Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Boyd had more than politics on his mind. The fly-off competition between the YF-16 and the YF-17 was about to begin and he frequently was off to Nellis or Wright-Pat. The lightweight fighter was Boyd’s dream and he knew the Blue Suiters were lying in wait. But until the fly-off was over there was little more he could do. He wanted to examine the B-1. His instincts told him something was terribly wrong with that project, and if he was right, that meant a skunk fight with the Air Force. There was nothing Boyd loved more than a good skunk fight. It kept the juices flowing. It kept him at a combat edge. Without a skunk fight, life was boring.

  One day he charged down the hall to the general who was his boss and complained that his office was filled with bureaucrats and that he wanted someone, anyone, just one person, who could do “real work.” The general and Boyd had a contentious relationship. Boyd’s loud voice and desk pounding and language often bordered on insubordination. It probably was to avoid another exchange that the general told Boyd he could have a young captain who was coming to the Building. When the general said the captain had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Boyd said he would take him sight unseen. “Anybody with a Ph.D. in double-e must be reasonably smart.”

  Boyd did not tell the general he had a special project for the young officer. He did not tell the general that what he really wanted was someone not contaminated by careerism, someone who still had his idealism, someone he could wind up and send into battle against the Air Force.

  The captain reported in June. He saluted and said, “Sir, Captain Raymond Leopold reporting for duty.”

  Boyd glowered over a cigar. He looked at a tall slender officer and bellowed, “Boyd. Like bird in Brooklynese. Got it?”

  A Ph.D. can figure out such things. “Yes, Sir.”

  Boyd put his feet on the table and opened the captain’s folder. He shook his head in dismay. Leopold was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, a “Zoomie.” “You got a warped education. The Academy teaches its graduates to be elitists, to expect too much.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Leopold had walked into Boyd’s office with the confidence found in many firstborn children, the self-absorption embedded in graduates of the Air Force Academy, and the intellectual pride of a twenty-seven-year-old with a Ph.D. in one of the most difficult fields of engineering. He was among the most talented and educated young officers in the Air Force and he knew it. He was an officer of exceptional promise. Everyone thought so. Everyone, that is, but Boyd.

  Leopold was born January 6, 1946, and boasted that he was “the first of the baby boomers.” Ever since he was twelve years old, all he had wanted was to grow up and go to the Air Force Academy. On the math portion of his college boards, he made 798, the highest ever in his south-side Chicago high school. While his classmates applied to three or four colleges, he applied only to the Academy. He graduated in 1967 and ranked 165 in a class of 524. The ranking is deceptive because while Leopold fared miserably in political science and English and history, he was a near genius in electrical engineering. The Air Force sent him to graduate school and by the time he was twenty-two he had a masters degree. At Williams AFB in Arizona he was second in his flight class to solo the T-38. Later, at a celebratory party, his classmates decided to throw him into a swimming pool. Leopold resisted and in the resulting melee he herniated a spinal disk. His flying career was ended. During the next three-and-a-half years, on his own with no Air Force assistance and no change of duties, he attended night school and earned his Ph.D.

  Men in their twenties whose lives have been spent in academics sometimes have a childlike naïveté. This seems especially true of those who study mathematics. And for reasons only psychologists can explain, many young people of extraordinary intellectual gifts and accomplishments also have a deep sense of insecurity. Even the most casual question brought a response from Leopold in which he emphasized his ranking: first of the baby boomers, highest math SAT in his class, second in his class to solo. Leopold was an overachiever, especially after his father died, a year before his Pentagon rotation. He was focused on his career and wanted to be first in everything.

  But he was standing in front of this gruff, blunt colonel and realized that none of his accomplishments mattered. In fact, he sensed he was on probation as far as Boyd was concerned. Leopold went home thinking someone made a big mistake by assigning him to Boyd’s office.

  The next morning Leopold showed Boyd his new Hewlett-Packard calculator. Such gadgets were still rare in the summer of 1973. Leopold had the first one in the office.

  “Tiger, take that calculator of yours and do me a budget analysis,” Boyd said. “I want you to go through the entire Air Force budget. I don’t want my ideas to contaminate your search, but pay particular attention to anything to do with the B-1. Anything you see on the B-1, pull it out.” Boyd leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper added, “I think they’re fucking with the budget.”

  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?”

  Leopold did not realize it, but Boyd was laying the ground rules, testing him. All Leopold wanted was to do his job, get a good ER, and move up the ladder. “Yes, Sir,” he said.

  Leopold went to the Pentagon library and to the Library of Congress and examined the defense authorization budget and the defense appropriation budget with as much attention to detail as those two hefty documents had ever seen. He studied the annual Air Force budget, the Research and Development budget, and the procurement budget. He studied the budgets of the previous eleven years and used the data to put together a preliminary analysis. In the Research and Development budget and the procurement budget, one project stood out: the B-1 Bomber. It was drawing off a disproportionate amount of money.

