Boyd

by Robert Coram

  The amateurish bungling of the Air Force response to Boyd and the Reformers has been documented over the years, but one incident is worth repeating because it shows just how desperate the Air Force was. TacAir was a small office with a handful of civilian analysts as well as four officers, one each from the Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marine Corps. The Air Force representative was a lieutenant colonel anxious to be promoted. Because of the Pentagon structure, his efficiency reports were signed by the vice chief of staff. The Air Force lieutenant colonel was ordered to report on all activities of the Reformers in the office. He asked the secretaries to let him know the names of everyone calling Boyd and Spinney. He rifled desk drawers looking for memos. Boyd was suspicious and eventually caught the lieutenant colonel searching Spinney’s desk. He confessed and told Boyd he was pressured by the office of the chief of staff. Christie demanded that the lieutenant colonel be reassigned. Boyd insisted that TacAir, not the Air Force, pick the Air Force officer assigned there. Boyd picked Ray Leopold.

  He called Leopold at the Air Force Academy and said, “Ray, do you want to work with me in the Pentagon?”

  “Colonel, I’m cut on orders to go to Europe. It can’t be done.”

  “Ray, I didn’t ask about your orders. Listen to me, Tiger. Do you want to come to the Pentagon? Yes or no?”

  “Yes, Sir, but—”

  “No buts. You just stand by.”

  Several days later, to his utter astonishment, Leopold’s orders were changed and he was assigned to TacAir.

  Then the Air Force chief of staff learned that Leopold had once worked for Boyd and that he and Spinney were close friends. The chief said Leopold was going to Europe.

  Again, Boyd was at the center of a potential constitutional crisis. The deputy secretary of defense sent down orders for the Air Force chief of staff to come to his office. The chief was reminded that in America it is civilians who run the military. In so many words, the deputy secretary said, “If you wish to remain chief of staff, you will reverse the decision sending Major Leopold to Europe and you will send him to the Pentagon.”

  Leopold’s orders again were changed and he came to TacAir.

  The lieutenant colonel he replaced—the spy—was promoted to full colonel.

  Leopold had a realistic understanding of how things worked in the Building. A few days after he arrived, he was walking down a hall when he saw an open door. The office was empty. He went in and wrote on the blackboard, “Duty Honor Country.” Then he crossed out the words and under them wrote, “Pride Power Greed.”

  Now two of Boyd’s Acolytes worked with him.

  One day Boyd said to Spinney, “You know, I like the Pentagon more than I liked Nellis.”

  Spinney waited.

  That feral grin sliced Boyd’s face and he held a clenched fist in the air, then jerked it sharply downward and said, “More targets.” His booming cackle filled the office; he was ready to do battle.

  Acrimony between TacAir and senior Air Force generals became such that little work was getting done. The Air Force was bogged down fighting the Reformers. A three-star approached Spinney and said the Air Force wanted to make peace. The senior generals in the Air Force wanted to hear Spinney’s briefing.

  More than two dozen generals gathered in a large briefing room in the basement of the Pentagon. Spinney’s every comment was ridiculed. Two hours later he was at a point in the briefing he usually reached in twenty minutes. All over the room, generals were interrupting, their faces contorted in anger. One two-star became so over-wrought that he had an anxiety attack and collapsed. Boyd took charge and called for a white wagon. Attendants loaded the two-star aboard the white wagon and carted him off to the infirmary. All this was happening in the back of the room and Spinney was not aware of it until later on in the gym when an Air Force colonel approached him and said, “You are now an ace.” He told Spinney how the briefing caused the two-star to collapse. “He’s okay now,” the colonel said. “But you downed him. He had two stars on each shoulder and we’re giving you one for free. That makes you an ace.”

  Spinney’s “white-wagon kill” was toasted again and again at happy hour the following Wednesday.

  The Reformers were seen as a threat to national security. General Bob Mathis, the Air Force vice chief of staff, repeatedly referred to them as “dark and satanic forces.”

