by Robert Coram
At the same time, Boyd was working on another briefing called “Conceptual Spiral,” a work that elaborated upon “Destruction and Creation” and thus more or less brought his work back to where it had begun.
Boyd often had counseled Spinney to have goals but to make sure the goals could not easily be reached. He talked of the desolation a man faced when he grew older and all his goals were realized. And now Boyd’s work had come full circle. He had reached all his goals.
About this time Jeff Ethell, a well-known aviation writer, wanted to write Boyd’s biography. But Boyd could never find the time and Ethell gave up on the idea.
Then began an alarming series of incidents involving Boyd’s health. One day he was delivering a briefing at Andrews AFB when suddenly he could not breathe. His chest felt as if it was about to burst and he broke into a cold sweat. He stopped the briefing, sat in a chair for an hour or so, then drove home. About 3:00 A.M. Mary called Mary Ellen and said, “I think your father has had a heart attack. He needs to go to the hospital. He won’t listen to me. He will listen to you.”
“Put him on the phone,” Mary Ellen said.
“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital. Where do you want to go?”
Boyd mumbled vaguely that he did not need to go to the hospital, then said he would go to Andrews. He did not think Mary Ellen would want to drive into Alexandria, pick him up, and then drive out to Andrews. “Be ready,” she said.
She and her dad arrived at Andrews before dawn. A doctor administered an EKG and found only a slight anomaly of no clinical significance. He said Boyd’s heart was strong. Nevertheless, Boyd believed he had a heart attack. Overnight he changed his diet and stopped eating red meat.
Then he suffered a case of tinnitus, a loud ringing in the ears that is not uncommon in men of a certain age. Boyd must have suffered a severe case because he told Burton, “It won’t quit. This buzzing is driving me crazy.” He could not sleep. Medication did not help. He took powerful drugs that only brought on depression. Then he went to a psychiatrist who changed his medication several times, each time bringing even worse depression. Boyd decided the medications were aggravating his problem and, against his doctor’s advice, stopped taking drugs. Both the depression and the tinnitus disappeared.
But months later a terrible depression, this one not caused by drugs, settled over Boyd. One day he was in Spinney’s office when suddenly he started trembling. His eyes welled with tears. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small vial, and quickly swallowed several pills.
“John, what is the matter?” Spinney said. He had never seen Boyd in such a state.
Boyd’s voice shook and he seemed about to break into tears as he confided that at times a black-dog night descended upon him and enveloped him in such pain and foreboding that he could not cope.
When he told Christie he was depressed, Christie said, “About what?” Boyd could only shake his head in bewilderment. He did not know what he was worrying about or what he was depressed about. But it was real and it frightened him as nothing ever had.
About this time Christie’s world turned upside down. His daughter reached puberty and ran away from home. Soon she was shuttling in and out of institutions. Christie used up all the benefits of his insurance plan but there was no relief in sight. His rank was the highest a nonappointed civilian could reach, but still he could not afford his daughter’s increasing medical bills. He resigned his Pentagon job and went to work at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a think tank that works for the secretary of defense. By now Boyd rarely showed up at the Pentagon. But when he did, he spent most of his time talking to Christie about Christie’s daughter. In fact, sometimes it seemed that was the only reason he came to work. Christie was puzzled by Boyd’s interest. What Christie did not know was that by now Boyd was wondering if one of his own daughters, Kathy, should be institutionalized because of her severe depression. She would never be able to make her way in the world alone. And Boyd must have wondered if his family’s history of mental disorders had fallen upon Kathy.
In late 1988, Boyd began looking for another place to live. He looked at apartments around northern Virginia but found nothing he liked. Then he drove to south Florida, met his brother Gerry, and picked out an apartment in Delray Beach, a community about halfway between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. The apartment had two bedrooms, one for Boyd and Mary and a second for Kathy. Boyd returned to Washington and announced he was moving to Florida the first of the year. His friends were astonished and wanted to know the reason.
