Boyd (56 page)
In 1982, Boyd and Wass de Czege ran into each other at a West Point symposium on the military reform movement. Wass de Czege
told Boyd the new doctrine was about to be announced and that it stressed four tenets: initiative, agility, depth of operations,
and synchronization. Boyd though the first three were splendid, a sign that the Army was indeed serious about discarding the
old heavy fire-power theories in favor of maneuver warfare. But what the hell was
synchronization
doing in the new Army doctrine?
Synchronization
is evening up the front line; it means an Army moves at the speed of its slowest unit.
Synchronization
is a fundamental part of the old doctrine of attrition warfare, and it obviates all the other changes. An army that relies
on synchronization is not an army that practices maneuver warfare. “You synchronize watches,” Boyd shouted, “not people.”
Wass de Czege agreed. But he said his bosses had insisted that synchronization be part of the doctrine. Boyd pointed his finger
at Wass de Czege and said, “Don’t ever again let them do that to you.” The Army had to change its ways, Boyd said. “They still
believe in high diddle diddle, straight up the middle.”
The Army not only adopted most of Boyd’s theories regarding maneuver warfare, they even created the School of Advanced Military
Studies—SAMS, for short—and placed Wass de Czege in charge. SAMS was for the top graduates in each class at Command and Staff
College—an extra year for studying the history of warfare. Boyd’s briefing was part of the curriculum up through the mid-1980s.
From the beginning, there was an aura about the SAMS graduates; they were called “Jedi Knights” and were considered the brightest
young officers in the Army. Spinney thought all this signified radical change. If the Army wanted to clutch the old security
blanket of synchronization, well, it was just not that important. “You are overreacting,” he told Boyd.
But Boyd was adamant. “This idea of synchronization will ruin the Army.”
The time was drawing nigh when, in a very dramatic fashion, Boyd would be proven correct.
After the Air Force, Navy, and Army came the Marine Corps. What happened to the Marine Corps as a result of John Boyd is one
of the great untold stories of modern military history. To understand
the enormity of the changes Boyd wrought, one must know something about the Marines.
First, the Marine Corps, at about one hundred seventy-three thousand troops, is considerably smaller than the Air Force (three
hundred fifty-seven thousand), Army (four hundred eighty thousand), or Navy (three hundred seventy-two thousand). Marines
live with the constant fear of being subsumed into the Army or Navy. When the Navy, of which the Marines are a part, portions
out dollars, Marines always end up holding the short end of the stick. Old equipment that nobody wants? Give it to the Marines.
The U.S. Marine Corps is a separate and distinct culture within the military. Marines are considered both primitive and elitist—primitive
because all Marines are basically infantrymen, and elitist because they are so few in number and so good at what they do.
They are warriors and for them there is no higher calling than defending their country in battle. The battle flags of these
proud, sea-going troops go back to the “halls of Montezuma and the shares of Tripoli.” They are the first to fight and they
are given the dirtiest and bloodiest assignments. Got a beach held by vastly superior forces that needs taking? A country
that needs taming? Send in the Marines.
Other services recruit by making promises. The Marines recruit by looking for a few good men. Almost from the beginning, the
Marines have been considered the military’s knuckle draggers, men who charge up a hill until they take it, classic up-the-middle
troops who not only take horrendous casualties but boast of those casualties. No part of the U.S. military, however, has more
esprit de corps, more respect for the military way, and more reverence for the individual than the Marine Corps. The Marine
creed of
Semper Fidelis
—always faithful—is a living breathing thing. When a Marine agrees to do something, looks someone in the eye and says, “
Semper Fi,
” you know he will do what he promised. The Marines are more than a military organization; they are a national institution.
No two branches of the American military are farther apart than the Air Force and the Marines. It is a cultural chasm almost
impossible for civilians to understand. There are the obvious differences: the Air Force is the youngest branch of the military
and fights its battles in the skies, a place where wars rarely are decided, while Marines fought for America’s independence
in 1775 and still fight in the mud,
where the fate of nations and the course of history are resolved. But there are less obvious differences as well. The Air
Force is a technocracy while the Marines are a warrior culture. This all boils down to one thing: Marines are utterly contemptuous
of the Air Force.
