Boyd (64 page)

For a long moment there was silence. Then Boyd said, “Chuck, I want you to forget what you just said. You are not to discuss
it with anyone else. Ever.” Boyd used a tone Spinney had never heard before. He was not issuing an order. Instead he used
a flat, no-nonsense tone that showed Spinney how deadly serious he was. Spinney was taken aback. He had been like a son to
Boyd for almost fifteen years but had never seen this aspect of him. Spinney stuck his plans in a box and never discussed
them.

Still another piece of the puzzle, one that the public would not become aware of until after the Gulf War—when books were
written—was the growing awareness during Desert Shield that Cheney opposed General Norman Schwarzkopf’s initial war plan.
Schwarzkopf’s plan was a head-to-head assault against the main strength of the Iraqi forces, the classic mind-set of Army
commanders imbued with the theory of attrition warfare. Slug it out
mano a mano,
toe-to-toe, force against force, and the last man standing wins.

But Cheney, with the support of General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected the plan and asked Schwarzkopf
to give it a second try. Young lieutenant colonels who were graduates of the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, the
famed “Jedi Knights,” came in to revise Schwarzkopf’s plan. The Jedi Knights were said to be well versed in maneuver warfare
and Boyd’s ideas. They offered Schwarzkopf a direct head-on attack and two variations of a less-than-ambitious left-hook envelopment.
These plans were not only rejected but ridiculed.

In
The Generals’ War,
a book written by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainor after the war, Cheney is quoted as saying to Powell, “I can’t let
Norm do this high diddle up the middle plan.” Not only did Cheney reject Schwarzkopf’s plan but he used Boyd’s language to
do so.

It is rare indeed that the secretary of defense challenges the war plans of the on-scene commander. Even the Joint Chiefs
of Staff are reluctant to do this.

But in Dick Cheney the Pentagon had a rare SecDef. Cheney had enough one-on-one sessions with Boyd to give him the knowledge
and self-confidence to second-guess even a headstrong four-star general such as Norman Schwarzkopf. Simply put, Cheney knew
more about strategy than did his generals.

Cheney now says Boyd “clearly was a factor in my thinking” about the Gulf War. Cheney minimizes his role in changing Schwarzkopf’s
initial plan, saying “nobody” liked the idea of going “straight up the middle into the heart of Iraqi offenses.” He says he
had “no direct influence” on the final plan: “It was not my job to figure out the nitty gritty. That was Schwarzkopf’s mission.”

Nevertheless, it has become an article of faith that Cheney developed his own plan for fighting the Gulf War. The Marines
would feint an amphibious assault while the Army made a wide sweep through the western desert and then swung north to cut
off the Iraqi Army.

What is still not generally known to the public is just how well the Marines performed in the Gulf. Brigadier General Mike
Myatt, a graduate of the Fort Pickett free-play exercises and a man intimately familiar with Boyd’s work, was then commander
of the 1st Marine Division. Three days before the war officially began, Myatt’s men raided deep behind Iraqi lines. They bypassed
strong points, forgot their flanks, and penetrated so deeply and caused such confusion that
the Iraqi Army rushed in reinforcements against what they anticipated would be the main thrust of the American invasion. Then
they began surrendering by the thousands. Nowhere can be found a better example of Boyd’s ideas on “folding the enemy in on
himself” than in the fact that some fifteen Iraqi divisions surrendered to two divisions of Marines.

Spinney was sitting in the study of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, when Brigadier General Richard Neal, the American spokesman
during the Gulf War, went on television to brief the press on the extraordinary success of coalition forces. He told of a
confused Iraqi Army whose soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds of thousands. Asked for a reason, he said, “We kind of
got inside his decision cycle.”

“Son of a bitch!” Spinney shouted. He called Boyd and said, “John, they’re using your words to describe how we won the war.
Everything about the war was yours. It’s all right out of ‘Patterns.’”