  Leopold came back to Boyd, who told him to look at a parametric analysis of the projected B-1 costs and to use three numbers for starters: $500,000 for each engine, $2,000 per pound for avionics, and $200 per pound for the airframe. These numbers came from Boyd’s work on the F-15 and the lightweight fighter.

  When Leopold put the numbers on a graph, they showed an inexorable and undeniable trend. Congress had mandated that the B-1 not cost more than $25 million per copy. But the chart showed the costs were more than double that amount. Not only was the B-1 taking a disproportionate amount of the Air Force budget, it was violating a congressional mandate.

  Boyd was so excited he bounced from one foot to the other. “Great work, Tiger. Great stuff. Stay with it.” He told Leopold to take a “metaview.” He used meta in the mathematical sense of a different domain, a higher level.

  Boyd did not want to take these numbers to the Air Force, not yet. He ordered Leopold to recompute everything as a “best case,” that is, to give the B-1 advocates the benefit of every doubt. Every time Leopold had a choice of num
bers, he was to use the most conservative. This meant that under scrutiny, and the Air Force would indeed subject the study to the most rigorous scrutiny, the numbers would only get worse; that is, any adjustments would show only higher costs.

  Boyd had a brief interruption from supervising the B-1 investigation when ongoing flight tests of the F-15 required his attention. Although the F-15 was a bitter memory, Boyd perked up when an Air Force general asked him if he wanted a flight in the new aircraft. Boyd did not like what the F-15 had become, but the general’s offer resurrected both his parental pride in the aircraft and the persona of Forty-Second Boyd. “Hell yes,” he said. The general said he would get back to Boyd.

  In the meantime Leopold discovered, as had others, that Boyd had little perception of time. Leopold might work at the Pentagon until midnight and then, as he wearily walked into his house in Dale City some thirty miles south, the phone was ringing. Boyd had calculated to the minute the time it took Leopold to get home. And he would have more questions, more directions for the B-1 study.

  In August, Leopold wrote a classified memo saying that if the Air Force bought the 240 B-1s it was scheduled to buy, the cost would be $68 million per copy. When the costs of the B-1 were superimposed on a chart showing the costs of other aircraft, it caused a giant and unmistakable bulge. The B-1 Bomber was the costliest project in the Air Force.

  Leopold gave Boyd the memo, then took a week of leave to drive home to Chicago and see his mother. She met him at the door, all aflutter of the barrage of phone calls from the Pentagon. Leopold was to call a Colonel John Boyd immediately. Boyd said the command structure of the Air Force, the top three-and four-stars in the building, were thunderstruck over the implications of Leopold’s memo.

  Much of Leopold’s vacation was spent on the phone with Boyd, explaining and expanding his budget analysis. When he returned to the Pentagon, two young colonels working for the chief of staff were there to ask pointed questions and to tear apart his memo. Once Leopold showed them the source for his numbers and how he had charted the results, they saw that any change would only make the B-1 look worse. They reported to the chief that Leopold was a young staff officer doing his job. He had presented the information in the most conservative manner possible. He had no agenda.

  Leopold transformed his memo into a classified briefing for top Air Force officials. Most young captains, if they ever were allowed to brief three-and four-stars, would have told the generals what they wanted to hear. Leopold was respectful but did not let the generals browbeat him into altering his findings. That made a tremendous impression on Boyd, and as a result, Leopold’s life changed. He was in an office of colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors, the junior member of the firm. But because he was Boyd’s protégé, he was number one.

  One morning Boyd arrived about 10:00 A.M. to find Leopold sleeping at his desk. Ordinarily, if a colonel finds a captain sleeping on the job, the captain finds himself on the receiving end of a royal chewing out. The captain probably will be transferred. The lieutenant colonels and majors waited and watched and wondered what Boyd would do.

  He tiptoed through the office, finger to his lips, saying, “Shhhhhhhhh. Everybody be quiet. Ray needs his sleep.” Then he thought for a minute and in a stage whisper said, “Okay, everybody out. Go to the concourse and read magazines and drink coffee, walk around or whatever. Ray has to have his nap.”

  The lieutenant colonels and majors were not amused at being tossed out of their office so a captain could sleep. But Boyd knew what no one else knew, that Leopold had worked most of the night.

  The flap over the B-1 seemed to have been absorbed into the bowels of the Pentagon. Now Leopold was working on other projects. Two or three days a week, about 1:00 P.M., Boyd went to Leopold and said, “Ray, let’s go take a walk.” And the colonel and the captain walked down to the concourse, bought candy by the handful, read the newspapers, and talked.

