boyd would later change “velocity” to “energy state.”) The amount of airspeed or velocity or energy available to the enemy dictates what that enemy is able to do, which maneuvers he can perform. Boyd was the first to understand the cognitive aspect of aerial combat, that it was possible to isolate not only every maneuver a fighter pilot could perform but also the counters to those maneuvers. And the counter to the counter. This meant that when a fighter pilot bounced an enemy pilot, he could know, depending on the altitude and airspeed and direction of the attack, every option ...

Situational awareness

Fighter pilots from Nellis and throughout TAC often came to Eglin to test weapons. Boyd grabbed them and talked for hours of how airplanes could maneuver against each other, about how he was trying to quantify their performance. In the middle of a conversation he suddenly would stop, pull out a scrap of paper, and scratch out an equation or a few notes. The more he talked, the more he understood about what he was trying to do. Each soliloquy was another step toward wherever it was he was going.

Real world triangulation

An engineer trying to get hard information out of a fighter pilot is like a man trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

Hillaker did not know he was looking at the only man in the world who knew more about the capabilities of the F-111 than he did. Boyd had done some preliminary E-M calculations on the F-111 and knew what a terrible mistake the Air Force was making. Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111. The Air Force looked at technology rather than the mission. And if they did consider the mission, it was always the fashionable mission of the day.

Boyd was deeply affected. This was a pivotal event in his career, as well as a personal epiphany. Often, when a man is young and idealistic, he believes that if he works hard and does the right thing, success will follow. This was what Boyd’s mother and childhood mentors had told him. But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system. Those who do not conform will one day realize that the path of doing the right thing has diverged from the path of success, and then they must decide which path they will follow through life. Almost certainly, he realized that if he was not promoted early to lieutenant colonel after all that he had done, he would never achieve high rank. And in light of a speech he was to give in coming years to young officers, his famous “To Be or to Do” speech, he likely realized that while he might do big things, he would never be at the top of the Air Force hierarchy.

Strength And defenses of culture // cf Moses early idealistic work

Boyd’s public reaction to what he saw as a personal and grievous slight was entirely out of character. He went to the Officers Club and got rip-roaring, knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk. He sat alone at the bar, not holding court, not talking about fighter tactics or E-M, but just staring at the wall, smoking his cigar, and drinking. And drinking. And drinking. It is the only time he is known to have gotten drunk.

The Pentagon is tricky and treacherous, and can be immensely rewarding. No assignment in the military is more desired, more detested, and more necessary to an officer’s advancement. It is said that Air Force careerists—“Blue Suiters”—would put on track shoes and climb up the backs of their mothers for such an assignment. If an officer is to be promoted rapidly, he must have a protector, a guardian, a rabbi—what the Navy calls a “sea daddy”—to prepare the way. No better protector can be found than a man with stars on his shoulders. A general who bestows his blessings on a young officer can see that the officer receives assignments that prepare him for ever-higher commands. A general’s support automatically puts an officer’s career on the fast track. For a Blue Suiter who craves face time with generals, the Pentagon is the ultimate assignment. All the things that make the Pentagon so prized by careerists make it loathed and detested by warriors. The self-promotion and sycophancy and backstabbing treachery are all anathema to a warrior. A warrior wants his country to be prepared for war, to win against all enemies, to prevail at all costs. Duty and patriotism and honor are not buzz words to a warrior; they are his creed. A warrior speaks the truth to generals and congressmen. Being promoted is not the top priority of a warrior. Thus, warriors do not fare well in the Pentagon. But then, there are few true warriors in the Air Force. There are officers of great patriotism, howev...

Command and control culture

Those who work in the Pentagon call it the “Building”—a 6.5-million-square-foot structure covering twenty-nine acres and containing more than twenty thousand workers, the bureaucratic nerve center for a worldwide network of airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines who operate weapons of scarifying lethality. The Pentagon has clothing stores, bookstores, bakeries, and a shopping mall; it even has its own battery-powered ambulances called “white wagons.” The need for ambulances is not surprising when one considers the plague of inter-service rivalries in the Building. The depth of these rivalries is difficult for civilians to understand. Even an Air Force officer who has never served in the Pentagon is amazed when he arrives and finds his primary job is to see that his branch of the service gets more money than any other branch of the service. He finds the real threat facing America is not a despotic foreign power or rogue terrorist groups; the real threat is that an officer from the Navy or Army or Marines might cut a deal with Congress that gives his branch of the service more money.

