Rating: 
Summary: A great yarn, with a compelling message
Review: "Boyd" is the kind of biography that ought to be written more often. Wonderful stories and a great message unfold as Robert Coram's readable and well-written book builds a convincing case: that Americans owe a lot to a man few of them have ever heard of -- John Boyd. At one level, "Boyd" is a splendid yarn. So much so that one could make perhaps six movies from its stories. Call them, based on real-life characters in the book, "The Ron Catton Story", "The Jim Burton Story", "Hiding the Plane", and so on. It's also a fascinating study of man versus organization. Boyd often dealt with a military version of "Dilbert" cartoons - petty and self-destructive activities carried on stodgy bureaucracies. Against this, he was masterful. He could make water run uphill, and it is a delight to read how he did it. Sometimes he worked with sympathizers in high places (including at least two Secretaries of Defense) and sometimes he just focused a group of like-minded people deep in the bureaucracy on a goal. Boyd used bluster and reason, idealism and guile, courage and fear. He persuaded fighter pilots around the world to change their tactics. He forced the Air Force to build planes that pilots and soldiers needed rather than those that contractors and Congressmen wanted. He quite literally rewrote the book on how the Marine Corps fights. He transformed the Gulf War strategy. And he did it all with a selfless and often hilarious personal style, mostly as an obscure, retired Air Force colonel, working a few days a week as a civilian at the Pentagon. He sought neither riches nor recognition. He was, in sum, a consummate partiot -- and an effective one. I think the book has two messages, one that Coram intends and one that he may not be aware of. He shows us, through Boyd, how to make bureaucracies perform unnatural acts. Like taking care of the people at the bottom of the organization charts, defeating truly bad ideas even when they are backed by the strong-arm tactics of the well-connected, operating at a rapid tempo, and successfully innovating.
The book's other message comes from the last twenty years of Boyd's life, and from his study of "winning and losing". Although it may seem far-fetched at first, this study has much to offer to skeptics of war, even pacifists. Boyd believed, with Sun Tzu, that the greatest military commander was the one who could get the other side to lay down its arms without a fight. In his day-long briefings that spanned thousands of years of military history, Boyd rubbed his audiences' noses in the stupidity and waste of military engagements like the World War I "Battles of the Somme" that sent thousands to needless deaths. He hammered home example after example of smart military commanders who succeeded while minimizing or even eliminating casualties. If he wanted to disparage a strategy, Boyd often referred to it sarcastically as "bombing Schweinfurt" - a reference to the World War II "carpet bombing" campaigns that he despised. Boyd was no Gandhi, to be sure. He was one of the toughest warriors the Air Force ever produced, as the book makes plain. But his relentless focus on prevailing in a world of uncertainty, "attracting the uncommited" and especially, "isolating adversaries" led him more and more toward rapidity, precision and nuturing deeply shared values. Mental agility outwits brute force every time, Boyd emphasized. More than that: operating at the "moral" level of belief and principled persuasion can be the key to ultimate success. Boyd argued not for the "ridge lines" of the traditional field commander, but for the "high moral ground" of the genuine leader. He argued for the power of integrity and honor -- the MILITARY power. If a shooting war did come, Boyd wanted to win, but he wanted to do so swiftly, with minimal casualties and damage. There are probably thousands of American (and British and Kuwati and, yes, Iraqi) soldiers alive today who would have been killed in the Gulf War, had Boyd not decisively influenced its strategy. Perhaps some may feel that an approach like Boyd's makes war more possible because it strives for fewer deaths and less destruction. But Boyd anticipated this. He allowed his studies to be freely and widely disseminated. So anyone contemplating a war using Boyd's principles must calculate that these very same ideas could be in the hands of the adversary. Coram's book offers us a lot to think about these days.
