You are absolutely right, he didn't. I met John Boyd at Air University in the early 1990s to discuss Airpower Doctrine with him and others. It was apparent early on that he was a "true believer" and knew in his fighter pilot's heart that airpower could singlehandedly win a war if only they were allowed to get inside the opponent's OODA Loop. Anything contrary to that conviction was quite simply wrong.
My impression of Boyd (which I'll address in a later part) is that he was a Schlieffen-type, a peacetime thinker concerned with finding the "secret" to victory, based on what the intellect of the commander could inflict on the hapless foe.
Clausewitz, by contrast, had a fairly miserable time fighting against Napoleon and disclaims any particular route to victory, saying instead it must always rely on the commander to grasp the circumstances and find an appropriate route. His statement that experience shows it takes extraordinary effort to achieve even average results makes sense for someone who commanded at Wavre, rather than in wargames.
Look, there’s impression and then there’s reality. If you think he’s a mere “peacetime thinker” then I would encourage you to read the biographies of him that are available. I have qualms with Coram’s biography which I think bleeds far too much into hagiography, but Grant Hammond has a solid biography and I devote a chapter to biography in my own “A New Conception of War.” Boyd saw combat in the Korean War and commanded a semi-secretive organization during the Vietnam War that was tasked with monitoring and interdicting communist traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail. His “thinking” also had a very strong pragmatic flavor as his background was engineering, and in addition to improving the F-15 fighter program and creating the F-16 program from scratch, the Energy-Maneuverability Theory which he derived to quantify changing energy states in aircraft performance has directly impacted the tactics, techniques and procedures in the tactical manual of every single U.S. military aircraft since the mid-Cold War. Every fixed wing and rotary wing pilot in the American military continues to benefit from his practical engineering knowledge whether they know it or not. In terms of “miserable fighting” it is also worth noting that his audience very often consisted of Vietnam veterans who had their own miserable experiences and wanted to reform their parts of the U.S. military so that America would not endure that sting of defeat again. The people in Boyd’s audience had their own bullet scars and had seen their own men die in futile engagements on the battlefield. If Boyd had a been peacetime dilettante, they’d have walked away.
Dismissing him as a mere commander of wargames is historically ungrounded.
My assessment of Boyd may well change as I read more on him, but his service record is in no way incompatible with the comparison to Schlieffen (who also had active service). Combat experience is clearly no great defense against false ideas—some of those subject to Clausewitz's harshest critiques served with distinction in the Seven Years' War. I do agree with Clausewitz that most writing done on war, even by bloodied soldiers, has been bad. It does not follow that every experienced soldier would walk away in disgust upon hearing them.
What I mean regarding Clausewitz's experience is that being on the opposite side of Napoleon (and indeed his marshals), having his country conquered and occupied, gave him a markedly different perspective on the conduct of war. Both Schlieffen and Boyd were scions of victorious armies, and raised in countries of great means. I speculate that this contributes to what I see as excessive optimism in both their concepts of war. This, in contrast, to Clausewitz, who devotes much more time to the matter of avoiding disaster when outmatched, and is consequently much more circumspect about the margins of victory that can be reliably achieved (without great losses).
I will leave judgment of his contributions to design and engineering to those more acquainted with that area.
OK, if you have not already done this, you owe it, both to yourself to uphold proper historiography standards and to your readers as part of due diligence, to stop right now, read some Boyd biographies, read about the national defense environment he operated in when he was crafting his ideas, and then you will have some idea of how far off base you are. He was not a scion of a victorious army—he and the military audience around him were grappling deeply with the stink of defeat from Vietnam. It permeates everything. It permeates Boyd’s presentations in both American and Vietnamese examples, it permeates the questions of the military audience who listened to him, it permeates the much broader Defense Department and Marine Corps discussions that shaped military reform movements in the 1980s and especially the Marine Corps as it moved into its deep institutional debate about maneuver warfare. ALL OF THAT was from a deeply-seated sense that America failed in Vietnam, that the causes of their failure were wide-ranging, and that as military professionals they owed themselves, their soldiers/Marines/sailors etc., and the American people sufficient introspection to identify the causes of that failure and energetic reform to change the way they operated so that such failure wouldn’t be repeated. The stench of defeat and failure underlies everything Boyd thought about and talked about in the late 1970s and 1980s.
If you have not read my first book on Boyd, “A New Conception of War,” I make it very clear that the zeitgeist of American military thinking at the time when Boyd was sharing his ideas in the late 1970s and 1980s was one of bitterness and disgust at having failed on the battlefield. I would strongly recommend you do much more extensive reading on Boyd, on the military reform movement following Vietnam, and the cultural and institutional contexts within the U.S. military that made ideas like Boyd’s attractive because everything therein was derived from a sense of failure and defeat.
