Yes, it is an excellent site, JF. And it has a good section on the most important Military man of the 20th century. Whom, of course, nobody's ever heard of. Colonel John R. Boyd, USAF. His thinking is revolutionizing our tactics. This will be of limited interest here, but I am going to post a great article about him.
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Independent of any specific geographical conflict, what sorts of strategies deal best with the types of conflict that go under the names "fourth generation warfare," "low intensity conflict," or, as favored by the late American strategist, Col John R. Boyd, "highly irregular warfare"? For our potential adversaries have surely learned that to challenge our high technology fighters and tanks in a "fair fight" will only produce defeat, but they may also be learning from Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even Iraq that there may be other ways to achieve their goals. Boyd's insights on what makes an effective competitor may help us understand our strengths as well as our vulnerabilities in this new environment and what we should do to achieve our national interests at acceptable cost.
Genghis John
October 9, 1998
"Genghis John," Proceeding of the US Naval Institute, July 1997. Attached.
It should now be clear to most readers of this list the Defense Department is not adapting to the changing conditions brought about by the end of the Cold War: We have a modernization plan that can not modernize the force structure, a readiness nose dive, and a corrupt accounting system that makes it impossible to figure out how to solve the modernization and readiness problems. Moreover, while threats are changing, the Pentagon remains mired in a defense program inspired by the tired thinking of the cold war — a condition that is exacerbated and sustained by the porkbarrelling pressures of the military-industrial-congressional complex. The crisis inspires the most basic question of all — Ready for What? — a question that seems forgotten by the courtiers inhabiting the five-sided halls of Versailles on the Potomac. [see comment #s 189 & 194].
I intend to expand the discussion to include this question from time to time over the coming months. I will be referring often to the theoretical studies of the conduct of by war by the late Col John R. Boyd (USAF Ret), who was a close personal friend, as well as mentor for over 20 years. I believe a wider understanding of his work can help interested people evolve their own appreciation of the challenges now facing the American military as it moves into the very uncertain, albeit certainly unpredictable, world of the post-cold war era.
The following essay will introduce you to Col Boyd. I published it in July 1997 as a memorial to a man who dedicated his life to achievement without asking for anything in return.
Chuck Spinney
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, the following material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
Reference
"Genghis John"
Proceedings of the U. S. Naval Institute
July 1997, pp. 42-47
By Franklin C. Spinney
One hardly expects the Commandant of the Marine Corps to agree with a dovish former Rhodes Scholar, or an up-from-the-ranks, brass-bashing retired Army colonel, or a pig farmer from Iowa who wants to cut the defense budget. Yet, within days of each other in mid-March 1997, all four men wrote amazingly similar testimonials to the intellect and moral character of John Boyd, a retired Air Force colonel, who died of cancer on 9 March at the age of 70.
General Charles Krulak, our nation's top Marine, called Boyd an architect of victory in the Persian Gulf War. General Krulak was "awed" by Boyd's intellect, character, integrity, and his selfless devotion to our nation's welfare. James Fallows, Editor of U.S. News and World Report, claimed that Boyd's "ideas about weapons, leadership, and the very purpose of national security changed the modern military." Retired Army Colonel David Hackworth, one of our nation's most decorated combat soldiers, wrote that Boyd's "legacy will be that integrity — doing the hard right over the easy wrong — is more important than all the stars, all the plush executive suites and all the bucks." And in a 20 March speech, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) declared that John Boyd, "the leader of the Military Reform Movement," was a man who "always set the example of excellence — both morally and professionally."
What kind of man could unite the emotions of such disparate men?
I met Colonel John Boyd in 1973, when I went to work for him in the Pentagon as a 27-year-old captain in the Air Force. He already was a legend, yet his most important work lay before him. Over the next 23 years, my life became intertwined with this maddening mix of eccentricity, intellect, creativity, and moral courage — a mix that did not fit into neat compartments. Over a career that spanned 50 years, he evolved from "40-Second Boyd," to the "Mad Major," to the "Ghetto Colonel," to "Genghis John."
Boyd opened his military career as a 19-year old draftee in the U.S. Army occupying Japan during the cold, wet winter of 1945-46. Morale was terrible. The soldiers froze in damp tents, often eating uncooked K-rations, while their officers indulged themselves with hot food in warm quarters. Boyd led the inevitable revolt — the mud soldiers chopped down a wooden hangar and burned it to keep warm. The Army, being the Army, court-martialed Boyd for destroying government property, but Boyd, being Boyd, converted the trial into a referendum on leadership and responsibility. The officers lost, the troops got hot chow, and the military got its first look at John Boyd.
