Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Boyd’s work has been cited in almost three hundred magazines, journals, and books. His legacy to science and to aviation, though he does not always receive credit, is exemplary and lasting. He contributed as much to fighter aviation as any man in the history of the Air Force. He single-handedly moved the Air Force away from aircraft designed to fly at high speed in a straight line and toward the highly maneuverable aircraft of today. And more than any other person he deserves credit for creating America’s tactical Air Force of the past thirty years: the Air Force F-15 and F-16 and the Navy and Marine Corps F-18 rule the skies because of Boyd. This is a claim that causes retired four-stars, whose own accomplishments are minimal, to grow livid. They say Boyd was unprofessional, unreliable, and an embarrassment to the Air Force—a man who happened to have a flair for math, and that’s all.

  Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability Theory did four things for aviation: it provided a quantitative basis for teaching aerial tactics, it forever changed the way aircraft are flown in combat, it provided a scientific means by which the maneuverability of an aircraft could be evaluated and tactics designed both to overcome the design flaws of one’s own aircraft and to minimize or negate the superiority of the opponent’s aircraft, and, finally, it became a fundamental tool in designing fighter aircraft.

  In the May 6, 1991, issue of U.S. News & World Report was an article about the innovative tactics that won the Gulf War. And it said the men behind the tactics were John Boyd, Mike Wyly, and Huba Wass de Czege. The January 4, 1998, issue of the New York Times Magazine,the annual issue called “The Lives They Lived” that marks the passage of those who have made a great contribution to society, includes a piece about Boyd.

  The academics who know of Boyd agree he was one of the premier military strategists of the twentieth century and the only strategist to put time at the center of his thinking. That is as far as they will go. But Boyd was the greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu.

  Academics snort in derision at such a claim. Von Clausewitz remains their favorite even though those who know the work of both Boyd and von Clausewitz agree that Boyd revealed the gaping flaws of von Clausewitzian theory. Another reason that academics are reluctant to rank Boyd with Sun Tzu is that he published so little. His ideas—while broadly disseminated by word of mouth—still received relatively limited circulation (though not as limited as the circulation of many professional journals). Academics dismiss Boyd because he left no text for them to analyze. They say that since his war-fighting strategy was never subjected to critical review, they find it difficult to support the position that he ranks with Sun Tzu. Academics are a cautious group that like to qualify their judgments. The absolute nature of ranking Boyd with Sun Tzu bothers them. “You just can’t say that” is their final rejoinder.

  But as the years go by and Chet Richards continues to deliver his lectures to large corporations, the word will spread. Richards—considering that he has a Ph.D. in mathematics and is a retired intelligence officer—has a rather unusual assessment of Boyd: he thinks Boyd is the most recent link in a chain that began with Sun Tzu and continued with Musashi, the sixteenth-century samurai, and then with Mao Tse Tung. Richards says the similarities between Musashi and Boyd are many: Boyd’s shiny fighter aircraft was like the lacquered armor of a samurai. Both went into battle one-on-one. Both had personal habits that caused others to think them uncouth. Both lived by an austere code of honor and self-sacrifice. Both believed that if they confused an enemy before the battle, they had won even before the fight. In combat, neither ever lost a battle. Both read widely and were single-minded in their search for enlightenment. Both loomed large in their times. Both evolved from fighters into teachers and both left works that lived long after their death. Musashi’s famous work was A Book of Five Rings and Boyd’s was the OODA Loop. The OODA Loop is in five pieces, the “Loop” itself being the fifth. “Boyd was the old warrior,” Richards says.

  Graduate students now are writing papers on Boyd. The two Web sites created by Chet Richards receive three hundred thousand visits annually and the numbers continue to increase.

  Boyd was not as interested in his career as he was in the fate of the American fighting man, the man who—as the military says—is at the pointy end of the spear. He wanted these men to have the best possible equipment, whether it was an airplane or a tank. That was his life.

  Boyd made men believe they could do things they never thought they could do. And most of them were men of integrity and accomplishment even before they met Boyd. He encouraged all that was good in them and galvanized them and sent them forth renewed. Boyd’s ideas and work are out there, still germinating, still spreading in an inkblot fashion, with the isolated and widely separated blots coming together and forming even larger pools of knowledge. Some say Boyd has become a cult figure. But no one who knows the Acolytes or the U.S. Marines or the growing use of Boyd’s ideas in business believes this is cultish activity.

  After the initial media coverage of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, newspaper and magazine reporters began mining their sources for the deeper meaning of the tragedy. A few weeks later stories began appearing on “fourth-generation warfare” and the October 1989 piece in the Marine Corps Gazette was rediscovered. The article, written more than a decade earlier, was so frighteningly prescient in its description of how terrorists might operate in America that it was reprinted in the November 2001 issue of the Gazette. Colonel G. I. Wilson suddenly was perceived as a prophet.

