Thoughts on Boyd and Warfighting

The Marine Corps has, in my lifetime, always purported to be (in part) an intellectual organization. It has also purported to be a "dumb" organization of doers, not thinkers--encoded in Marine tradition is the encouraged image of a stoic, strong, dependable, and cunning team player. This curious dichotomy serves to point Marines at the desired result: physical leadership, endurance, and capability mixed with an intellectual passion for the pursuit of armed conflict. Marines are expected to perform well in the Combat Fitness Test, endure drudgery and deprivation, and read works listed on the Commandant's reading list all within the same career.

Nowhere is this mix more emphasized than at The Basic School, my current assignment and the cradle of Marine Corps virtue (with apologies, of course, to the recruit depots). The Basic School exists to teach officers leadership, the basic combat skills of an infantry leader, and Warfighting--the name given to the branch of knowledge (both art and science) concerned with winning wars. Within the cadre of instructors ideas bounce around amid the cheerful gossip about student buffoonery and always-flowing sea stories, ideas about the nature of warfare, the technicalia of conflict, and the best way to achieve a "product" which will ensure a continued line of Marine Corps victories in "every clime and place."

Some hold that instilling the proper mindset is the right product. As long as a lieutenant leaves with the initiative and determination both to solve any future battle problem and continue to educate himself, that is sufficient. Others argue that a collection of skills is the correct product. Lieutenants must have a basic set of infantry skills to graduate. The answer, acknowledged by all, is of course both. Fancy phrasing combining the two abounds: use the infantry skills as a "vehicle" to instill the correct mindset is the most compelling. But the real end result is to produce leadership that will maintain the Marine Corps as an aggressive, intelligent, creative armed force that is physically and morally ready to take on any kind of conflict, from the smallest insurrection to World War, and win.

Producing such leadership is the aim of the ideas bounced around from instructor to instructor. It is part of both the teaching and learning process, because eventually we instructors will re-enter the combat forces and--with the help of lieutenants--seek to transform and maintain the rest of the force along the same lines. But while it's all well and good to speak of "an aggressive, intelligent, creative armed force that is physically and morally ready to take on any kind of conflict, from the smallest insurrection to World War, and win," understanding what that means and making it happen is a complex and difficult task.

No man in the American military has so closely studied this problem, nor developed anything like a solution, as Col John R. Boyd of the U. S. Air Force. A brilliant, single-minded, and acerbic man along the lines of a Michelangelo, Col Boyd desired only one thing: to fight and win. His desire led him to revolutionize aircraft fighter tactics, then aircraft design as a whole, then general tactics and tactical thought, and finally overall strategy and force structures.

It was a conversation with a peer that introduced me to Col Boyd through his biography, Boyd. Our discussions have struck at the fundamental nature of conflict and victory, seen through Boyd's thought. Though I see his work as but through a mirror darkly, his work has engaged me singularly and I reproduce below an email I wrote back to my peer:

K------,

When you first asked what I thought about the F-22 and the F-35, I had very limited understanding of what Col Boyd's "fighter mafia" wanted to accomplish in developing an airplane back in the 1970s. The fact that the same group of people could produce the ungainly but powerful ground-attack A-10 and the elegant, nimble F-16 goes to show how they weren't "all or nothing" guys like you said; they were very acquainted with compromise. They wanted aircraft that would perform it's mission the best, no matter what compromises came along with such criteria.

The conventional "best," according to the authorities at the time, was traditionally that which could fly faster, higher, and farther while carrying more weapons. The swing-wing design such as is found in a B-1 accomplishes that perfectly--it permits extremely high speeds and high-altitude flight. Unfortunately the weight and mechanical complexity of a swing-wing design limit its flight ability in other regimes, such as low-altitude flight. A rough ground combat analogy would be an artillery system that could fire farther with heavier payloads, but which consequently took so long to transport or assemble that it was essentially useless.

Col Boyd's "fighter mafia" realized that the "best" from an engineering standpoint was almost certainly not the "best" in actual warfare--a conclusion stimulated and borne out by the dismal record of F-105s and F-4s over Vietnam. His developments allowed for a different kind of "best," as in, "best" fit for the job. His insistence, for example, of the F-16 having a 30% or greater fuel ratio ensured that it would have enough legs to be a viable aircraft--and because of his realization that it wasn't fuel capacity that determined range, but rather fuel capacity as compared with engine requirements, ended up with the F-16 having the longest legs of any Air Force fighter. More subtle distinctions are not identified in the book, but I think Boyd must have considered them. For example, the missiles of his day were very unreliable, and at some point in combat an aircraft would get in a dogfight. Hence, a true "fighter" had to be able to fire missiles and yet "turn" at the merge. So he insisted that the F-16 be able do both.