It is against this backdrop that Boyd’s influence on the Marine Corps must be considered.
The education and training of Marines, both enlisted personnel and officers, is conducted largely at Marine Base Quantico,
about thirty miles south of Washington. Boyd came to Quantico through the offices of an extraordinary man: Lieutenant Colonel
Michael Duncan Wyly. For a decade, Boyd and Wyly were Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside for the radical changes that took place in
the Marine Corps. Boyd’s ideas were the foundation and the impetus for the changes, but Wyly, as an active-duty Marine Corps
officer, was the agent of change. Starting in 1980, Wyly became a critical player in Boyd’s story.
Mike Wyly cannot remember a time when he did not want to be a Marine. He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, hearing stories
of his uncle Donald Duncan, a Marine Corps captain who, on June 6, 1918, led the 96th Company of the 6th Marines to a place
in northeast France called Belleau Wood. Uncle Donald put on his service greens that morning, lit his pipe, and marched his
men into battle. When he came upon a German machine-gun nest he took the pipe from his mouth, pointed it at the Germans, and
said, “Hit their line together, boys. The guide is right.”
The Marines lined up on the man on the far right. Uncle Donald stood out front and motioned for his Marines to follow, and
they attacked the machine gun. Uncle Donald died that day. Belleau Wood became a hallowed name in Marine Corps history because
that is where more Marines died than on any other day in Marine Corps history and because that is where Marines stopped the
German advance. That is also where they acquired one of their most treasured nicknames:
teufelhunden
—“devil dogs.”
Mike Wyly’s relatives always finished this story by saying that if Uncle Donald had lived, he would have become commandant
of the Marine Corps.
Wyly wanted to join the Marine Corps as an enlisted man. Even today he is not quite sure why. His father wanted him to go
to
Annapolis and become an officer. Wyly was seventeen when he made a deal with his father; he would apply to Annapolis if his
father would allow him to join the Marine Corps reserves. So Wyly sent in his application to Annapolis, then signed up in
the Marine Corps and went off to boot camp.
The first thing an enlisted Marine learns is how to march and how to maintain “cover” and “dress.”
Cover
is standing precisely behind the Marine in front of you so that when a drill instructor looks down a long column he sees
only the first man in line.
Dress
is being lined up precisely with the man beside you so that the drill instructor can look across six or eight or ten rows
of men and see only the first man. Dressed and covered, that’s the rule. And when boots of a squad or company or even a battalion
of Marines strike the pavement, there must be a single click. Marines take precise thirty-inch strides and their boots make
one sound. A Marine who is a split second off is more annoying than one who is completely out of step. Dressed and covered
and with hundreds of feet striking the ground as one—that’s the Marine way.
Wyly was a private in the reserves when he entered Annapolis. He took his commission in the Marines, served a year on Okinawa,
and then became an instructor in the guerrilla warfare school at Camp Pendleton. Instructors at Pendleton were an intellectual
lot and read all they could find about any country that had known guerrilla warfare: Algeria, Indochina, Central America,
Cuba, Kenya, and a dozen other. General Victor “The Brute” Krulak came to Pendleton and told the instructors that if America
went to war in Vietnam it would be a long war and it would be different from other wars in which Marines had fought; it would
wreak a terrible toll because the American military did not know how to fight a guerrilla war. Wyly went to jump school, to
psychological-warfare school, and to special-warfare school, and he trained often with the Army. He read Bernard Fall’s
Street Without Joy,
the classic book on the French in Vietnam, and stood on a platform and told Marines passing through Pendleton, “If we go
to Vietnam, we are not going to make the mistakes the French made.”
In 1965 Lieutenant Mike Wyly went to Vietnam as a psychological-warfare officer. His work was in the villages and he was pushed
hard
for body counts. At the end of his tour he knew the Marines were tough and disciplined and brave. But did they understand
the war?
