The next day Leopold was summoned to the superintendent’s office and was told, “Don’t ever again bring someone from the military
reform movement on this base without notifying me in advance.”
It was a harbinger of what was to come, a rampant paranoia among senior Air Force officers where Boyd and the reform movement
were concerned. In a few more years the paranoia would be transformed into open warfare.
In June 1977, Boyd visited his mother in her nursing home in south Florida. The strong authoritative woman who had borne five
children and ushered them through the depths of the depression could not be recognized. The woman who had buried her husband,
a son, and a daughter was near death. Her passage through the world had been one of endless travail. Now she was worn out.
Boyd called his sister Marion in New York and said, “Mom is pretty bad. She is very weak. I think you better come down.”
“Oh, she’s got a strong heart,” Marion said.
“I really think you should come down,” Boyd repeated.
Marion said she would make airline reservations and call him back to give him her flight number and arrival time. But before
she completed the arrangements, Boyd called back and said, “Mom’s gone.”
She was buried next to Ann in Erie’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. Her husband was across town in Trinity Cemetery. Her son Bill was
interred in a single plot, all alone and separated from the other members of the family, in Erie Cemetery.
Boyd convinced Marion to come down to Erie from New York more frequently thereafter, to visit the house on Lincoln Avenue
and put it back into shape after three years of being empty. Gerry, Marion, and Boyd, the three surviving children, would
pool their resources and put a new roof on the house.
About the time Boyd returned to the Pentagon, the new promotion list for colonel was published. Burton again was passed over.
Now his chances were statistically less than 3 percent to make colonel. Under the Air Force policy of “up or out,” the next
time he was passed over would be the last. He would be forced to retire.
Boyd called Burton and said it was their friendship that kept Burton from being promoted. Burton agreed, but he was not upset
about that; he was upset because, like most men, he wanted to make a contribution, to do something significant with his life.
And it now appeared that chance was lost. Unless he was promoted, he had only a year remaining in the Air Force.
B
Y
1978, both officers and enlisted personnel were leaving the military services in large numbers. They left not because of
pay, as military leaders had said for the past few years, but because they were displeased with what they saw as a lack of
integrity among their leaders. They thought careerism inhibited professionalism in the officer corps. The military also was
having readiness problems; expensive and highly complex weapons systems were fielded before being fully tested. These systems
were not only expensive to buy but expensive to maintain, and they rarely performed as advertised. Stories began to appear
in the media of America’s “hollow military.”
The military’s answer was to place more emphasis on what it called the “electronic battlefield” by buying even more expensive
and more high-tech weapons. Somewhere in the military there must have been those who sensed the system was headed toward a
meltdown. If so, no one stepped forward to change it.
Then one day Christie called Spinney and said, “I want you to take a look at these retention and readiness problems.” The
results show why Boyd wanted Spinney working beside him. Spinney was young, brilliant, irreverent, and had the tenacity of
a pile driver. It was only a matter of weeks before he began briefing the first version of what was
officially called “Defense Facts of Life.” Few people remember that title; what they remember is the “Spinney Report.” From
the beginning, those who heard the brief realized the impact it could have on the Pentagon.
Spinney gave his briefing to anyone who would listen. When the give-and-take of the briefing revealed that Spinney’s presentation
had flaws in logic and gaps where more data were needed, he went back, talked to Boyd, and fine-tuned the brief. The presentation
had to be bulletproof. If Spinney were hosed one time—that is, if someone stood up during a briefing and delivered chapter
and verse where he was wrong—it would be a devastating blow to the fledgling reform movement. Finally the brief seemed flawless,
a seamless gathering of facts that came to an inescapable conclusion.
Then Spinney briefed Sprey. As Boyd had predicted, Sprey found dozens of flaws not seen by anyone else. Spinney revised the
brief and presented it again. This time Sprey nodded in approval. If the brief could stand against the Pierre Sprey buzz saw,
it was monolithic, impregnable against the blasts of heaven and Earth and all that the Air Force might throw at it.
There is nothing in the past to compare with the Spinney Report. For that reason alone, it is arguably one of the most important
documents ever to come out of the Pentagon.
Spinney’s basic point was that the unnecessary complexity of major weapons systems was wrecking the military budget. He made
public what only a few people in the Air Force knew: throughout the 1970s much of the Air Force budget went toward procuring
tactical air fighters and weapons while nearly all other areas suffered. So much money was being spent on overly complex weapons
such as the F-15 and the F-111D that there was little money to operate and maintain the aircraft. Training flights for pilots
were being replaced by simulators. Maintenance skills required to keep the F-15 flying were so high that civilian contractors
had to be hired. Electronics systems failed far more often and took far longer to repair than predicted. Spinney showed that
supporting the F-15 was more expensive than supporting the ancient B-52. He showed that readiness was at an all-time low;
in a full-scale war, supplies of the Air Force’s favorite munitions would last only a few days.
But the most significant part of the Spinney Report was that readiness problems were not caused by lack of funds; they were
caused by Air Force leaders who deliberately bought such expensive and overly complex weapons that fewer and fewer of each
model could be purchased. The leaders’ incentive was to force increases in their budget and to funnel more money to defense
contractors, and they said whatever they needed to achieve that goal. Spinney proved that virtually everything the Air Force
had promised the American people about the F-15 and the F-111D was false.
The Air Force declared war on Spinney.
In 1978 Spinney was thirty-three, young to be the target of Air Force generals. But he had worked in the Pentagon under Boyd
and knew the Building and its machinery better than many of those who were older and more senior. And he was brash enough
that he never felt inadequate for the task of taking on generals. Like Boyd, he believed many of these men had never done
anything but get promoted, that they had compromised their beliefs, that they were empty Blue Suits.
