Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
A very interesting book about John Boyd, who was a crack fighter pilot, and then later military strategist and reformer. Boyd flew as an instructor in the real life version of Top Gun, and beat everyone in 40 seconds or less. But later in his life he really studied military strategy, and this is where the interesting parts of this book are.Boyd was literally the designer of the F-15, and a theory of maneuvering called Energy-Manueverability (E-M), which mathematically gave a chart for each aircraft that gave pilots an idea of the ideal speeds and altitudes they could use to pull off various turns and tactics.One interesting thing I noted was that throughout his career, like everyone else in the military, Boyd was getting reviewed by his superiors, called ER's. It was interesting to hear, and relevant to business, how you had to "read through the lines" and how even a positive sounding ER could be a career-killer if the person wasn't recommended for promotion. Reading this has definitely made me think twice every time I've read (or written) recommendations for people.Another Boyd tidbit I liked was when fighting bureaucratic battles in the Pentagon, he had a mantra to "use the other persons information against him". Starting with the other persons argument and data, and working backwards, you can make pretty compelling arguments.Perhaps the biggest idea Boyd came up with is what is called the OODA loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. A key quote defining the OODA loop:"Thinking about operating at a quicker tempo - not just moving faster - than the adversary was a new concept in waging war. Generating a rapidly changing environment - that is, engaging in activity that is quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy - inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives."Another great quote that helps explain it:"Boyd said the strategies and bloodbaths of World War 1 were the natural consequence of both the vo Clausewitzian battle philosophy and the inability of generals to adapt new tactics to nineteenth-century technology: line abreast, mass against mass, and linear defenses against machine guns and quick-firing artillery. The bankrupt nature of that doctrine was demonstrated on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, which the British suffered sixty thousand casualties. After more than three years of the meat-grinding form of war, the Germans began engagements with a brief artillery barrage with smoke and gas obscuring their intentions, then sent in a special infantry teams. These small groups looked for gaps in the defense and advanced along many paths. They did not hit strong points but instead went around them, pressing on, always going forward and not worrying about their flanks. They were like water going downhill, bypassing obstacles, always moving, proving, and then, when they found an opening, pouring through, pressing deeper and deeper."Getting your lieutenants to the point where they can do this kind of infiltration successfully requires great communication and men who can think fast on their feet. In other words, you had to enable every leader to be able to follow the OODA loop, and just arm them with the overal goals, and trust them to make their own decisions. Very different from previous military structures, where "the need to know" remained at the top.Why is this empowerment valuable? Because:"The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is the not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such fashion as to get inside the mind and the decision cycle of the adversary. This means the adversary is dealing with out-dated or irrelevant information and thus becomes confused and disoriented and can't function."And:"Understanding the OODA loop enables a commander to compress time - that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use the temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, wonder, to question."This makes sense. You can almost picture the commanders of old, who used to have to get on the phone with their boss in order make any decision. "Take the bridge, blow it up, or wait?". Hours and days could be spent waiting around for generals to make up their minds. This form of maneuver warfare is what the Germans used in WWII - they called it blitzkrieg - and it's what we used in Iraq the first time. In business we have a word for the above - micromanagement. In a sense, it sounds like empowering business leaders and their lieutenants to have an effective OODA loop is what will let a business move faster and win marketshare. I bet somebody has written a book about that - I will have to look.
