Boyd - the story of an American disruptor

Boyd the book

Bill had recommended Boyd, published in 2002, based on a recommendation through his wife, possibly related to their son’s being an Army Master Sergeant. It’s the story of John Boyd, fighter pilot and legendary disruptor to how the Air Force, and by extension, the Pentagon operates.  This book chronicled his influence with credible detail and fast paced storytelling while offering insight into some of today’s biggest issues.

Bill opened the discussion with a single statement that Boyd lived many lives. Indeed, the kid from Erie PA with an absent father became: fighter pilot nicknamed “40-second Boyd”, the instructor at Top Gun who’d have your six - meaning behind you, guns hot - in less than 40 seconds; the central force among his Acolytes (more on this group soon); the laser focused proponent of a light-weight fighter which became the legendary F-16; the never-satisfied author of The Briefing, a five hour alternative to the military’s wars of attrition; and the intellectual force behind the Marines’ conversion from mud grunts to the cognitive elite; … for starters.  On the way to these, he broke combat rules of engagement, stole over a million dollars of computer time, burned a few generals' ties, and tragically, ignored and lost his family.

The book criticized honestly but brutally the Pentagon, “The Building”, relentlessly, describing how its power structure conspired against American strengths including innovation and accountability, so much that Joel asked whether the narrative was fair, or fully accurate.  Our consensus was two-fold: first, that the theme required no embellishment, just stories recalled; and that the results speak for themselves: increasingly expensive products, with decreased effectiveness or reliability.  Chuck piled on with stories of a summer at the Pentagon: generals WERE the epitome of the problem.  Young up-and-coming captains and lieutenants get assigned to the Pentagon to advance their careers, often to assist with procurement analyses.  They are so new to the game that highly skilled and knowledgeable defense contractors run circles around them, justifying massive expenses with poor deliverables.  (On a related topic of how lobbying has evolved in the decades since, read The Wolves of K-Street).   John Boyd summarized the zero-sum dysfunction within the Building, commenting: “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy’s doing.”  Within the defense budget, it IS a zero-sum game.

Boyd’s successes could be attributed in large part to the group of friends and comrades he cajoled, mentored, and led, aptly named the “Acolytes”.   Six men, summarized here, joined Boyd in various endeavors to change the direction and thinking within the US military.  .

Acolytes: (not organized in our discussion, but helpful to summarize here)

Chuck Spinney (Spinney the Brash) understood that unnecessary complexity made weapons systems too expensive and unreliable. He authored “Defense Facts of Life” (the Spinney Report), disrupting thought in 1978 when he was only 33. Using other people’s information against them, and by leapfrogging layers of decision trees he traded a fast career into something that would matter.

Tom Christie was The Finagler,  Christie facilitated stealing computer time at Eglin AFB for Boyd to run Boyd’s Energy Maneuverability (EM) Theory  numbers.  Energy maneuverability analyzes kinetic energy (mass and velocity, or ‘momentum’) with potential energy (here, gravitational force available from high altitudes to convert into greater kinetic energy).  Christie reappeared as the connected insider who among other influences engineered a promotion letter elevating Boyd from Lt Colonel to full Colonel.

Pierre Sprey (the Intelligent) was a McNamara whiz kid (entering Yale at 15), who had run analyses critical of Air Force projections.  Boyd was brought in to sabotage the young analyst. Instead, they became comrades in arms!   Sprey took a project on close air support, the A-X, ultimately delivering the A-10 (Warthog), one of the most storied close-air support jets in history.  The brass never liked it: low flying, slow, but an airborne monster you couldn’t shoot down, surviving the budget until 2024. 

Leopold the First was another genius:  Air Force Academy, electrical engineering, injured while roughhousing at the Academy, so didn’t fly, got his PhD instead.  His first job with Boyd was crunching the enormous Air Force budget, where his parametric analysis revealed how intentionally understated the true Air Force budget was for its weapons systems.

James Burton was another of these Reformers who preferred to Do Something than Be Someone; a common theme among the Acolytes.  

Mike Wyly was the Marine, Semper Fi, (always loyal) who advocated fast moving tactics, forget the flank, penetrate, using Fingerspitzengefuhl (finger tip feel).  

