Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
Date read: 3/10/23. Recommendation: 9/10.
The story of one of the greatest fighter pilots and military strategists in history. John Boyd was such an entertaining character—he never backed down, he didn’t operate according to conventions, and he lived life on his own terms. He was the first man to codify maneuvers, tactics, and strategies of air-to-air combat, changing the way every air force in the world fights and flies. He was a founder of the military reform movement, challenging the careerists and bureaucracy in the Pentagon to reconsider their outdated mental constructs. After retirement, he immersed himself in the study of philosophy, theory of science, military history, and psychology, packaging everything he knew about all forms of conflict into a briefing called “Patterns of Conflict.” Entertaining cover to cover and a book that will help hone your own strategic thinking.
Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Background:
“He was first, last, and always a fighter pilot.” Wore the Air Force uniform for 24 years. Career spanned the last half of the 20th century.
Childhood interests: During third grade, Boyd showed a strong interest in aviation, drawing airplanes after he finished working on class assignments. Rummaged through magazines at a friend’s house after school looking for stories or pictures of airplanes. In fifth grade, he rode in a small airplane with a local Erie man who owned a chain of drugstores that he knew through his sister.
In high school, he took a series of tests that told him he had an IQ of 90. He refused to retake the test and always cited his low IQ to bureaucrats so they would underestimate him. “I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I don’t know any better. I had an IQ test in high school and they gave me a ninety.”
Legacy:
Ideas greatly influenced the Gulf War in 1991. Became the first man to codify maneuvers, tactics, and strategies of air-to-air combat in 1959—the “Aerial Attack Study” which was the equivalent of the Bible of air combat. Changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. At Georgia Tech, established the Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory. Then founded the “military-reform movement” after retiring from the Air Force in 1975. Then immersed himself in the study of philosophy, theory of science, military history, and psychology, packaging everything he knew about all forms of conflict into a briefing called “Patterns of Conflict.”
Greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu: “The academics who know of Boyd agree he was one of the premier military strategists of the twentieth century and the only strategist to put time at the center of his thinking.”
Self-perception:
Even from his earliest years, Boyd saw himself as “the man of principle battling superiors devoid of principle; the idealist fighting those of higher rank who have shirked their responsibilities; the man who puts it all on the line, and after receiving threat of dire consequences, prevails.”
Fighter pilots:
“Aerial combat favors the bold, those who are not afraid to use the airplane for its true purpose: a gun platform. There is nothing sophisticated about sneaking up on someone and killing him. Aerial combat is a blood sport, a knife in the dark. Winners live and losers die. Boyd instinctively knew this and his flying was, from the beginning, that of the true fighter pilot.”
“Fighter pilots fly with their fangs out and their hair on fire and they look death in the face every day and you ain’t shit if you ain’t done it.”
Codifying aerial combat:
Pilots were intrigued by his handling skills and ideas. They asked him to write his tactics down and prepare diagrams of various tactical maneuvers.
“American pilots believed that both they and the enemy had such an infinite number of maneuvers at their disposal that aerial combat could never be codified. Air combat was an art, not a science. After simulated aerial combat, a young pilot would be defeated and never know why. Nor could his instructors tell him.”
“When Boyd said he was going to “tweak up the tactics,” what he meant was that he was going to develop, and codify, for the first time in history, a formal regimen for fighter aircraft. He went about the job with a passion. He worked far into the night devising a series of briefings on fighter versus fighter and began to develop his skills as a lecturer.”
In February of 1956, he published an article in the Fighter Weapons Newsletter entitled ‘A Proposed Plan for Ftr. Vs. Ftr. Training.’ Focused on teaching pilots a new way of thinking, illustrated maneuvers and results of those maneuvers. What were the effects on airspeed? What countermoves were available to an enemy pilot? How do you anticipate those counters?
Boyd became a legend for his skills as a fighter pilot, as well as his abilities as a teacher.
Created a 150 page single spaced manual that he called the “Aerial Attack Study.” This became the official tactics manual for fighter aircraft. “For the first time the high-stakes game of aerial combat was documented, codified, and illustrated. While all other fighter pilots used their hands, Boyd used mathematics.” The first 600 copies disappeared almost overnight and although it was a classified document, pilots would hide them and take them home to study.
“Within ten years the ‘Aerial Attack Study’ became the tactics manual for air forces around the world. It changed the way they flew and the way they fought.” And it was written by a 33-year-old captain—Boyd.
Thermodynamics + E-M Theory:
Boyd was studying at Georgia Tech studying mechanical engineering after his time working on the aerial attack study and his time here would seed his eventual E-M Theory.
“The E-M Theory, at its simplest, is a method to determine the specific energy rate of an aircraft. This is what every fighter pilot wants to know. If I am at 30,000 feet and 450 knots and pull six G’s, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can?”
“When people looked at it, they invariably had one of two reactions: they either slammed a hand to their forehead and said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Or said it had been done before—nothing so simple could have remained undiscovered for so long.
