In August, Leopold wrote a classified memo saying that if the Air Force bought the 240 B-1s it was scheduled to buy, the cost
would be $68 million per copy. When the costs of the B-1 were superimposed on a chart showing the costs of other aircraft,
it caused a giant and unmistakable bulge. The B-1 Bomber was the costliest project in the Air Force.
Leopold gave Boyd the memo, then took a week of leave to drive home to Chicago and see his mother. She met him at the door,
all aflutter of the barrage of phone calls from the Pentagon. Leopold was to call a Colonel John Boyd immediately. Boyd said
the command structure of the Air Force, the top three-and four-stars in the building, were thunderstruck over the implications
of Leopold’s memo.
Much of Leopold’s vacation was spent on the phone with Boyd, explaining and expanding his budget analysis. When he returned
to the Pentagon, two young colonels working for the chief of staff were there to ask pointed questions and to tear apart his
memo. Once Leopold showed them the source for his numbers and how he had charted the results, they saw that any change would
only make the B-1 look worse. They reported to the chief that Leopold was a young staff officer doing his job. He had presented
the information in the most conservative manner possible. He had no agenda.
Leopold transformed his memo into a classified briefing for top Air Force officials. Most young captains, if they ever were
allowed to
brief three-and four-stars, would have told the generals what they wanted to hear. Leopold was respectful but did not let
the generals browbeat him into altering his findings. That made a tremendous impression on Boyd, and as a result, Leopold’s
life changed. He was in an office of colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors, the junior member of the firm. But because
he was Boyd’s protégé, he was number one.
One morning Boyd arrived about 10:00
A
.
M
. to find Leopold sleeping at his desk. Ordinarily, if a colonel finds a captain sleeping on the job, the captain finds himself
on the receiving end of a royal chewing out. The captain probably will be transferred. The lieutenant colonels and majors
waited and watched and wondered what Boyd would do.
He tiptoed through the office, finger to his lips, saying, “Shhhhhhhhh. Everybody be quiet. Ray needs his sleep.” Then he
thought for a minute and in a stage whisper said, “Okay, everybody out. Go to the concourse and read magazines and drink coffee,
walk around or whatever. Ray has to have his nap.”
The lieutenant colonels and majors were not amused at being tossed out of their office so a captain could sleep. But Boyd
knew what no one else knew, that Leopold had worked most of the night.
The flap over the B-1 seemed to have been absorbed into the bowels of the Pentagon. Now Leopold was working on other projects.
Two or three days a week, about 1:00
P
.
M
., Boyd went to Leopold and said, “Ray, let’s go take a walk.” And the colonel and the captain walked down to the concourse,
bought candy by the handful, read the newspapers, and talked.
Leopold was supposed to work with Boyd for six months before going to another Pentagon office. Leopold’s Academy classmates
said to him, “Nobody is going to hold it against you that you worked for Boyd for six months. But you need to get out of there.
If you stay longer, it will affect your career.”
As Leopold approached the six-month deadline, Boyd asked him to consider staying. “I gotta tell you, it will be better for
your career if you move on. But you’re doing good work, Tiger, and I’d like for you to stay.”
“Sir, I’d like to sleep on it.”
The next morning, for the first time since Leopold was assigned to Boyd’s office, he arrived to find Boyd already there.
“Sir, I can’t imagine doing more anywhere else than I can do here,” Leopold said. “I’d like to stay.”
Boyd’s face lit up. “Ray, I can’t guarantee you any early promotions or special recognition. All I can guarantee is that you
will be doing important work. And it will be fun.”
Boyd had become Leopold’s surrogate father.
And Leopold had become the next Acolyte.
B
Y
1973 Tom Christie’s shop at Eglin had grown to about one hundred people. In September he left Eglin and moved to the Pentagon,
where he took over the Tactical Air Program in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. There must have been considerable speculation
about whether the big crewcut fellow from the Hobby Shop down at Eglin was ready for the Building—especially for the TacAir
job.
