The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Art of War

By Stephen Robinson

Colonel John Boyd, a maverick fighter pilot, revolutionized the American art of war but his research relied on accounts written by Wehrmacht veterans who fabricated historical evidence to cover up their participation in Nazi war crimes. The Blind Strategist separates fact from fantasy and exposes the myths of maneuver warfare through a detailed evidence-based investigation and is a must-read for anybody interested in American military history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Apr 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781991001016

Book preview

‘Stephen Robinson does a superb job of analyzing the momentous debate about the virtues of maneuver warfare that took place in the United States during the latter years of the Cold War. He shows in great detail that the proponents of maneuver — including their guiding light, John Boyd — based their claims on a deeply flawed understanding of history. The Blind Strategist is a must-read for all serious students of modern warfare.’

— John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago

‘Stephen Robinson makes a bold, but utterly convincing, assault on the foundations of nearly fifty years of military thinking. As the United States military and its allies across the globe reorient themselves for the challenges of great state competition, Robinson’s fascinating book is certain to be at the center of the debate.’

— Dr. James Lacey, Horner Chair of Military Theory, Marine Corps University

‘An important book, one Boyd’s advocates will not want to read, but should.’

— Antulio J. Echevarria II, US Army War College

‘Robinson’s well-researched book questions the tenets of Boyd’s OODA loop, maneuver warfare, infiltration tactics, blitzkrieg, World War II historiography, Desert Storm success, and much more. This will be controversial. Let the debates begin!’

— Mark F. Cancian (Colonel, USMCR, ret.), Center for Strategic and International Studies

‘In this important, engaging and meticulously researched study, Stephen Robinson presents a compelling corrective to the maneuverist myth and Boyd worship affecting large parts of the US defense establishment and other Western militaries. For all the undoubted influence of Boyd’s purportedly revolutionary ideas, their uncritical embrace has fostered forms of doctrinal dogmatism, and the resulting operational tunnel vision helps explain recent failures in American strategy. In exposing the flawed foundations of maneuver warfare, this book will hopefully go some way to releasing Boyd’s followers from their blind devotion to the blind strategist.’

— Thomas Waldman, Senior Lecturer in International Security Studies, Macquarie University

Dedicated to William E. DePuy, an American soldier

William E. DePuy in Vietnam

(Author’s Collection)

CONTENTS

Introduction

1Emergence of Maneuver Warfare

2The Maneuver Warfare Revolution

3History Written by the Vanquished

4The Father of Blitzkrieg

5Wehrmacht Operations: Myth and Reality

6Riddle of the Stormtroopers

7Maneuver Warfare and Operational Art

8Maneuver Warfare and the Defense of NATO

9The Gulf War and the Illusion of Confirmation

10 The War on Terror and the Return of Attrition

11 Fourth Generation Warfare and Educating the Enemy

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

A PHILOSOPHICAL FIGHTER PILOT

The legend of Colonel John Boyd is well known inside Western militaries but his ideas on competitive advantage have also inspired politicians, business leaders and many others driven by a desire to win. It is the story of a maverick fighter pilot who rebelled against the ‘bomber barons’ running the United States Air Force during the Cold War and later challenged the entire Pentagon system, fighting corruption and nepotism as leader of the Defense Reform Movement. However, Boyd is best remembered as a warrior philosopher and his theories on conflict and the human mind revolutionized the art of war.

Boyd, according to his biographer Robert Coram, may be ‘the most influential military thinker since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 2,400 years ago’.¹ General Paul Van Riper, a retired United States Marine Corps officer, similarly announced, ‘I believe the world’s greatest military theorists are Carl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and John Boyd.’² The scholar Daniel Ford considered Boyd to be ‘arguably the most important American military thinker since the late-19th-Century sea power theorist, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’.³ William S. Lind, an acolyte of Boyd, described him as ‘the greatest military theorist America ever produced’.⁴

John Richard Boyd, born on 23 January 1927 in Erie, Pennsylvania, enlisted in the United States Army in 1944 and participated in the occupation of postwar Japan.⁵ He later joined the Air Force in 1951 and served as a fighter pilot during the Korean War, flying twenty-two missions as a wingman in F-86 Sabres. However, he never completed the thirty missions required to become a flight leader and the war ended without him claiming any ‘kills’.⁶ As a wingman, Boyd protected the lead plane which engaged the Chinese MiG-15s and never had the opportunity to open fire in combat.

