Boydmania

Air & Space Power Journal, Fall, 2004 by David R. Mets

   Myth One:

   Boyd was born into a deprived situation
   but still managed to beat the
   odds.

Biographers and acolytes make much of this assertion. However, I believe that, to a man, they themselves are the products of privileged postwar environments and that they make their judgments without considering the context of young John Boyd's (born in 1927) own youth. Coram (born about 1938), Hammond (younger than that), and most of the acolytes are too young to remember the Great Depression years or even the wartime era during which John Boyd grew up. Furthermore, as Walter Kross points out, the combat experience of advocates of the "reform" movement (many of them Boyd acolytes) was "virtually nil." (11)

Coram titles the chapter on Boyd's youth "Haunted Beginnings." To be sure, his family did have its hardships--even tragedies--and that may look like deprivation to modern-day professors and journalists in the context of the affluent twenty-first century. But it was not at all rare in the context of the Depression and World War II. In fact, millions of young boys would have looked upon a family as wealthy if it owned a single-family home as well as an automobile and could afford to allow a son to spend his high school years lettering in two sports instead of working more to help out--as was the case in the Boyd household. But perhaps the biographers and acolytes had to overstate the case to make the apparent odds in favor of Goliath even greater than they were.

   Myth Two:

   Biographers and many acolytes declare
   that the Air Force establishment
   was prejudiced against Boyd,
   stacking the deck against him and
   denying him promotion to general
   officer.

John Boyd received his commission in 1952 at the time he graduated with a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Iowa. He eventually became a full colonel. Senior journalists, acolytes, and professors may look upon that fact as a failure or disgrace; if so, they peer out at the world from an ivory tower. One need only use the class of 1952 at West Point--certainly a group whose starting prospects were below neither the Army nor the Air Force average--as a baseline against which to measure Boyd's achievement. Of the 527 graduates, 339 (64%) did not make it as far as full colonel. Many of them had graduate degrees and intermediate- and senior-level professional military education--Boyd never did. Upon their commissioning as second lieutenants, all of them knew calculus and thermodynamics; Boyd did not get into that world until he was a senior captain, close to a decade later. Many of them had more combat and operational-unit command experience than did Boyd. (12) Yet, John Boyd went further than almost two-thirds of the US Military Academy class of 1952. In fact, only 34 (less than 7 percent) of the 527 made general officer. In other words, even without the starting-line benefits of an engineering degree and an academy education, Boyd did as well as or better than 93 percent of the West Pointers. (13)