Management by proxy

As Boyd later explained, “You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”

Cf workspaces

Trade-offs are the heart and soul of aircraft design. If an engineer wanted greater range, he knew acceleration would be diminished. If he wanted greater speed, the wings would have to be smaller, and that, in turn, would decrease turning ability. If he wanted a small airplane, the engine, wings, or range would shrink. All things have to be wrapped inside the skin of a fighter. Design discipline is the key. The engineer must remember the mission.

Design: the mission

History has proven Boyd correct in picking the fixed-wing design. The variable-sweep wing was one of the major aviation engineering blunders of the century. Hollywood and the movie Top Gun notwithstanding, the F-14 Tomcat is a lumbering, poor performing, aerial truck. It weighs about fifty-four thousand pounds. Add on external fuel tanks and missiles and the weight is about seventy thousand pounds. It is what fighter pilots call a “grape”: squeeze it in a couple of hard turns and all the energy oozes out. That energy cannot be quickly regained, and the aircraft becomes an easy target. Navy admirals strongly discourage simulated battles between the F-14 and the latest Air Force fighters. But those engagements occasionally take place. And when they do, given pilots of equal ability, the F-14 always loses.

Another contractor sent in its top engineer, a world-famous designer who had sold an extraordinary series of aircraft to the U.S. government, to make a bid for the proposed new fighter. The engineer presented a set of generalized plans with no supporting data. The aerodynamic estimates were broad and vague. The lift versus drag curves were wildly optimistic. Boyd realized the design was not for a new aircraft but simply an upgrade of an existing airplane. The designer was giving Boyd what he thought the Air Force needed and not what Boyd wanted. The contractor apparently thought Boyd would be awed by the famous designer. Boyd loved to tell the story of what happened. He looked at the drag curves and shook his head in apparent awe. “This is amazing,” he said. “I just can’t believe this.” The designer smiled. His retinue of engineers smiled. The famous John Boyd, for all of his reputation from E-M, was still a fighter pilot. And fighter pilots are easy to confuse when they are out of the cockpit. Boyd leaned over the lift and drag chart and his fingers moved to the left, beyond the edges of the chart. He looked up, wide-eyed. “I can extrapolate this thing back to where the wing has zero lift. Wow. This airplane is so good that not only does it have zero lift, it has negative drag.” The designer no longer was smiling. Perhaps he had underestimated this Colonel Boyd. Perhaps he should have spent more time on the design. Boyd was only warming to his subject. “If this thing has ...

Balonium

And it was then that he had another epiphany, a marvelous and far-reaching epiphany. In doing advanced conceptual design work on the lightweight fighter, he went over all his notes from the past, from as far back as Korea. He remembered his early E-M work and how difficult it was to prepare accurate E-M charts for the F-86. He remembered the F-86’s countless battles with MiGs. He remembered how, on paper, the MiG was a superior aircraft in almost every respect. But the F-86 had a ten-to-one kill ratio against the MiG. Why? Boyd pored over the notes again and again. Could there be something else, some other element, perhaps an element not covered by E-M, that held the answer? Boyd made a list of attributes of the MiG and the F-86. For days he went into frequent trances as he groped for the answer. In the end he came up with two significant advantages the F-86 had over the MiG. First, the F-86 had a bubble canopy that gave the pilot a 360-degree field of vision, while the MiG pilot’s view to the rear was blocked. Thus, the F-86 pilot had a much easier time observing his enemy than the enemy had observing him. Second, the F-86 had full hydraulic controls, while the MiG did not. This meant that the F-86 pilot could control his aircraft with one finger, while controlling the MiG was so difficult that MiG pilots often lifted weights between flights in order to gain strength. The unboosted controls of the MiG meant that its pilot grew fatigued more quickly than the F-86 pilot but...

Observation and agility

At the time the findings of the Fitzhugh Commission must have been very much on Packard’s mind. The commission had been appointed in 1969 to take a hard look at DoD management and the acquisition process. The group issued a report recommending that when building new weapons systems, the DoD should develop and test a prototype before sending the weapons system into production. This is because in almost every instance, a defense contractor underestimates costs and overestimates performance. (The practice of underestimating costs is so common that it has a name: “front-loading.”) A prototype reveals design flaws, performance inadequacies, and true costs. This was not a new idea. Before World War II most new fighters appeared first as prototypes. It made sense to test a design, decide whether it was good or bad, make modifications, redesign it, and then put it on the production line. But then came jet engines and swept wings and ever more exotic avionics, all of which caused larger Air Force and contractor bureaucracies. The development staff of an airplane went from maybe a hundred people to a thousand or more. Defense contractors said the business had become too complex and too expensive to make prototypes. Air Force bureaucracies agreed. They did not want tests that might cancel their projects. McNamara played into their hands when he brought to the Pentagon something called “Total Package Procurement Concept.” He thought all the analysis and quantification could be done on...