He was right. Everything successful about the Gulf War is a direct reflection of Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict”—multiple thrusts
and deception operations that created ambiguity and caused the enemy to surrender by the thousands. America (and the coalition
forces) won without resorting to a prolonged ground war. America not only picked when and where it would fight, but also when
and where it would not fight. Coalition forces operated at a much higher tempo than the enemy. The resulting crises happened
so fast that opposing forces could not keep pace with them. The one-hundred-hour ground war blitz against Iraq is a splendid
example of maneuver warfare, a first-rate instance of
cheng/ch’i,
the conventional and the unconventional, all done so quickly the enemy was disoriented and collapsed from within.

The brilliance of Cheney’s plan was proven in its success. But there were failures in execution, particularly by the Army,
whose famous left hook simply stopped in the desert for three nights because a general was afraid to expose his flanks—in
other words, he wanted his forces to be synchronized. This so slowed the Army that the retreating Republican Guard and much
of the Iraqi Army escaped.

Schwarzkopf and several generals have since spent much of their time blaming each other, but it was the slavish adherence
to an outmoded attrition-warfare doctrine that allowed the Iraqis to escape.
Boyd’s earlier predictions about synchronization in the Army were proven true.

Boyd rarely had been happier than he was in those euphoric days after the war, when his old friends called to congratulate
him. Boyd never mentioned his visits to Washington to see Cheney. The closest he ever came to revealing his involvement was
after General Schwarzkopf held his famous press conference and revealed the audacious sweep around the western flank of the
Iraqi Army, what he called a “Hail-Mary plan.” Boyd angrily disputed the phrase. “A ‘Hail-Mary plan’ implies desperation,”
he told Spinney. “There was nothing desperate about that envelopment. It was planned that way.”

Boyd’s friends also took great delight in pointing out that his long-time criticisms of the B-1 Bomber were confirmed in the
Gulf War. The full inventory of Air Force combat aircraft saw duty in the Gulf—except the B-1. The aircraft resurrected by
President Reagan could not answer when summoned for war. Once again, Boyd had been right.

Boyd’s ebullience reached its peak when, on Monday, April 22, 1991, the House Armed Services Committee convened in the Rayburn
House Office Building to conduct a hearing on the performance of high-technology equipment in Operation Desert Storm, and
he was called to testify. Others testifying were former senator Gary Hart, who had been a member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee and the Military Reform Caucus; John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy; Don Hicks, the Pentagon’s under secretary
of defense for research and engineering; and Pierre Sprey.

Chairman Les Aspin opened the hearing by saying that each of the panel members “shaped the forces, the doctrine, and the debate
about our military structure that fought so successfully during Desert Storm.” Boyd wore a bright-orange polyester sport coat
and madras pants, an outfit guaranteed to make him stand out among the dark suits in the hearing room. But it was his eloquence
that marked the day. He opened calmly with passing references to maneuver warfare and high technology. But then he segued
into praising two officers who made a major impact on the services by promoting maneuver warfare: Huba Wass de Czege and Colonel
Mike Wyly. Only days earlier Wyly learned the Marine Corps was pushing him into early
retirement. Boyd saw the Wyly affair as the
Schwerpunkt
of his appearance.

That day, when Boyd turned a hearing on high-tech weapons into a hearing on military personnel matters, was one of his finest.
He said that despite the success of maneuver warfare in the Gulf War, the Marine Corps still had senior officers with the
old attrition-war mind-set. Boyd’s eyes flashed and his chin jutted out in defiance. His eyes roamed the row of congressmen,
lingering on each, singling out each one of them. His voice deepened. The Plum was back from retirement and holding center
stage on behalf of a comrade, and he was never in better form. Boyd may have been sixty-four, but his personality had never
been more magnetic, more commanding. His voice reached every corner of the hearing room, clear and dominating and insistent.
He said he was “incensed and outraged” about what the Marine Corps had done to Mike Wyly. He told the congressmen if they
did not act it would inhibit young Marine officers from proposing crucial new ideas and the Marine Corps would be ruled by
“dinosaurs.” People are more important than budgets or hardware, he said, and while the officer selection process is deemed
sacrosanct, there are nevertheless ways for Congress to become involved. He would be happy to tell Congress just what it should
do. He said gifted renegades such as Wass de Czege and Wyly must be protected or “it is high diddle diddle right up the middle
again and we are going to be in deep yogurt.”

