Boyd

by Robert Coram

  The assistant secretary found it necessary to do what several other civilian leaders had done in similar confrontations: he reminded the generals that civilians rule the military. The assistant secretary said if the generals continued to fight his wishes, he would call a press conference and resign. When reporters asked the reason, he would say it was over a fundamental constitutional issue. Only then did the eighteen stars fade away.

  Burton arrived at the OSD testing office in June 1982. From the time he walked in the door, Pierre Sprey besieged him to conduct tests showing how vulnerable American aircraft and armored vehicles were to Soviet weapons. Sprey was one of the most vocal critics of the Army’s new M1-A1 Abrams Tank, and especially of how the vulnerability testing of tanks and armored vehicles was done largely by computer modeling. And the models were never verified by field tests. Thus, to Sprey, the model-based tests had no validity. Subject our tanks and our infantry carriers to realistic battlefield tests, he said. The lives of American soldiers are at stake.

  Burton, with Sprey in the background, came up with the idea for a live-fire test program—that is, actually shoot live Soviet rockets and cannons at U.S. tanks to test their vulnerability. Such a program seems to be common sense, but in fact it was a radical departure from current practice. Boyd predicted that the Army would rise up in opposition.

  For a year Burton briefed his ideas on live-fire testing to low-level Pentagon staffers and junior officers. After laying the groundwork and receiving the unanimous support of all branches of the services, Burton chose the first weapon he wanted to test: the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He could not have picked a weapon closer to the heart of the Army. The Bradley was supposed to be an advance over the traditional armored personnel carrier, which is just an armored box used to transport troops safely. The Bradley added a light turret to the armored box to allow it, in theory, to both carry troops and “fight.” But the Bradley was too lightly armored to fight tanks: what it was supposed to fight had never been precisely detailed by the Army.

  The Bradley was of crucial importance. First, it was the weapon whose safety affected the greatest number of soldiers; if America went to war, as many as seventy thousand soldiers might ride this vehicle into combat. Second, the Bradley program was in early production. This meant any problems could be corrected before thousands of the vehicles were sent to troops in the field. And third, the Bradley had never been tested for vulnerability to enemy weapons.

  The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army’s ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing use real Soviet weapons.

  The Army agreed. But the first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no explosion would result.

  “What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.”

  Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion and logic with Army officials, but to no avail.

  When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them and without allowing them the time to develop lung lesions, as had happened in other tests. The Army surgeon general’s office then reported the animals had suffered no serious aftereffects.

  Time after time the Army lied about the realism of its testing. But even the spurious tests were so damaging that the Army decided it wanted to postpone completing the live-fire tests for two years. This would insure that the contractor received a big portion of his money and would put the Bradley too far into its production run to discontinue, no matter what the tests revealed.

  “Jim, you must like this,” Boyd chided. “You are allowing it to continue.” He looked at Burton and knew what was going through his mind. The issue now before Burton was orders of magnitude beyond anything in his previous experience. The Bradley was to the Army what the F-15 was to the Air Force. Eleven billion dollars were at stake, an amount that—to the Army—mitigated against honest tests. Boyd pressed Burton. “Jim, you can’t have a normal career and still do the good work,” he said. “You have to decide.”

  Burton knew he stood at a crucial point in his career and in his life. This was the place he had heard Boyd talk about so many times, the to be or to do fork in the road. From this point forward, no matter what his decision, there would be no turning back. If he did what the military expected—that is, if he allowed the Army to have its way—he would be a good soldier. If he challenged the Army, retribution was a certainty.

  Rarely in his life had Boyd been so excited. He saw the coming fight as an operational field test for “Patterns of Conflict.” What better way for Boyd to test his theories than to pit one man against the U.S. Army? At first glance, there could be no more unequal contest.

  But the moral element of conflict is a crucial part of “Patterns.” Boyd realized the Army was doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, guarding a program worth billions of dollars, “protecting the farm” in Boyd’s words, while Burton wanted to protect the lives of American soldiers. The Army would try to steamroll Burton, to use the sheer mass of U.S. Army resources to crush him. It would be the crudest form of attrition warfare. Burton would have only his wits and the techniques of maneuver conflict. Boyd saw this as a chance for Burton to get inside the mind of the Army, to put the OODA Loop into action, to cause confusion and disorientation.

  Boyd believed Burton could defeat the U.S. Army.

  Burton knew he was being used as a test bed for Boyd’s ideas, but he did not mind. In fact, he looked forward to it.