Going back to waterfall

Boyd, as a senior officer, lived in a trailer. By all accounts he worked eighteen- and twenty-hour days. He bought a reel-to-reel tape deck, and every night as he did paperwork his trailer was filled with the ominous “Ride of the Valkyries” or the majestic “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” It was at night that Boyd made his phone calls to America, to Sprad or Christie or Sprey and once to Mary. These calls were made on the ham-radio network called MARS, a system that necessitated saying “over” after speaking and then waiting to accommodate the interminably long pause; Mary found it terribly confusing. And it was at night that he worked long hours on his “learning theory.” It would be almost five years before this search culminated in one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, an eleven-page paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” an unpublished work that some think is his most significant intellectual achievement.

Learning theory

Boyd liked nothing about his new office. The long-range planning was done without budget considerations and therefore was largely irrelevant. Boyd called his new workplace the “office of no planning” and refused to sign most papers sent his way. Dozens of memos and plans and studies and directives crossed his desk and were tossed aside. The paperwork piled up, first in his desk, and then in a box in the corner. “If somebody asks me, I tell them the papers are here but I can’t find them,” he said. “I don’t sign off on no-plans.” He stalked the office, staring at his underlings, then suddenly walking up to them, sticking a bony finger into their chest, and saying things such as, “If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, then give him loyalty.”

Integrity

Then Boyd delivered what was to be called his “To Be or to Do” speech. Leopold was the first person known to receive the speech, probably because Boyd, based on his experiences over the years, was solidifying certain conclusions about the promotion system within the military. “Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” he said. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into Leopold’s eyes and heart. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?”

Be or do?

As Leopold approached the six-month deadline, Boyd asked him to consider staying. “I gotta tell you, it will be better for your career if you move on. But you’re doing good work, Tiger, and I’d like for you to stay.” “Sir, I’d like to sleep on it.” The next morning, for the first time since Leopold was assigned to Boyd’s office, he arrived to find Boyd already there. “Sir, I can’t imagine doing more anywhere else than I can do here,” Leopold said. “I’d like to stay.” Boyd’s face lit up. “Ray, I can’t guarantee you any early promotions or special recognition. All I can guarantee is that you will be doing important work. And it will be fun.” Boyd had become Leopold’s surrogate father. And Leopold had become the next Acolyte.

Lead by gathering followers

Now they were all together, all save one: Christie the Finagler, Sprey the Intelligent, Leopold the First, Spinney the Brash, and Burton the Unbending. For the next decade they revolved around Boyd, asserting themselves in various degrees before coalescing into the most powerful ad hoc group the Building had ever seen.

“unique in his ability to study, dissect, analyze and assemble ideas in a useful form so they can be transmitted into future actions.”

Seeing it all on the blackboard made clear to Burton what Boyd and Spinney and Leopold had seen months earlier. And from that moment on, Burton had a new rule: judge people by what they do and not what they say they will do. The conversion of Jim Burton had begun. But it would take another, far more traumatic event before he became a true believer. And when he did, the hidden iron will would become a coat of armor. He would shock Spinney and Leopold and Sprey and Christie—everyone but Boyd. The quintessential Blue Suiter would turn his back on all that he had worked for and prove that he wanted to do something with his life rather than be somebody.

Conversion

was obvious from Boyd’s phone calls that he was not only spending a disproportionately large amount of his retirement pay on books but was reading them all. Christie’s phone might ring at 2:00 A.M. and when he picked it up Boyd would say, “I had a breakthrough. Listen to this.” And without a pause he would begin reading from Hegel or from an obscure book on cosmology or quantum physics or economics or math or history or social science or education. Christie thought Boyd had taken leave of his senses. Except for the year at NKP, the past nine years of Boyd’s life had been devoted to hosing his superiors. He was a man of action. But when he walked out of the Building, he walked into a world of ideas. There was almost no transition. One day he was on the phone checking on the progress of the F-16 and the next he was calling people at 2:00 A.M. to read German philosophy. And for what? What was this learning theory he kept talking about? He said he had begun work on the thing back at NKP and he still had nothing to show for it. Why didn’t Boyd just retire?

