The Art of Manliness - #101： The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War With Robert Coram

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:18.840 Now, there are a lot of great military strategists in history that come to mind when you mention

00:00:23.720 military strategy.

00:00:25.140 The most obvious one is Sun Tzu, or the Art of War, thousands of years ago.

00:00:28.520 There's also Carl von Clausewitz, but there's another one, one of the most greatest military

00:00:33.680 thinkers and strategists since Sun Tzu.

00:00:36.880 His name's John Boyd, and he started his career as a fighter pilot during the career in war,

00:00:42.720 and then he went on to revolutionize air tactics, the design of fighter planes.

00:00:48.420 He also went on to just develop these grand theories that are being used today in branches

00:00:53.140 of the military around the world on how to win wars.

00:00:56.740 We've written about John Boyd on the site.

00:00:58.260 He's one of the most fascinating characters I've ever read about and written about.

00:01:01.920 So today we have his biographer on.

00:01:03.360 His name's Robert Corum.

00:01:04.460 He wrote this biography called Boyd, the fighter pilot who changed the art of war.

00:01:09.040 Today we're going to discuss John Boyd's contribution to military strategy, his life, his idiosyncrasies,

00:01:15.820 his battles within the bureaucracies of the Pentagon.

00:01:18.700 We're going to talk about what we can learn from Boyd on being a better man, and also learn

00:01:23.260 from his faults as well.

00:01:24.680 It's a fascinating discussion.

00:01:26.340 I think you're really going to like this, so let's do this.

00:01:33.500 Robert Corum, welcome to the show.

00:01:35.560 I'm glad to be here.

00:01:36.420 Thank you.

00:01:37.340 Okay.

00:01:37.580 So for our listeners who aren't familiar with you and your work, can you tell us a little

00:01:41.280 bit of a background about your career and what ultimately led you to writing a biography

00:01:47.920 about an obscure military strategist that not a lot of people know about named John Boyd?

00:01:53.660 When I was in college, I wrote for the student newspaper, and some of my columns came to the

00:02:01.680 attention of the people at the Atlanta Journal, and I was offered a job there and was there

00:02:07.780 for four or five years and left freelance, write for Atlanta Magazine, wrote a number of

00:02:14.160 magazine articles for most of the major national publications, Esquire, the New Yorker.

00:02:19.640 And then in 1980, I went back to the newspaper, this time to the Constitution.

00:02:24.440 There were two separate newspapers at the time.

00:02:27.000 And after a couple of years, like every reporter, I wanted to write the great American novel.

00:02:32.140 So I left the paper, and I wrote five novels before I ever published one.

00:02:37.920 That's why I had a rather long learning curve in this business.

00:02:40.580 In 1988, I published the first novel, and over the next 10 years, I published seven novels

00:02:48.040 and three nonfiction books.

00:02:49.760 And I've got to tell you, except for one of those books, they were all somewhere south of

00:02:53.760 Mediocre.

00:02:55.100 And by 1999, I was 62 years old.

00:02:59.320 My career was in the toilet.

00:03:01.720 My agent was about to fire me.

00:03:04.300 And one of John Boyd's friends, whom I had known for 10 or 15 years, and who had been

00:03:11.600 after me for most of those 15 years to write a biography of Boyd, contacted me again.

00:03:17.380 And he said, it's time to write the biography of Boyd.

00:03:20.300 And not having anything else to do at the time, I thought I would go to Washington and talk

00:03:27.160 to a couple of Boyd's friends, primarily to get Boyd's friend, Chuck Spinney, who was

00:03:33.260 a good friend by then, to get him to leave me alone about this.

00:03:36.820 Frankly, I didn't think it was much of a book.

00:03:39.160 Chuck was big into hero worship.

00:03:41.140 But I went to Washington and talked to Tom Christie and Pierre Spray, and at length to Chuck, and

00:03:48.060 I realized this is one of the biggest stories I've ever come across.

00:03:52.560 So I wrote a proposal and sent it off.

00:03:56.140 And that's how it happened.

00:03:58.100 Well, I mean, OK, that's the thing that's amazing.

00:03:59.900 So John Boyd, he is one of the greatest military strategists in the history of the world.

00:04:05.980 And some people have called him that, like he's up there with Sun Tzu.

00:04:09.200 But not a lot of people know about him.

00:04:12.420 So for our listeners who aren't familiar with John Boyd, could you outline his career and

00:04:17.820 his significant accomplishments?

00:04:19.320 He was probably the greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu.

00:04:26.740 He wrote an energy maneuverability study he developed that changed aviation forever.

00:04:33.600 He wrote an aerial attack study that changed the way every air force in the world fights.

00:04:39.080 And Patterns of Conflict, which was his final work, was probably the most influential briefing

00:04:44.940 ever to come from a military mind.

00:04:46.840 But the thing you have to remember about Boyd is, even though what I wrote was a military

00:04:51.660 biography, that Boyd's work transcends the military.

00:04:55.660 His work has been embraced by academia.

00:04:58.280 He's taught in MBA programs all over the country.

00:05:02.500 First responders, police officers, fire departments all read about him.

00:05:07.140 Homeland Security is in the process right now, developing a – using Boyd's OODA loop to

00:05:13.900 try to fight cyberterrorism.

