Boyd Audiobook By Robert Coram cover art

Boyd

The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

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Boyd

By: Robert Coram
Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
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John Boyd may be the most remarkable unsung hero in all of American military history. Some remember him as the greatest US fighter pilot ever - the man who, in simulated air-to-air combat, defeated every challenger in less than 40 seconds. Some recall him as the father of our country's most legendary fighter aircraft - the F-15 and F-16. Still, others think of Boyd as the most influential military theorist since Sun Tzu. They know only half the story.

Boyd, more than any other person, saved fighter aviation from the predations of the Strategic Air Command. His manual of fighter tactics changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. He discovered a physical theory that forever altered the way fighter planes were designed. Later in life, he developed a theory of military strategy that has been adopted throughout the world, and even applied to business models for maximizing efficiency. On a personal level, Boyd rarely met a general he couldn't offend. He was loud, abrasive, and profane. A man of daring, ferocious passion and intractable stubbornness, he was that most American of heroes - a rebel who cared not for his reputation or fortune, but for his country.

©2002 Robert Coram (P)2016 Tantor
Air Forces Military Military & War Politicians Warrior Transportation Aviation War Inspiring US Air Force Thought-Provoking

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John Boyd, the warrior philosopher

Boyd grew up in Erie, PA, my hometown. (Although I’d never heard of him before). I was amazed to learn of the brilliance, courage, and tenacity of this former fighter pilot. If you want to know how to battle an entrenched bureaucracy, how to champion great ideas, and how to think profoundly, Boyd offers both insight and example. He is the rarest of breeds: a warrior philosopher.

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We owe a debt to Boyd

Fantastic book on an American hero who should be remembered and studied. That the military (other than the Marines, showing their usual good sense) ignores him is both a travesty and ineffably stupid. The task of the warrior is to win - and this man showed then how to win.

In time, the prophet will be proven right.

Erie - you should get on that statue.

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Best Bio I ever read

I have read a large number of bios in my lifetime and without doubt this one rivals them all. The closest one is Churchill the Last Lion. Well Boyd's should be subtitled The Last Tiger.

I have read the book and then listened to the audio version. I do not like writing reviews but this one just makes me want to send out BIG THANK YOUS to a whole cast of characters in the book. People in the military if there is at least one book you should read it is this one.

Thank you Robert Coram for bringing Boyd to life. And to the narrator for an outstanding job. I will continue to share copies of this book with several friends.

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great man that should be regarded as a hero!

this was a great book with an insightful look into the life of John Boyd

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The god of War and his Acolytes

Obviously the author is the latest of Boyd's acolytes. John Boyd was truly the greatest military theorist since Sun Tzu. His theories in "Patterns of Conflict" supersede even those of Clausewitz and Jomini. Still the author is too close to his flawed subject. Boyd was an insecure repressed man who over compensated by being overly loud and boastful. While single mindedly pursuing his professional and intellectual objectives, he essentially ignored his wife and children.

Boyd's professional and intellectual achievements were linear in nature. Each followed and built upon the previous landmark. As a highly gifted and aggressive fighter pilot as an instructor at the US Air Force's Fighter Weapons, (FWS), had a standing bet for all comers, that he could reverse from the target slot in front, to the six o'clock position on his opponent and get on gun camera film a confirmed simulated kill on said opponent in 40 seconds or less. In the 5 years that Boyd was at FWS he never lost the bet, gaining the nickname, 'Forty-Second Boyd'.

Up until this time all air-to-air combat was considered too complex and fluid to delineate in written form. The Air Force, (AF), had also decided that with the advent of air-to-air missiles, air-to-air combat or dog-fighting was a thing of the past, and so was talking about decreasing funding for the FWS. Afraid that the basic concepts could be lost, Boyd spent a year working on his own to write the 100 page, "Aerial Attack Study". Given the relative position and velocity of an enemy, Boyd was able to demonstrate what possible maneuvers that enemy could take, what counter-moves a pilot could make, the counter-moves that the enemy could take and the what the pilot could do to counter those moves. In the process Boyd proved that pilots could out maneuver missiles - also proving that dog-fighting was not dead. "Aerial Attack Study" became the handbook for fighter pilots world-wide. and is still considered the definitive work on air-to-air combat, some 45+ years later.