In the end, it was the compromises Boyd made that achieved his ideal. The F-16 is not as fast or high-flying as the F-15, and therefore cannot engage at as long a range. Yet it can effectively engage with missiles, because the fighter mafia wanted a high thrust-to-weight ratio, which assists fundamentally in acceleration and vertical maneuvers--but which also is critical when it comes to generating speed and altitude. The F-16 was a compromise between a lot of factors: fuel capacity, weight, engine power, armament, and ease of maintenance. In many of the above categories it was inferior to the F-15. But all together, it is (without any doubt) by far the superior fighter.

Where the F-16 excels, of course, is in maneuverability--what the book calls "fast transients." In fact, the "fast transients" piece set the YF-16 prototype far above it's immediate competitor, the YF-17. "Fast Transients" allowed a pilot to change his aircraft's regime of flight nearly instantly; for example a pilot might very quickly switch from a fast pursuit profile to a slow, tight-turn profile with a violent re-orientation of the aircraft or go from slow to fast by "firewalling" the throttle and taking advantage of a high thrust-to-weight ratio. The hat trick of "Forty-Second Boyd," where he could start a dogfight at the worst disadvantage and yet reverse the situation to kill his opponent within 40 seconds through such a quick, violent maneuver, proves the value of such ability in a turning fight. Certainly our own MCDP-1 indicates that a ground commander's ability to do the same thing with, say, a battalion actually generates the kind of fleeting opportunities and tactical advantage that allow one force to morally defeat another, even if it is numerically inferior ("morally", in this case, refers to the plane of conflict that occurs in the minds and souls of the combatants, and is concerned with morale will, instead of the physical or material plane which is concerned with weapons and numbers).

So, knowing that the Navy (and by extension, the Marine Corps) would be forced by Congress to by a lightweight fighter, you might reasonably ask why they didn't buy the F-16. The reasons are, I believe, the same reasons Boyd designed the F-16 in the first place. The Navy needed an ideal aircraft--one that would fit all its missions. But it only stumbled upon this realization by accident.

There is a legend that after losing the Lightweight Fighter competition, McDonnell-Douglas was in trouble. It had spent a great deal of money designing this aircraft, an aircraft that had the absolute best current aviation technology. But who would buy the aircraft if the U.S. Air Force had found it lacking? It could hope that by underbidding the F-16, foreign militaries would bite, but that wouldn't last for long. As the F-16 went into production, it's cost-per-unit would inevitably and inexorably decrease, quickly becoming a more affordable alternative. So they went wooing the Navy. And, pulling some strings, they achieved a demonstration for some top Navy brass. Now the Navy had already viewed the lightweight fighter competition, and so they knew the performance specifics and pilot feedback: the former nearly equal between the two airplanes, the latter much in favor of the F-16. So McDonnell-Douglass only demonstrated one thing. They showed a maintenance crew remove an engine from the YF-17 and replace it within 30 minutes. And the Navy was sold.

I don't know if that story is true, but it was the birth of another compromise that launched an immensely successful airplane. The Navy's needs are different from those of the Air Force: it doesn't have limitless hangar space to maintain aircraft, it doesn't have interior lines of communication on U.S. soil to guarantee quick and responsive logistical support, and it doesn't have two-mile runways on which aircraft can be babied during take-off and landing. Carrier aviation is brutal on equipment. The hangar deck is small, and there isn't much storage elsewhere for extra parts. The "runway" is 600 feet long, and aircraft are accelerated quickly to speed so they can get airborne then arrested sharply on landing, both of which require a much sturdier frame than usual. Navy pilots to a man prefer two-engine aircraft because there is usually no land beneath them while they fly, and so they'd rather a malfunction didn't condemn them to a long slow death of starvation, drowning, or shark attack. They also need an aircraft that is controllable at very low speeds to make landing on a carrier a reasonably safe proposition. And in the post-Vietnam years, I suspect the navy was getting tired of managing separate parts pipelines for their variegated fleet of F-14s, A-4s, A-6s, and A-7s.

What the apocryphal McDonnell-Douglass demonstration showed was that the Navy could meet its specific maintenance and aircraft requirements in a single airplane. And so the F-18 was born. It's two engines met the criteria for overwater flight. It's modular engine system made it easy to maintain, and additionally the redundancy that resulted made it an aircraft that could well sustain battle damage. Designed as Boyd's lightweight fighter, it had the ability to climb high and get fast to shoot missiles while also being able to slow quickly and maneuver in a close-in engagement. It also had sufficient power and size to carry about half the ordnance load-out of the existing A-6s and A-7s, making it a capable ground-attack aircraft. Knowing one of it's big missions was to support a Marine landing, Navy designers optimized the aircraft for low-altitude flight to further increase its ability as a CAS platform. It was a compromise, of course, from beginning to end. It is slightly worse as a fighter than the F-16, and slightly worse as an attack aircraft than the A-10. But it made the Navy more expeditionary and better able to accomplish it's assigned missions. The Air-to-Air, Air-to-Ground F-35C (unweighted by the lift fan), is a natural extension of this idea, but whether it's a better airplane than the F-18E/F (Super Hornet) is still up for debate. It lacks an internal gun, which would damn it completely in Boyd's eyes.