You are absolutely right, he didn't. I met John Boyd at Air University in the early 1990s to discuss Airpower Doctrine with him and others. It was apparent early on that he was a "true believer" and knew in his fighter pilot's heart that airpower could singlehandedly win a war if only they were allowed to get inside the opponent's OODA Loop. Anything contrary to that conviction was quite simply wrong.
My impression of Boyd (which I'll address in a later part) is that he was a Schlieffen-type, a peacetime thinker concerned with finding the "secret" to victory, based on what the intellect of the commander could inflict on the hapless foe.
Clausewitz, by contrast, had a fairly miserable time fighting against Napoleon and disclaims any particular route to victory, saying instead it must always rely on the commander to grasp the circumstances and find an appropriate route. His statement that experience shows it takes extraordinary effort to achieve even average results makes sense for someone who commanded at Wavre, rather than in wargames.
Look, there’s impression and then there’s reality. If you think he’s a mere “peacetime thinker” then I would encourage you to read the biographies of him that are available. I have qualms with Coram’s biography which I think bleeds far too much into hagiography, but Grant Hammond has a solid biography and I devote a chapter to biography in my own “A New Conception of War.” Boyd saw combat in the Korean War and commanded a semi-secretive organization during the Vietnam War that was tasked with monitoring and interdicting communist traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail. His “thinking” also had a very strong pragmatic flavor as his background was engineering, and in addition to improving the F-15 fighter program and creating the F-16 program from scratch, the Energy-Maneuverability Theory which he derived to quantify changing energy states in aircraft performance has directly impacted the tactics, techniques and procedures in the tactical manual of every single U.S. military aircraft since the mid-Cold War. Every fixed wing and rotary wing pilot in the American military continues to benefit from his practical engineering knowledge whether they know it or not. In terms of “miserable fighting” it is also worth noting that his audience very often consisted of Vietnam veterans who had their own miserable experiences and wanted to reform their parts of the U.S. military so that America would not endure that sting of defeat again. The people in Boyd’s audience had their own bullet scars and had seen their own men die in futile engagements on the battlefield. If Boyd had a been peacetime dilettante, they’d have walked away.
Dismissing him as a mere commander of wargames is historically ungrounded.
My assessment of Boyd may well change as I read more on him, but his service record is in no way incompatible with the comparison to Schlieffen (who also had active service). Combat experience is clearly no great defense against false ideas—some of those subject to Clausewitz's harshest critiques served with distinction in the Seven Years' War. I do agree with Clausewitz that most writing done on war, even by bloodied soldiers, has been bad. It does not follow that every experienced soldier would walk away in disgust upon hearing them.
What I mean regarding Clausewitz's experience is that being on the opposite side of Napoleon (and indeed his marshals), having his country conquered and occupied, gave him a markedly different perspective on the conduct of war. Both Schlieffen and Boyd were scions of victorious armies, and raised in countries of great means. I speculate that this contributes to what I see as excessive optimism in both their concepts of war. This, in contrast, to Clausewitz, who devotes much more time to the matter of avoiding disaster when outmatched, and is consequently much more circumspect about the margins of victory that can be reliably achieved (without great losses).
I will leave judgment of his contributions to design and engineering to those more acquainted with that area.
OK, if you have not already done this, you owe it, both to yourself to uphold proper historiography standards and to your readers as part of due diligence, to stop right now, read some Boyd biographies, read about the national defense environment he operated in when he was crafting his ideas, and then you will have some idea of how far off base you are. He was not a scion of a victorious army—he and the military audience around him were grappling deeply with the stink of defeat from Vietnam. It permeates everything. It permeates Boyd’s presentations in both American and Vietnamese examples, it permeates the questions of the military audience who listened to him, it permeates the much broader Defense Department and Marine Corps discussions that shaped military reform movements in the 1980s and especially the Marine Corps as it moved into its deep institutional debate about maneuver warfare. ALL OF THAT was from a deeply-seated sense that America failed in Vietnam, that the causes of their failure were wide-ranging, and that as military professionals they owed themselves, their soldiers/Marines/sailors etc., and the American people sufficient introspection to identify the causes of that failure and energetic reform to change the way they operated so that such failure wouldn’t be repeated. The stench of defeat and failure underlies everything Boyd thought about and talked about in the late 1970s and 1980s.
If you have not read my first book on Boyd, “A New Conception of War,” I make it very clear that the zeitgeist of American military thinking at the time when Boyd was sharing his ideas in the late 1970s and 1980s was one of bitterness and disgust at having failed on the battlefield. I would strongly recommend you do much more extensive reading on Boyd, on the military reform movement following Vietnam, and the cultural and institutional contexts within the U.S. military that made ideas like Boyd’s attractive because everything therein was derived from a sense of failure and defeat.