  Boyd and Burton talked daily. Boyd wanted to know exactly what was said in every meeting with Army generals. He wanted to know who brought out which reports or studies. “Don’t filter it with opinions or interpretations,” he said. “Just tell me what happened and then we will talk of the implications.” He listened and thought and told Burton where the Army was maneuvering to set him up and what he should be prepared for the next day. He and Burton spoke often of Churchill’s comment in World War II that the truth was too precious a commodity to travel alone—that it had to be protected by a “bodyguard of lies.” Boyd said Burton must break through the bodyguard of lies to find the truth. He told Burton to always keep the initiative. “And you must never panic. When they surprise you, even if the surprise seems fatal, there is always a countermove.”

  Boyd gave Burton three guiding principles. The first was the most difficult and most familiar to anyone who had worked with Boyd. “Jim, you can never be wrong. You have to do your homework. If you make a technical statement, you better be right. If you are not, they will hose you. And if they hose you, you’ve had it. Because once you lose credibility and you are no longer a threat, no one will pay attention to what you say. They won’t respect you and they won’t pay attention to you.”

  The second thing Boyd told Burton was not to criticize the Bradley itself. “If you do, you are lumped in with all the other Bradley critics. It is the testing process you are concerned with.”

  While Boyd and Burton might make such a distinction, the Army could not. To them, criticizing the testing process was the same as criticizing the Bradley. But the difference in the two approaches is not at all subtle. By staying focused on the testing methodology, Burton was protecting the l
ives of American soldiers; he held the mental and moral high ground.

  Finally, Boyd counseled Burton not to talk to the media or to Congress, to stay inside the system. If you go outside the system, he said, you will be viewed as just another whistle blower. And whistle blowers get no respect; they get others to help them do something that they can’t do themselves.

  All of this advice and counsel should not be taken to mean that Burton was in any way Boyd’s instrument. Quite the contrary: Burton was the man who had to walk into a room filled with Army generals and challenge them. He was the man on the mission. And he sometimes ignored both Boyd and Sprey.

  In June 1984, Burton wrote what he called his “Rubicon Memo” to Secretary of Defense Weinberger. He said the Army was not performing realistic tests on the Bradley and was putting the lives of up to seventy thousand soldiers at risk. He asked that the Army be ordered to perform “full-up tests”—that is, tests in which the Bradley was loaded with fuel and ammunition, just as it would be in combat, and fired upon with real Soviet weapons rather than simulations.

  On September 28, the Army agreed to conduct tests with a minimum of ten shots against a fully loaded Bradley. But two weeks later the Army realized how vulnerable the Bradley was and the under secretary of the Army cancelled the live-fire tests. Burton made an appointment to see the under secretary, and was persuasive. The under secretary again reversed himself; now the Army would conduct the tests as earlier agreed.

  The Army did not want Burton around for those tests, however, so Army generals talked to Air Force generals, who sent down word that Burton was being transferred to Alaska. He was given a seven-day notice to accept the transfer or resign. It was just as Boyd predicted: a brutal, head-on assault. And it appeared effective. After all, if there is a bothersome employee, what better way to get rid of him than to transfer him? Burton thought the battle was over. But Boyd laughed. “Goddamn, Jim, this is the dumbest decision the Air Force can make. Whoever made this decision is general officer material.” He told Burton to collect every memo and every letter and every study in his files that dealt with the Bradley controversy, to make copies, and to flood the Building with little brothers and sisters.

  Burton protested. “I thought you wanted me to work within the system.”

  “Jim, part of working within the system means that everyone who has a right to know what’s going on has a copy of all the paperwork.” He paused. And when he spoke again Burton heard the laughter in his voice. “If something needs to leak outside the Building, God will take care of it.”

  Not even the most militant of Burton’s opponents could fault him for providing information to those connected with the Bradley program, so Burton emptied the contents of a filing cabinet and made copies of every document. He delivered copies to a number of people. A cover memo explained that he had been relieved of his job and that these documents should bring them up to speed on the status of the program. When he handed the stack of documents to a senior Army general, the general blanched. He knew copies would leak. Burton was giving notice that he was not only still in the game but was raising the stakes.

  Word came down to Burton that he was not being transferred. In an effort to resolve his conflict with the Army, his job description was being changed. The Army would conduct its own tests on the Bradley. But the tests would be exactly as Burton wanted. He could even observe.

  Boyd told Burton he had won this battle and he had done it by working within the system. If the story breaks in the press, don’t talk to reporters.

