Boyd’s attitude toward Mary puzzled his friends. She was so lovely and so winsome. Even though she had borne five children,
she remained trim and had a sunburst of a smile that lighted a room. But there was something of the sleepwalker about her;
she seemed to drift through life, oblivious of what was going on about her. At parties Mary was still the quiet one while
Boyd dominated the room with his stories.
When Boyd talked to someone at a party, he gave them 100 percent of his attention. He did not look over the person’s shoulder
to see who else was in the room. But there were times at a party when Boyd might sit down and sleep for an hour or so. Mary
tried to hustle him out quickly once he awakened. If she was not successful, Boyd, rested and raring to go, might hold forth
until 2:00
A
.
M
.
One day in 1979 Boyd received a call from a man who identified himself as the Washington editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
. The caller said that for years he had wanted to do a piece about national defense, a deep and wide exploratory piece about
the state of America’s military. The story was sidetracked when he spent two years as chief speech-writer for President Jimmy
Carter, but now he wanted to resurrect the idea. The timing was perfect, as Carter was dueling with Republican
challenger Ronald Reagan over defense spending. Reagan said he wanted to “re-arm America,” a phrase that meant if he were
elected, billions of dollars would flood into the Pentagon. Reagan knew the post-Vietnam military faced serious problems.
He was going to fix everything with money.
The man who called Boyd had talked to Bill Lind in Senator Gary Hart’s office. Lind recommended that he interview Boyd. Could
he come over to the Pentagon and talk?
Boyd agreed, but only if the caller would spend enough time to hear “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd was not interested in any
drive-by reporting; he wanted to make sure the writer was serious. The writer agreed; this was his first big piece for the
Atlantic
and he wanted to do it right.
A few days later, Boyd looked up at a tall, slender, thirty-year-old man in khaki pants and Polo shirt and blazer. The writer
had graduated from Harvard and had been a Rhodes scholar. He could not have been more different from Boyd. He stuck out his
hand and introduced himself. “Colonel Boyd, I’m Jim Fallows.”
Neither man was terribly impressed with the other. Boyd later told Spinney that Fallows was a “goddamn preppy.” Fallows looked
at Boyd and saw a man with an ancient Ban-Lon shirt drooping from his shoulders, plaid pants that were hopelessly out of date,
and slip-perlike shoes of a sort rarely seen in the Pentagon. Boyd stood up and put his nose about three inches from Fallows’s
face, poked Fallows in the chest, and began talking in a voice loud enough to be heard far down the hall.
“Is this guy nuts?” Fallows asked himself.
Fallows heard the “Patterns” briefing and later spent more than four hours listening to an unclassified version of Spinney’s
“Defense Facts of Life.” This was followed by a long session with Pierre Sprey. Fallows was overwhelmed by Sprey’s intensity
and intellect. “Is that guy for real?” he asked Spinney. Then he came back to Boyd for additional hours of interviews. By
now Boyd had a growing respect for Fallows. Here was a writer who did his homework.
The
Atlantic
published “The Muscle-Bound Superpower” in the October 2, 1979, issue. It was the first of three events that launched the
reform movement onto a national stage. While newspaper reporters had written a few articles about Boyd and the Reformers
and the issues they espoused, Fallows was the first writer for a major national publication to tie it all together, to question
the way the Pentagon spent billions of taxpayer dollars and to wonder if America’s military was so burdened with high technology
that it might fail in warfare.
Much of Fallows’s fourteen-page story revolved around Boyd and “Patterns of Conflict.” In the story, Fallows said he had come
to “respect and value” Boyd more than anyone else he interviewed. Boyd and his followers “thought fresh thoughts” and were
willing to take the impossibly rare risk that those thoughts might cause them to be labeled as fools. Fallows said Boyd’s
ideas were all common sense but were a “heretical departure” from current practices. Fallows made Boyd and the Reformers legitimate.
Boyd and Fallows became fast friends. Boyd respected Fallows’s intellect and the depths to which he pursued a story. Fallows
admired Boyd’s integrity and single-minded devotion.