  Leopold was supposed to work with Boyd for six months before going to another Pentagon office. Leopold’s Academy classmates said to him, “Nobody is going to hold it against you that you worked for Boyd for six months. But you need to get out of there. If you stay longer, it will affect your career.”

  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.

  Chapter Twenty - One

  “This Briefing is for Information Purposes Only”

  BY 1973 Tom Christie’s shop at Eglin had grown to about one hundred people. In September he left Eglin and moved to the Pentagon, where he took over the Tactical Air Program in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. There must have been considerable speculation about whether the big crewcut fellow from the Hobby Shop down at Eglin was ready for the Building—especially for the TacAir job.

  TacAir was part of the old Systems Analysis office, the home of the Whiz Kids. Under McNamara, TacAir had been extremely powerful because it confronted the Air Force and Navy and made them prove why each program was needed. It thus had great influence on which proposed Air Force programs made it into the budget. Not surprisingly, the military loathed Systems Analysis so much that the name was changed to Program Analysis & Evaluation (PA&E). TacAir was thought to have been neutered by the name change, but the power of the office, while dormant, remained.

  That power depended on two things: first, whether the person running the office was willing to confront the Air Force, and second, whether the person had the confidence of the secretary of defense. Before Christie was hired, he met with Schlesinger, who told him his primary assignment was to make the Air Force accept the lightweight fighter. That put Christie on a collision course with the Air Force. But he had the backing of the SecDef.

  Gearing up to do battle with the Air Force took a few weeks. In the meantime Christie took care of something close to his heart. He called in Chet Richards, a twenty-seven-year-old management intern, and assigned him a crucial mission: find a bar where Christie could continue the Eglin tradition of Friday night office parties. Richards was the youngest person ever to receive a Ph.D. in math from the University of Mississippi, so he was up to the challenge. But none of the bars Richards checked out seemed to have that intangible mood that would make it a home for Christie’s office family. On Friday nights Washington bars are crowded and raucous—not the mood Christie wanted. Then Richards discovered the Old Guard Room in the basement of the Officers Club at nearby Fort Myer. And he picked Wednesday night rather than Friday night; Wednesdays were quiet and offered a midweek break. So Christie and the TacAir crowd, along with Boyd and the people in his office, began meeting in the Old Guard Room of Patton Hall at Fort Myer. Christie was the de facto patron of the group, almost a father figure, but it was Boyd who was the center of attention. For more than a decade, the happy hour gatherings were a crucial part of Boyd’s life.

  Christie had barely settled into his office when the Air Force launched a strike against the lightweight fighter, and in the most vulnerable part of any Pentagon project: the budget. In late 1973 the Air Force was putting together the 1975 budget and the lightweight fighter was not included. The Air Force planned to fly the prototypes in 1974, then shut down the program. The lightweight fighter was considered a “technology demonstrator” and not part of any long-range Air Force plans.

  Ch
ristie, with the crucial assistance of Chuck Myers, director of air warfare, slipped $30 million into the 1975 budget to continue work on the lightweight fighter and move it into full scale development. The Air Force found the $30 million and removed it. Christie and Myers put it back.

  Christie’s immediate boss was famous for writing scathing memos on tiny pieces of white paper called “snowflakes.” Christie’s budget battle with the Air Force brought him a blizzard of snowflakes, one of which said in effect, “The Air Force will decide to field the lightweight fighter when and if it wants to. Get off the Air Force’s back.”

  It had never occurred to Christie’s boss or to Air Force generals that the new civilian from Eglin had access to Schlesinger. The generals did not know that, through Colonel Richard Hallock, Sprey had introduced Boyd to Schlesinger and that he, too, was meeting privately with the SecDef. The generals did not know that Sprey was a special advisor to Schlesinger. And the generals did not know that Schlesinger was committed to making the lightweight fighter part of his legacy.

  When Schlesinger said the money would stay in the budget, Air Force generals ground their teeth in anger. As the generals began making plans to go over Schlesinger’s head and take the issue to sympathetic members of Congress, a young Air Force captain transferred to Boyd’s office. His name was Franklin “Chuck” Spinney.

  Spinney is a military brat, the son of an Air Force colonel. He was born at Wright-Pat but, like most military brats, moved often. To the extent that he is from anywhere, he is from Severna Park, Maryland, where he moved when he was ten and lived until he was fifteen. Spinney is a mathematician. His college boards in math were excellent, but the English portion was a disaster. He went to Lehigh University and graduated in 1967 with a degree in mechanical engineering. When he joined the Air Force, his father swore him in as an officer. Spinney was assigned to Wright-Pat and worked in the same building where his father worked during World War II. His job was to study the effects of bullets on F-105s shot down in Vietnam.