Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

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