TacAir was part of the old Systems Analysis office, the home of the Whiz Kids. Under McNamara, TacAir had been extremely powerful
because it confronted the Air Force and Navy and made them prove why each program was needed. It thus had great influence
on which proposed Air Force programs made it into the budget. Not surprisingly, the military loathed Systems Analysis so much
that the name was changed to Program Analysis & Evaluation (PA&E). TacAir was thought to have been neutered by the name change,
but the power of the office, while dormant, remained.
That power depended on two things: first, whether the person running the office was willing to confront the Air Force, and
second, whether the person had the confidence of the secretary of defense. Before Christie was hired, he met with Schlesinger,
who told him his
primary assignment was to make the Air Force accept the lightweight fighter. That put Christie on a collision course with
the Air Force. But he had the backing of the SecDef.
Gearing up to do battle with the Air Force took a few weeks. In the meantime Christie took care of something close to his
heart. He called in Chet Richards, a twenty-seven-year-old management intern, and assigned him a crucial mission: find a bar
where Christie could continue the Eglin tradition of Friday night office parties. Richards was the youngest person ever to
receive a Ph.D. in math from the University of Mississippi, so he was up to the challenge. But none of the bars Richards checked
out seemed to have that intangible mood that would make it a home for Christie’s office family. On Friday nights Washington
bars are crowded and raucous—not the mood Christie wanted. Then Richards discovered the Old Guard Room in the basement of
the Officers Club at nearby Fort Myer. And he picked Wednesday night rather than Friday night; Wednesdays were quiet and offered
a midweek break. So Christie and the TacAir crowd, along with Boyd and the people in his office, began meeting in the Old
Guard Room of Patton Hall at Fort Myer. Christie was the de facto patron of the group, almost a father figure, but it was
Boyd who was the center of attention. For more than a decade, the happy hour gatherings were a crucial part of Boyd’s life.
Christie had barely settled into his office when the Air Force launched a strike against the lightweight fighter, and in the
most vulnerable part of any Pentagon project: the budget. In late 1973 the Air Force was putting together the 1975 budget
and the lightweight fighter was not included. The Air Force planned to fly the prototypes in 1974, then shut down the program.
The lightweight fighter was considered a “technology demonstrator” and not part of any long-range Air Force plans.
Christie, with the crucial assistance of Chuck Myers, director of air warfare, slipped $30 million into the 1975 budget to
continue work on the lightweight fighter and move it into full scale development. The Air Force found the $30 million and
removed it. Christie and Myers put it back.
Christie’s immediate boss was famous for writing scathing memos on tiny pieces of white paper called “snowflakes.” Christie’s
budget
battle with the Air Force brought him a blizzard of snowflakes, one of which said in effect, “The Air Force will decide to
field the lightweight fighter when and if it wants to. Get off the Air Force’s back.”
It had never occurred to Christie’s boss or to Air Force generals that the new civilian from Eglin had access to Schlesinger.
The generals did not know that, through Colonel Richard Hallock, Sprey had introduced Boyd to Schlesinger and that he, too,
was meeting privately with the SecDef. The generals did not know that Sprey was a special advisor to Schlesinger. And the
generals did not know that Schlesinger was committed to making the lightweight fighter part of his legacy.
When Schlesinger said the money would stay in the budget, Air Force generals ground their teeth in anger. As the generals
began making plans to go over Schlesinger’s head and take the issue to sympathetic members of Congress, a young Air Force
captain transferred to Boyd’s office. His name was Franklin “Chuck” Spinney.
Spinney is a military brat, the son of an Air Force colonel. He was born at Wright-Pat but, like most military brats, moved
often. To the extent that he is from anywhere, he is from Severna Park, Maryland, where he moved when he was ten and lived
until he was fifteen. Spinney is a mathematician. His college boards in math were excellent, but the English portion was
a disaster. He went to Lehigh University and graduated in 1967 with a degree in mechanical engineering. When he joined the
Air Force, his father swore him in as an officer. Spinney was assigned to Wright-Pat and worked in the same building where
his father worked during World War II. His job was to study the effects of bullets on F-105s shot down in Vietnam.