While writing, "Aerial Attack Study", and all the various iterations for maneuvers and counter-moves. etc., Boyd, felt that there was some factor that was right in front of him that he wasn't seeing effecting all these maneuvers.His eureka moment came while a fellow student a Georgia Tech was attempting to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics to him and somehow brought up the concepts of kinetic and potential energy having a sum of potential energy. Boyd made the leap of converting the velocity and position used in his, "Aerial Attack Study", to their root components. Using the velocity, thrust, drag and weight of an aircraft, he came up with a predictive formula for the aircraft's performance envelope.By comparing different aircraft envelopes Boyd could compare different aircraft at various points within the envelopes. By varying the factors of thrust, drag and weight the maneuverability and the performance of the aircraft changed, giving designers a quantitative tool to increase the flight characteristics of fighter aircraft. The charting of the "Energy-maneuverability" required millions of calculations for each aircraft. In 1962, computers were in short supply. Boyd teamed up with Dr. Thomas Christie at Eglin AFB to use the base's high speed computer. It took 2 years to chart all US and Soviet fighter aircraft of the day into a 2 volume report. Being in charge of the Eglin AFB graphic's department, Boyd was able to distill the 2 volumes onto slides comparing US aircraft to Soviet aircraft. He colored the areas that US fighters were superior in blue and the areas that the Soviet Fighters were superior in red. The Soviet aircraft compared favorably. Having been an instructor for 5 years at FWS, Boyd was a dynamic speaker. He took his slideshow on the road to various US fighter bases explaining his charts and how they were created. As word of his slideshow got out, more senior AF Officers demanded to see it until eventually the AF Chief of Staff demanded to see it. In a 2 day contentious presentation the Chief of Staff's staff tried to challenge the originality, accuracy and applicability of Boyd's work after the Chief of Staff requested a slide of the AF's newest aircraft in development, the F-111. The slide was all red.

Boyd was transferred to the Pentagon. The F-111 was essentially re-considered as more of a bomber and work was picked up on the FX project. Up until this time all AF planes were basically contracted on 2 things; how fast and how high the plane could fly. Basically was is fine for a bomber, but didn't make for the best fighters. Immediately resistance began from the Tactical Air Command, (TAC), which is responsible for the research and design of all Air Force planes. TAC had 2 major problems; firstly Boyd's "Energy–maneuverability theory" hadn't originated there and the AF being bomber-centric, all planes had to be able to deliver nukes. TAC was forced to take Boyd's theory into account in designing what eventually became the F-15.

While at the Pentagon Boyd soon met Colonel Everest Riccioni and Pierre Sprey, they were the foundation of what was to become known as the "Fighter Mafia". Riccioni was assigned to R&D and Sprey was a PhD. originally brought into DoD by McNamara to study the military situation in Europe. Both joined Christie as Boyd acolytes. As it became obvious that the FX was being gold-plated with more and more gadgets and becoming more expensive and less capable as a fighter, the Fighter Mafia began drawing a dream fighter that was both cheaper and more capable than the FX. As the price of the FX rose the AF, wanting more fighters, for the first time since WWII had 2 companies build competing prototypes of the Fighter Mafia's concept of an ideal fighter; the YF-16 and the YF-17. The YF-17 eventually became the F-18.