John Boyd serving as a United States Air Force fighter pilot

(Contributor: Military Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

MiG Alley — the focus of the air war in Korea

After returning to America, Boyd taught tactics at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas in 1954. He challenged other pilots that he could outmaneuver any of them from a disadvantageous position within forty seconds. He never lost, and this feat earned him the nickname ‘Forty Second Boyd’. During this time, he wrote the air-to-air combat manual Aerial Attack Study. The manual avoided the dogma of proscribing specific maneuvers in given situations and instead encouraged pilots to think for themselves by evaluating their options as they cycle through a sequence of moves and counter-moves.⁷ Aerial Attack Study was integrated into the official Air Force manual on air-to-air tactics and became the international fighter pilot bible. By the end of the 1950s, many in the Air Force considered Boyd to be their finest fighter pilot.

In 1960, Boyd studied industrial engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta before being posted to Systems Command at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida two years later. At Eglin, with the help of the mathematician Thomas Christie, he formulated energy maneuverability theory. Boyd wanted to quantify fighter plane performance by comparing the ability of different airframes to alter altitude, speed and direction. Energy maneuverability could quantify how well aircraft can maneuver by analyzing how they change energy states in different conditions.⁸ However, Boyd needed computer access to make the complex calculations but lacked authorization to use Air Force computers for this purpose. Undeterred, he created dummy accounts and stole the computer time, which he used to evaluate the flight performance data of all American and Soviet fighters.⁹

Boyd’s covert research proved that Soviet MiG-17, MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighters all possessed greater maneuverability compared to American jets, a shocking revelation which shattered the myth of American Cold War air superiority.¹⁰ The Air Force initially wanted to court martial Boyd for the stolen computer time but, after the realization of his achievement sunk in, it instead presented him with the Air Force Systems Command Scientific Achievement Award and the Air Force Research and Development Award for Aeronautical Engineering.

As energy maneuverability could improve aircraft design, the Air Force posted Boyd to the Pentagon to help the struggling F-X project, which aimed to develop the next generation air superiority fighter. In 1966, he arrived at the Pentagon and clashed with the senior ‘bomber barons’ who downgraded the importance of fighters. The F-86 Sabre was the last dedicated air superiority fighter as a trend toward more complex platforms designed for multi-role missions, such as dogfights and ground attack, had resulted in heavier, less maneuverable planes. During the Korean War, Sabres achieved a 10:1 kill ratio against MiG-15s, but in air combat over Vietnam, F-4 Phantoms experienced a ratio closer to a 1:1 against communist pilots. As Boyd knew, the existing American planes did not possess an edge over the latest Soviet designed air superiority fighters.¹¹

A Soviet MiG-15 fighter

(Contributor: Malcolm Haines/Alamy Stock Photo)

American F-86 Sabre fighters during the Korean War

(Contributor: Alpha Stock/Alamy Stock Photo)

The destruction of a MiG-15 fighter taken from the gun camera of an F-86 Sabre during the Korean War

(Contributor: RBM Vintage Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

Boyd believed the fighter envisaged by the F-X project was too heavy at 80,000 pounds with overly complex swing-wings. ‘I’ve never designed an airplane before,’ he declared, ‘but I could fuck up and do better than this.’¹² In contrast, Boyd advocated a lighter 40,000 pound twin tailed plane with greater maneuverability. In this quest, he found allies among a group of officers who opposed the F-X project’s multi-mission compromise plane. Boyd also found support from a handful of others in the Pentagon and industry and his ‘Fighter Mafia’ advocated a lightweight fighter based on energy maneuverability. He enhanced the design by eliminating the cumbersome swing-wing, resulting in a vastly improved prototype which was approved in 1968.

Boyd nevertheless believed the F-X design did not go far enough and began designing another lightweight fighter, without asking for permission from the Air Force hierarchy, which became the F-XX project. The ‘bomber barons’ planned to approve this fighter through the first two committees but would reject the concept at the final approval stage, which would give a pretense that the proposal had been genuinely considered. Boyd, alerted to the trap by an informer, used his network to pitch the F-XX directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, who approved the project. After entering the generals’ committee, Boyd announced, ‘Gentlemen, this is not a decision briefing. Since the secretary of defense has already approved this program, today’s briefing will be for information only.’¹³ Boyd had outmaneuvered the stunned ‘bomber barons’.

