by Robert Coram
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Coram
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: March 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2777-5
To John Pennington: my mentor in the newspaper years,
my fellow traveler in the wilderness years,
and my inspiration forever.He died too soon.
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Reminiscences
Part 1: FIGHTER PILOT
Chapter 1. Haunted Beginnings
Chapter 2. The Big Jock and the Presbytreian
Chapter 3. Fledgling
Chapter 4. K-13 and Mig Alley
Chapter 5. High Priest
Chapter 6. Pope John Goes Severely Supersonic
Chapter 7. Rat-Racing
Chapter 8. Forty-Second Boyd and the Tactics Manual
Part 2: ENGINEER
Chapter 9. Thermo, Entropy, and the Breakthrough
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11. The Sugarplum Fairy Spreads the Gospel
Chapter 12. Pull the Wings off and Paint It Yellow
Chapter 13. “I’ve Never Designed a Fighter Plane Before”
Chapter 14. Bigger-Higher-Faster-Farther
Chapter 15. Saving the F-15
Chapter 16. Ride of the Valkyries
Chapter 17. The Fighter Mafia Does the Lord’s Work
Chapter 18. A Short-Legged Bird
Chapter 19. Spook Base
Chapter 20. Take a Look at the B-I
Chapter 21. “This Briefing is for Information Purposes Only”
Chapter 22. The Buttonhook Turn
Part 3: SCHOLAR
Chapter 23. Destruction and Creation
Chapter 24. OODA Loop
Chapter 25. Reform
Chapter 26. The Great Wheel of Conspiracy
Chapter 27. Boyd Joins the Marines
Chapter 28. Semper Fi
Chapter 29. Water-Walker
Chapter 30. They Think I’m a Kook
Chapter 31. The Ghetto Colonel and the SecDef
Epilogue: El Cid Rides On
Appendix: “Destruction and Creation”
Sources
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgments
RARELY has a writer approached a subject where so many people were so anxious to help. This was not because of my winning ways and bubbling personality; it was because John Boyd inspired such passionate feelings among those who knew him and who wanted to be sure his story was told in the proper fashion.
Researching this book brought me into frequent and lengthy contact with the men who were close to Boyd: the Acolytes. The distance I always keep between myself and the people I write about disappeared when I met these men. For my more than two years of researching and writing this book, Franklin “Chuck” Spinney was the “go to” person for everything I needed. Him I owe the most. Chuck Spinney, Tom Christie, Pierre Sprey, Ray Leopold, Jim Burton, and Mike Wyly are as fiery and idealistic today as they were back in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. For the endless hours they spent with me going over those white-hot years—and for their friendship—I shall always be grateful.
Mary Boyd, Kathy Boyd, Jeff Boyd, and John Scott Boyd could not have been more forthcoming during many talks about their family. Often it was painful for everyone involved. Mary Ellen Holton, as Boyd’s executrix, was particularly helpful in obtaining personal family papers.
It is a measure of the respect Boyd evoked that Vice President Dick Cheney took time to talk about his old friend. The generosity of his comments added much to the book.
Of the dozens of others who helped, a few must be singled out. Jack Shanahan, a brilliant Air Force officer, spent months walking me through Air Force history, Air Force culture, the subtleties of Officer Efficiency Reports (ERs), the intricacies of air combat, and a hundred other details of Air Force life.
Grant Hammond was always willing to share the insights that came from spending hundreds of hours with Boyd in the mid-1990s.
Vernon Spradling remains the institutional memory of the Fighter Weapons School as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. He proves that memory does not have to decline with age.
Ron Catton has the wisdom that comes from having a wild youth followed by a distinguished Air Force career and a highly successful business career. His guidance was invaluable.
Chet Richards is a consultant and lecturer on Boyd’s ideas as applied to business. He has the keen logic of a mathematician and he saved me from many mistakes.
Dr. Wayne Thompson at the Office of Air Force History provided documents I might never have known about.
At Georgia Tech, Bob Harty, Marie McVay, Debbie Williamson, and Kathy Tomajko brought depth and dimension to the chapter about Boyd’s two years at that respected institution. And my friend Grady “Himself” Trasher spent hours telling me of Tech as it was during his student days in the early 1960s.
Jim Stevenson knows all there is to know about airplanes. He shared his knowledge.
For about thirty years, a group of men has met every Wednesday night in the Officers Club at Fort Myer, across the river from Washington. In few other places in America can you find a room filled with men who have made more of a contribution to national defense than these men have. They are legends all. And they are why I always timed my trips to Washington so I could be there on Wednesday.
A few additional notes.
I happen to have the best literary agent in New York. Mel Berger of the William Morris Agency gets the job done. Quickly.
This book covers a long and tumultuous time in American military history. To insure accuracy, many people mentioned in the book have read part or all of the manuscript. Any errors, however, are mine alone.
I edited the manuscript on St. Catherines Island. No writer ever had a better place to work, and I am forever grateful to my good friend Royce Hayes, the superintendent of that remote island off the Georgia coast.