  That spring, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the gnomish power-house of the Senate Armed Services Committee who had cultivated a reputation for brilliance simply by not saying much, heard of “Defense Facts of Life” and asked the Pentagon to send Spinney to his office to deliver the briefing. SecDef Brown refused. The Reformers were making too many inroads with Congress and the media. And Spinney’s briefing was too dangerous to be heard by a U.S. senator. It might give him ideas not sanctioned by the Building.

  Several times over the next six months or so, Nunn asked the Pentagon to send Spinney to his office. Brown was adamant in refusing.

  Ronald Reagan was elected in November and almost immediately afterward Brown—under the threat of a subpoena—relented. In early December, Christie, Boyd, and Spinney went to Nunn’s office and gave him the full briefing. They told Nunn the Reagan Administration was about to start throwing money at the Pentagon and that more money would only exacerbate already serious problems.

  Nunn told Spinney to remove the classified materials from his briefing, write it as a report, and submit it to him. Spinney took leave and spent the remainder of December bent over a legal pad in his home office. After going through a security review, Spinney’s report was cleared for release to the public. Spinney by now was infamous inside the Building, but this was the first the American public would hear of him.

  In early 1981, the Reform Movement received another big boost, both in public awareness and credibility, when Jim Fallows published his first book, National Defense, to an extraordinary reception. The book was an elaboration of the articles he published in the Atlantic Monthly. It was a damning indictment of the Pentagon and the defense industry, and it portrayed Boyd and the Reformers as men who might have the solution to all that was wrong. One of the strongest sections of the book dealt with how Boyd originally had perceived the F-16 and what it had become in the hands of the Air Force—how “enhancements” had converted the once-nimble fighter into an all-weather bomber. The buttonhook turn was something of the distant past.

  Various books on the Reformers and the reform movement followed National Defense. But Fallows was first, and his book gave the reform movement enormous credibility with the media and with the public. Not only did the book win the nonfiction category of what then was called the American Book Awards but it was runner up for nonfiction in the National Book Critics Circle. It launched Fallows’s brilliant career.

  Timing for the book could not have been better. Ronald Reagan came into office in January and no president could have been less interested in military reform. Upon taking office, one of Reagan’s first actions was to resurrect the B-1 Bomber manufactured by Rockwell in his native state of California.

  The B-1 later flunked its specifications for the radar cross section it presented to enemy radar, flunked its range specifications, and flunked its electronic countermeasures specifications. A combat-loaded B-1 cannot fly over many mountain ranges. Its altitude limitations are classified, but it cannot even reach the altitudes flown by commercial airliners. Design flaws create wind turbulence that prevents bombs in the rear bomb bays from dropping unless a rotary cylinder and long arms are attached. This modification means a bomb falls every few seconds, preventing carpet bombing, which means the B-1 must return over the target—not a pleasant prospect in heavily defended areas.

  But none of this mattered. The aircraft that Jimmy Carter killed because its cost had risen to $167 million a copy was at last going into production… now at a cost of $287 million per copy.

  Chapter Twenty - Six

  The Great Wheel of Conspiracy

  THE February 1981 confirmation
hearing for Caspar Weinberger as President Reagan’s secretary of defense was reminiscent of a 1960s love-in. Senators knew a flood of defense dollars was about to cascade from Washington and each wanted more than his share. The senators were extraordinarily cordial to Weinberger.

  But then Sam Nunn said he knew of people in the Pentagon who believed that throwing money at the armed services was not the answer to Pentagon budget problems. Nunn said those people were being squelched. He said he had an unclassified version of the Spinney Report and wanted to know if Weinberger had read the report. Weinberger had not been briefed to expect this question. He knew nothing of the Spinney Report.

  Reporters covering the hearing were galvanized by Nunn’s comment—first, because he was a pillar of the defense establishment, and second, the Pentagon had successfully blocked many of their stories, a tactic that built up enormous enmity. Now they were about to have their day. Not since the Vietnam War had such a large crush of reporters descended on the Pentagon.

