Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture
Bill Whittle is back, in fine form, telling the story of a brilliant fighter pilot, whose ideas helped the US take Baghdad with very few casualties. Well, at least "take" it in the first wave. It's hard to beat people who are willing to die to the last man for their beliefs. As the Swiss have shown. Unless you're willing to kill them to the last man.
About a hundred miles north of Las Vegas there is a clump of wild grass and cottonwood trees called "The Green Spot." Not much to look at from the ground, but from thirty thousand feet above the brown Nevada desert it stands out for a hundred miles.
In the mid to late fifties, a fighter pilot could earn himself a quick forty bucks and perhaps a nice steak dinner in Vegas -- not to mention everlasting renown, which is to fighter pilots what oxygen is to us lesser beings -- by meeting over the Green Spot at thirty thousand feet and taking position just 500 feet behind an arrogant and unpleasant man with precisely zero air-to-air victories to his credit. From that perfect kill position, you would yell "Fight's on!" and if that sitting duck in front of you was not on your tail with you in his gunsight in forty seconds flat then you would win the money, the dinner and best of all, the fame.
Tank commanders may be charging cavalrymen at heart; sub skippers may be deer hunters using patience and stealth. But fighter pilots are Musketeers. They are swordsmen whose survival depends on remaining on the offensive... that is to say, they are men who survive because they can (and have) initiated 16-to-1 fights because they possess the confidence -- actually, the untrammeled ego -- to know they will win.
To be challenged in such a manner is an irresistible red flag to men like this, and certainly no less of one because the challenger was a rude, loud, irreverent braggart who had never been victorious in actual air-to-air combat. And yet that forty dollars went uncollected, uncollected for many years against scores of the best fighter pilots in the world.
That is more than luck. That is more than skill. That is more than tactics. That level of supremacy is the result of the ability to see things in an entirely new way. It is the difference between escaping from a maze you are embedded in, versus finding the way out from one that you look down upon from above.
Part 2 is here.
We've spent a lot of time with John Boyd, because I and others believe his theories not only won the war, but if properly applied they might do the nearly impossible and win the peace as well.
If I understand this enigmatic and complex man correctly, he came to the conclusion that there was something beyond the Perfect Sword; something beyond even the Perfect Swordsman. Because as Sun Tzu pointed out, there is a level of warrior satori beyond even that. Beyond them both lay Swordlessness.
Swordlessness is not peace and it is certainly not surrender. Swordlessness uses nothing but the enemy's sword against him. Perfect Swordlessness is a sublime victory so complete that there is no fight at all. It is over before it begins.
General Petraeus -- just perhaps -- is in the process of winning such a victory in Iraq. By brilliant diplomacy, deep understanding of the culture and the judicious use of gunpowder and money, it appears he has severed most of the Sunni tribes from al Qaeda and used them as "Awakening" peacekeeping militias against their former allies. General Petraeus is not fighting the last war; he is fighting the next one. He did not arrive there and just hope for the best. He observed. He oriented. He decided. And he acted. And then he observed again to see what effect he had. And again. And again.
This is not firepower. This is not attrition. This is, rather, an intelligent, delicate, sophisticated, maneuver-based strategy. A light, but sometimes deadly touch. Fingertip control. Water flowing downhill, into the cracks which our enemy cannot fill.
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(Everything I learned about John Boyd I discovered through BOYD: THE FIGHTER PILOT WHO CHANGED THE ART OF WAR by Robert Coram, available here.
And if you missed it earlier and can spare seven minutes to improve your life, I think you will be as deeply impressed as I was when I saw the trailer for my friend Jake Rademacher's Brothers at War located here.
Finally, if you'd like to support these essays, you can purchase a copy of SILENT AMERICA: ESSAYS FROM A DEMOCRACY AT WAR by clicking here.)
Sometimes, I wish I could share Mr. Whittle's optimism about the U.S. War on Iraq. If the Busheviks weren't so busy destroying civil rights here at home, maybe I could believe they're trying to establish them over there. But they are. And I don't. But damn! He writes a good story.
