Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Then one day Burton came to Boyd with a problem. He was working with a close friend, a fellow classmate from the Academy, another lieutenant colonel who also was a water-walker destined to become a general officer. The other officer’s job was to take the changes in the Air Force planning process being devised by Boyd and Burton and see that they were implemented. The friend always nodded and agreed with Burton and said he would follow through. But nothing ever happened. Burton was confused. After all, his friend was an Academy man.

  Boyd shook his head in disbelief. He stood up and went to the blackboard and outlined what should have happened and what did happen. He diagrammed events that could not be refuted. Burton wrote later that Boyd said to him, “Your friend is not a friend. He used you.” Burton knew that Boyd was right.

  Seeing it all on the blackboard made clear to Burton what Boyd and Spinney and Leopold had seen months earlier. And from that moment on, Burton had a new rule: judge people by what they do and not what they say they will do. The conversion of Jim Burton had begun. But it would take another, far more traumatic event before he became a true believer. And when he did, the hidden iron will would become a coat of armor. He would shock Spinney and Leopold and Sprey and Christie—everyone but Boyd. The quintessential Blue Suiter would turn his back on all that he had worked for and prove that he wanted to do something with his life rather than be somebody.

  On June 25, 1975, Boyd won the Harold Brown Award, the highest scientific award granted by the Air Force. In Room 4E-871, in a ceremony presided over by Secretary of the Air Force John McLucas, Boyd received a citation stating how E-M was used in designing the F-15 and F-16. The citation said E-M gave the Air Force the means to “forge a superior fighter force in the decades ahead.”

  Afterward, at home, Boyd turned to Mary and shook his head in disbelief, almost in embarrassment, not so much that the Air Force had given him such a prestigious award but that he did not deserve it, that his accomplishments were not of sufficient magnitude to merit such acclaim. This was not the false modesty of a man talking to his friends. It was the heartfelt response of a man talking to his wife in the privacy of their home. It was the response of a small-town boy who never outgrew his childhood insecurities.

  That summer was tumultuous for Boyd. Mary Ellen was making no effort to hide her heavy smoking. Tired of seeing his Snookums with a cigarette in her mouth, Boyd said, “Okay, here’s the deal. You stop smoking cigarettes and I’ll stop smoking cigars. We do it cold turkey. Now. Deal?” Mary Ellen agreed and Boyd gave up his trademark cigar. But Mary Ellen soon was smoking again. At the office Boyd constantly gnawed on carrots. He had to have something in his mouth. He drank Metrecal, then went to the cafeteria and had a big lunch. He went out to dinner with one of the Acolytes and ate a huge meal and drank wine. But he never again smoked a cigar.

  Meanwhile, Spinney resigned his commission in June and left the Pentagon to become a consultant for a defense contractor. He entered night school at George Washington University and began working on his doctorate in business and applied statistics. He was in almost daily contact with Boyd.

  Boyd, too, was talking of leaving the Air Force. He wanted to devote all of his time to “Destruction and Creation.” The paper was one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, and it certainly was the longest. While the E-M Theory, for which he was most famous, had been written as a technical document, it was primarily a briefing. Even the “Aerial Attack Study” had been dictated and then transcribed by a typist; it was not written. The only things Boyd had written were a few articles for the Fighter Weapons School publication. But now he wanted to put his ideas on paper.

  Boyd’s vague talk of retiring was postponed when he was asked to do a highly classified study of the Soviet “Backfire Bomber.” The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, but especially the Navy and the Air Force, were conjuring up a tremendous capability for this new swing-wing bomber. The Navy said the Backfire was, like the B-1, a strategic bomber with accurate deep-strike capability and with such extended range that it was a threat to sea lanes between the United States and Europe. The Navy said the Backfire was capable of being launched from the area around Murmansk, flying down through the GIUK Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom), and attacking convoys. The Air Force used the threat of the Backfire to ask for more surveillance aircraft and more F-15s to defend Western Europe.