  During the next few days, hundreds of newspapers all over the world published news stories on the Spinney Report. Dozens more stories dribbled out in coming weeks in what reporters call “think pieces” or “thumb suckers.” Chuck Spinney was catapulted from obscurity onto the national stage. With the exception of Weinberger, he suddenly was one of the best-known people in the Building.

  In May, David Chu, head of PA&E, sent down word for Spinney to stop briefing “Defense Facts of Life” and to work on something else. For the next eighteen months Spinney worked on another briefing. It would be even more explosive than the first.

  In the meantime, Boyd continued to research and amend and add to “Patterns,” briefing it often. Story after story about Boyd appeared in newspapers around the country. No one could counter Boyd’s briefing because no one in the Building was doing similar work; the Pentagon had no military theorists. Boyd was out there all alone and gaining converts by the day. The Pentagon was under siege from reporters. Paranoia was a palpable presence in the Building.

  The depth of that paranoia is best revealed by what Reformers called the “Great Wheel of Conspiracy.” When President Reagan’s civilian appointees came to the Pentagon, they were taken on tours and briefed—the Pentagon version of the Welcome Wagon. These briefings are largely self-serving, designed to make civilian leaders aware of the military’s position on various issues and to show why the military position was the only one worth considering. By now Tom Christie was a deputy assistant secretary of defense, one of the highest-ranking nonappointed civilians in the Building, but the briefing book prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Walt Kross for Reagan’s appointees was so sensitive that Christie could only look at it; he could not take it to his office. The five-inch-thick notebook concerned the “dark and satanic forces” that drove the reform movement. It opened with a depiction of a giant wheel with spokes radiating out from the center. Each spoke represented what the Air Force saw as a significant part of the reform movement. Christie laughed when he saw himself at the center of the wheel. Colonel Kross thought Christie was the leader of the reform movement, probably because TacAir was under his jurisdiction and was the front office for the Reformers. Therefore, in the top-down, rank-conscious Air Force, Christie had to be the leader. In truth, Christie protected Spinney and Boyd. He maneuvered Spinney’s work into the political arena. He pushed the readiness issue so brilliantly worked by Spinney into the forefront of the Department of Defense budget process. He was deeply involved in bringing the revelations about the F-111D to the attention of the SecDef. But in all of this he was very much in the background. He was not the leader.

  The Great Wheel of Conspiracy illustrates how little the Air Force knew of the Reformers and how wrong they were in considering the movement an organized cabal. While there was some cross-fertilization between the Reformers and the Congressional Reform Caucus, mostly in the form of Boyd’s briefing, the Reformers were still small, independent groups. They were organized only in the sense that they looked to Boyd as their leader. Even this most basic of facts, the Air Force got wrong. The Great Wheel of Conspiracy listed Boyd and Sprey on a spoke labeled “Consultants.”

  Still another spoke represented the media, where Fallows’s name was the most prominent. He headed a list of journalists who wrote stories about the Reformers.

  Senator Gary Hart and Representative Jack Edwards were listed on the spokes that included members of Congress whom the Pentagon considered Reformers. Winslow Wheeler, the congressional aide to Senator Nancy Kassebaum, was listed as leader of the congressional staffers in the conspiracy.

  Christie has a near-photographic memory and at the next happy hour he went into considerable detail about the Great Wheel of Conspiracy. Laughter has seldom been louder in the Old Guard Room than it was that night. A possible exception was a few years later when the news came that the lieutenant colonel who developed the Great Wheel of Conspiracy was promoted to four-star general.

  By now, some of the ideas in Boyd’s briefing, particularly the OODA Loop, were popping up in various publications, often without crediting him. Boyd never seemed to care. He was a true guerrilla in that he only wanted his ideas to find acceptance. Nor did he care when, in the surging dialectic that was the reform movement, other men occasionally came to the forefront. In fact, he encouraged it. An incident involving Spinney and Time magazine is a prime example.

