The fighter jock who changed the way you fight

Little-known John Boyd transformed combat

By Bradley Peniston, Times Staff Writer

Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times

January 27, 2003

The F-15 Eagle fighter plane. The F-16 Fighting Falcon. The F/A-18 Hornet. The Air Force's dogfighting textbook. The Marine Corps' Operational Maneuver From The Sea doctrine. The armored "left hook" that sealed victory in the 1991 Gulf War.

All owe their fundamental shape - some, their existence - to John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot-turned-theorist. Not since Sun Tzu has mankind produced such an influential military thinker, biographer Robert Coram argues convincingly in "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War" (Little, Brown, $27.95).

But Boyd, a profane, sloppily dressed obsessive who made colonel only by cultivating patrons who outranked his ever-growing list of enemies, remained forever an outsider. In a passage to break your heart, Coram reports that only two Air Force officers attended Boyd's 1997 funeral in Arlington National Cemetery.

Though he flew combat missions over Korea, the Erie, Pa., native first made his mark as "40-Second Boyd," the instructor who waxed every challenger who met him over the Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., training range. At night, Boyd wrote, distilling his stick-and-rudder talent into a textbook that turned dogfighting from a kind of sport into a science.

Coram shows how this "Aerial Attack Study" set the pattern for a career of guerrilla innovation. Forbidden to write at work, Boyd labored after hours for six months, only to have the finished book rejected in favor of established doctrine. Boyd gambled his career on a bureaucratic end-run - he sent copies of the 150-page text to Tactical Air Command headquarters - and was vindicated in 1960 when the Air Force adopted it as the service's guide to fighter tactics.

Boyd would soon change the very shape of jet fighters. While earning an engineering degree at Georgia Tech, he tumbled to the notion that an aircraft's loops and turns might be described as an ongoing swap of potential and kinetic energy. More months of late-night effort produced the Energy-Maneuverability Theory, a set of design principles that revealed fatal flaws in the Air Force's nascent F-X fighter.

Coram describes how Boyd and a cadre of collaborators used deft action and dazzling briefs to reshape the aircraft that would become the F-15. Unsatisfied, they secretly dreamed up and produced the 1974 flyoff that launched the F-16 and F/A-18.

But Boyd's final, greatest intellectual work would change ground combat and joint operations. Clausewitz wrote of the "fog of war," as if nature alone causes plans to go astray. The fighter jock saw what the German general did not: that a commander ensures victory by befogging the enemy's mind.

In the years following his 1975 retirement, Boyd formulated a brand-new method of warfare that emphasized speed, not mass. Victory is yours, he taught, if you alter battlefield conditions too quickly for your enemy to observe, orient, decide and act.

The Marines, then the Army, used Boyd's theories to mount the services' most thorough doctrinal overhauls in half a century. Coram provides compelling, if circumstantial, evidence that the fighter pilot, in his role as adviser to then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, was the intellectual godfather of the deceptive thrusts and fluid maneuvers that won the Gulf War.

Drawing on scores of interviews, Coram manages the unlikely feat of sweeping readers through a tale of intellectual travail. The book crackles with anecdote and personality as Boyd and his boys outwit and outwork a bureaucracy bent on squelching their ideas.

This first full-length treatment of Boyd's life does not omit his flaws. For 23 years, the self-described "Ghetto Colonel" rebuffed his family's pleas to move out of their seedy basement apartment near the Pentagon. A distant father, Boyd never knew that his son staved off the thefts that plagued neighbors by repairing household appliances for local ne'er-do-wells. And Coram debunks several stories Boyd loved to tell about himself.

But the reader is left to marvel at a leader who persuaded likeminded men to fight the Pentagon at the peril of their careers. You must choose to Be or to Do, Boyd would tell his followers: to be someone with rank and power, or to do good for the military and the country.

Taking up his challenge, Boyd's self-styled "Acolytes" have performed many good works. Air Force Col. James Burton, to name one, threw away a surefire promotion to general while forcing Army brass to improve the Bradley fighting vehicle. (Coram owes much to Burton's excellent, unsung 1993 autobiography "The Pentagon Wars.") Another, Chuck Spinney, continues to spread the Boyd gospel from his post inside DoD's tactical aircraft office.

Find out what fires these men and drives contemporary military thought. Read this book.