Re: Colonel John Boyd
More Col. John Boyd<br /><br />Norfolk Virginian-Pilot <br />December 9, 2002 <br /><br />Air Force Col. John R. Boyd: The Man Who Shaped The Military <br /><br />By Dale Eisman, Virginian-Pilot <br /><br />WASHINGTON -- The leader was "Genghis John," his troops "the Fighter Mafia," and their project "the Lord's work." In a <br />few cramped Pentagon offices, a volatile but brilliant Air Force colonel secretly led a handful of other pilots and engineers in the <br />development of a revolutionary aircraft design. They pored over drawings of wings and fuselages, prodding and occasionally <br />bullying contractors. They studied variables for thrust, lift and drag, then shipped their calculations to a co-conspirator in <br />Florida who had access to computers that could analyze and spot flaws in the data. As the Air Force brass touted the new <br />F-15 Eagle and the Navy worked on the F-14 Tomcat, Col. John R. Boyd and his henchmen dreamed and schemed of a <br />lighter, more nimble plane that would out-perform both and cost less. <br /><br />"It was one of the most audacious plots ever hatched against a military service and it was done under the noses of men who, if <br />they had the slightest idea of what it was about, not only would have stopped it instantly, but would have cut orders reassigning <br />Boyd to the other side of the globe," author Robert Coram writes in a new book about Boyd, who died of cancer in 1997. <br /><br />Helped along by a handful of senior officers and congressmen dubious about official claims for the Eagle and the Tomcat, Boyd <br />and his gang provided the intellectual energy for what would become the F-16, a warplane now flown by 22 nations and hailed <br />as the most successful fighter aircraft in history. <br /><br />Thirty years later, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushes the development of weapons systems that promise to <br />transform today's military, Boyd's story may serve as both inspiration and warning. <br /><br />The saga demonstrates that radical change is possible, even in the world's most notoriously hidebound institution, but suggests it <br />must bubble up from deep within the ranks. <br /><br />"Rumsfeld is trying . . . to impose change from the top down," complained Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, one of the few members <br />of the Fighter Mafia still working in the Pentagon. "And what that means is that they have to have an answer they're trying to <br />impose. . . . The problem is, they haven't done the research to see if that answer is actually workable." <br /><br />In contrast, Boyd, the Mafia's godfather and the central figure in the broader military reform movement it spawned, was a <br />cigar-chomping, free-cursing dynamo, notorious for challenging convention and questioning authority at every level. He was <br />endlessly revising projects he'd spent years developing. <br /><br />Some of Boyd's Mafia also worry that Rumsfeld's vision of transformation relies too heavily on gadgets and not enough on <br />human intellect. <br /><br />Boyd "would be appalled" that Osama bin Laden remains beyond the reach of the U.S. military 15 months after the Sept. 11 <br />attacks, said one Boyd contemporary who, because of his continuing association with the military, asked to remain anonymous. <br />The al-Qaida leader, said Boyd's contemporary, is demonstrating how an ability to stay ahead of the opposition in thought and <br />movement can frustrate the most advanced technologies. <br /><br />Though he hit his stride as a flier a half-century ago, Boyd remains a legend among fighter pilots. Training young aviators in <br />Nevada during the 1950s, he became known as "40-second Boyd" because of his offer to pay $20 to any opponent who <br />could evade him for more than 40 seconds in air-to-air maneuvers; none ever did. <br /><br />In the 1960s, when contemporaries called him the "Mad Major," Boyd developed the "Energy-Maneuverability Theory," a <br />revolutionary way to measure the performance of different aircraft. It demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet MiGs then in <br />use in Vietnam, spurring development of the F-15. <br /><br />And in the '70s, convinced that the Air Force had overloaded the Eagle, Boyd not only led the Fighter Mafia, he fathered a <br />way of thinking about warfare that continues to influence the U.S. military and foreign forces. <br /><br />Embraced most enthusiastically by the Marine Corps, Boyd's theories were critical to development of strategies that helped the <br />United States win the Persian Gulf War of 1991; carried into the private sector, they've been adopted and adapted by <br />businesses such as Toyota, General Electric and Wal-Mart. <br /><br />Coram, whose book "Boyd" was three years in the making and reached bookstores last month, is a veteran