  One of the Web sites devoted to Boyd suddenly was receiving as many as one thousand six hundred hits per day, many visitors pulling up the 1989 article. A surprising number of the visits originated from the Pentagon, where a mighty battle was waged over how to respond to the terrorist attack. The deployment of B-1 and B-52 Bombers meant the traditional Air Force mind was at work. But Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated following Boyd’s ideas. Powell appeared on national television and talked of a response involving multiple thrusts and getting inside the adversary’s decision cycle.

  Vice President Cheney has his own ideas about Boyd’s place in military history. “We could use him again now. I wish he was around now. I’d love to turn him loose on our current defense establishment and see what he could come up with. We are still oriented toward the past. We need to think about the next one hundred years rather than the last one hundred years.”

  The military itself does not have such certitude.

  After Ron Catton delivered his emotional eulogy at Boyd’s funeral, he stopped by the office of his congressman, George Nethercutt, to ask a favor. Catton wanted the Air Force to recognize Boyd in some formal fashion. Today Catton is a multimillionaire financial consultant and one of Spokane’s most prominent citizens. If he asks something of his congressman, chances are, he gets it. The initial response from the Air Force was that Grant Hammond, who teaches at the Air University, was writing his book and that should be enough recognition for Boyd. Nethercutt disagreed and on September 17, 1999, the Air Force dedicated Boyd Hall at Nellis AFB. It is a small building across the street from the Weapons School. The original version of the dedication speech was twenty minutes, but a retired general said Boyd was not worth twenty minutes and ordered the speech cut by half. This same retired general read the prologue to this book on the Internet several years ago and sent an e-mail to friends in which he denigrated Boyd and said when Boyd was at the Fighter Weapons School, “I had to wax his ass” in simulated aerial combat. The claim brought howls of derision from those who knew both men.

  The Fighter Weapons School has gone through a name change. Because crews for the B-1 Bomber and the B-52 and other aircraft are now trained there, the “Fighter” was dropped and it is now the “Weapons School.” In the summer of 1999, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the school, the Air Force published a special issue of USAF Weapons Review. The featured article was titled “Air Combat Maneuvering” and was from Boyd’s “
Aerial Attack Study.” His name was not mentioned.

  At the Air Force Academy, seniors take an advanced course in aeronautical engineering. The textbook is primarily an explication of the E-M Theory. Boyd’s name is not in the book and those who teach the course do not give Boyd credit. When a group of graduating seniors was polled, not one cadet knew the name of Colonel John Boyd.

  The U.S. Army has forgotten that one of its generals stopped three nights in the desert during the Gulf War and today proudly proclaims that it practices maneuver warfare. The Army also says that Boyd had nothing to do with the doctrinal changes of the late 1970s, that those changes came from within.

  And then there is the Marine Corps. When Boyd died, Commandant Charles Krulak wrote a moving tribute in a Pentagon newspaper saying Boyd was the architect of America’s victory in the Gulf War. He later elaborated, saying it was “the concept of maneuver, intent, and agility that led to victory.” Young Marine officers know of Boyd and study his work. Twice a year retired Marine officer Chris Yunker sponsors a Boyd Symposium to discuss Boyd’s ideas.

  The Marine Corps Research Center at Quantico is a soaring building of brick and glass. Mike Wyly greatly influenced its design. When a visitor enters the large airy lobby, straight ahead are two brass cannons gleaming as bright as the day they were cast. On the walls are pictures of stern-faced Marine generals and of battle scenes dating back to America’s beginnings. Wings of the building and the conference rooms are named for famous three- and four-star Marines. This sacred and hallowed hall is the repository of the mystique surrounding one of America’s most elite fighting forces. This is a hall that commemorates Marine warriors. But the eye quickly roves past all of this and is drawn straight ahead and to the left, to the most prominent display in the lobby: the figure of a man in a blue flight suit. Behind the figure is a model of the F-16 and on his shoulders are the silver eagles of a colonel. The name tag over his right breast is in big bold letters and says JOHN BOYD. In his outstretched arms rests a thick briefing book with a faded green cover: “A Discourse on Winning and Losing.”

  And finally there is Erie, Pennsylvania, where Boyd returned year after year, finding renewal and seeking approbation. A half dozen or so of Boyd’s boyhood friends read his obituary in the New York Times. They might have later seen Jim Fallows’s glowing tribute in U.S. News & World Report and perhaps even the widely reprinted eulogy written by David Hackworth. They were amazed. John Boyd, the fellow they grew up with, the man they considered a loud-talking salesman, really did all those things he said he did. They journeyed down to Washington for the memorial service and heard the eulogies from Ron Catton and Pierre Sprey, and they were proud that a boy from Erie had gone so far.

  They wished they had known earlier.

  The house on Lincoln Avenue has gone through several owners and today is empty. While the Erie Times-Union did a full-page story about Boyd several years before he died, and while the publisher occasionally mentions Boyd in his columns, the city has never formally recognized Boyd. Erie has a statue commemorating Colonel Strong Vincent, a man generally overlooked by historians. The city is proud of how in the War of 1812 Oliver Hazard Perry fought aboard a ship built in Erie. Yet Erie does not recognize its most accomplished son. The children of Erie do not know of John Boyd.

