by Robert Coram
Christie thought Boyd was putting Spinney out front as a target. Spinney shrugged off such comments. His attitude was “Maybe so. But if not me, who?” He was the right man in the right place at the right time. He had done his homework and knew his briefing was rock solid. He took great pride in knowing he was the first person ever to probe so deeply into the soft underbelly of the Pentagon. Plus, he had more than a little of the rock thrower in his character. He enjoyed a skunk fight.
The Reformers were united in their goals, but their approaches to reform varied widely. Boyd was the moral force that drew all the others. If Boyd was intense, Sprey was even more so. For him this was an Armageddon-like conflict in which the forces of good stood against the forces of evil. Christie was a survivor. He knew how to get the job done without appearing on anyone’s radar screen. Burton, who against all odds had made colonel in his third and last chance, was quiet and remote, not given to the unrestrained antics of the Reformers. He was fueled by rectitude and guided by an unwavering sense of what was right. These men, and all the others gathered around Boyd, thought the Pentagon was off course and wanted to set things right. Spinney followed that belief. But for him it was also fun—a rollicking romp through the bosky fen that was the Pentagon. Never mind that billions of dollars were at stake, never mind that the most important weapons projects of the American military were the issue, never mind that the full force of the Building was about to come down on his head—it was a great, great time.
Part of Spinney’s battle joy was that the Air Force did not know how to deal with his report. One of Boyd’s fundamental dictums when waging bureaucratic war was to use the other person’s information against him. Spinney’s brief was built on Pentagon documents. He understated everything so that any revisions would only make his conclusions more damning. (Boyd’s belief in using the adversary’s information against him is the practical application of Asian writings, particularly The Japanese Art of War, in which translator Thomas Cleary talks of “swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations, and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)
Since Spinney’s briefing spoke to the readiness problem, something the media were beginning to write about, his report was becoming increasingly relevant to the stories appearing in the press. But Spinney was not yet known outside the Building.
It is here, with the advent of the reform movement, that Boyd’s story becomes infinitely more complex. It no longer follows a linear path but rather explodes into various stories, some of which in the beginning may seem tangential. But taken together these stories demonstrate the tremendous reach of Boyd’s ideas. Spinney is one story. The Marine Corps is about to become a separate story. The Army is another story. Jim Burton, still another. All these stories have two things in common: Boyd and “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd and his briefing were at the center of everything.
By now the “Patterns” briefing was the credo, the manifesto, the coalescing force for the reform movement. It was a briefing that continued to gather momentum over the years, a gleaming intellectual tour de force that caused enormous and profound change.
Spinney’s brief was more immediate, more directly relevant. While it covered the full spectrum of Pentagon spending, it used the F-15—America’s front-line fighter aircraft and the darling of the Air Force—as the example of problems facing the military. The Spinney Report documented everything the Reformers had suspected.
Because of Boyd’s coaxing and Sprey’s critique, the Air Force could find no factual errors in the brief. Nor were there any flaws in the concept. Air Force generals used derision and sarcasm, hyperbole and misstatement, even personal attacks against Spinney. The Air Force referred to him as a “captain who has never been shot at,” a silly argument but one thought to be devastating by officers who have been in combat. This tactic reveals a fundamental truth about the Building. Generals are allowed to indulge their egos as few people in business or government are allowed to do. A general is surrounded by people whose careers depend on what he says on their ERs. Every word he utters is considered as if Moses brought it down from the mountaintop. What in most of us would be harmless quirks seem rather bizarre when codified by a man with stars on his shoulder. And as the number of stars on a man’s shoulder grows arithmetically, his bizarre behavior grows exponentially. Stories abound of a general who would let no one in his office who had a mustache, of a general who ordered a blinking red light be turned on in the hall before he entered as a signal to lesser mortals that they must disappear, of a general who ordered that the back side of traffic signs be painted brown, of a general who ordered that no one walk beside him but instead a respectful two paces behind, of a general who ordered that subordinates wear the same type of headgear he wore, then hourly switched between a cap and a hat. Generals rule with such absolute power that few dare confront them, so when someone has the audacity to point out they are wrong—as did Spinney—they often have no recourse but to fall back on hyperbole and emotion and personal arguments. The Air Force knew no other way to react toward Spinney.
Mary talked often of Florida. Ever since being stationed at Eglin, she had loved the state. She wanted the family to go there for several weeks every summer, but Boyd said he did not have time for “that sentimental vacation crap.” For three or four years, Mary and the children went alone. Boyd went to Erie instead.
Spinney and Sprey and Christie and Burton sensed that things were not well in the Boyd household, but they divided Boyd’s life into his work and his home life and did not want to know the details of the latter. “Mary is a saint,” they said and left it at that. They sometimes felt a faint sense of embarrassment when they saw the way Boyd treated Mary, but they never asked questions. Boyd’s friends knew little or nothing about Kathy’s withdrawal, Jeff’s collection of poisonous snakes, John Scott’s confrontations with his father, or of the years when Mary Ellen and Boyd did not speak.
