by Robert Coram
A little over halfway through the briefing, Boyd begins building his snowmobile. He looks back and rehashes attrition warfare as practiced by Emperor Napoléon (as opposed to the far more creative strategies practiced earlier by General Bonaparte). He talks of maneuver conflict and the moral weaponry of guerrilla warfare.
This begins the most difficult part of the brief. Now Boyd begins slicing the same idea from a different direction simply to provide another shading of the same point. And it shows why simply reading the slides fails to give a full understanding.
Boyd begins the section on maneuver conflict with two crucial words: “Ambiguity, deception…”—the essence of maneuver tactics. This is General Patton’s approach to fighting the Germans. It is Muhammad Ali saying he will “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
One of the most important charts in the briefing is utilized when Boyd begins to pull everything together to show how the key to victory is operating at a quicker tempo than the enemy. While the briefing continues through 185 slides, for all practical purposes it ends some forty slides earlier, when Boyd begins a series of repetitious examples of how to use the OODA Loop in war. This latter part is of interest primarily to soldiers and military historians. The theme of this section is consistent: disorient the enemy, then follow with the unexpected lightning thrust.
Boyd’s briefing, then, is an updating and affirmation of Sun Tzu and a repudiation of von Clausewitz. In fact, if the briefing could be reduced to two simple thoughts, they would be: 1) the essence of warfare is cheng and ch’i, and 2) to practice this most effectively a commander must operate at a faster OODA Loop than does his opponent.
The briefing has a number of problems. It is repetitive in the extreme. Boyd often threw in a slide that said ?—RAISES NAGGINGQUESTION—? when, in fact, the question had not been raised except rhetorically by Boyd. Periodically he had a slide titled INSIGHT, which is little more than a platform for him to launch into a tangential cadenza. The cluttered slides were jammed with ponderous and virtually impenetrable sentences. None of the discipline of the academic existed. Boyd was force-feeding his audience, another hallmark of the autodidact and a characteristic manifest in his insistence of “full brief or no brief.”
Considering the impact of the briefing, these are niggling faults. And they speak more to Boyd’s personality than to the content of the briefing. The purpose of the briefing was not to reveal the “Answer” but to jar listeners out of complacency and into thinking on their own. Boyd abhorred the idea that his briefing might be considered dogma. In fact, he often said listeners should take the briefing out and burn it before they considered it dogma.
The brief followed the ink-blot theory of growth. First a small group of men—the Acolytes—heard it. Then congressional staffers led by Winslow Wheeler, who worked for Senator Nancy Kassebaum, heard it. Dozens of reporters heard it. A number of junior officers stationed in the Pentagon heard it. Slowly, day by day, week by week, the numbers grew. And then the groups began touching and merging to form larger groups. By now the core group, Boyd and the Acolytes, were known far and wide as “Reformers.”
One day Boyd was in his apartment working on an update of the briefing when he received a phone call. Jim Burton was not only passed over for promotion to colonel but was fired from his job and told to leave the Pentagon. It was not entirely unexpected. Burton was unwilling to bend to the ways of the Building. When Donald Rumsfeld became secretary of defense in November 1975, Burton prepared a briefing chart showing the F-16 had better turning performance than did the F-15. While true, this did not sit well with Air Force leadership and Burton was ordered to change the chart to show the two aircraft had equal turning performance. He refused to do so. Burton also advocated canceling the B-1 because it performed far below specifications and because the Air Force could not afford it.
When Boyd heard the news, he called Burton and asked, “How did you like that kick in the stomach?”
Burton was devastated. Throughout his career he had been one of the golden boys. Now, after sixteen years—not enough time for retirement—he had been passed over, a clear signal that his career had ended. In a year he would have another chance at promotion, but once a man is passed over, his chances are slim.
“I know you are disappointed,” Boyd said. Then came the lines he had recited to Leopold long ago: “You still have an opportunity to be promoted. But now you are at a fork in the road with your life. You have to decide if you really want that promotion and all the trappings that come with it. You can’t have a normal career and do the good work.”
