How Col. John Boyd beat the generals; he was first to codify air-to-air combat techniques, and his ideas now have become standard operating procedure for air forces and ground combat worldwide

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 2, 2002 | by Martin Edwin Andersen

For nearly 40 years a group of Washington's best minds on defense issues has met each Wednesday at the end of the day for a midweek happy hour in the basement of the Officers Club at spacious Fort Myer in Virginia, overlooking the Potomac River and the federal capital beyond. Participants on any given evening might include a French liaison officer, a Russian intellectual, several retired colonels, a former assistant secretary of defense and a budding journalist needing to be schooled in the intricacies of one of the Pentagon's newest weapons systems.

As the beer flows, one knot of guests is talking about the latest news from the budget wars on Capitol Hill; another, sitting at an adjoining table, the applicability of Sun Tzu's theories to the war in Afghanistan. High-powered debate is laced with testosterone-fueled war stories and sometimes-raucous humor. The median age of the group gathered at the club is older now, but its purpose remains pure: to make sure that the Pentagon offers America's troops the best-tested and most developed weapons. Their collective record in doing so is fearsome.

The largest presence at the club, however, is not seated there in the Old Guard Room but buried a mile away at Arlington National Cemetery. In March 1997, Col. John Boyd was interred with full military honors from the U.S. Air Force he served for 24 years, as well as with the highest accolade the U.S. Marine Corps can bestow. "Forty-Second" Boyd, the man remembered for defeating every opponent in aerial combat at the Air Force's premier dog-fighting academy in two-thirds of a minute, helped found the Fort Myer get-togethers at the end of his Air Force career.

But these weekly gatherings are in some ways merely a grace note in the long and often painful saga of a man who, as a full colonel, went toe to toe, time after time, with a phalanx of two- and three-star generals for the good of the country, winning most of his battles and surviving long enough to help provide secretary of defense Richard Cheney the ideas needed for swift and decisive victory in the Persian Gulf War. ("Keep it simple--so that the generals will understand it" Boyd frequently told his small band of fellow guerrillas, known collectively as "The Acolytes.") Boyd was, in the words of Pierre Sprey--a Pentagon "Whiz Kid" who became a close friend and advocate of the colonel and eulogized him that wintry morning five years ago--one of the rare few who were "defined by the courts-martial and investigations they faced." He also was, biographer Robert Coram tells INSIGHT, "the most important unknown man of his time and the most remarkable unsung hero in American military history."

From hardscrabble beginnings in Erie, Pa., where he grew up without a father, Boyd first achieved fame at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where he became an instructor upon returning from a combat tour in Korea. (He had just missed action in World War II, serving in Japan as part of the occupation force.)

A thinking fighter pilot, Boyd while still a junior officer became the first person ever to codify air-to-air combat techniques. His "Aerial Attack Study" eventually became official Air Force doctrine and a foundational text for air forces around the globe. After studying thermodynamics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Boyd applied his knowledge as a fighter pilot to create his energy-maneuverability (E-M) theory. The contribution was so significant that the "Mad Major" went on to play a key role, through the application of E-M to the aerodynamic configuration of the planes, in making the F-15 and the F-16 the finest aircraft of their class in the world. In fact, the Soviets also used Boyd's ideas in designing both the MiG-29 and the SU-27 fighters.

Loud and profane, Boyd's intellectual achievements were matched by his relentless guerrilla warfare against hidebound "careerists" then running the Air Force. These careerists believed that big bombers and equally large budgets were both the wave of the future and their ride to advancement in the service and in the wild blue yonder of lucrative "retirement." Shrewd and aggressive, Boyd took profound delight as he repeatedly "hosed" squadrons of two- and three-star careerists from the general staff. Throughout his career, Boyd's own professional advancement appeared in jeopardy as his string of bureaucratic victories left rivals seething for revenge. Only the repeated intervention of the most senior officers--impressed by Boyd's intellect, single-minded dedication and devotion to the service and its men--allowed him to rise to the rank of colonel.

Boyd's service in Indochina came not as a fighter pilot but as commander of a top-secret intelligence center in Thailand, a base whose activities were so sensitive that for the first three years of its operation it did not officially exist. His performance there was "absolutely superior," one rating official remarked, and Boyd's leadership on the ground was matched by his pilots' equally outstanding efforts in the air, where they employed the devastating panoply of aerial-warfare techniques that Boyd himself developed. Once back in Washington, Boyd succeeded--through a back channel to then-secretary of defense James Schlesinger--in developing off the books a prototype of an ultralight fighter (which later became the F-16) that was opposed vigorously by the Air Force brass.