  Exactly who commissioned the top-secret study is not known, but there was no doubt that an independent assessment of the Backfire was needed. Boyd prepared a briefing for Schlesinger and there was talk that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to know the results.

  Stripped of the E-M comparisons and technical jargon, Boyd’s briefing said the Backfire threat was highly inflated. He said it was not a strategic bomber but a medium-range bomber, and he summarized its performance by saying, “The Backfire is a piece of shit, a glorified F-111.”

  Soon after completing the Backfire research, Boyd walked into the personnel office and said, “I want to retire. Now.”

  On August 31, 1975, John Richard Boyd retired after twenty-four years in the Air Force. He was forty-eight years old. He told Spinney and Sprey and Christie and Burton that the secretary of the Air Force pleaded with him not to retire. He said the secretary promised to make him a general if he would stay in the Air Force. “I told him no. I don’t want to get on the cocktail and pussy circuit.”

  But this was an effort to save face. Boyd could never have become a general. He talked of hosing generals so often that at office parties and birthday parties he was given garden hoses as gifts. Spinney and Leopold laughed at the idea of Boyd in what was called “charm school,” the indoctrination course for colonels who have just been promoted to general. Even if Boyd could have been promoted to general, he would have been—at best—a different kind of general, most likely a terrible general. He was incapable of compromise. He had little patience with those who disagreed with him. And while he performed brilliantly as a commander at NKP, that was a wartime environment. He was a natural leader, but he did not have the sort of management skills the Air Force looked for when they promoted colonels.

  One of the first things Boyd did after retiring was drive home to Erie. He went by himself and saw many of his boyhood friends. He told them he had retired, and that the airplanes he had been instrumental in producing—the F-15 and the F-16—were in production and that now he was working on this new thing, this paper called “Destruction and Creation.” Several asked what rank he had held at retirement and when he said “colonel” they laughed and chided him about not making general. How could he have been responsible for those two airplanes when he was not a general? Everyone knew that generals did all the important work in the Pentagon.

  Boyd walked the beach out on the Peninsula, where already a hint of fall was in the air. He spent hours with Frank Pettinato, who still was the chief lifeguard. Pettinato was not like Boyd’s childhood friends; he believed what Boyd told him about the F-15 and the F-16, and he believed “Destruction and Creation” would be a very important achievement.

  The postretirement visit must have been an emotional trip for Boyd. The Boyd family no longer had a presence in Erie. And now his mother, the person who always held the family together, was sliding ever deeper into the dementia that seemed to plague her side of the family.

  In his home town, were it not for Frank Pettinato, Boyd would have been alone.

  For several weeks Boyd stayed, walking the beach, thinking about his new project and how he would go about researching and writing it. He let the ideas bubble, mulled them over, turned them back and forth, and examined them from all angles and then discarded most of them and began again. By the end of his visit he was rejuvenated. The Peninsula did that for him. He was overflowing with thoughts about the books he wanted to read and the ideas he wanted to explore.

  And then he returned to Washington. Even though he arguably had more influence on the Air Force than any colonel in Air Force history
, his greatest contributions were yet to come. He was about to enter the most productive and most important part of his life.

  In November 1975, President Gerald Ford fired Secretary of Defense Schlesinger.

  Within days the Air Force resumed its efforts to kill the A-10. The chief of staff of the Air Force also ordered that the F-16s be wired for the delivery of nuclear weapons.

  Part Three

  SCHOLAR

  Chapter Twenty - Three

  Destruction and Creation

  THE 1970s were a low point in American military history.

  The Vietnam War had humiliated America’s armed forces. The greatest superpower on earth used almost every arrow in its quiver, everything from multimillion-dollar airplanes to laser-guided bombs to electronic sensors to special-operations forces, and still was defeated by little men in black pajamas using rifles and bicycles.