Boyd, a maverick by nature, followed none of the conventions of career Air Force officers, as his subordinate James Burton recalled:

I thought Boyd was crazy. He did nothing right, according to what I had been taught since entering the Academy. His uniform was a mess; he never got to work on time; he ignored work deadlines; he even ignored the work itself. When the generals told him to do something, he would do something else. He was uncontrollable. He openly criticized numerous generals as either corrupt or incompetent, some as both.¹⁴

In the Pentagon, Boyd became known as ‘The Mad Major’, ‘The Ghetto Colonel’, ‘Genghis John’ and ‘That Fucking Boyd’.¹⁵ Nevertheless, the F-X program resulted in the F-15 Eagle and the F-XX project produced the F-16 Falcon — the first fighters designed using energy maneuverability — and they became the backbone of American airpower.

Boyd looked beyond fighter aircraft by championing the next generation ground attack plane. During the 1970s, the Air Force tasked Pierre Sprey, a member of the ‘Fighter Mafia’ who assisted Boyd on the F-X project, with designing its first dedicated ground attack aircraft, and he wanted historical lessons to influence the design. Sprey, Boyd and the design team interviewed German World War II veterans in CIA safe houses in Maryland to learn combat lessons, such as how pilots can best locate, approach and destroy ground targets.¹⁶ The team interviewed Adolf Galland, a Luftwaffe fighter ace, and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who flew 2,500 ground attack missions in Stuka dive bombers and is credited with destroying 519 tanks. The team learned that ground attack planes had to fly low toward their targets and be capable of absorbing considerable damage from anti-aircraft weapons, and their efforts resulted in the A-10 Warthog which demonstrated its worth as a tank killer during the Gulf War.

Colonel John Boyd

(Author’s Collection)

In 1975, the Vietnam War ended in defeat and the American military entered the darkest phase of its history. In that year, Boyd retired from the Air Force and became a civilian consultant for the Secretary of Defense with an office in the Pentagon from where he led the Defense Reform Movement, a network which spoke out against the corrupt relationship between military officials and industry. As the Pentagon often purchased poorly tested military hardware at inflated prices, the reform movement had a cause, as James Burton explained:

. . . unbridled ambition and rampant careerism in the officer corps of all services, the incestuous revolving door between the defense industry and Pentagon officials, the almost daily revelation of horror stories about $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers, a steady stream of weapons systems either inadequately tested or purchased regardless of poor test results, and a regular diet of senior military and civilian officials lying to the public and Congress to cover up embarrassments were only a few of the symptoms of a corrupt business that cried out for reform.¹⁷

The ‘Reformers’ believed the American military was addicted to high-tech expensive weapons, resulting in small numbers of highly complex platforms with unreliable readiness due to a greater likelihood of systems failure, which would ultimately be less effective than a greater number of simpler systems.¹⁸ In one noteworthy scandal, the ‘Reformers’ exposed that the Air Force had not properly funded maintenance so mechanics had been using their own pay to buy electronic spare parts at Radio Shack just to keep their aircraft flying. In another example, James Burton criticized the Bradley Fighting Vehicle project:

They’d fired 400 rounds in a test — and not a single round was fired at a tank. They just detonated a warhead in a steel block, measured how big the hole was, then derived combat results from their computer models. I said to myself, ‘These guys are crazy. What if their computer models are wrong?’ So I said it’s time to get some real data.¹⁹

Burton arranged a live-fire test program which fired rounds at vehicles loaded with weapons, fuel, ammunition and test dummies to realistically simulate combat.²⁰ The ‘Reformers’ forced the Pentagon to undertake proper testing which improved the design of the Bradley and Abrams tanks; this endeavor saved lives during the Gulf War.²¹

James Fallows, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, published an article, ‘The Muscle-Bound Superpower’, on 2 October 1979, propelling Boyd’s crusade onto the national stage, and other journalists began covering the reform movement. Fallows again championed the reform agenda in his influential bestseller National Defense (1981) and later in articles for The Washington Post.