While the Pentagon was trying to figure out how to respond to Fallows, the second event that launched the reform movement
was taking place on Capitol Hill. The Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing.
Congressman Jack Edwards of Alabama was the senior Republican on the committee. Readiness was a big issue with Edwards. He
had sent an aide named Charles Murphy out on a fact-finding tour of Air Force bases. When Murphy went to Christie and asked
what he should look for on his tour, Christie gave him the Spinney Report. Murphy briefed the congressman well. The hearing
quickly focused on readiness problems of the all-weather, night-attack bomber: the do-anything-but-dust-crops F-111D. Congressman
Edwards bored in on Secretary of Defense Harold Brown with detailed and specific questions. His probing queries revealed that
America’s premier fighter-bomber suffered from such a critical shortage of parts that in order to keep it flying, maintenance
sergeants used their own money to buy parts from Radio Shack.
Ordinarily this would have been a relatively insignificant story, perhaps a “bright” used on the inside pages of a few newspapers.
But suddenly the media had a symbol for the “hollow military” and the story achieved a life of its own. It ran in many daily
newspapers, on the television networks, and in many smaller newspapers around the
country. Follow-up pieces ran for days. The saga of enlisted men buying parts from Radio Shack to keep the F-111D flying was
a story that would not go away.
The Air Force reacted by searching for a leak in the Pentagon. The questions asked of SecDef Brown revealed too much inside
knowledge. They could only have come from inside the Building. Pentagon counterintelligence people threatened to withdraw
the security clearance of anyone revealing classified information, and virtually everything involving readiness was classified.
This was the first of many security investigations aimed at the Reformers.
In April 1980 came the third major event that gave the reform movement a national presence: Desert One, the debacle in the
desert during the failed attempt by the Carter Administration to rescue hostages in Teheran. Eight men died, five more were
seriously injured, and eight aircraft were lost. (Spinney had remarried and his wife went into labor as news of Desert One
broke on television. Spinney pulled out a calculator and, using what he knew of helicopter reliability studies, began calculating
how many helicopters the military should have used in order to have a successful mission. The data were complex and the calculator
slow. Spinney’s wife grew upset. “Let’s go, Chuck!” she shouted. “I am about to have a baby.” But Spinney was deep into his
calculations and mumbled, “Just a minute. Just a minute.” He calculated that the military should have used fourteen helicopters
instead of the eight actually used. Then he took his wife to the hospital.)
These three events all happened in a six-month period and showed clearly that something was wrong with the U.S. military.
These Reformers might be on to something.
Then, in May, Fallows weighed in with another piece titled “America’s High-Tech Weaponry.” He told of Spinney’s “extraordinary
report” and quoted Sprey at length.
The military simply could not refute what the Reformers were saying. They tried. Their most common response was that the Reformers
were Luddites and antitechnology, the same argument used against the Fighter Mafia’s complaints about the F-15. It was an
equally spurious argument, overlooking the fact that Boyd, Christie, Sprey, and Spinney all came out of the technology community
and that Sprey had insisted on the most high-tech cannon in the Air Force
for his A-10. In truth, the Reformers argued not so much against technology as against the improper use of technology. One
of the most valuable aspects of “Patterns of Conflict” was that it laid out a framework for assessing different technological
approaches. It promoted the application of scientific and engineering knowledge to human needs. “Patterns” is about the mental
and moral aspects of human behavior in war. That technology should reinforce that behavior, not drive it, was the argument
of the Reformers. Boyd’s mantra was “Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.” He also preached, “People,
ideas, hardware—in that order.” Thus, machines and technology must serve the larger purpose. The Reformers believed that America’s
technological advantages were being used incorrectly and had, in fact, become a liability.
Even decades later, the depth of Pentagon paranoia about Boyd and the Reformers is amazing. The idea that an institution as
large and as seemingly omnipotent as the Pentagon would react as it did toward a handful of men is almost impossible to grasp.