  Yet, there was little soul-searching among senior generals. They were managers rather than warriors. And when managers lead an army it is their nature to cast blame rather than to accept responsibility. The senior generals who prosecuted the war and the weathervane careerists under them never admitted their failure. They never admitted that their war-fighting strategy—both in the air and on the ground—was flawed. They never admitted they did not know how to fight a guerrilla war. Instead, they looked outside the military for scapegoats: politicians had stabbed them in the back or the media were out to get them. Then they put a fresh coat of paint on the strategy of the past, the strategy that failed in Vietnam, and they pressed on.

  Military leaders of the 1970s were more familiar with business theory than with military theory. They read management books and talked at length of how things were done at the Harvard Business School. But some had never heard of Sun Tzu and could not spell “von Clausewitz.” They might have known the names of Douhet or Jomini or von Schlieffen or Fuller or Guderian or Lawrence or Balck, but few knew the theories espoused by these men. Many Civil War buffs knew more about military tactics than did the average senior officer in the mid-70s.

  Not all officers were careerists. There were young men who believed there was a better way. Throughout the military were hundreds of company-grade and field-grade officers who were contemptuous of senior officers and of their outdated dogma. Unlike their superiors, they had done a lot of soul-searching about Vietnam. They came back from Vietnam and said, “We got our asses kicked.” They had seen their friends killed because of the idiocy of their commanders, and they felt an obligation to their departed comrades to hang tough and fight for change. They looked at senior generals and saw men who had done nothing but get promoted. They were ashamed that these generals blamed everything on politicians and the media.

  Young officers, primarily in the Army and the Marine Corps, talked often about strategy. But the talks swirled and eddied and all too often were vague and formless. There was no organized movement, no coalescing force. There were only small and widely scattered groups, most unaware of one another’s existence.

  These officers needed new ideas about war. They needed something they could hold in their hands and study far into the night, something they could debate and argue, something that had the power to galvanize them and the troops under them with new and powerful knowledge. In short, they needed a military theory that would enable them to win wars. They also needed a leader to whose flag they could rally. He must be untainted by the disgraceful past. He must be a man of far different character than their present leaders, a man uncorrupted by the system and committed to cleaning it up. He must love America more than he loves his career. Young officers emerging from the dank careerist swamps of the post–Vietnam era would accept no other.

  When Boyd retired as a full colonel with twenty-four years of service, his retirement pay was $1,342.44 per month plus COLA-the cost-of-living allowance. Even in 1975 that was a pitifully small sum to support a wife and five children. Boyd could easily have followed the route of many senior officers and gone to a well-paying job with a defense contractor. But his real life’s work lay ahead and he sensed the dangers of accepting a civilian job. Boyd knew he had to be independent and he saw only two ways for a man to do this: he can either achieve great wealth or reduce his needs to zero. Boyd said if a man can reduce his needs to zero, he is truly free: there is nothing that can be taken from him and nothing anyone can do to hurt him.

  Boyd stopped buying clothes. The cars that he and Mary drove would, over the next decade, become rambling wrecks. He even refused to buy a case for his reading glasses; instead, he carried them around in an old sock. And despite the rising anger of his children, he said the family would continue to live in the basement apartment on Beauregard.

  Boyd disappeared for about a year. But if he was not seen, he certainly was heard—in almost nightly phone calls that lasted hours. Sprey referred to these calls as the “pain” and said they were the price of admission for Boyd’s friendship. One weekend Christie and Spinney and Burton were out of town and Boyd spent much of Friday and Saturday night on the phone with Sprey. On Monday, Sprey called the others to complain about their leaving town at the same time.