Rating:
Summary: Forty Seconds Over Washington
Review: "Forty-Second Boyd" was the best fighter pilot in the Air Force for many, many years, but he was the best instructor as well - saving many, many lives with his ability to pass on his tricks to the rank and file pilots who fought in Vietnam. The irresistable urge to understand his plane and himself led Boyd in his later years to understand the relationship between Thermodynamics and flight performance and the relationship between information theory and pilot performance. A generalization of his theories allowed Boyd to have an impact on all military strategy - and led to the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) revolution in US Army and USMC thinking which continues to rage today. Boyd's ideas on confusing the enermy remain prescient for how We can defeat Radical Islam. Boyd was Chuck Yeager, Dick Feynman, and Sun Tzu rolled into one man. An abrasive and obnoxious person, Boyd's career in the Air Force shows the Air Force at its best and worst - tolerating and encouraging Boyd, but also punishing him. It also shows hints of how the top generals can and often do run the Air Force for the benefit of the defense contractors - the "Military-Industrial" complex Eisenhower warned about - rather than for the benefit of the needs of the troops for the best weapons for the given mission. The evolution of the A-10 and the F-16 are keen examples of this. Boyd is the only USAF officer revered by the USMC. Boyd also shows that winners come in many packages and leadership is more often the ability to creatively solve problems with integrity than just mere spit and polish. Boyd's insight into the "ability to deal with change" in the specific instance of the F-86 being able to defeat a much better aircraft because the pilot could see and then react ( hydraulic controls ) faster - and his general idea about it - is reflected in my real world military experience where mousy soldiers rose to the occasion in combat while the all-american types went out - the mouse was always under stress and always having to react - but not the golden-boy. When the ability to creatively solve problems was needed, guess who could do it? The section on Desert Storm brought back memories. For most of the book, I kept recalling the words of the briefers and the events in my mind - and telling myself that they had "Boyd" all over them. Then came the pages on Desert Storm and it was Deja Vu! Boyd's Washington years showed that one man can rattle an insular, large, protected institution to its core. Similar to Doolittle's short raid over Tokyo which caused a psychological shift in the Japanese elite, Boyd's years in the Pentagon had a radicalizing effect throughout the services. This book is a great book!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Theory, Ugly Corruption, Sad Personal Decay
Review:
In forty years of adult reading, thousands of books, hundreds of biographies, I have not in my lifetime found a better integration of subject, sources, and scholarship. This book will make anyone laugh, cry, and think. There is a deep spirit in this book, and knowing a little about all of this, I was quite simply stunned by the labor of love this book represents. The author's skill and devotion to "getting it right" is breathtakingly evident across the book. His sources, both those close to the subject and those more distant, have been exhaustively interviewed and the quality of this book is a direct reflection of some of the most serious "homework" I have ever been privileged to read.
On the theory of war, on the original contributions of John Boyd, the book renders a huge service to all military professionals by dramatically expanding what can be known and understood about the Energy-Maneuverability Theory and the nuances of the OODA Loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act--for the real Tigers, Observe-od-Act--a faster loop). Two things stuck out, apart from the heroic manner in which Boyd pursued the intellectual side of combat aviation: first, Boyd consistently had his priorities right: people first, ideas second, hardware last--this is the opposite of the existing Pentagon priorities; and second, truth matters--the book has some extraordinary examples of how both the Air Force and the Army falsified numbers, with disastrous results, while also selecting numbers (e.g. choosing to list an aircraft's weight without fuel or missiles, rather than fully loaded, a distortion that will kill aviators later when the aircraft fails under stress). On the practical side, the insights into Pentagon (and specifically Air Force) careerism and corruption, as well as contractor corruption and cheating of the government, are detailed and disturbing. There have been other books on this topic, but in the context of Boyd's heroic endeavors as an individual, this book can be regarded as an excellent case study of the pathology of bureaucracy--the Air Force regarding the Navy, for example, as a greater threat to its survival than the Russians. Especially troubling--but clearly truthful and vital to an understanding of why the taxpayer is being cheated by the government bureaucracy, were all the details on the mediocrity and mendacity of Wright-Patterson laboratories and organizations nominally responsible for designing the best possible aircraft. The same thing happens in other bureaucracies (e.g. the Navy architects refusing to endorse the landing craft ideas of Andrew Higgins, who ultimately helped win World War II), but in this instance, the author excels at documenting the horrible--really really horrible--manner in which the Pentagon's obsession with building monstrous systems that increase budgets has in fact resulted in fewer less capable aircraft. The book is a case study in corrupt and ill-considered (mindless) gold-plating and mission betrayal. As a tiny but extremely interesting sidenote, the book provides helpful insights into the failure of the $2.5 billion "McNamara Line," a whiz-kid lay-down of sensors in Viet-Nam that Boyd finally ended up terminating. On a personal level, the author treats Boyd's family life, and his neglect of his family, in objective but considerate terms; the author is also quite effective in identifying