Reading

It is thick and heavy and ponderous, filled with caveats and qualifiers and arcane references that span theories never before connected. To read “Destruction and Creation” is to fully appreciate the term “heavy sledding.” The most important part of “Destruction and Creation” is Boyd’s elaboration on the idea that a relationship exists between an observer and what is being observed. This idea is not original. One of the oldest questions in philosophy concerns the nature of reality. But Boyd presented a new explanation of how we perceive physical reality. A half-dozen people can look at the same process or the same event and each might see the process or the event in an entirely different fashion. For a simple example, a crowd streaming into a college football stadium is looked upon one way by a fraternity boy, another way by a television cameraman, another way by a beer distributor, another way by a security officer, and still another way by the college president. Atop this insight Boyd placed an idea borrowed from Heisenberg: the process of observation changes what is being observed. To continue with the simplified example, people in the crowd, knowing they are being observed by a television cameraman, might wave or shout or begin spontaneous demonstrations. The same crowd, knowing security officers are observing, might become subdued and decorous. Or it might become confrontational. If we are aware that these changes take place we reassess and recalculate our relationship...

Synthesis

Now Boyd showed how synthesis was the basis of creativity. He asked, “From some of the ingredients in this sea of anarchy, how do we find common qualities and connecting threads to synthesize a new and altogether different domain?” Few people ever found a new way to put them together. Boyd coaxed and wheedled but eventually helped the audience along by emphasizing handle bars, outboard motor, tank treads, and skis. These, he said, were the ingredients needed to build what he called a “new reality”—a snowmobile. To make sure the new reality is both viable and relevant, Boyd said it must be continually refined by verifying its internal consistency and by making sure it matches up with reality. But the very process of making sure the reality is relevant causes mismatches between the new observation and the description of that observation. It is here that Godel, Heisenberg, and the second law come into play. The mismatches are inevitable and expected because, as Boyd said, “One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.” This never-ending cycle of mismatches, destruction, and creation is the “natural manifestation of a dialectic engine.” This “engine” is the relationship between the observer and whatever is being observed. The idea that a two-way relationship exists between the observer and the observed, that the process of observation changes what is being observed, and that our awareness of ...

Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives. The briefing revealed that the central theme of Boyd’s work—a time-based theory of conflict—was beginning to take form. And it marked a significant transition in Boyd’s work with its references to the Blitzkrieg and the Entebbe raid; he was becoming interested in ground warfare.

Fast transients briefing

From Sun Tzu, Boyd moved to the campaigns of Alexander the Great around 300 B.C., Hannibal around 200 B.C., Belisarius around 500 A.D., Genghis Khan around 1200 A.D., Tamerlane around 1400 A.D., then Napoléon and von Clausewitz and on through World War I and World War II. He found that the campaigns of many of these great commanders, particularly the Eastern commanders such as Genghis Khan, demonstrated an understanding of Sun Tzu.

Art of war

Understanding the OODA Loop is difficult. First, even though it is called a loop, it is not. A drawing of the Loop shows thirty arrows connecting the various ingredients, which means hundreds of possible “loops” can be derived. The best drawing of the OODA Loop was done by Spinney for Boyd’s briefings. It shows a very large orientation part of the cycle. Becoming oriented to a competitive situation means bringing to bear the cultural traditions, genetic heritage, new information, previous experiences, and analysis / synthesis process of the person doing the orienting—a complex integration that each person does differently. These human differences make the Loop unpredictable. In addition, the orientation phase is a nonlinear feedback system, which, by its very nature, means this is a pathway into the unknown. The unpredictability is crucial to the success of the OODA Loop.

The loop

The OODA Loop briefing contains 185 slides. Early in the briefing the slide “Impressions” gives the frame of reference for what is to come. Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: 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. After marching through the great battles of history, Boyd dwells a moment on T. E. Lawrence, who talks of how a commander must “arrange the mind” of the enemy. Another important slide shows how the Blitzkrieg—or maneuver conflict—is the perfect tactical application of the OODA Loop. Boyd asks: How does a commander harmonize the numerous individual thrusts of a Blitzkrieg attack and maintain the cohesion of his larger effort? The answer is that the Blitzkrieg is far more than the lightning thrusts that most people think of when they hear the term; rather it was all about high operational tempo and the rapid exploitation of opportunity. In a Blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his Schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize and hold a certain hill; instead they are given “mission orders.” This means that they understand their commander’s overall intent and they...

