Tempering Boyd with Chesterton | Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War | Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War | Robert Coram

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	• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War Robert Coram Little, Brown and Company, 2002 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 92 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

He turned air combat upside down.

Boyd, a rough-cut diamond developed fighter jet theories and stuck to his guns with the hide-bound Pentagon brass. We would all be richer if more military officers quit saying "yes sir" and used their minds to act like Boyd did.Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Tempering Boyd with Chesterton

If you want to change the world for the better or just keep your little corner of it from getting worse, then you'll want to read this book. It's not just about "the art of war," as the subtitle claims. It's what Boyd discovered about how conflicts are fought and won. Sadly, although he flew in two wars, most of Boyd's clashes were fought within our own military rather than with some foreign foe. As a result, one of the best USAF fighter pilots who ever lived is better remembered by the Marine Corps, where he is a hero, than by his own branch.

I'm not going spend time praising Boyd. The fact that I finished this book with a list of books and articles to read is praise enough. Instead, I'm going to offer a useful corrective to Boyd the man, by introducing someone else you should read.

That someone is G. K. Chesterton, an Englishman with a maverick, warrior personality every bit as fierce and unyielding as Boyd's. On June 1, 1941, on one of the darkest days in World War II, when the island of Crete had fallen to the Germans, leaving 17,000 British soldiers as prisoners of war, the Times of London, defiantly put these lines from Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" on its front page:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Like Boyd, Chesterton understood that how we fight determines if we win or lose. He shared Boyd's contempt for those who believe that bigger is better. In a 1909 at the height of England's fears about new German battleships, Chesterton wrote precisely what Boyd would later say about fighter aircraft.

"Common-sense tells a man that indefinite development in one direction must in practice over-reach itself... If you perceive your enemy plunging on blindly in a particular direction, the real thing to do, if you have any spirit and invention, is to calculate the weakness in his course and advance yourself in some other direction. You ought to take advantage of his infatuation, not to imitate it; you ought to surprise his plan of campaign, not copy it laboriously. If he is building very big ships, the best thing you could do would probably be to build small ones; ships lighter, quicker, and more capable of navigating rivers."

But Chesterton understood something that Boyd never learned, an aspect of warfare that's so often forgotten today that the very word for it seems quaint--chivalry. Perhaps his best explanation of chivalry came in a 1906 article explaining why the Europe of his day dominated the world. Again Chesterton described a concept dear to Boyd, the power that comes from an ability to think new thoughts and imagine new ways of acting.

"The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination."

Boyd thought like a fighter pilot. He would have us understand a man in order to destroy him, knowing that a foe who's blown out of the air will never trouble you again. As a writer, Chesterton had a different perspective. He believed that understanding leads to restraint, writing in that same article: "For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."

Chesterton saw conflict in broad terms. When he clashed with H. G. Wells over the latter's infatuation with a World State or with Bernard Shaw over pacifism, he took the time to understand what each was saying. His criticisms of the dangers and weakness of international institutions are among the best ever written. His description of the pacifist personality is so accurate that it applies with near perfection to today's pacifists. But having gotten into the mind of his opponent, he recognized in him a fellow human being. With few exceptions, he retained the respect and even friendship of his foes. Only when one crossed a critical line, demonstrating that without great pain he was beyond redemption, would Chesterton seek to crush him to prevent the evil he intended. What was for Boyd the rule, destroying anyone who disagree with him, was for Chesterton the rare exception. Boyd needs to be tempered with Chesterton

In short, I'd suggest that, as you read what Boyd said about war and conflict, you also read what Chesterton wrote. You'll accomplish a lot more and suffer far less grief if you do. And as you might suspect, I wrote a book on that topic, a collection of Chesterton's best articles on war and peace paying particular attention to his warnings about Germany. And when the necessity arose, Chesterton could be as tough-minded as Boyd. Chesterton used all his powers as a writer to crush those ideas in the German mind that Nazism would later exploit.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II

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Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Great book - Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
if you like history!!! I was a member of the Officers Club that Boyd and his team met at. I never got to meet this genius - wish I had. The book is great and I have bought other books about Boyd's theories.

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Not What I Expected- A Real Eye-Opener

I had never heard of John Boyd, but I had read Coram's other excellent work about George "Bud" Day, so I decided to give this one a try as well. After reading both of these books, I would have to say that Coram ranks among the very top of military historians I have read. His books are well researched with hundreds of hours of personal interviews that clearly show through in the stories he presents.

The idea that a USAF fighter pilot ("excuse me, but I'm just a dumb fighter pilot") can change the way our military wages war is pretty far fetched indeed. But it happened. Boyd was brilliant- loud, brash, opinionated, extremely well read, but brilliant.

From his childhood in Erie Pennsylvania to his service in World War II, Korea, USAF Weapons School, Southeast Asia and finally in the Pentagon, Boyd knew how to make enemies. Coram paints a very balanced, thoughtful and insightful picture of John Boyd, his life and the times. And in the process, he brings real insights to the Pentagon, the top brass in each of the US Armed Forces. Nothing and no one is spared.

It's often said that "At the Pentagon, Colonels are emptying the trash cans." That would be over-simplifying things a bit, but the idea that someone of his lowly stature would have the ear of two Secretaries of Defense (SecDefs), Chiefs of Staff and other top brass speaks volumes to his influence. But that the Commandant of the Marine Corps was a huge fan of a former USAF fighter pilot is nothing short of amazing.

Ever wondered who came up with the famous "feint" and left hook attributed to "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopff? John Boyd, that's who, a lowly retired USAF Colonel who had the ear of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheyney.

If you find the works of Von Clausawitz and Sun Tsu of interest, get this book. Exhaustingly researched and very well written.

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Tempering Boyd with Chesterton

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John Boyd was the greatest fighter pilot in American history. From the proving ground of the Korean War, he went on to win renown as the instructor who defeated-in less than forty seconds-every pilot who took him on. But what made Boyd a man for the ages was what happened after he left the cockpit. Boyd made a career of challenging the intractable Pentagon bureaucracy, making enemies and a few devoted disciples who would become known as "The Acolytes." Boyd transformed the way military aircraft-in particular the F-15 and F-16-were designed with his revolutionary "Energy-Maneuverability Theory," fighting the Air Force's entrenched ideas every step of the way. He then dedicated lonely years to a radical theory of conflict that at the time was mostly ignored, but now is acclaimed as the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu.

A man of daring, ferocious passion, and remarkable stubbornness, John Boyd was that most American of heroes-a rebel who cared not for his reputation or fortune, but for his country. And in BOYD, Robert Coram finally tells his incredible story. Until now, John Boyd has been the great secret hero of the American military. No longer.

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