The Architect of Victory

by John Thompson

03/24/03

At the time of writing (March 22^nd), the liberation of Iraq was well underway. A storm of JDAMs, JSOWs, Have Naps, JSSAMs, GAMs (the Pentagon love its acronyms) and Tomahawks have been pulverizing Saddam’s palaces and the lairs of his sinister security forces; meanwhile American, Australian and British troops have already unhinged the front gates to Iraq.

Within a few days, the guns of American Abrams and British Challenger tanks will probably be knocking on the gates of Baghdad itself while the "elite" Republican Guards melt under a steel rain from MLRS artillery rockets and attack helicopters.

While there is much that can still go wrong politically, military victory over the forces of the Tyrant of Tikrit is almost certain. There is an old expression that victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan; but perhaps it is time to acknowledge the contributions of one this victory’s most important fathers.

John Boyd was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1927 and became a US fighter pilot in time to catch the end of the Korean War. As a fighter jock, he became known as ’Forty Second Boyd’ because of his ability to outmaneuver all other pilots — due in part to an intuitive understanding of the potential for jet fighters to engage in new tactics and moves that had been unknown before. He quietly wrote up an unofficial guide to advanced combat maneuvers for the jet age that rapidly became passed to every fighter pilot in most of the World’s air forces. It forms the basis of aerial combat techniques today.

A first-class eccentric, Boyd could focus tremendous powers of concentration on learning something new and was never adverse to bypassing the chain of command and the limits of protocol. After teaching himself advanced mathematics, he refined his theories into a single elegant mathematical formula and (with the aid of some of the first of his band of determined partisans) stole $1 million in computer time in 1963 to test his formula and conduct analyses of it on existing models of fighters.

Boyd’s findings that the newest models of US fighters were duds when it came to air to air combat made him as welcome as a skunk in the Pentagon. But as North Vietnamese MiGs scored success after success against America’s F-105s and F-4s, it was clear he was on to something. The next result was the re-invention of a fighter-jock come flight engineer into a guerrilla bureaucrat inside the Pentagon itself. It was here in the 1960s and ‘70s that he spearheaded the movement that allowed such masterpiece aircraft as the F-15, F-16, A-10 and F-18 to soar over planned clunkers like the B-1 bomber or the F-14 Tomcat.

Boyd’s bureaucratic victories as a Pentagon reformer halted his own career and he retired from the US Air Force in 1975 as a Colonel, but his mind was already consumed with a new vision and his next re-invention. Boyd devoured philosophical works to give him the tools for a new theory of combat, and emerged from his work having linked Gödel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This then became a dialectical engine (called the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act Loop) that has slowly become inserted into US military thinking.

The US Marine Corps, who despite their popular image as hidebound traditionalists are one of the world’s most innovative and dynamic military forces, were the first to see the value of Boyd’s new theory. It gradually percolated into other branches of the military through the 1980s and ‘90s. Boyd died in 1997, but the strategic concepts employed in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan reflect his thinking.

Boyd essentially proved that the true target of a military offensive was the mind of the enemy; that it was more important to stun him with a massive series of psychological blows, deprive him of accurate information about the reality of the situation, and only let him react to circumstances that were never accurate to begin with and/or which have already changed. Campaigns conducted this way result in ineffectual resistance and induce more losses to the enemy through surrender rather than through actual battlefield casualties.

Today, Saddam’s palaces are going up in smoke, his grasp of the situation is tenuous, he cannot trust his generals, and usually only knows where the Coalition troops have been rather than where they are. Add Saddam’s psychological paralysis and confusion to the overwhelming quality of Western arms and military victory will be served.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca