The F-16 was an altogether different creature than the YF-16; the thoroughbred was becoming a draft horse.
Boyd fought every change. He called Christie and Sprey and ranted about what the Air Force was doing to his airplane. He screamed
to Leopold and Spinney and Burton that his pure and nimble little fighter was turning into another goddamned gold-plated multimission
aircraft.
The Air Force failure to increase the wing area finally caused Boyd to turn his back on the F-16. The original F-16 wing was
280 square feet. Boyd thought that if the wing area were increased to 320 square feet, much of the original performance could
be retained. But the Air Force wanted a wing of only 300 square feet. Rather, it wanted to make sure the F-16 could not outperform
the F-15. Boyd had a friend, a young officer, at the F-16 development office. Perhaps the officer would use the authority
of his office to fight for 320 square feet. Boyd called and for weeks the two men talked on a daily basis. Then after one
phone call Boyd turned to Spinney, pointed at the phone, and said, “He flunked roll call.” In the end the young officer had
gone along with his superiors and settled on 300 square feet; he had decided to be someone rather than to do something. Years
later, when the young officer was rewarded by being promoted to general, he called Boyd. He had been drinking and was contrite
and apologetic about the decision he made on the F-16 wing. He asked, in effect, to come back into the fold and be Boyd’s
friend.
Boyd hung up on him.
Boyd’s anger at what the Air Force did to the F-16 never abated. He had lost the last great battle of his Air Force career.
And perhaps his bitterness at the defeat was the final catalyst in shifting his attention from hardware toward more cerebral
pursuits.
Boyd’s learning theory was now a partially formed paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” but his efforts to finish it
were pushed aside by events at the office. Two of the Acolytes were about to leave the fold. Spinney was disenchanted, both
personally and professionally. His marriage was disintegrating and, as is often the case in such instances, he felt the need
for professional changes. The idealism he
felt since childhood toward the Air Force had been shredded when the two-star general told him to fudge the numbers on the
B-1 in order to save the project. Not long afterward a general had called Spinney into his office, closed the door, and said,
“When I was a captain, if I had gone through what you did with the B-1 budget, I would have resigned.” Spinney was thinking
of doing that.
Leopold was teaching at the Air Force Academy and began inviting Boyd out as a guest lecturer. Boyd began what would become
years of teaching at the Academy by delivering early versions of “Destruction and Creation” to cadets. He listened to their
response and to Leopold’s comments, and when he returned to the Pentagon he asked Burton and Spinney for their thoughts as
well. Then he made changes to the paper. It was always fluid. Sprad had found that it was almost impossible for Boyd to finish
the “Aerial Attack Study” and Christie discovered the same thing with the E-M Theory. Boyd never wanted to finish an intellectual
effort. He made changes and those changes made him see another fallacy or another place for elaboration, and the process began
all over. But the value of this process, arduous though it was to all around Boyd, was apparent, both with the “Destruction
and Creation” paper and the earlier “Development Planning Study.”
Boyd spent much of 1974 trying to educate Jim Burton about the true nature of the Building and its denizens. Burton took it
all in but there appeared to be no change in his thinking. Spinney and Leopold were convinced Burton would always be a Blue
Suiter, that he was simply biding his time and doing what he had to do in order to get a good ER, that he would always be
an officer who wanted to be somebody rather than an officer who wanted to do something.
Then one day Burton came to Boyd with a problem. He was working with a close friend, a fellow classmate from the Academy,
another lieutenant colonel who also was a water-walker destined to become a general officer. The other officer’s job was to
take the changes in the Air Force planning process being devised by Boyd and Burton and see that they were implemented. The
friend always nodded and agreed with Burton and said he would follow through. But nothing ever happened. Burton was confused.
After all, his friend was an Academy man.
Boyd shook his head in disbelief. He stood up and went to the blackboard and outlined what should have happened and what did
happen. He diagrammed events that could not be refuted. Burton wrote later that Boyd said to him, “Your friend is not a friend.
He used you.” Burton knew that Boyd was right.