Washington was his next assignment. In 1969 he returned to Vietnam as a twenty-nine-year-old captain. Like his uncle Donald,
he now was a company commander. He led Delta Company, part of the First Battalion of the 5th Marines, and operated out of
An Hoa, west of Danang. Delta 1 / 5 was such a hard-luck group that it was called “Dying Delta.” Wyly found that the war in
1969 was a different war than it had been in 1965. One of his Marines said, “Skipper, everybody here is the enemy.” Delta
Company was in a firefight every night. But the young Marines had learned how to survive—and not with traditional Marine Corps
tactics. Marines in Delta Company knew how to disperse and how to use guerrilla tactics—how to fight like the enemy. Wyly
remembered the lessons of Pendleton and saw how those lessons made sense. He sent out saturation patrols. His Marines were
in the bush all the time. He kept the enemy off balance; they knew Delta Company could show up anywhere, anytime.
Senior Marine leaders had not learned the same lessons. One day Wyly flew to battalion headquarters and en route saw Marines
advancing in a line across a field. The enemy let them pass and then attacked from the rear. Wyly sensed that something was
fundamentally wrong with the way the Marine Corps did business.
Wyly had a platoon leader named James Webb. One day Lieutenant Webb was out leading a patrol. He waded across a shallow river
and as he reached the far shore the men behind him were attacked. Webb came to their assistance so fast that a young Marine,
in telling Wyly what happened, said, “Lieutenant Webb ran across the top of the water.” It became axiomatic among Marines
in Delta Company that Lieutenant Webb could walk on water. Later, Wyly recommended Webb for the Navy Cross, second only to
the Medal of Honor as a recognition of valor.
Wyly and Webb would cross paths again.
When Wyly left Vietnam, Delta 1/5 was known throughout the Marine Corps as a savvy and aggressive bunch of troops, real mud
Marines. The greatest compliment Wyly ever received was when, as he turned over command of his company, one of his young Marines
said to him, “Skipper, we ain’t the Dying Delta anymore.”
Wyly now was a decorated combat veteran, a senior captain about to be promoted to major. In return for his education at the
Naval Academy, he had pledged five years of service. That obligation now was over and he had to decide if he wanted to stay
in the Corps or if he wanted to join the civilian world. His two tours in Vietnam showed him that the Marine Corps had fundamental
problems in the way it conducted warfare. If he stayed in, there was much he wanted to change.
He chose the latter, and his next assignment was as a student at Quantico, where he went through the Amphibious Warfare School
(AWS). The school is located in Geiger Hall, a two-story brick building atop a high hill overlooking a tributary of the Potomac.
Amphibious warfare is unique to the Marine Corps; it is all that keeps the Marines from being swallowed by the Army or Navy.
Amphibious warfare is what the Marine Corps is supposed to do better than any other military organization in the world. Yet,
Wyly found the Marines were still teaching long linear attacks on beachheads, a tactic that produced the terrible casualties
of World War II.
After graduating from the AWS, Wyly was assigned as an instructor at the Basic School, where young lieutenants are taught
company-level tactics. The instructors were Vietnam vets, but they were ordered not to talk about Vietnam; why rehash that
war when the next war would be against hordes of Soviets in Europe? The Marine Corps still taught the concept of advancing
on line, just as Wyly’s uncle Donald had done in World War I and just as Marines had done in World War II—the same suicidal
tactics used in Vietnam. In fact, the worst criticism that could be leveled against a student during field exercises was that
he did not advance his troops on line.
Saigon fell and no senior Marine Corps officer at Quantico realized that Marine tactics had not worked. One of them even said
to Wyly, “We killed more of them than they killed of us.” Officially, the Marine Corps won in Vietnam. But Mike Wyly and a
host of other hard young officers, men who had been there and seen their friends die and who believed they were living on
borrowed time, knew that was utter nonsense.
While the Marine Corps prided itself on being different, now the Corps was having the same problems as other services: race
riots and
discipline problems. Commandant Robert Cushman was so over-weight that young lieutenants joked that the Marine Corps fitness
test was “three laps around Bobby Cushman.”