Another book rec: "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War"
/I just read Robert Coram’s biography of John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot. It is a phenomenal book. It tracks his early days as a fighter pilot, fighter pilot instructor, researcher/designer for new jet aircraft, and eventually maneuver war theorist. He would eventually become known for saying (among other things), “People, ideas, machines … in that order” and that’s a great framework to evaluate what made him special at each point in his career (with a notable exception for his performance as a husband and father - underwhelming).
Many fighter pilots struggled to control the F100, especially when it was first introduced, let alone perform well in it. Boyd, on the other hand, turned many of his tactial ideas into maneuvers that neither the Air Force nor the jet manufacturer had considered or thought possible (like “flat-plating the bird” - basically, when being chased, throwing on the brakes, letting the pursuer fly by and become the pursued). He made the machine serve him, instead of the other way around.
Before Boyd, fighter pilot instruction was mostly one-off tactics and maneuvers taught to be used in specific situations. Mostly instruction was hands-on - practicing over and over again - and giving pilots a feel for what it meant to be a good fighter pilot. Boyd was very very good at these drills - he earned the nickname “40 Second Boyd” because he could beat any opponent in one of these drills in 40 seconds. But more remarkably he was able to articulate that feel and draw up broader, comprehensive doctrine for how to conduct aerial warfare.
Between assembling this doctrine and getting his aeronautical engineering degree, he gained his key insight that jets, given a particular speed, altitude, Gs etc, have a particular number of options - accelerate or decelerate, climb or descend etc. Every moment a fighter jet has an opportunity to improve its position relative to its adversary, so the better pilot knows (i) every potential option that he/she has at any given point and (ii) every potential option of the adversary (this is a very non-technical explanation and I might also be wrong but this is my understanding of it). Moreover, all of this could be quantified, for every plane. He called this “Energy-Maneuverability Theory” (EM)
EM allowed Boyd to further refine his tactical ideas but identifying the optimal conditions for American and enemy Aircraft. EM also highlighted how much worse American fighter jets were then their Soviet counterparts. Until EM, the Pentagon’s guiding principle for designing aircraft was “higher, faster, and farther” - maybe good qualities for a bomber but not a fighter.
So what if you designed an aircraft backwards from EM principles? Boyd and some of his colleagues/mentees (the “Fighter Mafia”) tried to do this, with some success - they receive a lot of credit for improvements in the F-15 and F-16. And relatedly, a member of the Fighter Mafia was an important mind behind the A-10, a close air support plane still beloved by A-10 pilots and the ground troops they support. (a google search of “A-10 memes” supports this)
Boyd retired as a Colonel and did what many former service members do - read a ton of military history. But it was not a leisure activity - it consumed him. He was looking for an EM-level insight into ground war generally. This research led to “Patterns of Conflict” - a sprawling hours-long brief (Coram makes a lot of his briefing skills) that analyzes warfare from the Roman legions through the late twentieth century. Here’s a written copy - it is dense and hard to read but it lit some serious fires especially in the Marine Corps where its ideas on maneuver warfare (as opposed to attrition warfare) and people-first approach formed the basis of MCDP 1 - Warfighting. The Marine Corps still teaches Boyd’s ideas today (some directly credited, like OODA loop, but others, the doctrine of maneuver warfare generally, less so) and his ideas are everywhere. If you’ve seen “Generation Kill”, you’ve seen a Marine channeling Boyd - “tempo, tempo, tempo”. “Patterns of Conflict” got a mixed reception in the Army. The Air Force did not care for it at all.
Boyd’s mentees in the Pentagon also shook things up. Franklin Spinney made the cover of Time magazine for his reports on military budget overruns. Jim Burton was the subject of an HBO movie for his work in reforming weapons testing procedures. Did you know the Army tried to field their new Bradley fighting vehicle, an armored personnel carrier, without ever shooting enemy weapons at it to test it out? And then when Burton insisted they do it, they used weaker-than-Soviet Rumanian weapons and filled the Bradley’s fuel tanks with water? And, per Coram, “When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas.” Generally unimpressive and anathema to Boyd’s ideas about making machines that serve the warfighter, instead of the other way around.
Coram calls Boyd the greatest military theorist since Sun Tzu and in my underinformed opinion he’s probably right. But the title of this book is a little misleading - Boyd didn’t change the art of war - he rediscovered it. It had been buried by the atom bomb, the Strategic Air Command, interdiction bombing, and Pentagon bureaucracy.