It is worth noting that neither Boyd nor Sprey held any portfolio or any official position in the Pentagon, private business,
or academia. Boyd was retired and being paid for one day every two weeks. Sprey was a consultant to various businesses. It
seems the most sensible thing for the Pentagon to do would have been to ignore them. But these men could not be ignored. The
Pentagon has long dealt with the complaints of various organizations. But those groups often are single-issue groups whose
members have no more than a surface knowledge of the military or of defense matters. Because their concerns are frivolous
or tangential, they are easily dismissed. Now for the first time in history, Pentagon insiders, men who had the keys to the
kingdom, men who knew the budgets and the issues as well as anyone in the Air Force, were attacking the Building. And they
were building alliances with Congress and the media, the two institutions that can cause heart-burn in generals. Reform was
becoming a motherhood issue with the media. Publications from
Business Week
to the
New York Times
did stories about the Reformers. Congressmen and senators who were members of the Reform Caucus got more media coverage than
they ever imagined. This fed their enthusiasm and, in turn, generated even more coverage. One Reformer described the process
as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
Now Boyd was delivering his briefing to everyone from captains to colonels to four-star generals. One of the colonels was
a Marine Corps officer named Al Gray. Gray later became a general and asked to hear the briefing several more times. He and
Boyd had long private sessions in which they discussed the ramifications of “Patterns.” Congressional aides heard the briefing
and recommended it to the congressmen and senators for whom they worked. One quiet congressman from Wyoming, Dick Cheney,
heard the “Patterns” briefing and then Boyd’s other briefings—an investment of some twelve hours. He asked Boyd to come by
his office for numerous private sessions to talk of tactics and strategy and how America might best conduct itself in the
next war. “I was intrigued by the concepts he was working on,” Cheney would later say. “He was a creative and innovative thinker
with respect to the military.” Cheney added that the Reformers had “great ideas” that were “a part of my education.” He said
the ideas of the Reformers were valuable to him then as a member of the House Intelligence Committee and later when he became
secretary of defense. Asked if he and Boyd discussed maneuver warfare, Cheney said, “Maneuver warfare was embodied in the
whole notion of what he was talking about.”
The Acolytes sometimes had little respect for congressmen and senators, but even Pierre Sprey was impressed with Dick Cheney.
He accompanied Boyd on some of the visits to Cheney’s office and knew the congressman did his homework. Cheney studied deeply
the intricacies of Boyd’s approach to strategy. He was one of the founders of the Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill, a group that
soon numbered more than one hundred congressmen and senators.
The amateurish bungling of the Air Force response to Boyd and the Reformers has been documented over the years, but one incident
is worth repeating because it shows just how desperate the Air Force was. TacAir was a small office with a handful of civilian
analysts as well as four officers, one each from the Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marine Corps. The Air Force representative
was a lieutenant colonel anxious to be promoted. Because of the Pentagon structure, his efficiency reports were signed by
the vice chief of staff. The Air Force lieutenant colonel was ordered to report on all activities of the Reformers in the
office. He asked the secretaries to let him know the names of everyone calling Boyd and Spinney. He rifled desk drawers
looking for memos. Boyd was suspicious and eventually caught the lieutenant colonel searching Spinney’s desk. He confessed
and told Boyd he was pressured by the office of the chief of staff. Christie demanded that the lieutenant colonel be reassigned.
Boyd insisted that TacAir, not the Air Force, pick the Air Force officer assigned there. Boyd picked Ray Leopold.
He called Leopold at the Air Force Academy and said, “Ray, do you want to work with me in the Pentagon?”
“Colonel, I’m cut on orders to go to Europe. It can’t be done.”
“Ray, I didn’t ask about your orders. Listen to me, Tiger. Do you want to come to the Pentagon? Yes or no?”
“Yes, Sir, but—”
“No
buts
. You just stand by.”
Several days later, to his utter astonishment, Leopold’s orders were changed and he was assigned to TacAir.
Then the Air Force chief of staff learned that Leopold had once worked for Boyd and that he and Spinney were close friends.
The chief said Leopold was going to Europe.