40-Second Boyd
He left the Army and went to college on the G.I. Bill, where he met his wife, Mary, a woman best described as a saint. He graduated with a degree in economics, was commissioned in the Air Force, and became a fighter pilot. He flew about 20 combat missions in F-86s at the tail end of the Korean War — enough to warrant his selection as one of the first instructors at the fledgling Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. He designed the dogfight tactics curriculum and earned the nickname "40-Second Boyd" as a result of a standing bet that he could maneuver from a position of disadvantage (challenger on his tail) to advantage (positions reversed) in 40 seconds — or pay the challenger 40 dollars. One of Boyd's lifelong friends, Ron Catton, a retired fighter pilot, and one of the few ever to graduate from the Fighter Weapons School with a perfect score, told me that Boyd usually needed only 20 seconds to win, but liked a little insurance in case something went wrong.
Boyd never lost. By the late 1950s, he was widely regarded as the finest fighter pilot in the Air Force.
He personified the romantic image of a fighter jock — tall, lanky, wildly gesticulating, loud, and irrepressible, an in-your-face type of guy, who smoked long thin stogies and blew smoke in your face, while he shouted and sprayed saliva at you in a head-on attack, from two inches, nose to nose. But 40-Second Boyd's flamboyant exterior hid an incisive mind, and he was about to blossom into a warrior-scientist — the "Mad Major."
The Mad Major
In the late 1950s, he began this improbable mutation by teaching himself enough calculus to work out the formulas describing his view of the maneuver-countermaneuver aerial duel. He published his results in a book-length technical report, the Aerial Attack Study, a secret document that eventually spread throughout the Free World and became the international bible of air combat.
His next stop was Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The Air Force sent him there to learn industrial engineering, a standardized curriculum that forced him to take a survey course in thermodynamics — the science of heat and energy. On the way to class one day, he had a flash of insight: the laws of thermodynamics, particularly those governing the conservation and dissipation of energy, were like the tactical give-and-take of an air-to-air duel. It was the kind of insight that characterized his genius for using analogies to combine seemingly unrelated pieces of information, gleaned serendipitously from very different disciplines, into a new world view.
As any logician will tell you, reasoning by analogy is a very dangerous game for most mortals. False similarities can capture our imagination, restrict our vision, and seduce us into seeing things that do not exist. To the orderly, Cartesian thinkers of the self-styled defense intelligentsia, Boyd had a very spooky way of thinking. To make matters worse, he had an IQ of only 90, which he claimed was an advantage because it forced him to be more efficient.
Nevertheless, Boyd always seemed to end up with the winning answer when the bureaucracy begrudgingly permitted the free market of ideas to work its painful magic. Most people attributed his success to luck, but he had a secret weapon: his uninhibited imagination was tightly coupled to a maniacal discipline to follow the truth wherever it might lead — even if it meant trashing his own creations. Boyd subjected each new synthetic analogy to rigorous analysis and testing, rolling it over and over in his mind, checking it obsessively for internal consistency as well as its matchup to reality, tearing it to pieces on paper, or during interminable phone calls at two in the morning, or, in the case of the analogy between thermodynamics and tactics — inside a computer.
Boyd hypothesized that a fighter's performance at any combination of altitude and airspeed could be expressed as the sum of its potential and kinetic energies and its ability to change these energy states by maneuvering. With this idea as a point of departure, he thought he could describe how well a fighter could perform at any point in its flight envelope. If the hypothesis were true, the next step would be to compare the performance of different fighters and determine which one was superior to the other at each point in the envelope. Establishing such a global standard of comparison promised two enormous payoffs:
First, he could compare the flying characteristics of an existing fighter to those of another, say an American F-4 to a Soviet MiG-17, and thereby identify what tactical regions of the flight envelope were most advantageous or dangerous to the friendly pilot.
Second, he could evolve a design for a truly superior fighter by developing a comprehensive tradeoff process that systematically compared the performance of successive, marginally different designs.