Spinney made no recommendations in his brief, so he was said to be a nihilist, a destroyer. But the omission was deliberate.
Spinney knew that if he followed the usual procedure and included a list of recommendations, the focus would shift from the
problem to which chores would go to what agency. He wanted the focus to remain on the problem. He chose to be the wrecking
crew. He was tearing the domain apart and creating the destructive deduction. He was proving the fundamental point of the
Reformers—that the Pentagon needed an overhaul.
Christie thought Boyd was putting Spinney out front as a target. Spinney shrugged off such comments. His attitude was “Maybe
so. But if not me, who?” He was the right man in the right place at the right time. He had done his homework and knew his
briefing was rock solid. He took great pride in knowing he was the first person ever to probe so deeply into the soft underbelly
of the Pentagon. Plus, he had more than a little of the rock thrower in his character. He enjoyed a skunk fight.
The Reformers were united in their goals, but their approaches to reform varied widely. Boyd was the moral force that drew
all the
others. If Boyd was intense, Sprey was even more so. For him this was an Armageddon-like conflict in which the forces of good
stood against the forces of evil. Christie was a survivor. He knew how to get the job done without appearing on anyone’s radar
screen. Burton, who against all odds had made colonel in his third and last chance, was quiet and remote, not given to the
unrestrained antics of the Reformers. He was fueled by rectitude and guided by an unwavering sense of what was right. These
men, and all the others gathered around Boyd, thought the Pentagon was off course and wanted to set things right. Spinney
followed that belief. But for him it was also fun—a rollicking romp through the bosky fen that was the Pentagon. Never mind
that billions of dollars were at stake, never mind that the most important weapons projects of the American military were
the issue, never mind that the full force of the Building was about to come down on his head—it was a great, great time.
Part of Spinney’s battle joy was that the Air Force did not know how to deal with his report. One of Boyd’s fundamental dictums
when waging bureaucratic war was to use the other person’s information against him. Spinney’s brief was built on Pentagon
documents. He understated everything so that any revisions would only make his conclusions more damning. (Boyd’s belief in
using the adversary’s information against him is the practical application of Asian writings, particularly
The Japanese Art of War,
in which translator Thomas Cleary talks of “swordlessness,” or the ability to defend oneself without a weapon, a concept
that by implication means using the enemy’s weapon against him. Cleary says this technique can be used in debate, negotiations,
and all other forms of competition. He says swordlessness is the “crowning achievement of the warrior’s way.”)
Since Spinney’s briefing spoke to the readiness problem, something the media were beginning to write about, his report was
becoming increasingly relevant to the stories appearing in the press. But Spinney was not yet known outside the Building.
It is here, with the advent of the reform movement, that Boyd’s story becomes infinitely more complex. It no longer follows
a linear path but rather explodes into various stories, some of which in the beginning may seem tangential. But taken together
these stories demonstrate the tremendous reach of Boyd’s ideas. Spinney is one
story. The Marine Corps is about to become a separate story. The Army is another story. Jim Burton, still another. All these
stories have two things in common: Boyd and “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd and his briefing were at the center of everything.
By now the “Patterns” briefing was the credo, the manifesto, the coalescing force for the reform movement. It was a briefing
that continued to gather momentum over the years, a gleaming intellectual tour de force that caused enormous and profound
change.
Spinney’s brief was more immediate, more directly relevant. While it covered the full spectrum of Pentagon spending, it used
the F-15—America’s front-line fighter aircraft and the darling of the Air Force—as the example of problems facing the military.
The Spinney Report documented everything the Reformers had suspected.
Because of Boyd’s coaxing and Sprey’s critique, the Air Force could find no factual errors in the brief. Nor were there any
flaws in the concept. Air Force generals used derision and sarcasm, hyperbole and misstatement, even personal attacks against
Spinney. The Air Force referred to him as a “captain who has never been shot at,” a silly argument but one thought to be devastating
by officers who have been in combat. This tactic reveals a fundamental truth about the Building. Generals are allowed to indulge
their egos as few people in business or government are allowed to do. A general is surrounded by people whose careers depend
on what he says on their ERs. Every word he utters is considered as if Moses brought it down from the mountaintop. What in
most of us would be harmless quirks seem rather bizarre when codified by a man with stars on his shoulder. And as the number
of stars on a man’s shoulder grows arithmetically, his bizarre behavior grows exponentially. Stories abound of a general who
would let no one in his office who had a mustache, of a general who ordered a blinking red light be turned on in the hall
before he entered as a signal to lesser mortals that they must disappear, of a general who ordered that the back side of traffic
signs be painted brown, of a general who ordered that no one walk beside him but instead a respectful two paces behind, of
a general who ordered that subordinates wear the same type of headgear he wore, then hourly switched between a cap and a hat.
Generals rule with such absolute power that few dare confront them, so when someone has the audacity to point out they are
wrong—as did Spinney—they often have no recourse
but to fall back on hyperbole and emotion and personal arguments. The Air Force knew no other way to react toward Spinney.
Mary talked often of Florida. Ever since being stationed at Eglin, she had loved the state. She wanted the family to go there
for several weeks every summer, but Boyd said he did not have time for “that sentimental vacation crap.” For three or four
years, Mary and the children went alone. Boyd went to Erie instead.
Spinney and Sprey and Christie and Burton sensed that things were not well in the Boyd household, but they divided Boyd’s
life into his work and his home life and did not want to know the details of the latter. “Mary is a saint,” they said and
left it at that. They sometimes felt a faint sense of embarrassment when they saw the way Boyd treated Mary, but they never
asked questions. Boyd’s friends knew little or nothing about Kathy’s withdrawal, Jeff’s collection of poisonous snakes, John
Scott’s confrontations with his father, or of the years when Mary Ellen and Boyd did not speak.