and addressing those instances in Boyd's professional life when his fighter-pilot embellishments might be construed by lesser mortals to be falsehoods. There are three sets of heroes in this book, apart from the subject: the ranking officers, including a number of generals, who protected Boyd against the corrupt careerists--there *are* good officers at the top; the enlisted and officer personnel that carried on in the face of poor leadership, mediocre aircraft, and daunting external challenges; and finally, the "Acolytes," the six specific individuals (Tom Christie, Pierre Sprey, Ray Leopold, Chuck Spinney, Jim Burton, and Mike Wyly), each of whom endured what they call "the pain" to nurture John Boyd and his ideas. I found the author's dissection and articulation of the personal relationships and sacrifices to be quite good and a most important part of the larger story. Finally, a few tributes en passant. The author does a great job of showing how Boyd ultimately was adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps rather than the U.S. Air Force, and how his ideas have spawned the 4th Generation and Asymmetric Warfare theories, for which the Pentagon does not yet have an adequate appreciation. The mentions in passing of two of my own personal heroes, Mr. Bill Lind and Col G. I. Wilson of the U.S. Marine Corps, and the due regard to the roles played by Dr. Grant Hammond of the Air War College and Mr. James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, add grace and completion to the story. This book is moving--if you care about America, the military, and keeping our children safe into the future, it *will* move you to tears of both laughter and pain.
Rating: 
Summary: Boyd who?
Review: A pretty insignificant agitator, crackpot theorist and small minded iconoclast whose thinking on tactics (not art of war, or strategy, for that matter) is just a mishmash of uneducated guesswork, intuitive ramblings and deranged relevations, elevated to the pantheon of great military thinkers. Now that's what I call pathetic!
Rating:
Summary: Boyd, the Fighter Pilot who changed the art of war
Review: A really great biography. I bought this book after watching a
CSPAN author interview. I had a hunch that this book would be
important in understanding how the war in Iraq would progress.
Important is an understatement. This astonishing accomplishment
by our armed forces owes a great debt to this unusually talented
man.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging read, hard to put down
Review: An excellent book about an brilliant, engaging military strategist, John Boyd. I looked to this book to get a better grasp of Col. Boyd's OODA loop concept for possible use in my consulting business. I found myself engrossed in a great story - what I would give to hear his two cents on our current action in Iraq! I can well see that Col. Boyd's friends endured a great deal to maintain their relationships with John but I find myself envious of their adventures. (Wish there was a video available of Col. Boyd's briefing....) GREAT read. Roger, there's got to be another book or two in there!
Rating:
Summary: Integrity Wins Every Time
Review: As a lifelong autodidact myself, having majored in History and English, I found the book absolutely absorbing. Havinglived for 18 years near enough to NASM to take in the monthly G.E. Lectures by the aviation greats of the 20th Century, I have heard much from the horses' mouths as to how our air wars have been fought and won. What I found in the content of Boyd was not at all what I was expecting, however, despite having seen several reviews of the book beforehand. After finishing it, I accessed this 'readers comments' section to see what others had written, and it was certainly no surprise to see the careerist 'empty blue-suiters' still trying to shoot 40-second Boyd down even after he had exerted probably the greatest influence on our national security of any man in our history. The 'be somebody' guys are sure sore losers! But the 'do something' guys are the ones who know you can't cheat history. The truth is impossible to hide in the long run, though ambitious PR pressure from its enemies can delay its discovery for a time. Boyd will become almost as famous outside the military-industrial complex for his greatness as he was in the Building, and the hecklers are only embarrassing themselves and underlining their own petty meanness by their continuing efforts to sabatage a great man's contributions. The more they fight him, the shabbier they will appear in history. I agree that the first part of the book is not extremely well written, but the latter part is so gripping, it almost appears that other highly literate people had a hand in the writing as well as the historical narration. No matter, the content is of such gravity that the style becomes unimportant. The one disappointment in the book for me was the total omission of reference to another great man who set the stage for Boyd's break-throughs, Claire Chenault of AVG (Flying Tigers) fame. General Chenault anticipated the importance of what was then called pursuit flying and developed the principles of the very technique that Boyd later patented. On his way to China he went by way of Japan so he could study the performance characteristics of the front-line Japanese fighters. [They were at the top end of Boyd's E-M curve.] Having to work with the P40, a doggy fighter the Army air Corps didn't want, the export version at that, he figured out what the P40's strengths were and what the Zero's were and trained his pilots to stay out of the portion of the envelope where the Zero was superior. He developed what Boyd would derisively call a 'one-pony trick' that gave the AVG guys the highest kill ratio in history. All they did was come in high and up-sun and dive through the Japanese formation from 6:00 with their guns blazing and fly away home. They didn't fare so well until they found out from experience that they would lose in a dog-fight every time and began to practice Chenault's doctrine. And most historians of the AVG saga give a 'probable' kill ratio of twice what was officially claimed, if you count the planes the went down in the jungle on their way back to their home bases.