While elegant in its simplicity, and computationally straightforward, Boyd's energy-maneuverability theory was a gargantuan number-cruncher that required millions of calculations. The only way to do these calculations was with a computer, but in the early 1960s computer calculations were slow, computer time was expensive — and Boyd had no budget. Furthermore, the aeronautical engineers were not interested in the inspiration of a dumb fighter pilot with a yukky industrial engineering degree. To make matters even worse, Boyd had no right to design airplanes — he worked at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, where rednecks tested bombs designed by others, whereas the airplane designers worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio, the home of the Wright brothers and the mecca for aeronautical engineering. For a man like Boyd, there was only one thing to do. He concocted a daring plan to steal thousands of hours of computer time by making it appear that the computer was being used for something else.
Much to the dismay of the autocrats at Wright-Pat, the Mad Major's theory of energy-maneuverability (E-M) turned out to be a stunning success. It provided a universal language for translating tactics into engineering specifications and vice versa and revolutionized the way we look at tactics and design fighter airplanes.
Boyd used it to explain why the modern F-4 Phantom performed so poorly when fighting obsolete MiG-17s in Vietnam and went on to devise new tactics for the Phantom — whereupon Air Force pilots began to shoot down more MiGs.
He used it to re-design the F-15, changing it from an 80,000-pound, swing-wing, sluggish behemoth, to a 40,000-pound fixed-wing, high-performance, maneuvering fighter. His crowning glory was his use of the theory to evolve the lightweight fighters that eventually became the YF-16 and YF-17 prototypes — and then to insist that the winner be chosen in the competitive market of a free-play flyoff.
The YF-16, which won, is still the most maneuverable fighter ever designed. The production successors, the not-so-lightweight F-16 (Air Force) and the F/A-18 (the Navy-Marine Corps aircraft that evolved from the YF-17), together with the F-15, dominate the skies today. Naturally, Boyd believed they could have been much better war machines if the bureaucrats had not corrupted their thoroughbred design with so many bells and whistles. Nevertheless, more than any other single person, the Mad Major is responsible for our nation's unsurpassed air superiority, which began in the mid-1970s and continues to this day.
Boyd received the accolades, if not the acceptance, of the aeronautical engineering aristocracy for his pioneering work, and the thanks of the combat pilots who now understood how to fight an F-4 against the more maneuverable MiGs.
The Air Force, being the Air Force, tried to court-martial Boyd for stealing the computer time but it could not come up with the evidence; in the end, investigators found only four hours of stolen time. When confronted, the Mad Major blew cigar smoke in the chief inspector's face and explained calmly how he had stolen the rest. He then showed the inspectors a thick file of letters, which documented how his requests for computer time had been refused repeatedly by the bean counters at Eglin and the autocrats at Wright Patterson. He suggested they call Headquarters, Tactical Air Command, and tell the Commanding General that Boyd was about to be hosed for uncovering better combat tactics.
The inspectors, being inspectors, sensed a debacle and retreated. The bureaucracy, being a bureaucracy, said it had always liked Energy-Maneuverability and awarded Boyd a scientific achievement award and the Legion of Merit.
The Ghetto Colonel
All this was the stuff of legend in 1973 when I met Boyd, who was living modestly with Mary the Saint and their five children in a run-down apartment complex in Northern Virginia. He was well into his third mutation: the Ghetto Colonel. Like Immanuel Kant, he was an austere man of intense rectitude, whose life had become devoted to the study of science, philosophy, and the humanities in a small room. Like Kant, Boyd was obsessed with understanding how the mind creates knowledge, or in modern parlance, how it creates theoretical models of the real world — how new observations make existing theories obsolete, and how the mind replaces old theories with new theories in a never-ending cycle of destruction and creation.
To this end, he devoured books on physics, mathematics, logic, information theory, evolutionary biology, genetics, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, economics. Between 1973 and 1976, he poured his intellectual energy into producing a 16-page double-spaced, type-written paper describing his theory. Entitled "Destruction and Creation," this abstract treatise describes how a dialectical interplay of analysis and synthesis destroys and creates our mental images of the external world. It describes what pressures drive this mental process, and how internal phenomena naturally regulate it in a never-ending dialectic cycle, which takes on the outward manifestations of disorder turning into order, and order turning into disorder.
At the heart of Boyd's theory of knowledge was a natural regulation mechanism that he discovered by unifying for the first time certain aspects of the Incompleteness Theorem of Mathematics and Logic discovered by Kurt Godel, an Austrian mathematician; physicist Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Typically, he did not even try to publish his paper, although he did vet it through many distinguished scientists and mathematicians — none of whom was able to poke any holes in it.
END OF PART ONE |