As an aside, the F-22 program adopted Boyd's approach, as far as I could tell: the contractor's mantra while developing the F-22 was "not a pound for air-to-ground." I suspect that installing two engines was a practical response to the stealth element's requirement for an internal weapons bay, which takes up a lot of space inside the airframe, as well as a way to maximize the thrust-to-weight ratio. But ultimately the F-22 achieved a perfect compromise: unassailable at a distance due to stealth and long-range missiles (made more so by the extreme altitude and speed available to the aircraft), unbeatable in a close fight because the large wings and thrust vectors make it incomparably maneuverable. The F-35, on the other hand, is exactly the compromise that Boyd hated: weighed down with air-to-ground gadgets and gizmos that provide (I predict) far too much information to really be of use to a ground commander, and in the case of the F-35B weighed down with a huge lift fan that drastically reduces fuel capacity and weapons carriage as well. In fact, one of the most contentious elements of the F-35 program is the contractor's inability to get the F-35B's weight within specs.

The story of the F-18 (and the F-35) has a great deal of applicability to the Marine Corps and Boyd's work on maneuver warfare. I don't yet fully understand the OODA cycle, but at the most superficial level it's merely a map of human experience. Applied to warfare as a discipline, it expands exponentially and speeds up. The "Observe-Orient" part is the most important, since both observation and orientation can be clouded by prejudice (leading to mistakes) or more readily understood by experience (leading to a faster cycle time). Hence we emphasize initiative and the freedom to make mistakes at TBS (and hopefully throughout the fleet) in order to gain experience. But the hard wall within the OODA cycle is the movement from "orient" to "decide." How often do you suppose that a commander orients and conceives of a bold move that will paralyze his enemy with confusion, only to to be stopped short by inability to realize his plan? Such inability can be the result of controlling commanders, or undisciplined units, or the limitations of equipment. Nevertheless I think we have to realize that as Marines we live in a system that puts a strong filter before the D in our OODA cycles.

I can't speak to the command limitation in our OODA cycles. It is composed, I think, of being collectively somewhat risk-adverse, careerist, and uncomfortable with decentralized execution (though much less so than our sister services). But the filter imposed by equipment is a big deal. Col A-----'s vision of a light-infantry force is a step towards fixing this problem. Focusing on a small logistics train and solid discipline--the kind that will bend a unit to its commander's will as a fighter is bent to its pilot's--would put the Marine Corps in company with Lee's Army of the Potomac, Rommel's Afrika Corps (and really the entire German Wehrmacht of the Second World War), and the Israeli Army's march to the canal in 1967. Equipment that complements this light-infantry mindset, such as the M777 or the IAR (it's usefulness pending) or even the EFV is to be desired. Such equipment will give a commander options. Options to cross the lake, rather than the expected river. Options to helibear lighter, fewer items to ground units in order to sustain a push. Options to maneuver around existing roads, options to disperse forces--ultimately options to Decide - Act in unexpected and decisive ways to morally defeat the enemy.

For Marine Corps fixed-wing aviation (and with apologies to Col Boyd), I think the F-18 literally provides this kind of flexibility best. It is expeditionary and capable and proven. I think, sadly, that it will be more flexible and more effective at all it's missions than the F-35 will be--especially if upgraded to the Super Hornet model, which incorporates some technical advancements, better fuel capacity, and more weapons load-out. On the macro level for the Corps, however, we must be able to protect our Marines from enemy air--even if our current enemy has none--and provide the close air support that will give our ground commanders options to deal with what will in the future almost certainly be a materially superior conventional enemy. Of course, to accept an aircraft that cannot depart and recover on a MEU means one has to accept certain other things--such as the need to depend on the Navy for carrier support, or the need to capture an airfield to support the operation, or the need to detail KC-130s for refueling support. But as the fighter mafia showed us, getting the ideal means making some compromises.

As Col Boyd demonstrated in "Patterns of Conflict," our job as military leaders is not to assemble a tinker-toy of statistical fillers and engines of war ready to be unleashed by the Pentagon wherever the president points his finger, but rather to build an "ideal" force for accomplishing our missions. This force will be focused, stripped of unnecessary capabilities, and responsive. It will be the F-16 (or perhaps with our expeditionary mentality, the F-18) of military forces. With such a force a commander may cycle through OODA fast enough to (as MCDP-1 teaches) "shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a variety of rapid, focused, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope," and therefore win--just as we (along with Col Boyd) ardently desire.