The gist of his answer was that he was doing this for Mary. Ever since Eglin she had loved Florida. Mary had endured a lot from him, and now he was finally doing something for her.
As usual, in matters involving his family and personal affairs, Boyd did not reveal the whole truth. He had lived in the basement apartment on Beauregard Street for twenty-three years. Neighbors complained often about the Boyd family, first about Jeff’s snakes, which escaped from time to time, then about Stephen’s TV repair work being done in the apartment. Boyd thought all that was behind him, as both Jeff and Stephen had moved out. But Scott, now thirty, was in college and still lived at home. He developed a fascination for motorcycles—loud motorcycles—and he roared in and out of the complex with the blatting of the mufflers echoing off the buildings. Rather than park in the lot as tenants were required to do, he parked his motorcycle on the patio behind the apartment. Sometimes he even drove it inside the apartment. Eventually management had enough of the Boyd family. The official reason for asking them to move out was that after twenty-three years the apartment needed renovation.
But Boyd knew the real reason.
Chapter Thirty - One
The Ghetto Colonel and the SecDef
BOYD sat in the cramped living room of his third-floor apartment in Delray Beach. The television was on. Any news story about the Pentagon or generals or weapons programs caused him to erupt with “Take him out” or “Cut his head off.”
Boyd was surrounded by hundreds of books and copies of his briefings and the scattered yellow legal pages of revisions for “Patterns.” He frequently retired to the bedroom, sprawled across the bed, and called Sprad and Catton and Christie and Sprey and Leopold and Spinney and Burton and Wyly. The apartment had two phone lines, one for Boyd and one for Kathy, but Boyd gave both numbers to his friends. He did not want to be on his line and miss a call.
On this day, Boyd called Pierre Sprey and with an almost ironic tone said, “Tiger, the pace of life down here is different. About all these people can handle is one project a day, like going to the supermarket.” He told Sprey how he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, where he lectured at the Air War College, and how he delivered his briefings all around the country. But he always had to come back to Florida, where he said he was “rotting.” Sprey laughed and did not place too much significance on Boyd’s comments.
The truth is that Boyd was miserable in Florida, and only Mary knew just how much. Six months after they moved to Delray Beach, Boyd told Mary he had been forgotten—that people thought he was crazy and that his work was insignificant.
When he was not delivering his briefing or talking on the phone, his days were spent prowling through bookstores, searching the nonfiction shelves for the growing list of books that mentioned him or his work. He leaned against a bookcase for hours as he read a book, then returned it to the shelf. Near the beach he found a restaurant he liked, Bimini Bob’s, and he went there one or two days a week to eat conch chowder. No more Wednesday nights, no more prowling through the Pentagon. Boyd could sense himself deflating.
In early 1989, a group of Boyd’s old comrades began talking about his ideas on maneuver conflict and how those ideas might presage a new form of war. They sat down and wrote a piece saying the first generation of war was the era of muskets and massed troops, the second was when massed firepower replaced massed troops, and the third was time driven, as exemplified by the blitzkrieg. And then they wrote of something new, so
mething they called “fourth-generation warfare.”
Marine Corps Colonel G. I. Wilson was one of the five authors. During his research he talked almost daily with Boyd about using strength against weakness, about how an enemy might use a low-technology or even no-technology offense to defeat a high-tech adversary, and how an enemy might win without a major battle. The piece was titled “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation” and was published in the October 1989 issue of both the Marine Corps Gazette and the Army’s Military Review. It may have been the only instance in military history in which two service publications ran the same article at the same time.
The article said fourth-generation warfare might emerge from “Islamic traditions” and that the “distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point.” It talked of terrorists moving freely within American society “while actively seeking to subvert it.”
The piece was so futuristic, so against the grain of military thinking, that the Pentagon ignored it. But it elicited great interest and caused much debate with the Marine Corps and the Army’s special-operations community.