Even though the other three men on the panel had held high public office and were skilled in debate, Boyd dominated the hearing.
At the end of the day, nothing changed. But Boyd had defended Mike Wyly before the U.S. Congress, and when he walked out of
the Capitol he was beaming.

His happiness soon passed. There was something far more serious with which he had to deal.

He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.

The symptoms had been present for years, but Boyd had ignored them. He had not had a physical examination since 1975, when
he retired from the Air Force. Now he was given five years to live.

He called the Acolytes and told them he had cancer, but he downplayed the prognosis. Only Pierre Sprey knew how tenaciously
Boyd
researched various treatments. Even though his brother Gerry strongly recommended surgery, Boyd rejected that option. He did
not like the numbers: 50 percent of the survivors are incontinent. He told Mary Ellen that the idea of having no control of
his bladder was anathema; “I won’t wear a bag,” he insisted. After leaning on the National Institutes of Health to reveal
European clinical trial results that they preferred not to release, Boyd eventually elected to have radioactive pellets implanted
in his prostate, a regimen then new in America.

In 1992, Jeff moved to Delray Beach. His earlier efforts at living with Scott and then with Mary Ellen failed. He could get
along with neither. So he moved in with his parents and his sister Kathy. He slept on the floor in the living room. He wanted
to bring his seven-foot Sri Lanka cobra, his forty tarantulas, the emerald tree boa, the canebrake rattlesnake, the timber
rattler, and the tailless whip scorpion known as the
vinegarroon,
but Boyd said no. As a result, Jeff kept the vinegar-roon and the tarantulas in his car. He always parked in a shady place
and came out regularly to feed the scorpion and the tarantulas and to talk with them. He remains angry today that Boyd would
not let him bring his collection into the apartment.

During his last years, Boyd’s two great professional delights were the work of Chet Richards and a book being researched by
Dr. Grant Hammond at the Air War College.

Richards was the mathematical whiz who came to the Pentagon in 1973, the man whom Christie assigned the job of finding a place
for happy hour. Richards had reviewed all of Boyd’s briefings. He later went to work for Lockheed and began studying the fabled
Toyota production system, which he found “frighteningly familiar” from his study of maneuver conflict. But the Toyota production
system began in the 1950s, about two decades before Boyd began work on “Patterns of Conflict.” The underlying ideas of mutual
trust, mission orders, and individual responsibility, and the concepts of “harmony” and “flow” and—most of all—the manipulation
of time as a production tool were central ideas in both the Toyota system and the strategy of maneuver conflict.

About that time Tom Peters published
Thriving on Chaos,
a book that revolutionized management theories in America. Peters talked
of creating and exploiting chaos—the essence of maneuver conflict—of shaping the marketplace and of mutual trust. Richards
wrote Peters and said the book sounded very much like the theories of Boyd. Peters said he had read James Fallows’s book and
knew Boyd’s work. He was embarrassed that he had not given Boyd credit, because his book had been shaped by Boyd’s ideas.
He later wrote a newspaper column in which he corrected the oversight.

Richards and Boyd talked for years about applying Boyd’s ideas to business. But by 1993, when Boyd began his physical decline,
Richards was beginning to lose interest. Boyd encouraged him to press on, to develop his ideas, and to write and publish papers
on the subject. He saw this as an affirmation of the fact that his intellectual legacy encompassed more than war fighting;
his ideas were universal, timeless, and could be applied to any form of conflict.

Richards found that lean production had the same impact on American business that maneuver conflict had on the U.S. military.
While the idea became a much-talked-about fad in business, very few companies actually put it into practice. Because lean
production depends on a certain cultural foundation, businesses, like the military, are reluctant to make the radical changes
demanded by a full commitment to the doctrine. McDonnell Douglas, for instance, was like the U.S. Army. With much fanfare
it adopted what it called “lean production.” But just as the Army stopped in the desert because it clung to the idea of synchronization,
McDonnell Douglas could not shake the adherence to top-down management and centrally controlled production, and the company
wound up selling itself to Boeing.