Boyd also formed alliances with politicians, including influential Republicans Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. He gained another powerful ally, Democrat Senator Gary Hart, who helped establish the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, which included Republicans and Democrats. Hart and Gingrich, an unlikely duo, wrote a series of articles on defense policy as part of the reform movement. In 1981, Hart, assisted by his legislative aide William S. Lind, wrote an opinion piece, ‘The Case For Military Reform’, in The Wall Street Journal. Hart later authored America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform (1984), again with Lind’s help, which advocated inexpensive, simple and reliable weapon systems in tune with Boyd’s demands. Hart later reflected:

Through my staff assistant William Lind, I discovered a retired air force colonel named John Boyd and a handful of reformers, including Chuck Spinney and others. They let me sit in on some of their regular meetings, and I discovered an entirely new approach to thinking about the military.²²

By 1985, the Congressional Military Reform Caucus had over 100 members and eventually included over one quarter of Congress.

During this time, Boyd made his greatest contribution as a military philosopher after becoming intrigued with the fly-offs between the two F-XX prototypes.²³ Before the test flights, he predicted that the YF-17 would perform better but the pilots agreed the YF-16 was superior. Boyd realized the YF-16 discharged and regained energy quicker than the YF-17, which enabled it to perform faster transient maneuvers, giving the pilots superior responsiveness and tempo.²⁴ Through this observation, Boyd realized why F-86 Sabre pilots had inflicted a 10:1 kill ratio over Chinese MiG-15s in the skies over Korea — a curious statistic as the Soviet designed planes had superior acceleration, turning and climbing performance. However, the American fighters had a bubble cockpit, giving pilots excellent all-round visibility and hydraulic flight controls which enabled faster transitions between different maneuvers. Therefore, American pilots had superior situational awareness and could more easily translate their decisions into actions and, as dogfights required pilots to make a succession of decisions and actions, they established ‘decision cycle’ superiority over Chinese pilots.²⁵

Boyd, through these insights, developed his Observation–Orientation–Decide–Act (O–O–D–A) loop theory, which Franklin Spinney, an Air Force officer and Boyd acolyte, explained:

He thought that any conflict could be viewed as a duel wherein each adversary observes (O) his opponent’s actions, orients (O) himself to the unfolding situation, decides (D) on the most appropriate response or countermove, then acts (A). The competitor who moves through this OODA-loop cycle the fastest gains an inestimable advantage by disrupting his enemy’s ability to respond effectively.²⁶

As the O–O–D–A loop could be applied beyond the experience of fighter pilots, Boyd looked for links with other forms of conflict. He ultimately wanted to know if the O–O–D–A loop could be applied to conflict in general and studied military history searching for a grand narrative to guide military success.

After eighteen months of research, Boyd prepared a briefing titled Patterns of Conflict, first delivered in 1977. He had been heavily influenced by Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan and the British military theorists J.F.C. (John) Fuller and Basil Henry Liddell Hart, as well as by the German stormtroopers of World War I and the Blitzkrieg of World War II. Patterns of Conflict became a living, never-ending project as Boyd constantly updated and expanded its content, later renaming it A Discourse on Winning and Losing. It began as a one-hour lecture and became a thirteen-hour marathon, which he delivered over 1,500 times during the next twenty years, reaching influential audiences in the Pentagon and Washington who were seeking a new way of waging war after years of wasted attrition in Vietnam.

John Boyd’s O–O–D–A Loop

Patterns of Conflict explained Boyd’s concept of maneuver warfare — the apparent Holy Grail of military theory — a means of rapidly defeating opponents by paralyzing their minds and ability to effectively react, mentally checkmating them with minimal violence. The key to understanding Boyd’s philosophy is the realization that warfare is an art fought in the human mind. ‘Terrain doesn’t fight wars,’ he said. ‘Machines don’t fight war. People fight wars. It’s in the minds of men that war must be fought.’²⁷ Maneuver warfare rejected the Pentagon’s Vietnam-era obsession with technology and managerialism — personified by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara — which had created a risk-averse culture without a warrior ethos, as James Burton explained:

Boyd embarrassed the nation’s military leaders by showing that there were no real military theorists practicing their craft in this country. They had been replaced by scientists and technologists who thought in terms of bandwidth, gigahertz and computer memory.²⁸

Robert Coram shared this scathing assessment:

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.’ . . . Many Civil War buffs knew more about military tactics than did the average senior officer in the mid-70s.²⁹