Boyd continued, giving Burton the “To Be or to Do” speech, and ended by saying, “Do you want to be part of the system or do you want to shake up the system?”
The water-walker decided he wanted to shake up the system. He wrangled an appointment to Andrews AFB and stopped thinking about promotion. He started thinking only of doing what was right. And he came to find that freedom from the concerns that governed the lives of most officers was remarkably liberating.
Not long after Burton left the Building, Boyd received a phone call from Tom Christie. The Finagler now was one of the top nonap-pointed civilians in the Pentagon, and he offered Boyd a job in the TacAir shop. It was clear from the way Boyd dressed—tattered Ban-Lon shirts, madras-patterned polyester pants, and slippers—that he needed money. But he refused to accept a salary from Christie. Boyd was horrified that he might be called a “double dipper”—a man who had both a government pension and a government job.
At the Pentagon, Boyd occasionally performed the duties expected of an analyst. But Christie hired Boyd more to give him a base of operations than anything else. Boyd needed access to telephones and copy machines. He worked about five years with no pay before word came down that the Pentagon could not have unpaid consultants. Boyd griped and complained and said he wanted the smallest salary possible, $1 per pay period. But the minium time a consultant could be paid for and remain on Pentagon rolls was one day every two weeks. So henceforth Boyd was paid for one day’s work every two weeks.
Boyd dove deeper and deeper into the study of war. He realized that while wars take place between nations, every person experiences some form of war; conflict is a fundamental part of human nature. To prevail in personal and business relations, and especially war, we must understand what takes place in a person’s mind. And what better place to continue work on a study of conflict than in the Pentagon?
Boyd needed someone he trusted to work beside him. He talked to Christie and Christie called Chuck Spinney, who was now working for a think tank and studying for his Ph.D. “Come see me,” Christie said. When Spinney arrived, Christie said, “Do you want to work for me in TacAir? You’ll be working with Boyd.” That was all Spinney needed to hear. To work with Boyd meant conflict with the Pentagon, and Spinney was born for conflict. He remembered what Boyd often said: “There are only so many ulcers in the world and it is your job to see that other people get them.” Spinney said yes on the spot.
TacAir had no job openings but this was not a problem for the Finagler. He created a job and Spinney went to work two weeks later.
In the eyes of the Air Force, TacAir had been suspect ever since the old Systems Analysis days of McNamara. Now word was beginning to get around the Pentagon and to a few Air Force bases about Boyd’s new briefing and the group of people around him. They were part of the old Fighter Mafia crowd, goddamn insurrectionists and seditionists, civilians all and not a team player among them. Calling themselves “Reformers” and saying they were part of the “military reform movement.” What the hell was there to reform? When officers dropped in to chide Boyd about his reform movement, they could not resist the temptation to ask him how his ideas fit in with a military placing greater emphasis on technology. “Machines don’t fight wars,” he responded. “Terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.”
The officers laughed and
wondered why Tom Christie had brought Boyd back to the Pentagon. Didn’t he know Boyd’s background? And Christie had hired a new man by the name of Franklin Spinney. Wasn’t there an Air Force captain by that name involved in the B-1 budget studies?
What the Air Force did not know was that the Finagler was flying top cover for Boyd and was about to unleash Spinney on a study that would put the Air Force on the defensive for years. The Air Force figured Christie was a team player—their team. But Boyd and Spinney were about to turn TacAir into a little shop of horrors, ground zero for the reform movement.
Because Boyd was paid for one day every two weeks, he was free to come and go as he chose. He continued to travel to the Air Force Academy, where he lectured to cadets in Ray Leopold’s classes. In the beginning the lectures had taken the form of briefings on “Destruction and Creation.” Now Boyd was introducing “Patterns of Conflict.”