From the time Spinney entered the Air Force, he was considered a brash young officer. In 1968, as a twenty-four-year-old second
lieutenant, he ran into Christie at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where both were after a $500,000 grant. Spinney outmaneuvered
the Finagler, something rarely done. Christie thought Spinney was a “smart-ass lieutenant” but offered him a job at Eglin.
In the first staff study Spinney wrote, he recommended that the Air Force cancel a consulting contract with a national company.
The CEO of the company took Spinney to lunch and said, “If you try to terminate my contract I will ruin your career.” Spinney
looked at the bars on his collar and said, “Ruin my career? I’m a lieutenant. I can’t go down.”
When a high-ranking civilian who worked for the Army promoted someone to chair an important working group, someone whom Spinney
thought incompetent, he had the temerity to ask, “Why in God’s name did you make that asshole the chairman? He doesn’t know
anything.”
Another of Spinney’s early actions demonstrated both his impatience with regulations and his intrinsic passion about fiduciary
responsibility. He needed a place to store records, so he had an empty building at Wright-Pat assigned to his office. Because
many of the records he wanted to store were classified, he needed a vault. Rather than issuing contracts, he figured he could
save taxpayer money by having employees scrounge materials around the base and build the office. The office was built without
paperwork, but when it came time to hang a door on the vault, for technical reasons Spinney had to issue a contract. The base
engineer came to inspect the door and looked around in amazement. He was in a facility that officially did not exist. It did
not matter that Spinney had saved thousands of dollars, he had bypassed the system, and that was unacceptable. But what really
upset the base engineer, a senior colonel, was that the young lieutenant had his own conference room and a desk with a big
flag behind it. Flags are a perk reserved for generals. Eventually, the Air Force decided to keep the building, but Spinney
had to give up his flag.
The Air Force sent Spinney to graduate school, where he got an MBA with an emphasis on applied statistics. Then he went to
the Pentagon, where he had a job his superiors thought commensurate with his education: he delivered mail. Spinney often ran
into Ray Leopold. They were the same age and the same rank, the only two young guys in the office. They were similar in many
ways; the big difference was that Leopold was quicker but Spinney was deeper. Spinney heard of what Boyd was doing and said
to Leopold, “I’d like to work with you.”
Boyd called Spinney in for an interview. Boyd was gaining weight because of all the candy and junk food he ate and was drinking
a diet supplement called Metrecal. He drank two cans during the half hour they talked, then said, “Let’s go eat lunch.”
Spinney’s eyebrows rose. Colonels do not invite captains to lunch. At the cafeteria, Spinney watched Boyd pick up a plate
and pile on
lettuce and tomatoes and cheese and peppers and carrots and mushrooms and whatever else he could find. After Boyd stacked
up a mountain of salad, he held up the line for almost five minutes as he tucked croutons into every nook and cranny and then
lined the borders of his plate. Even though he walked slowly toward a table, he left a trail of croutons and vegetables. He
sat down and tucked in. Spinney watched for several minutes and then said, “Colonel, I hope you don’t mind my asking. Don’t
you enjoy your food?”
Boyd stopped shoveling for a minute. Puzzled, he stared at Spinney. Then, as if belaboring the obvious, he said, “It’s just
fuel,” and resumed shoveling.
After lunch the two men talked further. Then Boyd said, “Okay, Tiger. We’ll try it out.”
The fourth Acolyte was now onstage.
He would stay in the battle long after the others moved on. And he would become the best known of them all.
The new year brought a stream of significant events into Boyd’s life. The battle over the lightweight fighter raged on two
fronts: Christie dealt with budget battles and the ebb and flow of power politics, while Boyd computed E-M data for the two
aircraft and planned the fly-off.
The biggest obstacle to the lightweight fighter remained Air Force intransigence in approving the aircraft for full-scale
development. Boyd tried to overcome the opposition with a series of briefings, the point of which was that the lightweight
fighter was needed and should go into production. The plan was to brief widely among the lower ranks and then begin working
up through the generals, culminating in a briefing to the three-stars, the barons who ran the Air Force. In early 1974, Boyd
learned he was facing a crisis: the three-stars were lying in wait. He was to brief up the ladder to them and then, once there
was an impression that he had received a fair hearing, they would scuttle the lightweight fighter once and for all.