Chet Reichert, Boyd’s boyhood friend from Erie, spent the winters in Delray Beach and Boyd took him to various bookstores, where he pulled out book after book and opened them to the proper page and pointed with a triumphant finger at references praising his work. And he told Reichert about other books being written, books that would be published in a year or so, one of which would be dedicated to him. Reichert remembers that he and his wife occasionally invited Boyd and Mary out for dinner and that Reichert always paid. Boyd never reciprocated and never invited the Reicherts to his apartment. Reichert did not know how little money Boyd had in retirement, and since Boyd still lectured and gave his briefings around the country, Reichert assumed he was being paid well. But Boyd accepted only expenses, and when the expense checks arrived, he tossed them into a drawer and forgot about them. After he died, his children found a stack of several thousand dollars’ worth of uncashed checks.
Boyd looked ahead and saw little about the twilight of his life that pleased him.
Then, on August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Less than a week later, American troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield.
Now began a phase of Boyd’s life that for years was only whispered about.
Until Dick Cheney later spoke of that period, all the evidence was anecdotal and pieced together after the fact. The anecdotes pointed inexorably toward the idea that Boyd played a crucial role in the top-secret planning of what would become America’s strategy for prosecuting the Gulf War.
Several weeks after Desert Shield began, Boyd suddenly was flying back and forth to Washington. He told Mary he had been summoned by then–Secretary of Defense Cheney. While in Washington, Boyd called none of the Acolytes, none of the men he spent hours every week talking to on the telephone—none, that is, save Jim Burton. When Burton asked, “What are you doing in town?” all Boyd said was, “I’m here to see Cheney.” Burton waited but Boyd added nothing. Burton understood. He knew enough about classified operations and the “need to know” that he did not press for details. But he could put things together. The SecDef was working eighteen-hour days directing the buildup of Desert Shield and planning the coming war. He did not have a lot of free time. The only thing Boyd and Cheney had in common was “Patterns” and their numerous talks about war-fighting strategy. Therefore, Burton reasoned, if Cheney had summoned Boyd to Washington, the only possible reason was to talk about waging war.
Still another bit of anecdotal evidence involved Spinney. After the Iraqi invasion, he drew upon his encyclopedic knowledge of military tactics and spent weeks working on invasion plans, determining what he would do if he were in charge. When Spinney finished he was so excited that he called Boyd. Once he told Boyd what he wanted to talk about, Boyd grew strangely silent. Spinney hardly noticed at the time. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “And there are only two options.” Still Boyd did not respond. Spinney told Boyd of his first plan, which drew only a noncommital grunt. Then Spinney told him of his second idea, which he thought was best: have the Marines feint an amphibious assault at Kuwait and then, while the attention of the Iraqi Army was diverted, make a gigantic left hook far into the desert, then swing north, envelop the Iraqi Army, and annihilate them. “It’s a classic single envelopment,” he said. “Almost a version of the von Schlieffen Plan.”
For a long moment there was silence. Then Boyd said, “Chuck, I want you to forget what you just said. You are not to discuss it with anyone else. Ever.” Boyd used a tone Spinney had never heard before. He was not issuing an order. Instead he used a flat, no-nonsense tone that showed Spinney how deadly serious he was. Spinney was taken aback. He had been like a son to Boyd for almost fifteen years but had never seen this aspect of him. Spinney stuck his plans in a box and never discussed them.
Still another piece of the puzzle, one that the public would not become aware of until after the Gulf War—when books were written—was the growing awareness during Desert Shield that Cheney opposed General Norman Schwarzkopf’s initial war plan. Schwarzkopf’s plan was a head-to-head assault against the main strength of the Iraqi forces, the classic mind-set of Army commanders imbued with the theory of attrition warfare. Slug it out mano a mano, toe-to-toe, force against force, and the last man standing wins.