  Several little brothers and sisters found their way to members of the Congressional Reform Caucus, who in turn told the press. Dozens of reporters showed up at the Pentagon wanting to know why Burton was being sent to Alaska. “Colonel Burton is not going to Alaska. There have been no such orders issued,” said a Pentagon spokesman.

  The reporters went back to their sources in the Senate and House who gave them copies of the seven-day notice. When the reporters realized the Pentagon spokesman had lied to them, they were in a state of high dudgeon. Burton’s phone rang for several days. But he talked to none of the reporters.

  Nevertheless, several days later the largest newspapers in America ran stories that Burton had accused the Army of rigging the Bradley tests and the Pentagon had retaliated by abolishing his job and then recanting. Burton still refused to talk to reporters, but the stories were written anyway.

  The Early Bird, the Pentagon’s internal newspaper, published a collection of stories from around the country. All told of the Bradley testing problems and how the Pentagon responded by abolishing Burton’s job. The Washington Post and the New York Times, the two newspapers most feared by the Pentagon, sided with Burton and attacked the Pentagon for its heavy-handed ways. The Congressional Reform Caucus, headed by Nancy Kassebaum, joined the fray.

  Not even the Pentagon could stand up against such forces. A Pentagon spokesman said Burton could supervise the Bradley program until all tests were completed.

  By now Burton was a national figure. As with Spinney, this was to be his protection. But Spinney, despite the impact of his two major studies, had not changed the Pentagon. He had stopped the Reagan defense-budget increase, but that would have stopped on its own within another year or so. The Reformers had made the American public aware of just how reckless, even irresponsible, the Pentagon was with its money. But they had done nothing of lasting significance. Burton was the last chance. If he could not force permanent change on the Pentagon, the past few years would have been for naught.

  The first round was a clear victory for Burton. The generals must have been bitter. Not only had a colonel defied them and won but he had done it in such a way that they could not punish him. Next time the military would not fail.

  A brother officer, a colonel in Burton’s office, began spying on Burton. He made notes when he heard Burton talking on the telephone. He kept a record of Burton’s meetings. Every memo Burton wrote was copied and hand delivered to top Army generals. The memos were then copied and filtered down from four-stars to three-stars to two-stars and one-stars, even to colonels. Burton knew the military was building a file, the sole purpose of which was to justify firing him.

  Boyd was elated. He saw this as a chance for Burton to wield great influence with the Army leaders behind the plan. He told Burton to keep in mind that when he wrote a memo, it was not for the person to whom it was addressed, but rather to the generals. Boyd called this a “reverse pump.” Burton was feeding information to the people spying on him. This meant that accuracy in everything Burton said and wrote was even more critical. Again and again Boyd came back to one of his earliest admonitions to Burton. “Do your homework. If they hose you one time, they will never again respect you.”

  Burton did his homework so well he became known at the Army test site as a man who asked endless questions. He was up against Army experts who devoted their careers to covering up for the Army in such arcane areas as armor, terminal ballistics, medical effects of explosions on troops in confined spaces, effects of halon gases, and “vaporifics,” the study of toxic gases that are byproducts of explosions. But the difference between Burton and the experts was that the Army relied on computer modeling to cover up the Bradley’s dangers and Burton searched out the test data that confirmed these dangers.

  While Boyd counseled Burton on tactics in dealing with the Army, Sprey provided the technical expertise. Sprey knew there was an entire range of literature on armored vehicles and combat results from wars in the Middle East. At his suggestion, Burton went to the Defense Technical Information Center and dug out every report ever written on the vulnerability of armored vehicles in war. He studied, took notes, and challenged everything. Time after time—either deliberately or from ignorance—Army experts made erroneous statements, thinking Burton did not know the truth. He let them proceed, let them justify their actions, then sprang the trap. “That’s not what the data says.” And then he reached into his briefcase and pulled out studies the Army
experts had never heard of or preferred to bury.

  Burton’s research showed that fire and explosions inside a tank were the biggest source of casualties among tankers in World War II and among Israeli tankers in Middle Eastern wars. When he demanded more realistic testing procedures, he turned to an Army expert and said, “I want you to know there is nothing personal in what I am about to do.” He took a deep breath and said, “Show me where your computer models deal with fire, explosions, toxic gasses, and blast lung.”

  Army experts said these were not a consideration.

  Burton reached into his briefcase, threw a report on the table, and said, “Then how do you explain the data from World War II, England, and Israel that show these are the main reason for casualties?”