Variety, rapidity, harmony, initiative

The OODA Loop briefing contains 185 slides. Early in the briefing the slide “Impressions” gives the frame of reference for what is to come. Here Boyd says that to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: 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. After marching through the great battles of history, Boyd dwells a moment on T. E. Lawrence, who talks of how a commander must “arrange the mind” of the enemy. Another important slide shows how the Blitzkrieg—or maneuver conflict—is the perfect tactical application of the OODA Loop. Boyd asks: How does a commander harmonize the numerous individual thrusts of a Blitzkrieg attack and maintain the cohesion of his larger effort? The answer is that the Blitzkrieg is far more than the lightning thrusts that most people think of when they hear the term; rather it was all about high operational tempo and the rapid exploitation of opportunity. In a Blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly exploit opportunity because he makes sure his subordinates know his intent, his Schwerpunkt. They are not micromanaged, that is, they are not told to seize and hold a certain hill; instead they are given “mission orders.” This means that they understand their commander’s overall intent and they...

Wholeness

A crucial part of the OODA Loop—or “Boyd Cycle,” as it has come to be known—is that once the process begins, it must not slow. It must continue and it must accelerate. Success is the greatest trap for the novice who properly implements the OODA Loop. He is so amazed at what he has done that he pauses and looks around and waits for reinforcements. But this is the time to exploit the confusion and to press on. Patton knew this intuitively. He ignored his flanks and kept his armored spear pointed at the heart of the enemy.

A ratchet

The briefing has a number of problems. It is repetitive in the extreme. Boyd often threw in a slide that said ?—RAISES NAGGINGQUESTION—? when, in fact, the question had not been raised except rhetorically by Boyd. Periodically he had a slide titled INSIGHT, which is little more than a platform for him to launch into a tangential cadenza. The cluttered slides were jammed with ponderous and virtually impenetrable sentences. None of the discipline of the academic existed. Boyd was force-feeding his audience, another hallmark of the autodidact and a characteristic manifest in his insistence of “full brief or no brief.” Considering the impact of the briefing, these are niggling faults. And they speak more to Boyd’s personality than to the content of the briefing. The purpose of the briefing was not to reveal the “Answer” but to jar listeners out of complacency and into thinking on their own. Boyd abhorred the idea that his briefing might be considered dogma. In fact, he often said listeners should take the briefing out and burn it before they considered it dogma.

Force Feeding

What the hell was there to reform? When officers dropped in to chide Boyd about his reform movement, they could not resist the temptation to ask him how his ideas fit in with a military placing greater emphasis on technology. “Machines don’t fight wars,” he responded. “Terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.”

Spinney made no recommendations in his brief, so he was said to be a nihilist, a destroyer. But the omission was deliberate. Spinney knew that if he followed the usual procedure and included a list of recommendations, the focus would shift from the problem to which chores would go to what agency. He wanted the focus to remain on the problem. He chose to be the wrecking crew. He was tearing the domain apart and creating the destructive deduction. He was proving the fundamental point of the Reformers—that the Pentagon needed an overhaul.

Solutioning not always appropriate

Part of Spinney’s battle joy was that the Air Force did not know how to deal with his report. One of Boyd’s fundamental dictums when waging bureaucratic war was to use the other person’s information against him. Spinney’s brief was built on Pentagon documents. He understated everything so that any revisions would only make his conclusions more damning. (Boyd’s belief in using the adversary’s information against him is the practical application of Asian writings, particularly The Japanese Art of War, in which translator Thomas Cleary talks of “swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations, and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)

Swordlessness

That technology should reinforce that behavior, not drive it, was the argument of the Reformers. Boyd’s mantra was “Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.” He also preached, “People, ideas, hardware—in that order.” Thus, machines and technology must serve the larger purpose.

Boyd and Wyly decided the AWS was fundamentally an educational institution, and educational institutions are places where students consider all ideas. One of the best ways to do that is to have students read. So Wyly and Boyd put together a reading list. This was a radical step for the Marine Corps, the least-intellectual branch of the U.S. military. But General Trainor, by now widely recognized as Wyly’s protector, blessed the concept and soon the young captains were reading Victory at High Tide and Guerrilla and White Death and Strategy and even books by World War II German officers such as Attacks by Rommel and Panzer Battles by von Mellenthin. Boyd and Wyly were both combat veterans, so when they claimed there was a connection between books and the ability to lead men into battle, students listened. In fact, students began coming to class early so they could debate the ideas they had been reading. Soon students were recommending additional books for the reading list.