Seeing it all on the blackboard made clear to Burton what Boyd and Spinney and Leopold had seen months earlier. And from that
moment on, Burton had a new rule: judge people by what they do and not what they say they will do. The conversion of Jim Burton
had begun. But it would take another, far more traumatic event before he became a true believer. And when he did, the hidden
iron will would become a coat of armor. He would shock Spinney and Leopold and Sprey and Christie—everyone but Boyd. The quintessential
Blue Suiter would turn his back on all that he had worked for and prove that he wanted to do something with his life rather
than be somebody.
On June 25, 1975, Boyd won the Harold Brown Award, the highest scientific award granted by the Air Force. In Room 4E-871,
in a ceremony presided over by Secretary of the Air Force John McLucas, Boyd received a citation stating how E-M was used
in designing the F-15 and F-16. The citation said E-M gave the Air Force the means to “forge a superior fighter force in the
decades ahead.”
Afterward, at home, Boyd turned to Mary and shook his head in disbelief, almost in embarrassment, not so much that the Air
Force had given him such a prestigious award but that he did not deserve it, that his accomplishments were not of sufficient
magnitude to merit such acclaim. This was not the false modesty of a man talking to his friends. It was the heartfelt response
of a man talking to his wife in the privacy of their home. It was the response of a small-town boy who never outgrew his childhood
insecurities.
That summer was tumultuous for Boyd. Mary Ellen was making no effort to hide her heavy smoking. Tired of seeing his Snookums
with a cigarette in her mouth, Boyd said, “Okay, here’s the deal. You stop smoking cigarettes and I’ll stop smoking cigars.
We do it cold turkey. Now. Deal?” Mary Ellen agreed and Boyd gave up his trademark cigar. But Mary Ellen soon was smoking
again. At the office Boyd constantly gnawed on carrots. He had to have something in his mouth. He drank Metrecal, then went
to the cafeteria and had a big lunch. He went out to dinner with one of the Acolytes and ate a huge meal and drank wine. But
he never again smoked a cigar.
Meanwhile, Spinney resigned his commission in June and left the Pentagon to become a consultant for a defense contractor.
He entered night school at George Washington University and began working on his doctorate in business and applied statistics.
He was in almost daily contact with Boyd.
Boyd, too, was talking of leaving the Air Force. He wanted to devote all of his time to “Destruction and Creation.” The paper
was one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, and it certainly was the longest. While the E-M Theory, for which he was most famous,
had been written as a technical document, it was primarily a briefing. Even the “Aerial Attack Study” had been dictated and
then transcribed by a typist; it was not written. The only things Boyd had written were a few articles for the Fighter Weapons
School publication. But now he wanted to put his ideas on paper.
Boyd’s vague talk of retiring was postponed when he was asked to do a highly classified study of the Soviet “Backfire Bomber.”
The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, but especially the Navy and the Air Force, were conjuring up a tremendous capability
for this new swing-wing bomber. The Navy said the Backfire was, like the B-1, a strategic bomber with accurate deep-strike
capability and with such extended range that it was a threat to sea lanes between the United States and Europe. The Navy said
the Backfire was capable of being launched from the area around Murmansk, flying down through the GIUK Gap (between Greenland,
Iceland, and the United Kingdom), and attacking convoys. The Air Force used the threat of the Backfire to ask for more surveillance
aircraft and more F-15s to defend Western Europe.
Exactly who commissioned the top-secret study is not known, but there was no doubt that an independent assessment of the Backfire
was needed. Boyd prepared a briefing for Schlesinger and there was talk that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to
know the results.
Stripped of the E-M comparisons and technical jargon, Boyd’s briefing said the Backfire threat was highly inflated. He said
it was not a strategic bomber but a medium-range bomber, and he summarized its performance by saying, “The Backfire is a piece
of shit, a glorified F-111.”
Soon after completing the Backfire research, Boyd walked into the personnel office and said, “I want to retire. Now.”
