Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

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.