Boyd’s attitude toward Mary puzzled his friends. She was so lovely and so winsome. Even though she had borne five children, she remained trim and had a sunburst of a smile that lighted a room. But there was something of the sleepwalker about her; she seemed to drift through life, oblivious of what was going on about her. At parties Mary was still the quiet one while Boyd dominated the room with his stories.
When Boyd talked to someone at a party, he gave them 100 percent of his attention. He did not look over the person’s shoulder to see who else was in the room. But there were times at a party when Boyd might sit down and sleep for an hour or so. Mary tried to hustle him out quickly once he awakened. If she was not successful, Boyd, rested and raring to go, might hold forth until 2:00 A.M.
One day in 1979 Boyd received a call from a man who identified himself as the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The caller said that for years he had wanted to do a piece about national defense, a deep and wide exploratory piece about the state of America’s military. The story was sidetracked when he spent two years as chief speech-writer for President Jimmy Carter, but now he wanted to resurrect the idea. The timing was perfect, as Carter was dueling with Republican challenger Ronald Reagan over defense spending. Reagan said he wanted to “re-arm America,” a phrase that meant if he were elected, billions of dollars would flood into the Pentagon. Reagan knew the post-Vietnam military faced serious problems. He was going to fix everything with money.
The man who called Boyd had talked to Bill Lind in Senator Gary Hart’s office. Lind recommended that he interview Boyd. Could he come over to the Pentagon and talk?
Boyd agreed, but only if the caller would spend enough time to hear “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd was not interested in any drive-by reporting; he wanted to make sure the writer was serious. The writer agreed; this was his first big piece for the Atlantic and he wanted to do it right.
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A few days later, Boyd looked up at a tall, slender, thirty-year-old man in khaki pants and Polo shirt and blazer. The writer had graduated from Harvard and had been a Rhodes scholar. He could not have been more different from Boyd. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “Colonel Boyd, I’m Jim Fallows.”
Neither man was terribly impressed with the other. Boyd later told Spinney that Fallows was a “goddamn preppy.” Fallows looked at Boyd and saw a man with an ancient Ban-Lon shirt drooping from his shoulders, plaid pants that were hopelessly out of date, and slip-perlike shoes of a sort rarely seen in the Pentagon. Boyd stood up and put his nose about three inches from Fallows’s face, poked Fallows in the chest, and began talking in a voice loud enough to be heard far down the hall.
“Is this guy nuts?” Fallows asked himself.
Fallows heard the “Patterns” briefing and later spent more than four hours listening to an unclassified version of Spinney’s “Defense Facts of Life.” This was followed by a long session with Pierre Sprey. Fallows was overwhelmed by Sprey’s intensity and intellect. “Is that guy for real?” he asked Spinney. Then he came back to Boyd for additional hours of interviews. By now Boyd had a growing respect for Fallows. Here was a writer who did his homework.
The Atlantic published “The Muscle-Bound Superpower” in the October 2, 1979, issue. It was the first of three events that launched the reform movement onto a national stage. While newspaper reporters had written a few articles about Boyd and the Reformers and the issues they espoused, Fallows was the first writer for a major national publication to tie it all together, to question the way the Pentagon spent billions of taxpayer dollars and to wonder if America’s military was so burdened with high technology that it might fail in warfare.
Much of Fallows’s fourteen-page story revolved around Boyd and “Patterns of Conflict.” In the story, Fallows said he had come to “respect and value” Boyd more than anyone else he interviewed. Boyd and his followers “thought fresh thoughts” and were willing to take the impossibly rare risk that those thoughts might cause them to be labeled as fools. Fallows said Boyd’s ideas were all common sense but were a “heretical departure” from current practices. Fallows made Boyd and the Reformers legitimate.
Boyd and Fallows became fast friends. Boyd respected Fallows’s intellect and the depths to which he pursued a story. Fallows admired Boyd’s integrity and single-minded devotion.
While the Pentagon was trying to figure out how to respond to Fallows, the second event that launched the reform movement was taking place on Capitol Hill. The Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing. Congressman Jack Edwards of Alabama was the senior Republican on the committee. Readiness was a big issue with Edwards. He had sent an aide named Charles Murphy out on a fact-finding tour of Air Force bases. When Murphy went to Christie and asked what he should look for on his tour, Christie gave him the Spinney Report. Murphy briefed the congressman well. The hearing quickly focused on readiness problems of the all-weather, night-attack bomber: the do-anything-but-dust-crops F-111D. Congressman Edwards bored in on Secretary of Defense Harold Brown with detailed and specific questions. His probing queries revealed that America’s premier fighter-bomber suffered from such a critical shortage of parts that in order to keep it flying, maintenance sergeants used their own money to buy parts from Radio Shack.
Ordinarily this would have been a relatively insignificant story, perhaps a “bright” used on the inside pages of a few newspapers. But suddenly the media had a symbol for the “hollow military” and the story achieved a life of its own. It ran in many daily newspapers, on the television networks, and in many smaller newspapers around the country. Follow-up pieces ran for days. The saga of enlisted men buying parts from Radio Shack to keep the F-111D flying was a story that would not go away.