reporter and pilot. <br />He argues that Boyd may have been the most important student of warfare since Sun Tzu, the Chinese scholar whose <br />2,400-year-old essay, "The Art of War," is still a touchstone for military officers. <br /><br />"Sun Tzu gave you a rulebook," said Mike Wyly, a retired Marine colonel who helped spread Boyd's ideas through the Corps. <br />"What Boyd said is way more applicable in actual thinking about tactics and strategy." <br /><br />Boyd built on Sun Tzu's teaching that the surest way to victory is to so confuse the enemy that he is rendered unable to fight. <br />He read voraciously, simultaneously studying human behavior and the history of warfare, in particular battles in which <br />outnumbered or ill-equipped forces defeated enemies who seemed clearly superior. <br /><br />He concluded that successful commanders managed to think and act ahead of their foes. In a briefing titled "Patterns of <br />Conflict" and delivered over the years to hundreds of military and civilian officials, he broke decision-making into a continuous <br />four-step cycle -- observe, orient, decide, act -- and demonstrated how the successful commander wins by "getting inside the <br />loop" to disrupt and ultimately paralyze his opponent. <br /><br />Boyd took six hours to deliver the briefing. He never reduced it to writing because he never considered it finished, Coram <br />writes. <br /><br />One policymaker who heard Boyd's brief in the 1980s was a Wyoming congressman with a strong interest in defense. His <br />name was Richard B. Cheney. As secretary of defense a few years later, he brought Boyd back into the Pentagon for private <br />sessions on plans for war in Iraq. Cheney, now vice president, told Coram last year that Boyd "clearly was a factor in my <br />thinking" as those plans evolved. <br /><br />"We could use him again now," Cheney added. "I wish he was around. . . . I'd love to turn him loose on our current defense <br />establishment and see what he could come up with." <br /><br />Coram recounts how Mafia-member Spinney, watching the 1991 war unfold on television at his home in Alexandria, leaped <br />from his chair as a U.S. military spokesman described how thousands of Iraqis were surrendering to Americans who'd gone <br />around their strongholds to hit targets and sow confusion behind the lines. <br /><br />"We kind of got inside his decision cycle," the spokesman told reporters. <br /><br />Spinney blurted an epithet, grabbed the phone, and called Boyd. "John, they're using your words to describe how we won the <br />war!" he said. "Everything about the war was yours. It's all right out of 'Patterns.' " <br /><br />Coram calls Boyd "the most important unknown man of his time." He also was among the most difficult. <br /><br />Secretaries regularly were reduced to tears by his profanity, and superior officers often noted his unkempt appearance; he <br />neglected his family, living with his wife and five kids in a series of tiny apartments well below their means. Two of the children <br />have struggled for most of their lives with depression, and the family worried that a third might boycott Boyd's funeral. <br /><br />The inattention to his children mirrored Boyd's own upbringing. His father, a salesman in Erie, Pa., died a few days before <br />John's third birthday; his younger sister had polio as a child, and after their father's death their mother "had to spread herself <br />thin among all of us children," Boyd once told an Air Force historian. <br /><br />Boyd "was the most intense man I've ever met or known," said Jim Burton, a retired Air Force colonel. Burton, along with <br />Spinney and a few other Boyd associates, came to be known as his "acolytes." The group grew accustomed during the 1970s <br />to 3 a.m. phone calls from Boyd, who would talk for hours on some point of aircraft design or military strategy. <br /><br />Boyd was so focused, "you could not communicate with him unless his mind was willing to allow that," Burton said. The <br />acolytes trained themselves to recognize when "the window was open," he said. <br /><br />At one time or another, most of the acolytes got what they call the "fork-in-the-road speech." It was a jarring perspective on <br />life in the Pentagon. <br /><br />As Coram recounts it, Boyd would tell them that a day would come when "you're going to have to make a decision about <br />which direction you want to go." Then he would point his hand to the left or right. <br /><br />"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 <br />friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments. <br /><br />"Or", he said, pointing in the other direction, "you can go that way and you can do something -- something for your country and <br />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 <br />good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself." <br /><br />Ray Leopold, now a vice president of Motorola, was not quite 28 when he heard the speech. He had come to Boyd's <br />Pentagon office with a reputation as one of the brightest young officers in the Air Force; he left having sacrificed his career by <br />helping Boyd document a coverup of the spiraling costs of the B-1 bomber. <br /><br />"It was the most fun I ever had in the military," Leopold says today. <br /><br />As the speech suggests, Boyd was incorruptible and contemptuous of those -- in uniform or out -- he saw as attempting to <br />push inferior ideas or sell inferior products to the military. <br /><br />As a major he was nearly court-martialed for cursing out a colonel and calling him and a roomful of other officers liars. He <br />rescued his career by convincing a general he was right. <br /><br />Coram describes how a defense contractor once sent its top aircraft designer to meet with Boyd during early planning for what <br />would become the F-16. The man brought aerodynamic estimates for a plane that Boyd quickly recognized as bogus. <br /><br />Boyd studied the figures, leaned over the charts and said, "I can extrapolate this thing back to where the wing has zero lift. <br />Wow. This airplane is so good that not only does it have zero lift, it has negative drag. . . . If this thing has negative drag, that <br />means it has thrust without turning on the engines. That means when it is on the ramp with all that thrust, even with the engine <br />turned off, you got to tie the . . . thing down or it will take off by itself." <br /><br />Boyd ended the conversation: The "airplane is made out of balonium." <br /><br />His former associates argue that Boyd would render a similar verdict on Rumsfeld's attempts to transform today's military, <br />though the secretary's demands for a more agile force would seem in line with Boyd's thinking. <br /><br />Boyd "was a technologist at heart," said Chet Richards, who runs a Web site, belisarius.com, dedicated to carrying Boyd's <br />ideas about strategy into the business world. But Boyd's focus, he said, was always on people and their thought processes. <br /><br />The current Pentagon leadership, in contrast, seems convinced that technology itself is the key to victory, Richards argued. He <br />said Boyd would view as nonsense today's talk of "network-centric warfare," and its claim that netted sensors can give <br />commanders a perfect picture of the battlefield. <br /><br />Others among Boyd's acolytes worry that not only is Rumsfeld's transformation headed in the wrong direction, but the military's <br />culture has become so careerist that it is now impossible for insurgents like Boyd to bring different ideas to the fore. <br /><br />Today's young Pentagon officers see that the path to advancement is the successful procurement of new weapons, said Pierre <br />Sprey, the acolyte probably closest to Boyd. The establishment "is vastly more corrupt and openly so," he asserted. That <br />"causes you to retain fewer and fewer real warriors." <br /><br />"We need a mechanism of rewarding and listening to leaders who think differently," said Tom Christie, who computer-checked <br />the Mafia's math for the F-16. <br /><br />Now the Defense Department's director of operational testing, Christie heads a small staff that regularly deflates contractors' <br />claims about new systems. The young officers who rotate through his office are dedicated, he said, but it's hard for them to <br />keep faith when systems of questionable merit continue to be funded. <br /><br />A handful of Boyd associates, including some of the acolytes, have met each Wednesday night for more than 20 years around <br />a quiet bar in the basement of the Officers Club at Fort Myer, less than a mile from Arlington National Cemetery where their <br />mentor is buried. <br /><br />The usual talk is of Spinney's continuing battles with the Pentagon bureaucracy -- he was a key player a few years ago in <br />bringing concerns about "wing drop" in the F/A-18 Super Hornet to public attention -- or gossip about the latest test results or <br />cost overruns on planes such as the F/A-22 Raptor or MV-22 Osprey. <br /><br />For last week's gathering, several dozen of Boyd's friends and admirers turned out to meet and toast Coram, reminisce about <br />old battles, and recall those middle-of-the-night phone calls from Genghis John. <br /><br />The evening was a reminder of how important Boyd had been in his life -- in all their lives -- Christie said, and at times he could <br />feel himself tearing up. <br /><br />"John's spirit is here with all of us. We had some great times, and I sure miss him." <br /> <br /><br />c/6<br /><br />Hooty
) and Jack Northrup are two of my alltime Greatist Heroes... <br /><br />Looks like I might have to add Colonel John Boyd to my list as well...