John Boyd, a fighter pilot who commanded an air base during the Vietnam War, once set a general's tie on fire by jabbing it with a lit cigar in a Pentagon hallway while telling him how fucked up the air force was.You gotta love John Boyd, contentious grump and royal asshole or no, at least I do, because when it comes to the art and craft of air war he was the working man's (combat pilot's) genius. If you don't know, asshole is the standard air force appellation for fighter pilots, and Boyd considered it higher praise than any commendation or promotion the powers-that-be might bestow. He had no interest in anything other than doing what needed to be done, and only what needed to be done, and doing it right the first time. As Boyd saw it, "right" was not happening until the air force returned to the basic precepts and tactics and technology of fighter warfare. He was appalled by how bloated and ineffective and outright corrupt the air force had become under the tyranny of Strategic Air Command, which believed in nothing but bombing. Bomber pukes, Boyd called them, though he was hardly the only fighter pilot to do so.Even among his detractors he earned respect because he was so damn smart, plain spoken, and in his way, noble, though his family life suffered; he was a man on a mission, with rarely a waking hour to spare on anything else. He took on what amounted to the entire military-industrial complex when he challenged production of an alleged fighter aircraft known as the F-111. A Pentagon briefing for a general and his staff went as follows.Boyd gave them the numbers that showed how at any altitude, any speed, any G-load, any part of the flight-performance envelope, the F-111 was inferior to the Soviet threat. If the F-111 faced a MiG, it would be shot down. Period. End of story. The F-111 was, in the traditional phrase of the fighter pilots, a dog. The general thought for a moment. Maybe there was something the charts did not reveal, something he could salvage. "Major, based on your extensive research, do you have any recommendations regarding this aircraft?" Boyd did not miss a beat: "General, I'd pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the goddamn thing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed taxi."Charming or no, his commitment and intelligence won him a comparably committed and intelligent following that became known as the Fighter Mafia; in the 1980s they made the cover of Time magazine. Coram does a fascinating job of telling Boyd's personal and professional stories. He's also good at explaining the technicalities of Boyd's schematics and formulas, such E-M Theory and P=[T-D over W]V, which added up to unprecedented breakthroughs in the potential for effective and efficient air warfare.John Boyd had an advocate in then congressman Dick Cheney. Subsequent attempts by Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to appropriate Boyd's ideas rang false, however. Boyd was not around to defend himself against their machinations, but one of his closest associates, Pierre Sprey, has and continues to set that record straight. See the following link to Bill Moyer's Journal for more about that: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/013...
What do You think about Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War (2004)?
This bio is a 3-for. John Boyd was the top-gun US fighter pilot in the era between Korea and Vietnam. When his Air Force flying days were over -- after returning from Georgia Tech with an engineering graduate degree -- he moved to the Pentagon, designing some of the best fighter aircraft ever flown, and laid the ground work for the "A-" series ground-support aircraft. Later, trying to out-guess Soviet capabilities in dogfights, he invented the OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) loop for military strategy (then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney employed it in Gulf War I)--and the OODA loop was adopted as a management tool, where it's still taught today. Still, Boyd was a misanthrope, ill-suited to command, and anything but a family man. Coram's excellent book presents Colonel Boyd, warts and all.
—Nooilforpacifists
Awesome book covering the life and ideas of John Boyd. I profess to knowing nothing about this man prior to reading this book, and it seems I am in the majority in that respect unfortunately by planned intent. Boyd was a US Air Force fighter pilot turned engineer and scholar, who wrote the Aerial Attack Study that shaped the fighter tactics of not only the USAF but air forces all over the world, pioneered the Energy-Maneuverability Theory that impacted how fighter pilots fought and had a monumental impact on aircraft design, and also developed the OODA loop and Patterns of Conflict that among other things contributed to the executed plan of the Gulf War. This was a man of conviction that tenaciously pursued his goals and ideas whilst being ostracized by most of the military. His stated beliefs regarding "to be somebody or to do something" is a climatic decision every person must make in this world, and that is the point I have taken from this book. Recommended reading for everyone, but military officers in particular. I look forward to reading more about Boyd's theories in the future.
—Chrissy
A fascinating, well-told tale of a supremely talented man who brooked no compromised, achieved so much, and paid a steep cost for his rigid adherence to his principles. But more than a story, Boyd is a study of the ideas generated by him and his followers, the Acolytes, an examination of how they changed first the nature of air combat, and then all of warfare, and then adversarial conflict in general. It is also a devastating indictment of the Pentagon and the military/industrial complex, and how power and profits are put above the safety of our men and women in uniform. Finally, the book seems to strategically ignore discussion of Boyd's personal and family life, except in passing, seemly a calculated demonstration of how little attention Boyd paid to his own family during his single-minded quest to find the truth and shove it down the military's throats, though we do eventually see the price his family paid for his inattention.A great biography needs both an exemplary subject and a talented biographer, and in this case, we find both in excess. Boyd is both triumph and tragedy, a stirring portrait and a cauldron of revolutionary ideas. It is also an excellent read. Highly recommended.
—Erik Johannessen