  But then, Erie always was a hard town.

  Appendix

  Boyd was obsessed with wanting to understand how he had developed his Energy-Maneuverability Theory when many far better-educated engineers had not discovered it. “Destruction and Creation,” one of the few things he ever wrote, is his effort to understand his own thought processes. It is a window into his mind.

  DESTRUCTION AND CREATION

  John R. Boyd

  September 3, 1976

  Abstract

  To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. In this sense, the discussion also literally shows why we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms. The activity is dialectic in nature, generating both disorder and order that emerges as a changing and expanding universe of mental concepts matched to a changing and expanding universe of observed reality.

  Studies of human behavior reveal that the actions we undertake as individuals are closely related to survival, more importantly, survival on our own terms. Naturally, such a notion implies that we should be able to act relatively free or independent of any debilitating external influences —otherwise that very survival might be in jeopardy. In viewing the instinct for survival in this manner we imply that a basic aim or goal, as individuals, is to improve our capacity for independent action. The degree to which we cooperate, or compete, with others is driven by the need to satisfy this basic goal. If we believe that it is not possible to satisfy it alone, without help from others, history shows us that we will agree to constraints upon our independent action—in order to collectively pool skills and talents in the form of nations, corporations, labor unions, mafias, etc.—so that obstacles standing in the way of the basic goal can either be removed or overcome. On the other hand, if the group cannot or does not attempt to overcome obstacles deemed important to many (or possibly any) of its individual members, the group must risk losing these alienated members. Under these circumstances, the alienated members may dissolve their relationship and remain independent, form a group of their own, or join another collective body in order to improve their capacity for independent action.

  In a real world of limited resources and skills, individuals and groups form, dissolve and reform their cooperative or competitive postures in a continuous struggle to remove or overcome physical and social environmental obstacles.11,13 In a cooperative sense, where skills and talents are pooled, the removal or overcoming of obstacles represents an improved capacity for independent action for all concerned. In a competitive sense, where individuals and groups compete for scarce resources and skills, an improved capacity for independent action achieved by some individuals or groups constrains that capacity for other individuals or groups. Naturally, such a combination of real world scarcity and goal striving to overcome this scarcity intensifies the struggle of individuals and groups to cope with both their physical and social environments.11,13

  Against such a background, actions and decisions become critically important. Actions must be taken over and over again and in many different ways. Decisions must be rendered to monitor and determine the precise nature of the actions needed that will be compatible with the goal. To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change. The concepts can then be used as decision-models for improving our capacity for independent action. Such a demand for decisions that literally impact our survival causes one to wonder: How do we generate or create the mental concepts to support this decision-making activity?

  There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: We can start from a comprehensive whole and break it down to its particulars or we can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole.28,24 Saying it another way, but in a related sense, we can go from the general-to-specific or from the specific-to-general. A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from the specific-to-general. In following this line of thought can we think of other activities that are related to these two opposing ideas? Is not analysis related to proceeding from the general-to-specific? Is not synthesis, the opposite of analysis related to proceeding from the specific-to-general? Putting all this together: Can we not say that general-to-specific is related to both deduction and analysis, while specific-to-general is related to induction and synthesis? Now, can we think of some
examples to fit with these two opposing ideas? We need not look far. The differential calculus proceeds from the general-to-specific—from a function to its derivative. Hence is not the use or application of the differential Calculus related to deduction and analysis? The integral calculus, on the other hand, proceeds in the opposite direction—from a derivative to a general function. Hence, is not the use or application of the integral calculus related to induction and synthesis? Summing up, we can see that: general-to-specific is related to deduction, analysis, and differentiation while specific-to-general is related to induction, synthesis, and integration.

  Now keeping these two opposing idea chains in mind let us move on a somewhat different tack. Imagine, if you will, a domain (a comprehensive whole) and its constituent elements or parts. Now, imagine another domain and its constituent parts. Once again, imagine even another domain and its constituent parts. Repeating this idea over and over again we can imagine any number of domains and the parts corresponding to each. Naturally, as we go through life we develop concepts of meaning (with included constituents) to represent observed reality. Can we not liken these concepts and their related constituents to the domains and constituents that we have formed in our imagination? Naturally, we can. Keeping this relationship in mind, suppose we shatter the correspondence of each domain or concept with its constituent elements. In other words, we imagine the existence of the parts but pretend that the domains or concepts they were previously associated with do not exist. Result: We have many constituents, or particulars, swimming around in a sea of anarchy. We have uncertainty and disorder in place of meaning and order. Further, we can see that such an unstructuring or destruction of many domains—to break the correspondence of each with its respective constituents—is related to deduction, analysis, and differentiation. We call this kind of unstructuring a destructive deduction.