Chenault's analysis and doctrinal development in WW II sounds to me a lot like Boyd's later evaluation of the F86 versus MiG contest in Korea. That's a minor point that may have been beyond the author's grasp of history, but Boyd would have known about it. Both Boyd and Chenault were renegades opposed by the military academy establishment by every means available to their nemeses, but they achieved the impossible and won wars in spite of their commanders' opposition. I was surprised to realize about 2/3 of the way through that this is one of the finest books on leadership that I have read'almost in the same league with Robert E. Lee on Leadership, Founding Fathers on Leadership and Franklin, Indispensable Founding Father'and they are all superb.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring look at the USAF
Review: As an Air Force Academy cadet, I was given this book by my father as he knows my interest in the Air Force and fighter piloting. Reading this book gave me alot of perspective as to what it means to be a true american, and a patriot at that. The beurocratic games that go on throughout the USAF, the mini wars that go on between the branches of the military and how true leaders, not the company men are often looked upon badly because they wont "tow the company line". The undying confidence and ferocity that John Boyd took towards everything he did was a stunning example of what a strong heart and mind will make you achieve. His ethics are top notch and I see no one as a better role model for todays youth. Coram writes with such detail showing not only the good sides but also the bad sides of the col., to give a well rounded picture of the man who literally wrote the book on fighter and ground attack tactics. I suggest this book for anyone looking for a true story about a real american who had overcome many obstacles on the road to serving his country with his best abilities.
Rating: 
Summary: A Decent First Shot
Review: First things first, it's not at all well written. As a rule, aviation writers should be given Tom Wolfe aversion therapy before setting a word on paper, a treatment that would have benefitted Coram no end. Then there's simple barbarisms like the misuse of the word 'enormity'. (Twice!) Not a good sign in a professional novelist.
But the book's basic fault is that it's a hagiography. Boyd was a messianic genius, his 'Acolytes' white knights sans reproach, and everybody opposing them midgets looking out for their careers. To read BOYD you'd think the Mad Major was responsible for every last military advance--technical or doctrinal--in the past fifty years. Breakthroughs such as stealth and PGMs, shepherded by people like Donald Rumsfeld, go unmentioned. Similarly, neither the B-1B nor the F-15 are quite the miserable botches that Coram claims--the Eagle's kill ratio is 102 to 0, a record unmatched by any other current fighter, certainly not by Boyd's F-16. And as for the assertion that Boyd is the equal of Sun Tzu... I think a few centuries will have to pass before that can seriously be made.
But still... Boyd was undervalued during his lifetime, and any exposure he gets is important. This book serves as a reasonable introduction to Boyd's thought, and for that reason alone is worth reading. Eventually, we'll get the critical biography that Boyd--and his theories--deserves, and a much better idea of his standing in history, which will be high enough, even without the halo. Until then, this one will do.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Story Well Written
Review: Great book. Like Boyd it may have a few flaws but also like Boyd it is unlikley that the story could be told with such passion and still be free of perhaps some questionable conclusions. The author did a geat job of telling a huge complex story within a relativly few pages. I wish I could get my MBA students to read the book for the lessons of how much damage institutional wisdom can do, Boyd's OODA loop and perhaps most importantly the lessons on character, integrity and sacrifice. Highly recommended. My only reservations were that the author's passion overcame a more balanced look at a number of aircraft including the F-14 whose mission priorities were not dogfighting. Like Boyd, the F-14 has outlived its critics. His discussion of the F111 missed the higher level political environment when McNamara and his group of bright young MBA's prostituted their analysis to give the contract to General Dynamics at the behest of the then VP. The story also omits the credit due Adm Tom Conolly and others who sacrificed their careers to stop the F-111 naval version. As others have noted footnotes would have been welcome. More information on his EM work would have added to the book.
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