Finally, my deepest appreciation as always is to my wife, Jeannine Addams. My life has been altogether different because of her.
Prologue
Reminiscences
ON March 20, 1997, a somber crowd gathered in the Old Post Chapel at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. They came to attend the memorial service for Colonel John Richard Boyd, United States Air Force, retired.
Winter often lingers in the hills of northern Virginia. And on that Thursday morning a cold rain and overcast skies caused many in the crowd to wrap their winter coats tighter and to hurry for the doors of the chapel.
Full military honors were provided for Boyd—a ceremonial detachment that included an honor guard, band, rifle squad, and flag-draped caisson drawn by six gray horses. Boyd was a fighter pilot. He wore the Air Force uniform for twenty-four years. During that time he made more contributions to fighter tactics, aircraft design, and the theory of air combat than any man in Air Force history. But on that soft and dreary day when Boyd’s ashes were laid to rest, the Air Force all but ignored his passing. Only two uniformed Air Force officers were in the congregation. One, a three-star general, represented the Air Force chief of staff. He sat alone in the front row and was plainly uncomfortable. The other was a major who knew Boyd’s work and simply wanted to pay his respects.
Neither man had ever met John Boyd.
Tom Christie, a tall, white-haired man, solemnly read the Twenty-third Psalm.
Ron Catton, one of Boyd’s former students and a fellow fighter pilot, delivered the first eulogy. He quoted Sophocles: “One must wait
until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.” As he told what it was like to fly with Boyd back in the old days, his lips trembled and his speech became rushed. Some of those present turned their eyes away, stared at Boyd’s linen-draped urn, and remembered.
There was much to remember, for few men have had such a splendid day as John Boyd.
Boyd’s friends smiled broadly, a few even chuckled, as they recalled Boyd at his loud, arm-waving, irrepressible best. The chuckles must have puzzled the chaplain. A military funeral with full honors is marked by dignity and solemnity. The slow measured cadences and the history-dictated procedures evoke respectful silence. This is a sacred rite, this final remembrance of a man whose life was spent in the service of his country. Here, levity is out of place.
But Boyd’s friends did not come to mourn; they came to celebrate a life that tossed and tumbled those in its wake. And when Pierre Sprey, an aristocratic and reserved man with swept—back white hair, began a second eulogy by saying, “Not many people are defined by the courts-martial and investigations they faced,” raucous laughter echoed off the white walls of the chapel. Sprey told how Boyd once snapped the tail off an F-86, spun in an F-100, and how he not only stole more than $1 million worth of computer time from the Air Force to develop a radical new theory but survived every resulting investigation. Chuck Spinney, a boyish Pentagon analyst who was like a son to Boyd, laughed so loud he could be heard all across the chapel. Even those in the congregation who barely knew Boyd wore broad grins when they heard how he was investigated a dozen times for leaking information to the press and how his guerrilla tactics for successful leaking are still being used today.
Boyd’s career spanned the last half of the twentieth century. He served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. His ideas greatly influenced the prosecution of the Gulf War in 1991. In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there were numerous media stories of “Fourth Generation Warfare,” a concept based on Boyd’s work. And while Boyd’s life was marked by a series of enormous accomplishments and lasting achievements, the thing that meant the most to him over the longest period of time was the simple title he had in the beginning. He was first, last, and always a fighter pilot—a loud-talking, cigar-smoking, bigger-than-life fighter pilot. There is no such thing as an ex–fighter pilot. Once a young man straps on a jet aircraft and climbs into the heavens to do battle, it sears his psyche forever. At some point he will hang up his flight suit—eventually they all do—and in the autumn of his years his eyes may dim and he may be stooped with age. But ask him about his life, and his eyes flash and his back straightens and his hands demonstrate aerial maneuvers and every conversation begins with “There I was at…” and he is young again. He remembers the days when he sky-danced through the heavens, when he could press a button and summon the lightning and invoke the thunder, the days when he was a prince of the earth and a lord of the heavens. He remembers his glory days and he is young again.
Some of Boyd’s friends at the memorial service remembered the time back in the mid- and late 1950s when John Boyd was the best fighter pilot in America. When he returned from a combat tour in Korea to become an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School—the Air Force’s premier dogfighting academy—he became known as “Forty-Second Boyd,” the pilot who could defeat any opponent in simulated air-to-air combat in less than forty seconds. Like any gunslinger with a nickname and a reputation, Boyd was called out. Some of the best pilots in the Air Force challenged him at one time or another. So did the best pilots in the Navy and the Marine Corps. But no man could be found who was better in the air than John Boyd. He was never defeated.
Boyd was more than a great stick-and-rudder man. He was that rarest of creatures—a thinking fighter pilot. Anyone familiar with the Air Force can tell you two things with confidence: one, fighter pilots are known for testosterone, not gray matter, and two, military doctrine is dictated by people with stars on their shoulders. But in 1959, when he was just a young captain, John Boyd became the first man to codify the elusive and mysterious ways of air-to-air combat. He developed and wrote the “Aerial Attack Study,” a document that became official Air Force doctrine, the bible of air combat—first in America, and then, when it was declassified, for air forces around the world. Put another way, while still a junior officer, John Boyd changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights.