On one visit, Leopold picked Boyd up at the airport in Colorado Springs. As Boyd and Leopold walked down the concourse, Boyd looked out the window and saw two F-16s taking off. He stopped and stared, mesmerized, as the sleek little aircraft climbed into the Colorado sky. Then, almost as if talking to himself, he said this was the first operational F-16 he ever saw. He shook his head as he remembered another airplane. “You know, they told me I could fly in an F-15 when I was at the Pentagon. But every time I was scheduled they cancelled the flight.”
Leopold drove Boyd to the Academy campus, nestled against the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. As they drove up the knoll toward the famous “Give Me Men” statue, Leopold looked in his rearview mirror and said, “The superintendent is behind us.” Boyd twisted around and recognized Bob Kelly, a three-star whom he had known as a fighter pilot at Nellis back in the 50s. He rolled down the window, leaned out, and began pumping his right arm—middle finger erect—up and down.
Leopold was horrified. Cadets marching to class were even more horrified. They saw the superintendent’s car, popped to attention, and snapped off salutes. But their eyes were on the shouting and shabbily-clad civilian leaning out of a car window giving the finger to a three-star.
“Stop the car, Ray,” Boyd insisted.
“John, don’t do this,” Leopold said as he pulled over.
Cadets stared as Boyd jumped from the car, shirttails flying, and held up his hand to stop the superintendent. “Hello, Bob,” he said. Then, in a voice heard across half the campus, he said, “Three stars! Goddamn. Whose ass you been kissing?”
The two men shook hands and the general asked Boyd what he was doing on campus. After a few minutes of conversation about the old days, Boyd returned to his car and the cadets continued on their way.
Leopold was dismayed. “John, you shouldn’t have given the superintendent the finger.”
“Ah,” Boyd said dismissively. “That’s a fighter pilot’s salute.”
The next day Leopold was summoned to the superintendent’s office and was told, “Don’t ever again bring someone from the military reform movement on this base without notifying me in advance.”
It was a harbinger of what was to come, a rampant paranoia among senior Air Force officers where Boyd and the reform movement were concerned. In a few more years the paranoia would be transformed into open warfare.
In June 1977, Boyd visited his mother in her nursing home in south Florida. The strong authoritative woman who had borne five children and ushered them through the depths of the depression could not be recognized. The woman who had buried her husband, a son, and a daughter was near death. Her passage through the world had been one of endless travail. Now she was worn out.
Boyd called his sister Marion in New York and said, “Mom is pretty bad. She is very weak. I think you better come down.”
“Oh, she’s got a strong heart,” Marion said.
“I really think you should come down,” Boyd repeated.
Marion said she would make airline reservations and call him back to give him her flight number and arrival time. But before she completed the arrangements, Boyd called back and said, “Mom’s gone.”
She was buried next to Ann in Erie’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. Her husband was across town in Trinity Cemetery. Her son Bill was interred in a single plot, all alone and separated from the other members of the family, in Erie Cemetery.
Boyd convinced Marion to come down to Erie from New York more frequently thereafter, to visit the house on Lincoln Avenue and put it back into shape after three years of being empty. Gerry, Marion, and Boyd, the three surviving children, would pool their resources and put a new roof on the house.
About the time Boyd returned to the Pentagon, the new promotion list for colonel was published. Burton again was passed over. Now his chances were statistically less than 3 percent to make colonel. Under the Air Force policy of “up or out,” the next time he was passed over would be the last. He would be forced to retire.
Boyd called Burton and said it was their friendship that kept Burton from being promoted. Burton agreed, but he was not upset about that; he was upset because, like most men, he wanted to make a contribution, to do something significant with his life. And it now appeared that chance was lost. Unless he was promoted, he had only a year remaining in the Air Force.
Chapter Twenty - Five
Reform
BY 1978, both officers and enlisted personnel were leaving the military services in large numbers. They left not because of pay, as military leaders had said for the past few years, but because they were displeased with what they saw as a lack of integrity among their leaders. They thought careerism inhibited professionalism in the officer corps. The military also was having readiness problems; expensive and highly complex weapons systems were fielded before being fully tested. These systems were not only expensive to buy but expensive to maintain, and they rarely performed as advertised. Stories began to appear in the media of America’s “hollow military.”