During this time period, 2 things occurred that were to have major import on the future. LtCol James G. Burton joined the Fighter Mafia, becoming an acolyte, and Sprey encouraged Boyd to think more about land warfare. Sprey had developed the Air-Land Warfare concept for NATO to counter any Soviet invasion. Boyd began taking esoteric concepts such as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics and combining them together into what he called, "Destruction & Creation", all based on what he called the "OODA Loop" and the "schwerpunkt" concept. The OODA Loop was derived from his energy-maneuverability theory for airplanes by adding "time" as factor. He was able to quantify in chart form the decision loop process and show how it was applicable in war at all levels. (The OODA Loop was later applied to everything from business to litigation). Schwerpunkt is more difficult to define, essentially it is the point upon which the most effort is concentrated during an attack.

Destruction & Creation began as another of Boyd's slide presentations entitled, "Discourse on Winning & Losing" , only it lasted 2 days long. Boyd felt that he needed to write a 10 page, single spaced introduction to Discourse on Winning & Losing, it was the only time that he codified Destruction & Creation in writing - the slide presentation was Destruction & Creation. He said that his concept was constantly evolving in his mind and that he didn't want to be tied down to something that may have changed in his ideas.

His presentation began with his theories regarding air combat and how by increasing the tempo, events could cause confusion and the key to winning was the pilots ability to collapse his opponent's decision making capability through that confusion and disorder until the opponent lost. Boyd then gave historical examples of where smaller armies used confusion and feints to win battles, going into more modern battles up to Napoleon.Then he showed the transition from WWI to WWII. By introducing blitzkrieg and the concept of schwerpunkt where force was concentrated at small points to overwhelm local defense, and that the resulting successes were due to the German rapid decision making, ie., a faster OODA loop. He then showed while the initial movements of blitzkrieg on a map appeared to be straight lines, that they were actually fluid in nature, seeking weak points at many places at the same time. By offering examples where guerrilla warfare shared many of the aspects of blitzkrieg by using a faster OODA loop, he gave suggested remedies.The conclusion of Boyd's presentation was the concept of the "counter-blitz', by being able to get inside the enemy's decision loop by using this faster OODA loop to channel his attacks so that they run out of steam on their own and can then be countered. Boyd's key to this is fluidity and maneuver based on the OODA loop.This is a much abbreviated version of both OODA and Destruction & Creation, the book goes into much greater detail along with the evolutionary process that created it.

By 1976, Discourse on Winning & Losing, was condensed into "Patterns of Conflict", (still with the 10 page Destruction & Creation). It became the foundation of the "defense reform movement" (DRM) in the 1970s and 1980s. Direct result of DRM and the acolytes were the A-10 Warthog and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the fate of the B-1 bomber. Patterns of Conflict became the basis of the USMC model of maneuver warfare as described in their manual "Warfighting". Serious rumors have it that Boyd was involved in the planning of Gulf War 1.

I have avoided describing over half of the content of this book, as I am an unabashed critic of the USAF. The rationale for it's very creation went away with the end of the Cold War. The amount of corruption due to the incestuous relations between the AF and it's contractors is well documented. The careerism if the AF is the rest of the book. The enemy isn't Russia or China, it is the Navy and the Army. The design process for airplanes explains the F-35. This is a MUST read for anyone interested in United States military history and affairs.

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Wow! This man had a amazingly military mind.

I never heard of this man before and I thought I new everything about the US military. I am going to find and study all of his writings. I'm very happy I found this book.😀

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An interesting character - Boyd

The book is interesting and speaks to the brilliance of John Boyd and the frustration of the ignorance/stubbornness within the military ranks. It is not very often that people such as John Boyd get recognized for their works ...

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Lousyfather, but he was an amazing man!

I think that this is a must-read for anyone in the US Air Force or military of any branch for that matter.

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Outstanding

A true warrior. As a proud Marine my chest sticks out a little further because of the way the Marine Corps has treated this legend. The genius of John Boyd has finally been given it’s due attention by Robert Coram. Bravo!

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An absolute must read

As a Marine I was vaguely familiar with Col. Boyd’s work but that didn’t scratch the surface. This is an excellent book about a true patriot.

We need more Boyds!

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