BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — The history of water polo is dotted with unique characters who shaped the world they lived in and laid the foundation for the world which came after their passing from the scene.
University of Iowa and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) alumnus John Boyd is an example of his tendency.
A United States Air Force fighter pilot and Pentagon consultant in the second half of the 20th century, Boyd’s theories have been highly influential in military, sports, business, and litigation strategies and planning.
The father and proponent of the United States Lightweight Fighter program (LWF) that produced the successful General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, Boyd’s influence on modern history is likely immeasurable.
Boyd was born on January 23, 1927, in Erie, Pennsylvania. Boyd enlisted in the Army Air Corps on October 30, 1944, while still a junior in high school. A swimming and water polo star at Strong Vincent High School in Erie, he completed his basic training and skill training as an aircraft turret mechanic during the waning months of World War II following graduation. From January 1946 to January 1947, Boyd put his water polo and swimming background to good use as a swimming instructor in Japan. He attained the rank of sergeant, and served in the Air Force Reserve until graduating from college. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1951 with a Bachelor’s degree in economics and later earned a second bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech.
Boyd was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force following completion of the Reserve Officers Training (ROTC) program at Iowa. On March 27, 1953 Boyd arrived in Korea as an F-86 Sabre pilot and flew a short tour (22 missions instead of 100). Although he was never credited with any kills, after his service in Korea he was invited to attend the most prestigious school a fighter pilot could attend, the Fighter Weapons School (FWS). Boyd attended the school and not only performed well, but rose to the top of his class. Upon graduation he was invited to stay at the FWS as an instructor, became head of the Academic Section and wrote the tactics manual for the school. It was during this time that Boyd revolutionized aerial tactics. His practice and teaching while at the FWS would sow early seeds for the later development of his concept of the OODA (observe, orient, decide, and act) loop.
Boyd was also brought to the Pentagon by to do mathematical analysis that would support the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle program in order to pass the Office of the Secretary of Defense‘s Systems Analysis process.
As an instructor, he was dubbed “Forty Second Boyd” for his standing bet that beginning from a position of disadvantage, he could defeat any opposing pilot in air combat maneuvering in less than 40 seconds. According to his biographer, Robert Coram, Boyd was also known at different points of his career as “The Mad Major” for the intensity of his passions, as “Genghis John” for his confrontational style of interpersonal discussion, and as the “Ghetto Colonel” for his spartan lifestyle.
During the Vietnam War, he served as Vice Commander of Task Force Alpha and as Commander of the 56th Combat Support Group at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand, from April 1972 to April 1973.
At his retirement in 1975, Boyd was awarded the prestigious Harold Brown Award by the US Air Force. The Brown Award is the highest honor presented by the Air Force to a scientist or engineer who applies scientific research to solve a problem critical to the needs of the Air Force.
After his retirement, Boyd continued to work at the Pentagon as a consultant in the Tactical Air office of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation.
However, his role in establishing the groundwork by which modern warfare is conducted – and the weapons exploited in the effort – can not be overlooked.
During the early 1960s, Boyd, together with Thomas Christie, a civilian mathematician, created the energy–maneuverability theory, or E-M theory of aerial combat. A legendary maverick by reputation, Boyd was said to have stolen the computer time to do the millions of calculations necessary to prove the theory, though a later audit found that all computer time at the facility was properly billed to recognized projects and that no irregularity could be prosecuted. E-M theory became the world standard for the design of fighter aircraft. At a time when the Air Force’s FX project (subsequently the F-15 Eagle) was floundering, Boyd’s deployment orders to Vietnam were canceled and he was brought to the Pentagon to re-do the trade-off studies according to E-M. His work helped save the project from being a costly dud, even though its final product was larger and heavier than he desired. However, cancellation of that tour in Vietnam meant that Boyd would be one of the most important air-to-air combat strategists with no combat kills.
With Colonel Everest Riccioni and Pierre Sprey, Boyd formed a small advocacy group within Headquarters USAF that dubbed itself the “Fighter Mafia“. Riccioni was an Air Force fighter pilot assigned to a staff position in Research and Development, while Sprey was a civilian statistician working in systems analysis. While assigned to working on the beginnings of the F-15, called the Blue Bird at the time, Boyd disagreed with the direction the program was going and proposed an alternative “Red Bird”. This concept was for a clear weather, air-to-air only fighter with a top speed of Mach 1.6 rather than the Blue Bird’s Mach 2+/2.5+. Top speed would be sacrificed in favor of lower weight (and therefore better maneuverability and lower cost). Boyd and Sprey also argued against an active radar and radar-guided missiles. They both proposed this concept to Air Staff. Their proposal went unheeded and there were no changes to the Blue Bird.