Boyd’s journalist contacts championed maneuver warfare in the press. For example, James Fallows reported in The Atlantic Monthly after attending a Patterns of Conflict briefing in 1979:

Deep within the Pentagon, on an inner hall of a lower floor, the retired colonel came to the end of his ‘brief.’ . . . ‘I’ve been talking about war, waging it and winning it,’ he said. ‘People don’t discuss that subject very often in this building.’ His associate chimed in, ‘It’s really the Department of Technology, not the Department of Defense.’³⁰

Boyd’s ideas on maneuver warfare influenced General Donn Starry, who incorporated them into United States Army doctrine through the AirLand Battle concept in 1982. The Marine Corps Commandant General Alfred Gray, impressed with Patterns of Conflict, authorized the new manual Warfighting, which made maneuver warfare Marine doctrine in 1989. Boyd fundamentally changed the Corps and, as Grant Hammond from the Air War College explained, for ‘five years, a retired Air Force Colonel taught every Marine officer that went through the Basic Course at Quantico, Virginia, about maneuver warfare’.³¹ The Marine Corps later dedicated a section of their library at Quantico to hold Boyd’s unpublished papers and notes.

The United States Navy and Air Force adopted the O–O–D–A loop as a standard decision-making tool. Maneuver warfare concepts are evident in Naval Doctrine Publication 1 Naval Warfare (1994) and Air Force Doctrine Document 1 Air Force Basic Doctrine (1997). Boyd’s ideas are present in Joint Vision 2010 (1996), authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which advocated gaining ‘OODA-loop dominance’.³² Boyd’s ideas also are evident in the Concept for Future Joint Operations (1997) and in many other Department of Defense publications.

Dick Cheney, after becoming Secretary of Defense in 1989, sought Boyd’s counsel during the planning of the Gulf War. Through this connection, Boyd is often considered the architect of the coalition’s incredibly swift victory. For example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared that Boyd developed ‘the principles of maneuver warfare’ which Cheney credited ‘for the lightning victory in the first Gulf War’.³³ After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell used Boyd’s language when articulating that America’s response would get inside the enemy ‘decision cycle’.³⁴

The O–O–D–A loop and maneuver warfare initially gained national attention following articles in The Washington Post and other newspapers in 1981.³⁵ As Boyd believed his theories could be applied to competitive business strategies, he encouraged others to adapt his concepts in the private sector. George Stalk, who worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Japan, realized that time can be a source of competitive advantage, as companies which make faster decisions normally triumph over their competition. Stalk noticed similarities between his observations of the Japanese business world and Boyd’s ideas, which he explored in Competing Against Time (1990): ‘A time-compressed company does the same thing as a pilot in an OODA Loop . . . it’s still the competitor who acts on information faster who is in the best position to win.’³⁶

Chester Richards, an acolyte of Boyd from the Pentagon, later wrote Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business (2004). Richards noted that many military leaders who became familiar with Boyd’s ideas ‘later left the military and went into business where they began to use the concept of competing using time as their primary weapon’.³⁷ Numerous similar books appeared which further established Boyd’s ideas in the commercial world, such as Santamaria, Martino and Clemon’s The Marine Corps Way: Using Maneuver Warfare to Lead a Winning Organization (2003). Boyd’s ideas have also been discussed in Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, and they are taught in business schools and by private sector consultants.

Boyd’s ideas on strategy have been applied in politics. Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, both members of the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, applied the O–O–D–A loop to their political struggles. Gingrich even attributed Boyd’s theories to the Republican takeover of Congress and stated:

The key to success in politics as in war is the ability to stay on offense. . . Learning to stay on offense requires a strategic vision that enables you to constantly orient to the future, an operational system that allows you to be inside your opponent’s decision cycle (see Boyd’s work on OODA-loops for an explanation).³⁸

Outside America, Boyd’s ideas have been just as influential. Maneuver warfare is military doctrine in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as in numerous other Western countries. He has changed the world and, as Grant Hammond declared, from ‘a Danish business school to military academies and war colleges from Australia to Norway, John Boyd is a familiar name’.³⁹ Frans Osinga, a Dutch Air Force officer, noted: ‘Over the past two decades the image of the OODA loop has become an icon and has spread like a meme beyond military organizations, infecting business consultants, psychiatrists, pedagogues, and sports instructors.’⁴⁰