The military’s answer was to place more emphasis on what it called the “electronic battlefield” by buying even more expensive and more high-tech weapons. Somewhere in the military there must have been those who sensed the system was headed toward a meltdown. If so, no one stepped forward to change it.
Then one day Christie called Spinney and said, “I want you to take a look at these retention and readiness problems.” The results show why Boyd wanted Spinney working beside him. Spinney was young, brilliant, irreverent, and had the tenacity of a pile driver. It was only a matter of weeks before he began briefing the first version of what was officially called “Defense Facts of Life.” Few people remember that title; what they remember is the “Spinney Report.” From the beginning, those who heard the brief realized the impact it could have on the Pentagon.
Spinney gave his briefing to anyone who would listen. When the give-and-take of the briefing revealed that Spinney’s presentation had flaws in logic and gaps where more data were needed, he went back, talked to Boyd, and fine-tuned the brief. The presentation had to be bulletproof. If Spinney were hosed one time—that is, if someone stood up during a briefing and delivered chapter and verse where he was wrong—it would be a devastating blow to the fledgling reform movement. Finally the brief seemed flawless, a seamless gathering of facts that came to an inescapable conclusion.
Then Spinney briefed Sprey. As Boyd had predicted, Sprey found dozens of flaws not seen by anyone else. Spinney revised the brief and presented it again. This time Sprey nodded in approval. If the brief could stand against the Pierre Sprey buzz saw, it was monolithic, impregnable against the blasts of heaven and Earth and all that the Air Force might throw at it.
There is nothing in the past to compare with the Spinney Report. For that reason alone, it is arguably one of the most important documents ever to come out of the Pentagon.
Spinney’s basic point was that the unnecessary complexity of major weapons systems was wrecking the military budget. He made public what only a few people in the Air Force knew: throughout the 1970s much of the Air Force budget went
toward procuring tactical air fighters and weapons while nearly all other areas suffered. So much money was being spent on overly complex weapons such as the F-15 and the F-111D that there was little money to operate and maintain the aircraft. Training flights for pilots were being replaced by simulators. Maintenance skills required to keep the F-15 flying were so high that civilian contractors had to be hired. Electronics systems failed far more often and took far longer to repair than predicted. Spinney showed that supporting the F-15 was more expensive than supporting the ancient B-52. He showed that readiness was at an all-time low; in a full-scale war, supplies of the Air Force’s favorite munitions would last only a few days.
But the most significant part of the Spinney Report was that readiness problems were not caused by lack of funds; they were caused by Air Force leaders who deliberately bought such expensive and overly complex weapons that fewer and fewer of each model could be purchased. The leaders’ incentive was to force increases in their budget and to funnel more money to defense contractors, and they said whatever they needed to achieve that goal. Spinney proved that virtually everything the Air Force had promised the American people about the F-15 and the F-111D was false.
The Air Force declared war on Spinney.
In 1978 Spinney was thirty-three, young to be the target of Air Force generals. But he had worked in the Pentagon under Boyd and knew the Building and its machinery better than many of those who were older and more senior. And he was brash enough that he never felt inadequate for the task of taking on generals. Like Boyd, he believed many of these men had never done anything but get promoted, that they had compromised their beliefs, that they were empty Blue Suits.
Spinney made no recommendations in his brief, so he was said to be a nihilist, a destroyer. But the omission was deliberate. Spinney knew that if he followed the usual procedure and included a list of recommendations, the focus would shift from the problem to which chores would go to what agency. He wanted the focus to remain on the problem. He chose to be the wrecking crew. He was tearing the domain apart and creating the destructive deduction. He was proving the fundamental point of the Reformers—that the Pentagon needed an overhaul.