  One of the significant battles in the reform movement began when Spinney finished his new briefing. He called it “Plans / Reality Mismatch.” The point of the briefing was that year after year the Pentagon underestimated the cost of proposed new weapons systems. When those systems went into production, the actual costs were much higher than the projected costs. Spinney showed that the Reagan Administration had underestimated the cost of the defense buildup by five hundred billion dollars. A couple of hundred million, maybe even a billion dollars, could be explained. But five hundred billion?

  Spinney began delivering his new briefing throughout the Building. Curiously, Air Force generals were particularly interested. He briefed most generals on the Air Staff. Then word came down for Spinney to stop the briefing while the Pentagon conducted an independent study of his work. Pressure on the Pentagon to finish the review of Spinney’s work was enormous. Dozens of people wanted to hear the briefing. A year later the review said Spinney’s briefing was accurate and that his conclusions could not be faulted. David Chu met with Spinney, ostensibly to talk about what he would do with the briefing. He said he would take some sort of action the following year. Spinney thought his work had been squelched.

  By late summer of 1982, defense reporters for Time magazine were interested in the reform movement. This was due in large part to Hugh Sidey, then one of the grand old men of American journalism. Sidey, who wrote a column for Time titled “The Presidency,” spent hours talking with Boyd and came away a believer. In fact, he organized a meeting of senior Time editors to hear Boyd’s briefing and Sprey’s ideas. It was largely because of Sidey that a team of Time reporters spent months researching a story on the defense industry.

  Boyd was busy during those months. Not only was he a primary point of contact for the Time reporters but he was showing Spinney how to work within the bureaucracy to affect change in the Pentagon. Boyd believed the independent study that confirmed the accuracy of Spinney’s work should “have lots of little brothers and sisters.” Spinney knew what that meant: he should make dozens of copies of the study and send it to everyone in the Pentagon who had heard the “Plans / Reality Mismatch” briefing. The independent study was not classified and it mentioned Spinney by name. It mentioned the “Plans / Reality Mismatch” briefing. Spinney was simply letting people know they could now hear the briefing.

  As Boyd knew would happen, news of the study found its way to reporters. It is safe to assume that this was leaked by a Reformer. Again, dozens of reporters descended on the Building demanding copies of Spinney’s newest work. Again the Pentagon launched a security investigation to d
etermine the source of the leak. David Chu appeared at a press conference and told reporters there was no study—only a few scribblings that had been pasted together. The reporters suspected they were getting a runaround and called friendly congressmen and senators and had them call the Pentagon. They called every contact they had in the Building. The big squeeze was on. Coincidentally, about this time another study confirming Spinney’s work popped out of the Pentagon. The Air Force had secretly conducted its own budget study and had come to the same conclusions as Spinney. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to the Republican Party, released still another study saying the Pentagon’s budget process was in serious trouble.

  By February 1983, the Time piece was finished. It was so powerful that it was scheduled as a cover story. Now Time needed both a news peg and someone from the reform movement to appear on the cover. By now congressmen and senators were weary of Pentagon stone-walling. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a conservative Republican, called Secretary of Defense Weinberger and asked to see Spinney’s study. To Grassley’s astonishment, Weinberger refused. Grassley thought the role of the Senate was being usurped by a political appointee and he jumped into his old Ford Pinto, went to the Pentagon, and demanded to meet Spinney. He was denied.

  Grassley returned to the Senate and called for Senate hearings. He was going to hear from Spinney even if he had to subpoena him. Now, once again, arose the constitutional issue of whether or not civilians controlled the Pentagon. That was not a battle the Pentagon wanted to fight, so the Building called upon one of its closest and most powerful friends. Senator John Tower of Texas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was such a strong Pentagon supporter that the Reformers referred to him as “a wholly owned subsidiary” of the Building. Senator Tower said Grassley’s budget committee had no authority to call for a hearing involving a Pentagon employee—that Pentagon issues should be heard before his committee. But Grassley, too, knew how to play the power game. He gathered enough support from fellow senators to force a joint hearing.