While Boyd chided and challenged this band of similar minded reformers, they ultimately achieved their own successes and wins.  All were brilliant, all traded advancing careers to DO something.

Another theme of this group employed especially by Burton arose from Boyd’s warfare tactics, known as OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.  This approach allowed for one of the great lessons from American military success, where soldiers in the field are given strategic clarity but tactical freedom. We all agreed that the OODA progression is useful in business today as well, indeed any organization with a clear mission against any opponent.  

Always a thorn in the sides of commanding officers, Boyd never paid much attention to rules.  One of the comic scenes was where Boyd was chosen as the colonel to deliver news on a lightweight fighter, which 2- and 3-star generals had successfully sabotaged for years.  Unknown to the audience was Boyd’s personal relationship with SecDef Robert McNamara.  He began the briefing with. “This is not a briefing with questions. This is a statement of policy: We’re getting our lightweight fighter.”  Challenged for its range, Boyd knew the physics of fuel to weight ratios, calmly explaining how the small F-16 had greater range than the larger F-15.  While the weight ultimately grew beyond its original conception, this became the true fighter jet NATO countries and fighter pilots wanted: the F-16.

People, Ideas, Technology: Boyd and his Acolytes repeatedly stated the priorities of People first, Ideas second, and Technology third.  Given his dismissal of his family and his treatment of many people, many of us thought that Ideas, People and Technology was a more realistic reflection of these priorities in action.  

As with Boyd’s paper on the emergence of asynchronous warfare a decade before 9-11, this turned out to be a more topical book than we expected.  Thus, our discussion drifted, as it often does, into contemporaneous issues: What can we learn to address today’s military challenges?  What was known as ‘guerilla warfare’ has evolved into ‘asynchronous warfare’, same idea, but today focused more on the economics than tactical differences.  When Yemenese Houthis can interrupt shipping in the Red Sea, and where ESSM missiles costing over $1 million each are shooting down $50,000 drones, that’s asynchronous.  Israel’s Iron Dome has similar economics with six-figure missiles against $500 Palestinian rockets from Gaza or from Lebanon.  Andruil is a private company today developing solutions - on its own dime - that it believes can deliver more economical results than the traditional defense contractors, Ratheon, Boeing, Lockheed and BAE. whose long cozy relationships define the “military industrial complex”.  While our nation’s defense contracting is not as subject to theft as in Russia, or as reliant on stolen tech in China and Iran, our national debt expenses now exceed our defense budget.  In a time of renewed focus toward effective allocation of  limited resources, private defense companies may meet the need.  Time will tell.

A final area of our discussion arose from Boyd’s only published paper, Destruction and Creation.  (Linked Here, 11 pages, and well worth the read). This work “sketched out how we destroy and create patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment.”   As we observe and experience a complicated world, we humans organize information both from the specific to the general (inductive reasoning), and from the general to the specific (deductive reasoning).  A blend of these approaches leads to the ‘creation’ of conceptual patterns, of ideas, to provide order for the domains we want to understand.  But the world changes constantly, offering new input to challenge our ideas that had created order under an earlier set of circumstances.  Chaos and uncertainty (entropy) never cease; eventually, destruction follows, forcing re-analysis of the structures we created earlier.  Creation and destruction.  Bringing this around to today, consider how different our education was to today’s.  When we were young, acquiring knowledge was expensive: to develop ideas, we had to engage people with different experiences, backgrounds and views.  Disagreement was valuable, in that it influenced and directed the synthesis of new, more resilient ideas than any based on our own experiences or prejudices.  Today, knowledge is cheap; while disagreement has become expensive.  Today’s educators curate information, selecting details that support existing views, while discarding (canceling) examples that challenge them.  But ideas not subject to criticism become fragile and outdated, while social media feeds our need for order, reinforcing pre-existing constructs. Such adherence to ideas stuck in time amplifies the pain of destruction when the inevitable reckoning occurs.  Once again, Creation. May we always subject our ideas to challenges, that we can understand the world, and ourselves, better.

The great thing about this book group is the variety of our ideas and a freedom to disagree, to joust to advance our understanding.  Napoleon’s medicine for what ails us?  Outdoor exercise, great literature, and quality time with Josephine.  Nobody disagreed with that idea.