At seventy years of age, Boyd died of prostate cancer on 9 March 1997, a slow and painful death. General Charles Krulak, Commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote a eulogy:

How does one begin to pay homage to a warrior like John Boyd? He was a towering intellect who made unsurpassed contributions to the American art of war. . . From John Boyd we learned about competitive decision making on the battlefield — compressing time, using time as an ally. . . I was in awe of him, not just for the potential of his future contributions but for what he stood for as an officer, a citizen and as a man. . . I, and his Corps of Marines, will miss our counselor terribly.⁴¹

Cheney, as Vice President, when asked about Boyd, reflected, ‘We could use him again now. I wish he was around now. I’d love to turn him loose on our current defense establishment and see what he could come up with.’⁴²

Boyd generated intense loyalty among his acolytes. ‘To those who believed in him and his causes,’ Grant Hammond remembered, ‘he was more than a hero, he was a virtual saint and they would have followed him anywhere and taken on any foe, regardless of the odds’.⁴³ Boyd’s legacy is seemingly assured as the scholar Michael Evans concluded: ‘Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, those who opposed and impeded Boyd’s career are forgotten men, while Boyd’s influence permeates advanced military doctrine throughout the West.’⁴⁴

Boyd, however, made a fatal mistake with the potential to undo his legacy. After formulating his views on air combat over Korea, he convinced himself that he had unlocked a universal truth. Therefore, he approached history with a preconceived view and sought confirmation of his theory, ignoring critical evidence which did not suit his quest. Far from discovering the Holy Grail of military theory, Boyd invented a mythological system of thought which the traumatized American military recovering from Vietnam mistook for reality.

A TEMPLE BUILT ON SAND

There is no denying the brilliance of John Boyd’s mind and his legacy in relation to air-to-air combat, energy maneuverability and his battle against Pentagon corruption; however, the achievements of his Defense Reform Movement are overstated. Although Boyd influenced the design of the F-15 Eagle, he wanted an even smaller aircraft without radar and denounced the plane as too large and complex. The F-16 Falcon was also heavier and more technologically complex than Boyd envisaged. He wanted a smaller, short-ranged, single-engine, 25,000 pound fighter armed with a cannon and heat-seeking missiles without radar and advanced avionics.⁴⁵ However, the Air Force, based on recent combat experience over North Vietnam, required a long-range all-weather aircraft with advanced air-to-air missiles, radar, electronic countermeasures and the ability to perform ground attack missions. Boyd denounced the final design because it was not the ‘pure’ air superiority fighter he advocated, and as Robert Coram explained, his ‘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.’⁴⁶

F-16 Falcon and F-15 Eagle aircraft during the Gulf War

(Contributor: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

Boyd ultimately valued energy maneuverability over combat experience. When briefing his energy charts to Top Gun instructors, he claimed that F-4 Phantoms could not win dogfights against more maneuverable MiG-17s. The instructors, including two pilots who had shot down MiG-17s over North Vietnam, rejected Boyd’s analysis and Commander Ron McKeown warned, ‘never trust anyone who would rather kick your ass with a slide rule than with a jet’.⁴⁷

Under Boyd’s leadership, the Defense Reform Movement advocated cancelling the high-tech F-15 Eagles, F-16 Falcons and Abrams tanks in favor of outdated F-5 Tigers and Patton tanks.⁴⁸ The ‘Reformers’ believed that air superiority would be gained by pilots operating only in clear weather using their own eyes without the benefit of long-range missiles and radar — unnecessary burdens which compromise maneuverability. ‘The Reform vision,’ as John Correll from Air Force Magazine concluded, ‘was perfectly suited to an imaginary war in which aerobatic fighters dueled in clear skies on sunny days. That war would never exist.’⁴⁹

The Gulf War effectively ended the ‘Reformers’ crusade as the conflict demonstrated the effectiveness of the expensive and complex weapons they opposed, eroding their credibility. The F-15 Eagle’s advanced radar, so despised by Boyd, has allowed its pilots to maneuver to advantageous positions prior to opening fire and the aircraft has been credited with 104 ‘kills’ to date without suffering any aerial combat losses.⁵⁰ The F-16 Falcon has tallied 72 ‘kills’ without any air-to-air losses.⁵¹ The majority of these ‘kills’ were inflicted with missiles beyond visual range, clearly demonstrating that the age of Korean War dogfights has long since receded into the past.⁵²