The Secretary of Defense, attracted by the idea of a low cost fighter, gave funding to Riccioni for a study project on the Lightweight Fighter program (LWF, which became the F-16 Fighting Falcon). The Department of Defense and Air Force both went ahead with the program, stipulating that it have a “design to cost” basis no more than 3 million per copy over 300 aircraft. The USAF considered the idea of a “Hi-lo” mix force structure and expanded the LWF program. The program soon went against the Fighter Mafia‘s vision: it was not the stripped-down air-to-air specialist they envisioned but a heavier multi-role fighter-bomber with advanced avionics, an active radar, and radar-guided missiles.
Boyd is credited for largely developing the strategy for the invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991. In 1981, Boyd had presented his briefing, Patterns of Conflict, to Dick Cheney, then a member of the United States House of Representatives. By 1990, Boyd had moved to Florida because of declining health, but Cheney (then the Secretary of Defense in the George H. W. Bush administration) called him back to work on the plans for Operation Desert Storm. Boyd had substantial influence on the ultimate “left hook” design of the plan.
In a letter to the editor of Inside the Pentagon, former Commandant of the Marine Corps General Charles C. Krulak is quoted as saying, “The Iraqi army collapsed morally and intellectually under the onslaught of American and Coalition forces. John Boyd was an architect of that victory as surely as if he’d commanded a fighter wing or a maneuver division in the desert.”
Arguably his most influential insight was that of the decision cycle or OODA loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent. The construct was originally a theory of achieving success in air-to-air combat, developed out of Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability theory and his observations on air combat between MiG-15s and North American F-86 Sabres in Korea. Harry Hillaker (chief designer of the F-16) said of the OODA theory, “Time is the dominant parameter. The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed.”
Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent organisms and organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. Boyd breaks this cycle down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which one cycles continuously:
- Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses
- Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current mental perspective
- Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one’s current mental perspective
- Action: the physical playing-out of decisions
Of course, while this is taking place, the situation may be changing. It is sometimes necessary to cancel a planned action in order to meet the changes. This decision cycle is thus known as the OODA loop. Boyd emphasized that this decision cycle is the central mechanism enabling adaptation (apart from natural selection) and is therefore critical to survival.
Boyd theorized that large organizations such as corporations, governments and militaries possessed a hierarchy of OODA loops at tactical, grand-tactical (operational art), and strategic levels. In addition, he stated that most effective organizations have a highly decentralized chain of command that utilizes objective-driven orders, or directive control, rather than method-driven orders in order to harness the mental capacity and creative abilities of individual commanders at each level. In 2003, this power to the edge concept took the form of a DOD publication “Power to the Edge: Command … Control … in the Information Age” by Dr. David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes. Boyd argued that such a structure creates a flexible “organic whole” that is quicker to adapt to rapidly changing situations. He noted, however, that any such highly decentralized organization would necessitate a high degree of mutual trust and a common outlook that came from prior shared experiences. Headquarters needs to know that the troops are perfectly capable of forming a good plan for taking a specific objective, and the troops need to know that Headquarters does not direct them to achieve certain objectives without good reason.
In 2007, strategy writer Robert Greene discussed the loop in a post called “OODA and You”. He insisted that it was “deeply relevant to any kind of competitive environment: business, politics, sports, even the struggle of organisms to survive”, and claimed to have been initially “struck by its brilliance”.
The OODA Loop has since been used as the core for a theory of litigation strategy that unifies the use of cognitive science and game theory to shape the actions of witnesses and opposing counsel.
Boyd also served to revolutionize air-to-air combat in that he was the author of the Aerial Attack Study. The Aerial Attack Study became the official tactics manual for fighter aircraft. Boyd changed the way pilots thought; prior to his tactics manual, pilots thought that air-to-air combat was far too complex to ever be fully understood. With the release of Boyd’s Aerial Attack Study, pilots realized that the high-stakes death dance of aerial combat was solved. Boyd said that a pilot going into aerial combat must know two things: the position of the enemy and the velocity of the enemy. Given the velocity of an enemy, a pilot is able to decide what the enemy is capable of doing. When a pilot knows what maneuvers the enemy can perform, he can then decide how to counter any of the other pilot’s actions. The Aerial Attack Study contained everything a fighter pilot needed to know.
The overwhelming belief in the Air Force was that air-to-air combat, also called dogfighting was a thing of the past due to the advent of guided air-to-air missiles. His Aerial Attack Study illustrated that the art of the dogfight was not dead by showing that fighter pilots could out-maneuver missiles. John Boyd’s Aerial Attack Study was revolutionary because it was the first instance in history in which tactics were reduced to an objective state. Boyd’s manual proved that he was the undisputed master in the area of aerial combat. Within a decade the Aerial Attack Study became the text for air forces around the world.
Boyd died of cancer in Florida on March 9, 1997 at age 70. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 20, 1997.
