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Title: Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram ISBN: 0316881465 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Rating: 5
Summary: A great yarn, with a compelling message
Comment: "Boyd" is the kind of biography that ought to be written more often. Wonderful stories and a great message unfold as Robert Coram's readable and well-written book builds a convincing case: that Americans owe a lot to a man few of them have ever heard of -- John Boyd.
At one level, "Boyd" is a splendid yarn. So much so that one could make perhaps six movies from its stories. Call them, based on real-life characters in the book, "The Ron Catton Story", "The Jim Burton Story", "Hiding the Plane", and so on.
It's also a fascinating study of man versus organization. Boyd often dealt with a military version of "Dilbert" cartoons - petty and self-destructive activities carried on stodgy bureaucracies. Against this, he was masterful. He could make water run uphill, and it is a delight to read how he did it. Sometimes he worked with sympathizers in high places (including at least two Secretaries of Defense) and sometimes he just focused a group of like-minded people deep in the bureaucracy on a goal. Boyd used bluster and reason, idealism and guile, courage and fear. He persuaded fighter pilots around the world to change their tactics. He forced the Air Force to build planes that pilots and soldiers needed rather than those that contractors and Congressmen wanted. He quite literally rewrote the book on how the Marine Corps fights. He transformed the Gulf War strategy. And he did it all with a selfless and often hilarious personal style, mostly as an obscure, retired Air Force colonel, working a few days a week as a civilian at the Pentagon. He sought neither riches nor recognition.
He was, in sum, a consummate partiot -- and an effective one.
I think the book has two messages, one that Coram intends and one that he may not be aware of. He shows us, through Boyd, how to make bureaucracies perform unnatural acts. Like taking care of the people at the bottom of the organization charts, defeating truly bad ideas even when they are backed by the strong-arm tactics of the well-connected, operating at a rapid tempo, and successfully innovating.
The book's other message comes from the last twenty years of Boyd's life, and from his study of "winning and losing". Although it may seem far-fetched at first, this study has much to offer to skeptics of war, even pacifists. Boyd believed, with Sun Tzu, that the greatest military commander was the one who could get the other side to lay down its arms without a fight. In his day-long briefings that spanned thousands of years of military history, Boyd rubbed his audiences' noses in the stupidity and waste of military engagements like the World War I "Battles of the Somme" that sent thousands to needless deaths. He hammered home example after example of smart military commanders who succeeded while minimizing or even eliminating casualties. If he wanted to disparage a strategy, Boyd often referred to it sarcastically as "bombing Schweinfurt" - a reference to the World War II "carpet bombing" campaigns that he despised. Boyd was no Gandhi, to be sure. He was one of the toughest warriors the Air Force ever produced, as the book makes plain. But his relentless focus on prevailing in a world of uncertainty, "attracting the uncommited" and especially, "isolating adversaries" led him more and more toward rapidity, precision and nuturing deeply shared values.
Mental agility outwits brute force every time, Boyd emphasized. More than that: operating at the "moral" level of belief and principled persuasion can be the key to ultimate success. Boyd argued not for the "ridge lines" of the traditional field commander, but for the "high moral ground" of the genuine leader. He argued for the power of integrity and honor -- the MILITARY power.
If a shooting war did come, Boyd wanted to win, but he wanted to do so swiftly, with minimal casualties and damage. There are probably thousands of American (and British and Kuwati and, yes, Iraqi) soldiers alive today who would have been killed in the Gulf War, had Boyd not decisively influenced its strategy.
Perhaps some may feel that an approach like Boyd's makes war more possible because it strives for fewer deaths and less destruction. But Boyd anticipated this. He allowed his studies to be freely and widely disseminated. So anyone contemplating a war using Boyd's principles must calculate that these very same ideas could be in the hands of the adversary.
Coram's book offers us a lot to think about these days.
Rating: 5
Summary: Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War
Comment: Robert Coram has written one of the ten best non-fiction books I've read in a quarter century. It is, however, a book that transcends the genres of military history and biography implied in its title.
A factually dramatic account of one man's genius and sacrifice in his decades-long personal battle to reform America's military and industrial complex, Boyd is a tale of cultural conflict on a grand scale, but from which every man, and every woman may find moral enlightenment in their personal and material lives.
John Boyd was a brilliant Air Force fighter pilot in the last days of WWII, who became perhaps the top jet fighter pilot in Korea, and later, Vietnam, when he conceived and taught new aerial combat tactics in a program that came to be known as "Top Gun" school. In doing so, he formulated altogether new concepts in aircraft design and maneuver, which brought him to the attention of the nantion's top military and naval strategists and planners.
If only he could have gone along with his superiors-told them what they wanted to hear; done as they wished him to do-his rise to a general's rank was virtually assured.
But John Boyd had a character flaw he was unable to overcome: He could only speak-and act upon-the truth. And the truth was, as Boyd showed with mathematical clarity: Our Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines were so far behind the curve and so co-opted by national defense industries, they all preferred to remain so, rather than break new ground that would lead to the precision warfare that made its debut in the 1991 Gulf War, and again, in disarming Iraq.
For in the end, John Boyd won his war with the Pentagon and the military industrial complex, despite other personality flaws, like an inability to control his penchant for invectives when face-to-face with generals and admirals-thus assuring their continued enmity.
If reviewers seem to have overlooked the hilarity of some of these incidents reported by Coram, many readers will laugh aloud. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Boyd's amazing career, is not the revolutionary reforms he lived to see implemented, so much as they were achieved in spite of himself. Deliberately setting a superior's tie on fire by punching a lit cigar into the adversary's chest during debate, in the presence of subordinates, is not a thing one excuses, much less forgets. Nor is yelling down a busy Pentagon hallway to a general who denied him, "You're a (exlitive) loser!", a form of expression not likely to earn future promotion.
Robert Coram's remarkably readable biography details the life of a man who consciously and consistently conceded career advances in his one-man war to expose bureaucratic and corporate collaboration. A profound and topical biography that reads more like a tragicomedic fiction than the bureaucratic malfeasance it brings to the harsh light of day, Coram's book and Boyd himself, can only miss becoming household names by inept marketing. Even readers who disdain books on warfare may take note of John Boyd's concern about the portent of an expanded Islamic conflict.
Robert Clarke, chief historian of the 802nd Air Division, USAF 1953, and the author of: Ellen Swallow- The Woman Who Founded Ecology, Follett, 1973
Rating: 5
Summary: A Must Read for all Military personnel and Historians
Comment: I am an Air Force Academy Graduate and former fighter pilot. I have a deree in aeronautical engineering and have trained in air to air combat yet I had never heard of John Boyd. What a shame. His name should have been plastered all over my aero textbooks and in my fighter training manuals.
Well, now I know who John Boyd was and his story is an inspiration that should be read by all military personnel.
Coming from very humble beginnings, the books shows how one man with an indomitable spirit can make a huge difference.
I strongly recommend this book to everyone, especially military
pilots and anyone interested in the history of military tactics.
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Title: The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant Tedrick Hammond ISBN: 1560989416 Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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