Read

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.”

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.

To read

When a Marine Corps colonel retires, especially a senior colonel who is a decorated combat veteran, there is a parade and a ceremony where he is presented with a Legion of Merit. His wife is given a large bouquet and there is a letter from the commandant thanking the colonel for his years of meritorious service. Wyly got none of these. He drove out the front gate of Quantico unnoticed. But then, guerrillas do not march home to victory parades.

Boyd gave Burton three guiding principles. The first was the most difficult and most familiar to anyone who had worked with Boyd. “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.” The second thing Boyd told Burton was not to criticize the Bradley itself. “If you do, you are lumped in with all the other Bradley critics. It is the testing process you are concerned with.” While Boyd and Burton might make such a distinction, the Army could not. To them, criticizing the testing process was the same as criticizing the Bradley. But the difference in the two approaches is not at all subtle. By staying focused on the testing methodology, Burton was protecting the lives of American soldiers; he held the mental and moral high ground. 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.

Principles for institutional conflict

The Army did not want Burton around for those tests, however, so Army generals talked to Air Force generals, who sent down word that Burton was being transferred to Alaska. He was given a seven-day notice to accept the transfer or resign. It was just as Boyd predicted: a brutal, head-on assault. And it appeared effective. After all, if there is a bothersome employee, what better way to get rid of him than to transfer him? Burton thought the battle was over. But Boyd laughed. “Goddamn, Jim, this is the dumbest decision the Air Force can make. Whoever made this decision is general officer material.” He told Burton to collect every memo and every letter and every study in his files that dealt with the Bradley controversy, to make copies, and to flood the Building with little brothers and sisters. Burton protested. “I thought you wanted me to work within the system.” “Jim, part of working within the system means that everyone who has a right to know what’s going on has a copy of all the paperwork.” He paused. And when he spoke again Burton heard the laughter in his voice. “If something needs to leak outside the Building, God will take care of it.” Not even the most militant of Burton’s opponents could fault him for providing information to those connected with the Bradley program, so Burton emptied the contents of a filing cabinet and made copies of every document. He delivered copies to a number of people. A cover memo explained that he had been relieved of his job and that t...

Subversive countermove: action opens up opp for factual flood

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.”

Do your homework

In the summer of 1987, Boyd finished two new briefings. “Organic Design for Command and Control” was completed in May. Historically, briefings about command and control dealt with the “how”—that is, who reports to whom between various levels of command in fast-moving tactical situations. Boyd’s new briefing dealt with the “what” of command and control—the implicit connections and bonds that form the foundation for the proper messages between levels of command. This was the first time that the substance of what was communicated took precedence over the hardwired connections of the past. “The Strategic Game of? And?” Boyd finished in June. Here he deals with the themes of interaction and isolation. How do we physically, mentally, and morally isolate our adversaries while still interacting with others and with unfolding events? Much of the content of this briefing is a recycling of material from “Patterns of Conflict,” “Destruction and Creation,” and “Organic Design for Command and Control.” At the same time, Boyd was working on another briefing called “Conceptual Spiral,” a work that elaborated upon “Destruction and Creation” and thus more or less brought his work back to where it had begun.

Find

Richards was the mathematical whiz who came to the Pentagon in 1973, the man whom Christie assigned the job of finding a place for happy hour. Richards had reviewed all of Boyd’s briefings. 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. But the Toyota production system began in the 1950s, about two decades before Boyd began work on “Patterns of Conflict.” The underlying ideas of mutual trust, mission orders, and individual responsibility, and the concepts of “harmony” and “flow” and—most of all—the manipulation of time as a production tool were central ideas in both the Toyota system and the strategy of maneuver conflict. About that time 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.

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.”

Culture

In the beginning, Hammond saw the book as a biography. But that changed when Boyd issued his only caveat: no personal information is to be included in the book. Boyd did not want to talk about Erie, about his family, or about the personal dimensions of his marriage and his life. 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.

To read

There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: We can start from a comprehensive whole and break it down to its particulars or we can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole.28,24 Saying it another way, but in a related sense, we can go from the general-to-specific or from the specific-to-general. A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from the specific-to-general. In following this line of thought can we think of other activities that are related to these two opposing ideas? Is not analysis related to proceeding from the general-to-specific? Is not synthesis, the opposite of analysis related to proceeding from the specific-to-general? Putting all this together: Can we not say that general-to-specific is related to both deduction and analysis, while specific-to-general is related to induction and synthesis?

Synthesizing