Boyd (54 page)

Again, Boyd was at the center of a potential constitutional crisis. The deputy secretary of defense sent down orders for the
Air Force chief of staff to come to his office. The chief was reminded that in America it is civilians who run the military.
In so many words, the deputy secretary said, “If you wish to remain chief of staff, you will reverse the decision sending
Major Leopold to Europe and you will send him to the Pentagon.”

Leopold’s orders again were changed and he came to TacAir.

The lieutenant colonel he replaced—the spy—was promoted to full colonel.

Leopold had a realistic understanding of how things worked in the Building. A few days after he arrived, he was walking down
a hall when he saw an open door. The office was empty. He went in and wrote on the blackboard, “Duty Honor Country.” Then
he crossed out the words and under them wrote, “Pride Power Greed.”

Now two of Boyd’s Acolytes worked with him.

One day Boyd said to Spinney, “You know, I like the Pentagon more than I liked Nellis.”

Spinney waited.

That feral grin sliced Boyd’s face and he held a clenched fist in the air, then jerked it sharply downward and said, “More
targets.” His booming cackle filled the office; he was ready to do battle.

Acrimony between TacAir and senior Air Force generals became such that little work was getting done. The Air Force was bogged
down fighting the Reformers. A three-star approached Spinney and said the Air Force wanted to make peace. The senior generals
in the Air Force wanted to hear Spinney’s briefing.

More than two dozen generals gathered in a large briefing room in the basement of the Pentagon. Spinney’s every comment was
ridiculed. Two hours later he was at a point in the briefing he usually reached in twenty minutes. All over the room, generals
were interrupting, their faces contorted in anger. One two-star became so over-wrought that he had an anxiety attack and collapsed.
Boyd took charge and called for a white wagon. Attendants loaded the two-star aboard the white wagon and carted him off to
the infirmary. All this was happening in the back of the room and Spinney was not aware of it until later on in the gym when
an Air Force colonel approached him and said, “You are now an ace.” He told Spinney how the briefing caused the two-star to
collapse. “He’s okay now,” the colonel said. “But you downed him. He had two stars on each shoulder and we’re giving you one
for free. That makes you an ace.”

Spinney’s “white-wagon kill” was toasted again and again at happy hour the following Wednesday.

The Reformers were seen as a threat to national security. General Bob Mathis, the Air Force vice chief of staff, repeatedly
referred to them as “dark and satanic forces.”

That spring, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the gnomish power-house of the Senate Armed Services Committee who had cultivated
a reputation for brilliance simply by not saying much, heard of “Defense Facts of Life” and asked the Pentagon to send Spinney
to his office to deliver the briefing. SecDef Brown refused. The Reformers were making too many inroads with Congress and
the media. And Spinney’s briefing was too dangerous to be heard by a U.S. senator. It might give him ideas not sanctioned
by the Building.

Several times over the next six months or so, Nunn asked the Pentagon to send Spinney to his office. Brown was adamant in
refusing.

Ronald Reagan was elected in November and almost immediately afterward Brown—under the threat of a subpoena—relented. In early
December, Christie, Boyd, and Spinney went to Nunn’s office and gave him the full briefing. They told Nunn the Reagan Administration
was about to start throwing money at the Pentagon and that more money would only exacerbate already serious problems.

Nunn told Spinney to remove the classified materials from his briefing, write it as a report, and submit it to him. Spinney
took leave and spent the remainder of December bent over a legal pad in his home office. After going through a security review,
Spinney’s report was cleared for release to the public. Spinney by now was infamous inside the Building, but this was the
first the American public would hear of him.

In early 1981, the Reform Movement received another big boost, both in public awareness and credibility, when Jim Fallows
published his first book,
National Defense,
to an extraordinary reception. The book was an elaboration of the articles he published in the
Atlantic Monthly
. It was a damning indictment of the Pentagon and the defense industry, and it portrayed Boyd and the Reformers as men who
might have the solution to all that was wrong. One of the strongest sections of the book dealt with how Boyd originally had
perceived the F-16 and what it had become in the hands of the Air Force—how “enhancements” had converted the once-nimble fighter
into an all-weather bomber. The buttonhook turn was something of the distant past.