  It was obvious from Boyd’s phone calls that he was not only spending a disproportionately large amount of his retirement pay on books but was reading them all. Christie’s phone might ring at 2:00 A.M. and

  when he picked it up Boyd would say, “I had a breakthrough. Listen to this.” And without a pause he would begin reading from Hegel or from an obscure book on cosmology or quantum physics or economics or math or history or social science or education. Christie thought Boyd had taken leave of his senses. Except for the year at NKP, the past nine years of Boyd’s life had been devoted to hosing his superiors. He was a man of action. But when he walked out of the Building, he walked into a world of ideas. There was almost no transition. One day he was on the phone checking on the progress of the F-16 and the next he was calling people at 2:00 A.M. to read German philosophy. And for what? What was this learning theory he kept talking about? He said he had begun work on the thing back at NKP and he still had nothing to show for it. Why didn’t Boyd just retire?

  Tom Christie now was a Pentagon superstar about to be promoted to deputy assistant secretary of defense. He knew how to say “no” to things not relevant to his work, and now he was growing impatient with his old friend. “John, I read that in college,” he said. Or, “John, I can read it myself.” Boyd ignored him and continued to read. When he was through with a twenty-minute passage he said, “Now, what do you think of that?” In the end Christie forgot how to say “no” and he and Boyd talked until the predawn hours.

  When Boyd had drained Christie, he called one of the other Acolytes and went through the same process. All of these men were well educated and widely read. But by the end of 1975 and certainly by the early months of 1976, the depth of Boyd’s study was moving beyond what any of them experienced in graduate school. Boyd was charging into esoteric and arcane areas of knowledge. And the Acolytes were far too proud to simply agree with Boyd on everything he said. If they were going to hold up their end of the conversation they had to buy whatever book Boyd was reading. They read and when Boyd called they were ready. And while the Acolytes did not discuss it with each other, they knew that Boyd was fortune’s child, that he had passed beyond the E-M Theory and was venturing into more rarefied heights. They sensed he was about to give birth to his greatest work.

  But they wished the birth were not so painful and protracted.

  Boyd’s calls tied up the phones of his friends for hours. Burton became the envy of the Acolytes when his wife installed a separate line for a “Boyd phone.” Only Boyd had the number.

  Boyd had less formal education than did any of the Acolytes. But he was their intellectual leader—not only in the number and substance of the books he had them read, but in his passion and his obsession and his iron discipline about getting to the truth. Boyd had a different relationship with each of the Acolytes. Christie served in an oversi
ght capacity; that is, he suggested adding to one part, taking out from another, and doing more research on still another part. Burton and Spinney were like sons—very bright sons who contributed so much to his work that at times they seemed extensions of his brain. The cross-fertilization between Boyd and Burton and between Boyd and Spinney was extraordinary.

  Sprey was in still another category. In one sense, he was closer to Boyd than any of the Acolytes. The two men were like brothers. But while the others encouraged Boyd’s research into his learning theory, Sprey was not at all sympathetic. He said Boyd was wasting his talents. Sprey knew that Boyd, like many autodidacts, craved sanctification from academics, from those he considered “real” scholars. Sprey told Boyd the learning theory was far too abstract, another “philosophy of science sort of thing” that held no promise. Sprey had become increasingly interested in ground warfare since his work on the A-10, and he was convinced it was the only sort of warfare that really mattered. He urged Boyd to drop this dalliance and to study ground warfare. But Boyd was obsessed with the learning theory. He did agree to read a few of the books Sprey recommended, but that was the end of it. Or so Sprey believed at the time.

  Boyd was sensitive to criticism from Sprey. Each time Sprey challenged him he plunged deeper into his research and dug up new references. He knew if his work passed through the Pierre Sprey buzz saw there would be little substantive room for anyone to criticize it.

  Boyd wrote draft after draft of his learning theory on yellow legal pads. He called the Acolytes to discuss the meaning of a word for hours. “What do you see when you hear that word?” he asked. “What picture comes to mind?” It was an exasperating business. Boyd liked ambiguity, believing it opened new vistas and led in unexpected directions. Burton was uncomfortable with Boyd’s lack of fix. “You are taking advantage of the fact words can have more than one meaning,” Burton said. “You are using words and ideas and concepts in ways that people don’t use those words and ideas and concepts.”