On August 31, 1975, John Richard Boyd retired after twenty-four years in the Air Force. He was forty-eight years old. He told
Spinney and Sprey and Christie and Burton that the secretary of the Air Force pleaded with him not to retire. He said the
secretary promised to make him a general if he would stay in the Air Force. “I told him no. I don’t want to get on the cocktail
and pussy circuit.”
But this was an effort to save face. Boyd could never have become a general. He talked of hosing generals so often that at
office parties and birthday parties he was given garden hoses as gifts. Spinney and Leopold laughed at the idea of Boyd in
what was called “charm school,” the indoctrination course for colonels who have just been promoted to general. Even if Boyd
could have been promoted to general, he would have been—at best—a different kind of general, most likely a terrible general.
He was incapable of compromise. He had little patience with those who disagreed with him. And while he performed brilliantly
as a commander at NKP, that was a wartime environment. He was a natural leader, but he did not have the sort of management
skills the Air Force looked for when they promoted colonels.
One of the first things Boyd did after retiring was drive home to Erie. He went by himself and saw many of his boyhood friends.
He told them he had retired, and that the airplanes he had been instrumental in producing—the F-15 and the F-16—were in production
and that now he was working on this new thing, this paper called “Destruction and Creation.” Several asked what rank he had
held at retirement and when he said “colonel” they laughed and chided him about not making general. How could he have been
responsible for those two airplanes when he was not a general? Everyone knew that generals did all the important work in the
Pentagon.
Boyd walked the beach out on the Peninsula, where already a hint of fall was in the air. He spent hours with Frank Pettinato,
who still was the chief lifeguard. Pettinato was not like Boyd’s childhood friends; he believed what Boyd told him about the
F-15 and the F-16, and he believed “Destruction and Creation” would be a very important achievement.
The postretirement visit must have been an emotional trip for Boyd. The Boyd family no longer had a presence in Erie. And
now his mother, the person who always held the family together, was sliding
ever deeper into the dementia that seemed to plague her side of the family.
In his home town, were it not for Frank Pettinato, Boyd would have been alone.
For several weeks Boyd stayed, walking the beach, thinking about his new project and how he would go about researching and
writing it. He let the ideas bubble, mulled them over, turned them back and forth, and examined them from all angles and then
discarded most of them and began again. By the end of his visit he was rejuvenated. The Peninsula did that for him. He was
overflowing with thoughts about the books he wanted to read and the ideas he wanted to explore.
And then he returned to Washington. Even though he arguably had more influence on the Air Force than any colonel in Air Force
history, his greatest contributions were yet to come. He was about to enter the most productive and most important part of
his life.
In November 1975, President Gerald Ford fired Secretary of Defense Schlesinger.
Within days the Air Force resumed its efforts to kill the A-10. The chief of staff of the Air Force also ordered that the
F-16s be wired for the delivery of nuclear weapons.
T
HE
1970s were a low point in American military history.
The Vietnam War had humiliated America’s armed forces. The greatest superpower on earth used almost every arrow in its quiver,
everything from multimillion-dollar airplanes to laser-guided bombs to electronic sensors to special-operations forces, and
still was defeated by little men in black pajamas using rifles and bicycles.
Yet, there was little soul-searching among senior generals. They were managers rather than warriors. And when managers lead
an army it is their nature to cast blame rather than to accept responsibility. The senior generals who prosecuted the war
and the weathervane careerists under them never admitted their failure. They never admitted that their war-fighting strategy—both
in the air and on the ground—was flawed. They never admitted they did not know how to fight a guerrilla war. Instead, they
looked outside the military for scapegoats: politicians had stabbed them in the back or the media were out to get them. Then
they put a fresh coat of paint on the strategy of the past, the strategy that failed in Vietnam, and they pressed on.
Military leaders of the 1970s were more familiar with business theory than with military theory. They read management books
and talked at length of how things were done at the Harvard Business
School. But some had never heard of Sun Tzu and could not spell “von Clausewitz.” They might have known the names of Douhet
or Jomini or von Schlieffen or Fuller or Guderian or Lawrence or Balck, but few knew the theories espoused by these men. Many
Civil War buffs knew more about military tactics than did the average senior officer in the mid-70s.