Various books on the Reformers and the reform movement followed
National Defense
. But Fallows was first, and his book gave the reform movement enormous credibility with the media and with the public. Not
only did the book win the nonfiction category of what then was called the American Book Awards but it was runner up for nonfiction
in the National Book Critics Circle. It launched Fallows’s brilliant career.

Timing for the book could not have been better. Ronald Reagan came into office in January and no president could have been
less interested in military reform. Upon taking office, one of Reagan’s first actions was to resurrect the B-1 Bomber manufactured
by Rockwell in his native state of California.

The B-1 later flunked its specifications for the radar cross section it presented to enemy radar, flunked its range specifications,
and flunked its electronic countermeasures specifications. A combat-loaded B-1 cannot fly over many mountain ranges. Its altitude
limitations are classified, but it cannot even reach the altitudes flown by commercial airliners. Design flaws create wind
turbulence that prevents bombs in the rear bomb bays from dropping unless a rotary cylinder and long arms are attached. This
modification means a bomb falls every few seconds, preventing carpet bombing, which means the B-1 must return over the target—not
a pleasant prospect in heavily defended areas.

But none of this mattered. The aircraft that Jimmy Carter killed because its cost had risen to $167 million a copy was at
last going into production… now at a cost of $287 million per copy.

T
HE
February 1981 confirmation hearing for Caspar Weinberger as President Reagan’s secretary of defense was reminiscent of a
1960s love-in. Senators knew a flood of defense dollars was about to cascade from Washington and each wanted more than his
share. The senators were extraordinarily cordial to Weinberger.

But then Sam Nunn said he knew of people in the Pentagon who believed that throwing money at the armed services was not the
answer to Pentagon budget problems. Nunn said those people were being squelched. He said he had an unclassified version of
the Spinney Report and wanted to know if Weinberger had read the report. Weinberger had not been briefed to expect this question.
He knew nothing of the Spinney Report.

Reporters covering the hearing were galvanized by Nunn’s comment—first, because he was a pillar of the defense establishment,
and second, the Pentagon had successfully blocked many of their stories, a tactic that built up enormous enmity. Now they
were about to have their day. Not since the Vietnam War had such a large crush of reporters descended on the Pentagon.

During the next few days, hundreds of newspapers all over the world published news stories on the Spinney Report. Dozens more
stories dribbled out in coming weeks in what reporters call “think pieces” or “thumb suckers.” Chuck Spinney was catapulted
from obscurity onto the national stage. With the exception of Weinberger, he suddenly was one of the best-known people in
the Building.

In May, David Chu, head of PA&E, sent down word for Spinney to stop briefing “Defense Facts of Life” and to work on something
else. For the next eighteen months Spinney worked on another briefing. It would be even more explosive than the first.

In the meantime, Boyd continued to research and amend and add to “Patterns,” briefing it often. Story after story about Boyd
appeared in newspapers around the country. No one could counter Boyd’s briefing because
no one in the Building was doing similar work;
the Pentagon had no military theorists. Boyd was out there all alone and gaining converts by the day. The Pentagon was under
siege from reporters. Paranoia was a palpable presence in the Building.