The O–O–D–A loop is a useful decision-making tool but is a far cry from being the universal key to victory, and maneuver warfare is essentially based upon fraudulent concepts. As Boyd had no direct experience of land warfare, he had little choice but to trust the insights of others when searching for confirmation of his theory. He trusted historical accounts of World War II which professional historians later exposed as dishonest fabrications and, as a result, maneuver warfare rests upon a foundation of deceit. Boyd at first innocently injected misinformation into his theory, unaware of the dishonesty of others, but after major anomalies eventually appeared, he failed to re-evaluate his grand narrative. He ignored and misrepresented damning evidence in complete contrast to his own intellectual standards.

Maneuver warfare originated from the ideas of the British military thinkers J.F.C. Fuller and Liddell Hart who, horrified by the slaughter in the trenches during World War I, sought new methods of waging war based on paralyzing the mind of enemy commanders as an alternative to blood-soaked attrition. Fuller and Liddell Hart both claimed that their concepts inspired the German Blitzkrieg. Boyd discovered their ideas while searching for his grand theory and expanded upon them when developing maneuver warfare. However, he only superficially studied the history of warfare and his analysis is reliant upon false dichotomies and faulty logic. Furthermore, his understanding of Blitzkrieg derived from fabricated history. Boyd and his key acolyte William S. Lind praised the Wehrmacht as the epitome of military virtue and depicted German generals as masters of maneuver warfare, but they had unknowingly fallen for a misinformation campaign conceived in 1945.

During the early days of the Cold War, the American military sought insights into the Red Army and asked Wehrmacht veterans to write accounts of their Eastern Front operations. However, this enterprise gave former German officers an opportunity to write myth-making propaganda and, instead of providing the Americans with genuine advice, these veterans salvaged their reputations by falsely claiming that their defeat originated from Hitler’s interfering orders, which undermined their military genius. They also dishonestly insisted that the Wehrmacht had nothing to do with the Third Reich’s criminal atrocities. These self-serving myths also reached wider audiences through popular memoirs such as Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Leader, Erich von Manstein’s Lost Victories and Friedrich von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles, which all contain a difficult to decipher mix of truth and deception. The myths of the Wehrmacht’s unparalleled military excellence and clean hands became largely accepted as fact in the English-speaking world, but the former German generals who conjured these fantasies were assisted by a collaborator.

World War II destroyed Liddell Hart’s reputation, as his pre-war predictions turned out to be completely incorrect, but after the war he regained his former standing by fabricating historical evidence in an effort to persuade the world that his ideas had inspired Blitzkrieg. He achieved this aim by developing a co-dependent relationship with former Wehrmacht generals who used him to endorse their myths while they legitimized his fraudulent history, resulting

Reviews for The Blind Strategist

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is a very mixed bag. On one hand it could grow into a history of the use of tanks in warfare. It could also be a history of excuses military leaders have given for failures: Germany in WWII, US in Vietnam. The main argument is that Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot, originated a theory of military victory based on the 'decision cycle'. Getting ahead of the enemy in this process causes a mental checkmate and victory with minimal violence. Boyd based this theory partly on his own experience as a pilot and partly on the theories of British officers who wished to avoid the grinding war of attrition that was WW I. Maneuver warfare, as it was termed, would slip through enemy weakness to paralyze nerve centers rather than attempt to destroy men and equipment. Robinson's assertion is that much of Boyd's theory was based on false premises based on information from defeated Wehrmacht officers who claimed that their strategies, also influenced by the British, had been thwarted by Hitler's interference in field operations. Their lies were aimed partially at retrieving their reputations as strategists and also at distancing themselves and the Wehrmacht from the genocidal aims of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Robinson feels that the maneuver warfare theory, with its emphasis on paralyzing central command structures led to mistakes in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. One example is that the myth that Soviet citizens had welcomed the Germans as liberators and only turned to partisan resistance after the SS arrived was accepted by American historians. So that would work in Iraq too, right? Americans will be welcomed as liberators, our army will not be followed by genocide squads therefore the nation will happily organize into a new, functioning democracy. This is a very detailed and exhaustive look at the history of a military theory and of its effects in action. Recommended for military buffs or for those looking for a different explanation of recent failures in US military actions.