Boyd (60 page)

Wyly was numb with shock. He returned to his office and called Boyd. “Where am I supposed to go?” he asked.

Boyd loosed a volley of profanity.

“I don’t think I’m going to tell my wife about this yet,” Wyly said.

“No, you have to tell her.”

The two men talked for a long time. And for the next several months, Wyly called Boyd four and five times daily. He was in
the greatest pain of his life, lost and wandering. But he carried on as Marines always do. He chaired a symposium at the MCU
when everyone in the audience knew he had been forced out of the Marine Corps.

It often seemed the fates conspired to heap even more indignity upon him. Wyly invited Martin Van Creveld, a renowned military
theorist, to speak at the symposium. But his superiors said Van Creveld was too controversial and Wyly had to withdraw the
invitation. He invited David Hackworth, the most decorated soldier in Vietnam, to speak. But Hackworth, too, was deemed too
controversial and Wyly had to withdraw the invitation.

During his last days in the Marine Corps, Wyly got some satisfaction when young officers found a copy of his masters thesis
in the MCU library and began briefing his ideas on amphibious warfare. Wyly told them not to use his name, that he was a pariah.
The young officers came back to Wyly and told him the briefings not only were well received but there was talk of reworking
amphibious warfare doctrine to be more in accord with the thesis and with the principles of maneuver warfare.

The plan for how Marines might conduct amphibious landings in future wars is highly classified. But today if anyone wants
to know the philosophical underpinnings, the doctrine behind those top-secret
plans, all he has to do is read Wyly’s thesis. It does not call for row after row of amphibious craft moving toward a long
beachhead in a linear attack. Rather it calls for swarms of amphibious craft landing maybe two or three at a time on a small
beachhead, allowing Marines to move in fast and deep. Officers will lead from the front. They will have a clear
Schwerpunkt
and they will bypass hard points of resistance, always moving, ignoring their flanks as they press toward the enemy’s rear
area.

It was also a matter of considerable pride to Wyly that during the 1980s the Marine Corps evolved from being knuckle draggers
who take the hill to the most intellectual branch of the U.S. military; even enlisted men were reading Sun Tzu.

When a Marine Corps colonel retires, especially a senior colonel who is a decorated combat veteran, there is a parade and
a ceremony where he is presented with a Legion of Merit. His wife is given a large bouquet and there is a letter from the
commandant thanking the colonel for his years of meritorious service.

Wyly got none of these. He drove out the front gate of Quantico unnoticed.

But then, guerrillas do not march home to victory parades.

N
OW
we must go back to the late 1970s to pick up the thread of another story in which Boyd played a crucial role. This is the
story of Jim Burton, a story that demonstrates, as does that of Mike Wyly, Boyd’s great gift as a mentor. Because he had no
father, he did not know how to be a father. But because of Art Weibel and Frank Pettinato he did know how to be a mentor.
There is no doubt Boyd took tremendous pride in the work of Wyly and Burton. Through these two men, Boyd was able to continue
his own work; he used Wyly and Burton to do what he no longer could do. And just as he had been receptive to the molding and
the direction of his mentors, so these men were receptive to Boyd’s molding and directing.

After making colonel on the third and last attempt, Burton knew he was no longer an Air Force golden boy. He would never make
general. He would never
be
someone in the Air Force, but he still had the opportunity to
do
something.

The strongest possible indicator of Burton’s rectitude and how he was perceived by his superiors is that after returning to
the Pentagon in the late 1970s, he served as the military assistant to three consecutive assistant secretaries of the Air
Force. The job of military assistant is one of the most sensitive in the military—so sensitive that those
who fill it often last only for a year or so. Almost never do they go from one administration to another. But Burton served
in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations.

A military aide rarely is loyal to his civilian boss because he knows that in a year or so he returns to regular military
duties. If he has been loyal to his generals and protected the interest of his branch of the military, he usually is promoted.
Some three-dozen military assistants work in the Pentagon. Their ostensible purpose is to act as a liaison between their civilian
boss and their branch of the service. But in reality they are spies, there only to protect the interests of their generals
and their branch. Every meeting of their civilian boss, every relevant phone call, even the areas of interest the civilians
have, are all reported back to their generals.

Burton did not fit that mold. On numerous occasions he informed his civilian boss of how the Air Force was trying to deceive
or mislead him. He saved his bosses from a host of embarrassing mistakes. That is why he was braced against the wall one day
and poked in the chest by a general who said he was being disloyal to the Air Force and who reminded him that one day soon
he would be returning to the regular Air Force and no longer would have the protection of the assistant secretary.

But instead Burton was assigned for his third tour in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and given a job overseeing the
testing of various weapons. The vice chief of staff of the Air Force was not happy when he heard of Burton’s new assignment;
he knew Burton’s background, that Burton was close to Boyd and the Reformers. He knew the harm that such a man could do to
the Air Force and to other branches of the military. The vice chief was only three days from retirement when he got word of
Burton’s assignment. “Not while I am in the Air Force,” he said to an aide. One of his last official acts was to cancel Burton’s
assignment and order him to Wright-Pat, where his job was taking care of parachutes and oxygen masks.

The assistant secretary of the Air Force said he wanted Burton in OSD. Once again, the battle lines were drawn. A group of
Air Force generals totaling eighteen stars marched into the assistant secretary’s office and said the Burton affair was an
internal Air Force matter of no concern to the assistant secretary. It was a personnel matter. The assistant secretary insisted
that he wanted Burton. The generals refused to back down.

