The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot

The world knows relatively little about any of this, in part because Boyd refused to write much down. He insisted on presenting his thinking in a 14-hour briefing titled "A Discourse on Winning and Losing." He was a striking speaker, witty and vigorous. But the 300-odd typewritten and hand-sketched pages of overhead slides that survive him are not especially compelling. The single work that he committed to paper before his death in 1997, a 12-page treatise called "Destruction and Creation," is daunting. "It's got the specific gravity of uranium," observes writer Robert Coram, whose biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little Brown), will appear in November.

"Boyd was a difficult man," admits Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. It has fallen to Spinney to parse, smooth, and preach Boyd's gospel. Spinney is an unapologetic disciple: He worked with Boyd for more than two decades, and he shares his mentor's brusque manner and healthy disregard for nearly everything official. Like Boyd before him, Spinney is a professional irritant at the Pentagon, disliked by many military leaders but secure in his position, thanks to his unique talent and his many political connections. He toils in Boyd's old office.

"Have you seen the thought experiment?" Spinney demands, hopefully. The best response is "no" -- because in Boyd's absence, the experiment and Spinney's own oral presentation, "Evolutionary Epistimology" (accompanied by PowerPoint slides instead of overheads), may be the only reasonable way to come to terms with Boyd's often tortuous thinking.

On to the experiment. Imagine four scenarios: someone skiing, someone power-boating, someone bicycling, and a boy playing with a toy tank. Break down each domain into its component parts: For skiing, there would be snow, chairlifts, skis, hot chocolate, and so on. Within their domain, the parts have directly identifiable relationships with one another. But scramble together the parts from the four domains, and suddenly it's hard to determine any relationships at all. We are thrown into chaos.

Now, Spinney instructs, take one part from each scene: From skiing, select the skis; from power boating, the motor; from bicycling, the handlebars; and from the boy with his toy tank, the treads. What do these elements have to do with one another? At first, seemingly nothing -- because we still think of them in terms of their original domains. But bring the parts together, and you've used your creative pattern-recognition skills to build ... a snowmobile! "A winner," Boyd concluded, "is someone who can build snowmobiles ... when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change."

The Uses of the OODA Loop

This kind of stuff generally ticks off actual fliers, who proudly proclaim themselves "dumb fighter pilots" and tend to shun anything that smells of intellectual extravagance. "I've never been inside anyone's OODA loop," Major Chris Peloza says dryly, rolling his eyes. Peloza has flown F-16s in the Air Force and the Air National Guard for 16 years. He's never heard of Boyd, and he doesn't know what OODA stands for.

But he knows exactly what it means. An effective pilot explodes his rival's comfortable view of the universe. With his familiar clues hopelessly scrambled, a rival under pressure will usually try to interpret the mess from his accustomed perspective. While the confused rival struggles -- and before he has a chance to figure out the pattern that will yield the dogfight equivalent of a snowmobile -- the savvy pilot quickly executes yet another set of maneuvers, once more scrambling the parts and further feeding his opponent's confusion. Ultimately, Boyd wrote, the winner "collapses his [adversary's] ability to carry on." You win the competition by destroying your opponent's frame of reference.

Boyd most often couched this phenomenon in a military context. His monumental research and reading let him draw from such strategies as the Battle of Marathon (Greece versus Persia, 490 BC) and Napoleon's tactics at Waterloo. Germany's blitzkrieg method in World War II led the country to "conquer an entire region in the quickest possible time by gaining initial surprise and exploiting ... fast tempo/fluidity of action ... as basis to repeatedly penetrate, splinter, envelop, and roll-up/wipe-out disconnected remnants of [the] adversary organism."