But creating a new standard for air-to-air combat was only the beginning of Boyd’s intellectual contributions to the Air Force. Pierre Sprey told how in 1961 the Air Force sent Boyd back to college for another degree. Boyd chose the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the tougher state engineering schools in America. Late one night, while studying for an exam in thermodynamics, Boyd went off on a riff about being a fighter pilot in Korea and what it was like to fly an F-86 down MiG Alley. Suddenly what he had learned in thermodynamics meshed with all that he had learned as a fighter pilot and Boyd had the epiphany that became his Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory.
Tom Christie smiled and nodded as he remembered. He was the man who steadied the soapbox for the rambunctious and confrontational Boyd in those tumultuous years of presenting the E-M Theory to the Air Force, the years when Boyd became known as the “Mad Major.” After E-M, nothing was ever the same in aviation. E-M was as clear a line of demarcation between the old and the new as was the shift from the Copernican world to the Newtonian world. Knowledge gained from E-M made the F-15 and F-16 the finest aircraft of their type in the world. Boyd is acknowledged as the father of those two aircraft.
Either the “Aerial Attack Study” or the E-M Theory would have given Boyd a lasting place in aviation history. But his greatest and most enduring accomplishments still lay ahead. After he retired from the Air Force in 1975, Boyd became the founder, leader, and spiritual center of the Military Reform Movement—a guerrilla movement that affected the monolithic and seemingly omnipotent Pentagon as few things in history have done. For a few years he was one of the most powerful men in Washington.
Then he went into a self-imposed exile and immersed himself in a daunting study of philosophy, the theory of science, military history, psychology, and a dozen other seemingly unrelated disciplines. He had evolved from being a warrior to a warrior-engineer, and now he was about to move into the rarefied atmosphere of the pure intellectual. He synthesized all that he studied into all that he knew about aerial combat, expanded it to include all forms of conflict, and gave birth to a dazzling briefing titled “Patterns of Conflict.”
When Sprey reached this part of his eulogy, he paused and his eyes roamed the chapel and found Christie and Spinney and two other men: Ray Leopold and James Burton. These were Boyd’s Acolytes, his most dedicated followers. Their years with Boyd were the pivotal, years of their lives. They followed Boyd into dozens of bloody bureaucratic battles and their careers were forever changed, some say ruined, by the experience. These men believe that Boyd’s final work made him the most influential military thinker since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 2,400 years ago. For, like an Old Testament prophet purified by wandering in the desert, Boyd’s exile ended with a vision so amazing and so profound that it convinced both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps to change their basic doctrines on war fighting. As bizarre and unbelievable as it sounds, an old fighter pilot taught ground troops how to fight a war. The results of what he taught were manifested in the crucible of the Gulf War. Everything about the startling speed and decisive victory of that conflict can be attributed not to the media heroes, not to strutting and bombastic generals, but to a lonely old man in south Florida who thought he had been for
gotten.
Boyd was one of the most important unknown men of his time. He did what so few men are privileged to do: he changed the world. But much of what he did, or the impact of what he did, was either highly classified or of primary concern to the military. The only things he ever published were a few articles in specialized Air Force magazines and an eleven-page study. His most important work was a six-hour briefing. Thus, there is almost nothing for academics to pore over and expound upon. That is why today both Boyd and his work remain largely unknown outside the military.
The Acolytes work to change that. They work to keep Boyd’s memory alive and to move his ideas into the mainstream of American thought. Each Wednesday evening, as they have done for almost thirty years, they meet in the Officers Club at Fort Myer. The basement room where they convene is called, fittingly enough, the Old Guard Room. They talk of Boyd and they replay the old battles and they laugh about the “cape jobs” and “hot platters” and “tube steaks” he engineered. But the conversation often lingers on Boyd’s character and integrity. Not that he was an exemplar of all things good and noble. Far from it. Like many fighter pilots, he took a certain pride in his profanity and coarseness and crude sense of humor. He cared little for his personal appearance and could be demanding, abrasive, and unreasonable. And while in his professional life Boyd accomplished things that can never be duplicated, in his personal life he did things few would want to duplicate.
Boyd’s Acolytes minimize his faults. They say it is more important that his core beliefs were steel-wrapped and his moral compass was locked on true North, that he never misspent his gifts. His motivation was simple: to get as close as possible to the truth. He would have been the first to admit there is no absolute truth. But he continued chasing something that was always receding from his grasp. And in the pursuit he came far closer to the unattainable than do most men.
Boyd never achieved the one thing he wanted most. He died thinking the people in his hometown never knew of his contributions to national defense. He died thinking he would be remembered, if at all, as a crackpot and a failure, as a man who never made general, and a man whose ideas were not understood and whose accomplishments were not important.