Realized that if E-M could quantify the performance of American aircraft, it could do the same for enemy aircraft. And eventually use it to design a fighter aircraft.
“Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability Theory did four things for aviation: it provided a quantitative basis for reaching aerial tactics, it forever changed the way aircraft are flown in combat, it provided a scientific means by which maneuverability of an aircraft could be evaluated and tactics designed both to overcome the design flaws of one’s own aircraft and to minimize or negate the superiority of the opponent’s aircraft, and finally, it became a fundamental tool in designing fighter aircraft.”
Drawdown period:
E-M Theory: “He added more notes, more thoughts, more equations. And then he put it away and went into what he called his ‘draw-down period,’ thinking, ‘Oh, hell. Somebody has already done this.’ If what he had discovered was work done by someone else, he did not want to waste more time….Then it registered: if someone had reached the same conclusions he had reached and applied it to tactics, he would have known about it when he was at Nellis….He became excited all over again. The enormity of what he was in the process of discovering would change aviation forever.”
Retired from the Air Force on August 31, 1975. He was 48 years old. Drove back to his hometown of Erie, PA. “For several weeks Boyd stayed, walking the beach, thinking about his new project and how he would go about researching and writing it. He let the ideas bubble, mulled them over, turned them back and forth, and examined them from all angles and then discarded most of them and began again. By the end of his visit he was rejuvenated. The Peninsula did that for him. He was overflowing with thoughts about the books he wanted to read and the ideas he wanted to explore. And then he returned to Washington. Even though he arguably had more influence on the Air Force than any colonel in Air Force history, his greatest contributions were yet to come. He was about to enter the most productive and most important part of his life.” The next chapter would focus on his learning theory.
“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes or examine its opposites.” John Boyd
“He practiced what he preached. He considered every word and every idea from every possible angle, then threw it out for discussion, argued endless hours, restructured his line of thought, and threw it out for discussion again. Creativity was painful and laborious and repetitive and detail-haunted.”
Focusing on solutions, not problems or use cases:
Too big, too expensive: “Boyd had done some preliminary E-M calculations on the F-111 and knew what a terrible mistake the Air Force was making. Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111. The Air Force looked at technology rather than the mission.”
Know your audience:
E-M charts: Boyd had to determine how to present his E-M theory and its implications to Air Force brass. He decided to take the data and map it on graphs that showed the differences between American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas were where differences favored American fighters, red showed where Soviets held an advantage. “Blue is good. Red is bad. Even a goddamn general can understand that.”
But his outspoken nature would always limit his trajectory and promotions in his career. He wasn’t willing to play politics and make people feel good about shitty decisions.
Hard work and success:
“But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system. Those who do not conform will one day realize that the path of doing the right things has diverged from the path of success, and then they must decide which path they will follow through life.”
“To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?” John Boyd
“All the things that make the Pentagon so prized by careerists make it loathed and detested by warriors. The self-promotion and sycophancy and backstabbing treachery are all anathema to a warrior.”
Guiding principle:
“Boyd was guided in his work by one simple principle: he wanted to give pilots a fighter than would outmaneuver any enemy. He didn’t become fixated on technology or ‘one-point’ numerical solutions.”
“Boyd was not as interested in his career as he was in the fate of the American fighting man, the man who—as the military says—is at the pointy end of the spear. He wanted these men to have the best possible equipment, whether it was an airplane or a tank. That was his life.”
“Boyd made men believe they could do things they never thought they could do. And most of them were men of integrity and accomplishment even before they met Boyd.”
Learning theory:
Started voracious reading program and his search for the nature of creativity. The next major focus in his life. He was trying to get a grasp on his learning theory. For Boyd, learning didn’t mean studying, it meant creativity.
Wrote draft after draft of his learning theory on yellow legal pads. Told his friends he didn’t know where he was going with his research and was just letting it carry him along.
Destruction and Creation: Spent more than four years researching and writing then distilling his work down to 11 pages. Core thesis focuses on “the danger of our mental processes becoming focused on internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase.” If you use this to your advantage, you can stoke chaos in the enemy and leave them constantly off balance. Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change survives. This was the beginning of his ‘time-based theory of conflict.’
Four areas drew most of his attention: general theories of war, the blitzkrieg, guerrilla warfare, and the use of deception by create commanders.
As he studied history, he found that very rarely would victorious commanders throw their forces head to head against the enemy. They didn’t fight wars of attrition. Instead, they used deception, speed, fluidity of action, and tactics that disoriented or confused, causing the enemy to unravel before the fight ever took place.
O-O-D-A Loop: Observe-orient-decide-act cycle. Speed is the most important element of the cycle. Whoever can go through it the fastest prevails. And once the process begins, it must only continue to accelerate. “The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is 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 outdated or irrelevant information and thus becomes confused and disoriented and can’t function.”
The key to victory is operating at a quicker tempo than the enemy.
“To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent. The enemy falls farther and farther behind in making relevant decisions. It hastens the unraveling process.”