Air Force Colonel John Boyd is now a legendary figure in military circles, revered for his unbending character and strategic insight. Boyd’s “OODA Loop” has achieved buzz-word status. There’s a building named after him at Nellis Air Force Base. He was instrumental in designing a fighter, the F-16 Fighting Falcon, that 50 years later still flies for the Air Force.
But Boyd was not revered in his time, least of all by the Air Force, which viewed him as a crank. As the saying goes, a prophet is never honored in his hometown.
Boyd changed the military in spite of this disrespect and the bureaucratic forces arrayed against him. That makes him a perfect candidate for the titles of Heretic and Hero.
Boyd is now renowned as a strategic thinker, but he earned his reputation as a fighter pilot. He flew combat missions in Korea, tearing down MiG Alley in the F-86 Sabre. He was credited with damaging a MiG during the war, but arrived too late to rack up the score.
After the war, Boyd refined his knowledge of air-to-air combat as an instructor at the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School. This was the age of Strategic Air Command and the nuclear bomber. Dog fighting and fighter pilots were viewed as relics. Boyd couldn’t care less. He taught generations of fighter pilots how to “hose” their opponents and stay alive, preaching aerial tactics as a science rather than an art or bag of tricks, the way most pilots talked about it at the bar. He memorialized these findings in a document called the “Aerial Attack Study,” which ultimately became the authority on the subject.
Boyd taught from the cockpit as well as the classroom. He had an open wager with his students that he could beat them in a dogfight within 40 seconds. To sweeten the deal, he agreed to start with his opponent dead on his tail. Boyd never lost the bet. He was no armchair theorist. “Forty Second Boyd” was America’s reigning champion in the skies. His legend grew.
Boyd’s next assignment was Eglin Air Force Base. Boyd wasn’t happy with the make-work jobs he was assigned, so he gave himself a new mission—systemizing his knowledge of flying to determine the performance characteristics of any airplane, at any point in the flight envelope.
This was an ambitious and compute-heavy task, in an era when computers filled the room and computing time was more precious than flight time. Boyd’s eccentric project didn’t qualify—so he stole the time, running his calculations under the guise of a different, approved project. When this came to light, he was threatened with court martial.
Boyd not only admitted the crime but explained to investigators how he had pulled it off. He was saved by the fact that his model proved immediately useful in predicting how American planes would fare against their Soviet counterparts. Boyd got an award instead of a court martial. Eventually, he was moved to the Pentagon, where his identity as a rebel came into full flower.
Boyd was a vicious critic of the Air Force’s procurement system and priorities. The Air Force was buying multi-role aircraft, which, like Swiss army knives, were adequate for many missions but exceptional at none. Boyd wanted finely honed daggers. His ideal was a lightweight fighter that could, in his evocative phrase, “fly up its own asshole” and hose MiGs all day. Boyd’s efforts to put Air Force fighters on a diet resulted in improvements to the F-15 Eagle and the creation of the highly successful and agile F-16 via an unorthodox acquisition process.
Boyd circumvented traditional aspects of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS, now PPBE) to promote the F-16. Two prototypes were purchased at fixed cost, with most of the specifications left up to the contractor. The winner was determined by a fly-off. When Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger authorized the plane to be missionized, the Air Force still had no formal requirements for the fighter. This was a truly heretical way to buy an aircraft.
Boyd offers a model for program managers today. He assumed total accountability and responsibility for the program. Succeed or fail, it was Boyd’s name and career attached to the lightweight fighter. Boyd also stuck around long enough to see the acquisition through to success. He ensured his program had uninterrupted support from the Secretary of Defense during the transition from Melvin Laird to Schlesinger. Today, programs outlive people, and it’s only too easy to use this to avoid accountability for failure. Boyd rejected this impersonal approach. He was all in for the lightweight fighter.
Boyd also had the technical competency to keep contractors in their place and ensure the tail wasn’t wagging the dog. He was a terror of the military-industrial complex, fueled by Dutch Master cigars and ten cups a day of black coffee, which he called “smart juice.” Thus fortified, he spent long hours ripping phony designs that wouldn’t perform as advertised when a pilot’s life was on the line. “Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium,” he remarked of one such design.
Boyd’s candor and color were bound to make enemies, and they did. As one performance evaluation put it in a masterclass of understatement, “Maj. Boyd is very opinionated and at times tends to be very argumentative,” though he was rated “absolutely superior” in technical competence.
Boyd’s skills as a bureaucratic knife-fighter helped navigate an increasingly hostile environment. He made great use of copiers and fax machines to disseminate his missives to interested parties. He also assembled a small band of like-minded thinkers, dubbed the Acolytes, to spread his gospel throughout the Pentagon. All suffered professionally due to their association with Boyd. All, in his opinion, were doing “the good work” for their country.
Boyd’s last chapter, the one he is best known for today, came after his retirement from the Air Force in 1975. He never made general, which, given his deficiencies as a manager, was probably a blessing for all involved. But he stayed in DoD orbit as a consultant. It is a further mark of his integrity that he insisted on being paid as little as possible for his services. He didn’t want to be accused of “double-dipping” a pension and a salary, and so became the closest thing to a dollar-a-year man that the government’s rules allowed.
During this period, Boyd broadened his outlook from aerial combat to warfare as a whole. Heavily influenced by Sun Tzu, he developed a theory of fighting that emphasized rapid maneuver, deception, and all the subtle arts of beating an enemy without fighting. He also developed his concept of the OODA Loop (short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act), or the process by which a commander gets inside the mind of the enemy and then acts to confuse, confound, and sow chaos in his ranks. For a man who spent much of his career developing planes, Boyd understood that human agency was the key to winning wars. “Machines don’t fight wars,” he preached, “people do, and they use their minds.” Boyd’s most lasting contributions to military history were mental models that would enable grunts and commanders alike to understand their enemy, situate themselves within a challenging environment, and win.
These concepts are now familiar and were not wholly novel even at the time. However, they flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which still thought in terms of attrition and decisive battles—what Boyd derided as the “high diddle up the middle” approach to fighting.
Boyd memorialized his teaching in a long briefing titled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing.” He delivered it hundreds of times to military audiences—particularly the Marine Corps, which adopted him and his theories as sons.
Boyd died of cancer in 1997, but lived long enough to see his ideas pay off during the Gulf War, a campaign he was instrumental in planning. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney—a Boyd acolyte—rejected proposals for a head-on clash in favor of a more ambitious plan to distract and then envelop the enemy with a massive “left hook” out of the desert. When a Pentagon spokesman told the press, following the mass surrender of the Iraqi Army, that “we kind of got inside his decision cycle,” that was all Boyd. The OODA Loop had arrived on the battle field.
Boyd was a warrior-sage, frequently ridiculed in his time but vindicated by events. He said every person had a choice: “To Be or To Do.” One road led to status and rank. You could “be” somebody. The other road led to results. You could “do” something, “something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself.”
John Boyd chose the road less traveled. And so we remember him still, as a hero and a heretic.
Further Reading
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
“Genghis John” by Chuck Spinney, Proceedings