The depth of that paranoia is best revealed by what Reformers called the “Great Wheel of Conspiracy.” When President Reagan’s
civilian appointees came to the Pentagon, they were taken on tours and briefed—the Pentagon version of the Welcome Wagon.
These briefings are largely self-serving, designed to make civilian leaders aware of the military’s position on various issues
and to show why the military position was the only one worth considering. By now Tom Christie was a deputy assistant secretary
of defense, one of the highest-ranking nonappointed civilians in the Building, but the briefing book prepared by Lieutenant
Colonel Walt Kross for Reagan’s appointees was so sensitive that Christie could only look at it; he could not take it to his
office. The five-inch-thick notebook concerned the “dark and satanic forces” that drove the reform movement. It opened with
a depiction of a giant wheel with spokes radiating out from the center. Each spoke represented what the Air Force saw as a
significant part of the reform movement. Christie laughed when he saw himself at the center of the wheel. Colonel Kross thought
Christie was the leader of the reform movement, probably because TacAir was under his jurisdiction and was the front office
for the Reformers. Therefore, in the top-down, rank-conscious Air Force, Christie had to be the leader. In truth, Christie
protected Spinney and Boyd. He maneuvered Spinney’s work into the political arena. He pushed the readiness issue so brilliantly
worked by Spinney
into the forefront of the Department of Defense budget process. He was deeply involved in bringing the revelations about the
F-111D to the attention of the SecDef. But in all of this he was very much in the background. He was not the leader.

The Great Wheel of Conspiracy illustrates how little the Air Force knew of the Reformers and how wrong they were in considering
the movement an organized cabal. While there was some cross-fertilization between the Reformers and the Congressional Reform
Caucus, mostly in the form of Boyd’s briefing, the Reformers were still small, independent groups. They were organized only
in the sense that they looked to Boyd as their leader. Even this most basic of facts, the Air Force got wrong. The Great Wheel
of Conspiracy listed Boyd and Sprey on a spoke labeled “Consultants.”

Still another spoke represented the media, where Fallows’s name was the most prominent. He headed a list of journalists who
wrote stories about the Reformers.

Senator Gary Hart and Representative Jack Edwards were listed on the spokes that included members of Congress whom the Pentagon
considered Reformers. Winslow Wheeler, the congressional aide to Senator Nancy Kassebaum, was listed as leader of the congressional
staffers in the conspiracy.

Christie has a near-photographic memory and at the next happy hour he went into considerable detail about the Great Wheel
of Conspiracy. Laughter has seldom been louder in the Old Guard Room than it was that night. A possible exception was a few
years later when the news came that the lieutenant colonel who developed the Great Wheel of Conspiracy was promoted to four-star
general.

By now, some of the ideas in Boyd’s briefing, particularly the OODA Loop, were popping up in various publications, often without
crediting him. Boyd never seemed to care. He was a true guerrilla in that he only wanted his ideas to find acceptance. Nor
did he care when, in the surging dialectic that was the reform movement, other men occasionally came to the forefront. In
fact, he encouraged it. An incident involving Spinney and
Time
magazine is a prime example.

One of the significant battles in the reform movement began when Spinney finished his new briefing. He called it “Plans /
Reality Mismatch.” The point of the briefing was that year after year the Pentagon underestimated the cost of proposed new
weapons systems.
When those systems went into production, the actual costs were much higher than the projected costs. Spinney showed that the
Reagan Administration had underestimated the cost of the defense buildup by five hundred billion dollars. A couple of hundred
million, maybe even a billion dollars, could be explained. But five hundred billion?

Spinney began delivering his new briefing throughout the Building. Curiously, Air Force generals were particularly interested.
He briefed most generals on the Air Staff. Then word came down for Spinney to stop the briefing while the Pentagon conducted
an independent study of his work. Pressure on the Pentagon to finish the review of Spinney’s work was enormous. Dozens of
people wanted to hear the briefing. A year later the review said Spinney’s briefing was accurate and that his conclusions
could not be faulted. David Chu met with Spinney, ostensibly to talk about what he would do with the briefing. He said he
would take some sort of action the following year. Spinney thought his work had been squelched.

By late summer of 1982, defense reporters for
Time
magazine were interested in the reform movement. This was due in large part to Hugh Sidey, then one of the grand old men
of American journalism. Sidey, who wrote a column for
Time
titled “The Presidency,” spent hours talking with Boyd and came away a believer. In fact, he organized a meeting of senior
Time
editors to hear Boyd’s briefing and Sprey’s ideas. It was largely because of Sidey that a team of
Time
reporters spent months researching a story on the defense industry.