But Cheney, with the support of General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected the plan and asked Schwarzkopf to give it a second try. Young lieutenant colonels who were graduates of the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, the famed “Jedi Knights,” came in to revise Schwarzkopf’s plan. The Jedi Knights were said to be well versed in maneuver warfare and Boyd’s ideas. They offered Schwarzkopf a direct head-on attack and two variations of a less-than-ambitious left-hook envelopment. These plans were not only rejected but ridiculed.
In The Generals’ War, a book written by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainor after the war, Cheney is quoted as saying to Powell, “I can’t let Norm do this high diddle up the middle plan.” Not only did Cheney reject Schwarzkopf’s plan but he used Boyd’s language to do so.
It is rare indeed that the secretary of defense challenges the war plans of the on-scene commander. Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reluctant to do this.
But in Dick Cheney the Pentagon had a rare SecDef. Cheney had enough one-on-one sessions with Boyd to give him the knowledge and self-confidence to second-guess even a headstrong four-star general such as Norman Schwarzkopf. Simply put, Cheney knew more about strategy than did his generals.
Cheney now says Boyd “clearly was a factor in my thinking” about the Gulf War. Cheney minimizes his role in changing Schwarzkopf’s initial plan, saying “nobody” liked the idea of going “straight up the middle into the heart of Iraqi offenses.” He says he had “no direct influence” on the final plan: “It was not my job to figure out the nitty gritty. That was Schwarzkopf’s mission.”
Nevertheless, it has become an article of faith that Cheney developed his own plan for fighting the Gulf War. The Marines would feint an amphibious assault while the Army made a wide sweep through the western desert and then swung north to cut off the Iraqi Army.
What is still not generally known to the public is just how well the Marines performed in the Gulf. Brigadier General Mike Myatt, a graduate of the Fort Pickett free-play exercises and a man intimately familiar with Boyd’s work, was then commander of the 1st Marine Division. Three days before the war officially began, Myatt’s men raided deep behind Iraqi lines. They bypassed strong points, forgot their flanks, and penetrated so deeply and caused such confusion that the Iraqi Army rushed in reinforcements against what they anticipated would be the main thrust of the American invasion. Then they began surrendering by the thousands. Nowhere can be found a better example of Boyd’s ideas on “folding the enemy in on himself” than in the fact that some fifteen Iraqi divisio
ns surrendered to two divisions of Marines.
Spinney was sitting in the study of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, when Brigadier General Richard Neal, the American spokesman during the Gulf War, went on television to brief the press on the extraordinary success of coalition forces. He told of a confused Iraqi Army whose soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. Asked for a reason, he said, “We kind of got inside his decision cycle.”
“Son of a bitch!” Spinney shouted. He called Boyd and said, “John, they’re using your words to describe how we won the war. Everything about the war was yours. It’s all right out of ‘Patterns.’”
He was right. Everything successful about the Gulf War is a direct reflection of Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict”—multiple thrusts and deception operations that created ambiguity and caused the enemy to surrender by the thousands. America (and the coalition forces) won without resorting to a prolonged ground war. America not only picked when and where it would fight, but also when and where it would not fight. Coalition forces operated at a much higher tempo than the enemy. The resulting crises happened so fast that opposing forces could not keep pace with them. The one-hundred-hour ground war blitz against Iraq is a splendid example of maneuver warfare, a first-rate instance of cheng/ch’i, the conventional and the unconventional, all done so quickly the enemy was disoriented and collapsed from within.
The brilliance of Cheney’s plan was proven in its success. But there were failures in execution, particularly by the Army, whose famous left hook simply stopped in the desert for three nights because a general was afraid to expose his flanks—in other words, he wanted his forces to be synchronized. This so slowed the Army that the retreating Republican Guard and much of the Iraqi Army escaped.
Schwarzkopf and several generals have since spent much of their time blaming each other, but it was the slavish adherence to an outmoded attrition-warfare doctrine that allowed the Iraqis to escape. Boyd’s earlier predictions about synchronization in the Army were proven true.