The Air Force reacted by searching for a leak in the Pentagon. The questions asked of SecDef Brown revealed too much inside knowledge. They could only have come from inside the Building. Pentagon counterintelligence people threatened to withdraw the security clearance of anyone revealing classified information, and virtually everything involving readiness was classified. This was the first of many security investigations aimed at the Reformers.
In April 1980 came the third major event that gave the reform movement a national presence: Desert One, the debacle in the desert during the failed attempt by the Carter Administration to rescue hostages in Teheran. Eight men died, five more were seriously injured, and eight aircraft were lost. (Spinney had remarried and his wife went into labor as news of Desert One broke on television. Spinney pulled out a calculator and, using what he knew of helicopter reliability studies, began calculating how many helicopters the military should have used in order to have a successful mission. The data were complex and the calculator slow. Spinney’s wife grew upset. “Let’s go, Chuck!” she shouted. “I am about to have a baby.” But Spinney was deep into his calculations and mumbled, “Just a minute. Just a minute.” He calculated that the military should have used fourteen helicopters instead of the eight actually used. Then he took his wife to the hospital.)
These three events all happened in a six-month period and showed clearly that something was wrong with the U.S. military. These Reformers might be on to something.
Then, in May, Fallows weighed in with another piece titled “America’s High-Tech Weaponry.” He told of Spinney’s “extraordinary report” and quoted Sprey at length.
The military simply could not refute what the Reformers were saying. They tried. Their most common response was that the Reformers were Luddites and antitechnology, the same argument used against the Fighter Mafia’s complaints about the F-15. It was an equally spurious argument, overlooking the fact that Boyd, Christie, Sprey, and Spinney all came out of the technology community and that Sprey had insisted on the most high-tech cannon in the Air Force for his A-10. In truth, the Reformers argued not so much against technology as against the improper use of technology. One of the most valuable aspects of “Patterns of Conflict” was that it laid out a framework for assessing different technological approaches. It promoted the application of scientific and engineering knowledge to human needs. “Patterns” is about the mental and moral aspects of human behavior in war. That technology should reinforce that behavior, not drive it, was the argument of the Reformers. Boyd’s mantra was “Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.” He also preached, “People, ideas, hardware—in that order.” Thus, machines and technology must serve the larger purpose. The Reformers believed that America’s technological advantages were being used incorrectly and had, in fact, become a liability.
Even decades later, the depth of Pentagon paranoia about Boyd and the Reformers is amazing. The idea that an institution as large and as seemingly omnipotent as the Pentagon would react as it did toward a handful of men is almost impossible to grasp. It is worth noting that neither Boyd nor Sprey held any portfolio or any official position in the Pentagon, private business, or academia. Boyd was retired and being paid for one day every two weeks. Sprey was a consultant to various businesses. It seems the most sensible thing for the Pentagon to do would have been to ignore them. But these men could not be ignored. The Pentagon has long dealt with the complaints of various organizations. But those groups often are single-issue groups whose members have no more than a surface knowledge of the military or of defense matters. Because their concerns are frivolous or tangential, they are easily dismissed. Now for the first time in history, Pentagon insiders, men who had the keys to the kingdom, men who knew the budgets and the issues as well as anyone in the Air Force, were attacking the Building. And they were building alliances with Congress and the media, the two institutions that can cause heart-burn in generals. Reform was becoming a motherhood issue with the media. Publications from Business Week to the New York Times did stories about the Reformers. Congressmen and senators who were members of the Reform Caucus got more media coverage than the
y ever imagined. This fed their enthusiasm and, in turn, generated even more coverage. One Reformer described the process as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
Now Boyd was delivering his briefing to everyone from captains to colonels to four-star generals. One of the colonels was a Marine Corps officer named Al Gray. Gray later became a general and asked to hear the briefing several more times. He and Boyd had long private sessions in which they discussed the ramifications of “Patterns.” Congressional aides heard the briefing and recommended it to the congressmen and senators for whom they worked. One quiet congressman from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, heard the “Patterns” briefing and then Boyd’s other briefings—an investment of some twelve hours. He asked Boyd to come by his office for numerous private sessions to talk of tactics and strategy and how America might best conduct itself in the next war. “I was intrigued by the concepts he was working on,” Cheney would later say. “He was a creative and innovative thinker with respect to the military.” Cheney added that the Reformers had “great ideas” that were “a part of my education.” He said the ideas of the Reformers were valuable to him then as a member of the House Intelligence Committee and later when he became secretary of defense. Asked if he and Boyd discussed maneuver warfare, Cheney said, “Maneuver warfare was embodied in the whole notion of what he was talking about.”
The Acolytes sometimes had little respect for congressmen and senators, but even Pierre Sprey was impressed with Dick Cheney. He accompanied Boyd on some of the visits to Cheney’s office and knew the congressman did his homework. Cheney studied deeply the intricacies of Boyd’s approach to strategy. He was one of the founders of the Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill, a group that soon numbered more than one hundred congressmen and senators.