I spent last week in Maine at the Bossov Ballet School (more later) located at the Maine Central Institute with a group of folks talking about Boyd and the future of War (This is the best overall source of Boyd Material run by Chet Richards) .
I am not at liberty to discuss the content of the meetings but I did want make a few remarks about Boyd's ideas and his life.
Here is a short review by Don Vandergriff (Who has also paid for his ideas) of Robert Coram's book on Boyd that will give you the guts of what I am talking about. Here is Genghis John, by Chuck Spinney that will provide a more complete picture. Here is a snip from Spinney's portrait:-
Looking back at those four years between 1973 and 1976, I now understand that they were a period of intellectual refueling for the next campaign in Boyd's war against a bureaucratic establishment that had lost sight of its goal. For unlike Immanuel Kant, Boyd worked in the Pentagon, a moral sewer dedicated to using other people's money to feed the predators in the Hobbsean jungle known as the military-industrial-congressional complex.
Viewed from this perspective, the Ghetto Colonel's lifestyle was much more than an aesthetic philosopher's quirk. It was a deliberate choice reflecting that bureaucratic warfare in the Hobbsean jungle had replaced the aerial dogfight as his first love.
Boyd loved a good skunk fight and he played for keeps � instinctively applying Napoleon's dictum of preparing a circumspect defense before unleashing an audacious attack. He built up his defenses by eschewing careerism and materialism, which left the generals and bureaucrats nothing to work on, no opportunity to gain leverage on him, no bait to tempt him into corruption. The Ghetto Colonel became an impenetrable fortress, a bastion of moral power in a way that Mohandas Gandhi would have easily understood. From the perspective of the bureaucracy's authoritarian mentality, however, the man was certifiably insane; even worse, he was completely out of control.
I once asked him why he lived this way. He got in my face, the ever-present cigarillo clenched between his teeth, its hot tip popping up and down a quarter of an inch from my nose, and amidst a gush of suffocating smoke, he explained: "The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom � you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero. I will never be rich, so I have chosen to crank down my desires. The bureaucracy cannot take anything from me, because there is nothing to take."
This statement went to the core of a puritanical ethos. For the Ghetto Colonel, life revolved around a simple choice: To be or to do? He could be somebody, with all the shallow accoutrements of power and small achievements � high rank, a big office in the Pentagon's E-ring, and a big post-retirement job with a defense contractor � or he could do important things and make a real contribution to society. The Ghetto Colonel was more interested in doing things than in being somebody, so he cranked down his needs. His choice really was very simple and logical, if somewhat bizarre and indecipherable to the inhabitants of Sodom on the Potomac.
I resigned from the Air Force in 1975. Boyd retired a few months later. He stopped smoking cigars, but not before accidentally burning a hole in a general's tie while using one as a pointer. By 1975, his work on Energy-Maneuverability, the F-15, and the Lightweight Fighters had made him the pre-eminent designer on new fighter concepts in America, if not the world. Most people with his kind of resume would have sold out to industry for a high six-figure income. The airplane contractors, in particular, wanted his talents desperately. One even offered me a fat job if I could convince Boyd to come with me. But the Ghetto Colonel had other things on his mind. His refueling operation was over, and he was ready for action. He was about to mutate into "Genghis John," the creator, chief strategist, and spiritual leader of the Military Reform Movement.
Boyd sought to see the truth and to act upon it. His ideas are all about "Seeing clearly and acting decisively". The irony of our time is that this is not how organizations work today. Insight and action are punished. No wonder most large institutions cannot adapt to change.
One of the debates that we had was about how best to disseminate Boyd's ideas. Boyd, like many great philosophers did not leave a "book" but only a series of massive presentations. At the time of discussing this I agreed - how were we to spread the ideas? But since my return home I have begun to see this issue differently.
Boyd had a mantra that he would offer to new officers. It is called the Fork in the road:-
"...one day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go that way and you can do something -something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself."
Most importantly Boyd would close, "If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself." "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"
As I thought of Don Vandergriff, Chuck Spinney, Chet Richards., Mike Wyly and many others close to Boyd and his thinking I noted that they had refused to compromise and that this nobility was the power behind the ideas - the amps behind the volts.
Do ideas have any power unless they have a life behind them?
I keep thinking of Prometheus who brought fire to man and so earned the ire of Zeus who chained him to a rock where his liver was eaten by an eagle every day. Is this not the price of people who really bring the truth to powerful organizations?I feel so humble when I think of what these men have given for the truth and it is their lives that I find inspiring.
Spin, dumbing down is surely not the way to spread a good idea. A good idea will be punished as will be the messenger. My question is that will the messenger have the courage to endure the price of speaking the truth?
Shelley ends his poem Prometheus Unbound with the following lines that all those who seek to make the world a better place:-
"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory."
What a man and what men!