To better understand why the generals thought this such a crucial issue, one needs a bit of background. Civilians unacquainted
with the ways of the Building have only vague ideas about what it is the Pentagon does. They think the real business of the
Pentagon has something to do with defending America. But it does not. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons.
And the military has a pathological aversion to rigorous testing procedures because in almost every instance the performance
of the weapon or weapons system is far below what it is advertised to be and, thus, far below the performance used to sell
Congress on the idea in the first place. Weapons development is inherently risky and the costs can be difficult to predict.
But the big problem is what Spinney calls “front-loading,” the practice of deliberately underestimating the costs in order
for Congress to fund the program. The weapons-buying business has few checks and balances; from beginning to end it is an
advocacy proceeding. Not only do military rewards and promotions go to the officer in charge of a major program but he almost
always finds a high-level job in the defense industry upon retirement, often with the company whose project he ushered through
the Pentagon. This is the true nature of the Building. And this is why Air Force generals did not want an unbending and rectitudinous
man such as Jim Burton in charge of testing weapons. This is why generals wearing a total of eighteen stars tried to intimidate
the assistant secretary.

The assistant secretary found it necessary to do what several other civilian leaders had done in similar confrontations: he
reminded the generals that civilians rule the military. The assistant secretary said if the generals continued to fight his
wishes, he would call a press conference and resign. When reporters asked the reason, he would say it was over a fundamental
constitutional issue. Only then did the eighteen stars fade away.

Burton arrived at the OSD testing office in June 1982. From the time he walked in the door, Pierre Sprey besieged him to conduct
tests showing how vulnerable American aircraft and armored vehicles were to Soviet weapons. Sprey was one of the most vocal
critics of the Army’s new M1-A1 Abrams Tank, and especially of how the vulnerability testing of tanks and armored vehicles
was done largely by computer modeling. And the models were never verified by field tests. Thus, to Sprey, the model-based
tests had no validity.
Subject
our tanks and our infantry carriers to realistic battlefield tests,
he said.
The lives of American soldiers are at stake.

Burton, with Sprey in the background, came up with the idea for a live-fire test program—that is, actually shoot live Soviet
rockets and cannons at U.S. tanks to test their vulnerability. Such a program seems to be common sense, but in fact it was
a radical departure from current practice. Boyd predicted that the Army would rise up in opposition.

For a year Burton briefed his ideas on live-fire testing to low-level Pentagon staffers and junior officers. After laying
the groundwork and receiving the unanimous support of all branches of the services, Burton chose the first weapon he wanted
to test: the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He could not have picked a weapon closer to the heart of the Army. The Bradley
was supposed to be an advance over the traditional armored personnel carrier, which is just an armored box used to transport
troops safely. The Bradley added a light turret to the armored box to allow it, in theory, to both carry troops and “fight.”
But the Bradley was too lightly armored to fight tanks: what it was supposed to fight had never been precisely detailed by
the Army.

The Bradley was of crucial importance. First, it was the weapon whose safety affected the greatest number of soldiers; if
America went to war, as many as seventy thousand soldiers might ride this vehicle into combat. Second, the Bradley program
was in early production. This meant any problems could be corrected before thousands of the vehicles were sent to troops in
the field. And third, the Bradley had never been tested for vulnerability to enemy weapons.

The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor
surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army’s ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing
use real Soviet weapons.

The Army agreed. But the first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than
Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets.
To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with
diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no
explosion would result.

“What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.”

Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion
and logic with Army officials, but to no avail.

When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They
jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated
before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them and without allowing them the time to develop lung lesions,
as had happened in other tests. The Army surgeon general’s office then reported the animals had suffered no serious aftereffects.

Time after time the Army lied about the realism of its testing. But even the spurious tests were so damaging that the Army
decided it wanted to postpone completing the live-fire tests for two years. This would insure that the contractor received
a big portion of his money and would put the Bradley too far into its production run to discontinue, no matter what the tests
revealed.

“Jim, you must like this,” Boyd chided. “You are allowing it to continue.” He looked at Burton and knew what was going through
his mind. The issue now before Burton was orders of magnitude beyond anything in his previous experience. The Bradley was
to the Army what the F-15 was to the Air Force. Eleven billion dollars were at stake, an amount that—to the Army—mitigated
against honest tests. Boyd pressed Burton. “Jim, you can’t have a normal career and still do the good work,” he said. “You
have to decide.”

Burton knew he stood at a crucial point in his career and in his life. This was the place he had heard Boyd talk about so
many times, the
to be or to do
fork in the road. From this point forward, no matter what his decision, there would be no turning back. If he did what the
military expected—that is, if he allowed the Army to have its way—he would be a good soldier. If he challenged the Army, retribution
was a certainty.

Rarely in his life had Boyd been so excited. He saw the coming fight as an operational field test for “Patterns of Conflict.”
What better way for Boyd to test his theories than to pit one man against the U.S. Army? At first glance, there could be no
more unequal contest.

But the moral element of conflict is a crucial part of “Patterns.” Boyd realized the Army was doing the wrong thing for the
wrong reasons, guarding a program worth billions of dollars, “protecting the farm” in Boyd’s words, while Burton wanted to
protect the lives of American soldiers. The Army would try to steamroll Burton, to use the sheer mass of U.S. Army resources
to crush him. It would be the crudest form of attrition warfare. Burton would have only his wits and the techniques of maneuver
conflict. Boyd saw this as a chance for Burton to get inside the mind of the Army, to put the OODA Loop into action, to cause
confusion and disorientation.