00:05:18.120 Almost 20 years after Boyd's death, there are conferences every year about his work.

00:05:23.000 It's far beyond the military, and it's approaching universal today.

00:05:29.460 In any area of conflict, you can use Boyd's teachings.

00:05:33.420 Excellent, and he also had a – played a significant role in the development of new fighter jets, correct?

00:05:41.220 He was the father of the F-15 and the F-16.

00:05:46.100 The F-15 has never been defeated in air-air combat, and the F-16, before the Air Force

00:05:53.200 added a lot of heavy weight to it, was one of the finest fighter aircraft ever built.

00:05:58.500 So, yeah, and he was behind the scenes in building the A-10.

00:06:01.880 So, yeah, he built – was responsible for three of America's frontline aircraft back

00:06:07.360 in the 70s, 80s.

00:06:08.880 Okay, and we'll talk a little bit more about sort of his troubles getting what he wanted

00:06:14.100 in a plane a bit later.

00:06:16.460 You mentioned the OODA loop, and we've written about that before on the site.

00:06:22.240 So, OODA loop, for those who don't know, stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

00:06:27.680 I know you're not an expert on the OODA loop, but can you just talk a little bit like what

00:06:33.740 it is, and do you think a lot of people – you talk about how a lot of people are using it,

00:06:37.820 but do you think a lot of people misunderstand what Boyd had in mind for the OODA loop?

00:06:42.660 Let me back up just a little bit and say that when Boyd and Chuck Spinney, who was working

00:06:47.400 with Boyd, developed the OODA loop, they almost did not release what they had found because

00:06:53.960 the OODA loop can be so powerful.

00:06:57.020 It's virtually omnipotent.

00:06:58.460 If you truly understand the power of it and know how to put it into play, and they were

00:07:03.360 afraid that some bad things could happen if this were made public.

00:07:08.900 But the good news about all this is that so few people understand it, and even fewer

00:07:14.220 know how to put it into practice.

00:07:16.660 But it's, as you mentioned, just observe, orient, decide, and act.

00:07:21.620 And where most people go wrong, two things.

00:07:24.140 They underestimate the importance of the orientation phase.

00:07:30.520 That's a nonlinear feedback system.

00:07:33.020 It's sort of a pathway to the unknown.

00:07:35.620 And once you truly know a lot about whatever your area is, when you develop what Boyd calls

00:07:43.040 finger spitzing fuel, it's a German word meaning a fingertip feel for something, you can skip

00:07:49.520 the orientation and the decision phase, and you can look at something and make an immediate

00:07:54.880 decision if you have the fingertip feel for the situation.

00:07:59.280 And what you'll usually do is the least expected action, which is always better than the most

00:08:05.160 effective action, because your enemy or opponent can figure out what's most effective, just

00:08:10.400 like you can.

00:08:11.120 But what they can't figure out is the least expected action.

00:08:15.460 And by doing that, you create confusion and ambiguity, and your opponent is sort of lost

00:08:22.520 in the fog of war.

00:08:23.720 And when he stumbles out the other side, he's way behind where you are in the time cycle.

00:08:30.660 Interesting.

00:08:31.240 Because I don't know if that makes sense or not.

00:08:32.660 It makes sense.

00:08:33.360 It makes perfect sense.

00:08:34.460 And I think a big part of the OODA loop is, you talked about this in an email, it's not

00:08:38.760 quickness, it's you just want to control the, it's not fast, you want to be quick or like

00:08:43.300 control the tempo.

00:08:44.400 Yeah, yeah, quick is more important than fast.

00:08:46.800 If you get inside the tempo and act quicker than your opponent is, and he's always behind.

00:08:52.780 And it doesn't matter whether you're playing tennis or you're in a combat situation, it doesn't

00:08:58.260 matter whether it's a corporate takeover or any area, a tennis match, any area of conflict, you

00:09:06.760 can use this principle.

00:09:09.080 Fascinating.

00:09:09.480 And I think, why is it that more people don't know about John Boyd or that he was behind

00:09:15.280 a lot of this, these really amazing theories about strategy and how to deal with ambiguity?

00:09:22.700 He was a very prolific, he put out a lot of presentations, but it seems like there's not

00:09:28.160 a lot out there that he wrote specifically.

00:09:30.060 I mean, there's like just a few papers or that he wrote.

00:09:34.020 Yeah, the military culture is an oral culture and most of his work came in briefings and

00:09:40.160 he only wrote a couple of things in his life and therefore there's nothing for academics

00:09:45.420 to pour over and therefore he's been ignored by academics.

00:09:50.860 His greatest legacy is a couple of briefings, but there's a website called Slightly East of

00:09:58.120 New.

00:09:58.580 It's run by Dr. Chad Richards, who was one of Boyd's close friends and it's got a lot

00:10:03.700 of articles on there about Boyd and all of Boyd's work is on there, including the Patterns

00:10:08.600 of Conflict Briefing.

00:10:10.340 Excellent.

00:10:11.740 So John Boyd, to say the least, was an interesting character.

00:10:18.160 Very brilliant, but he also had a lot of these idiosyncrasies about him.

00:10:22.400 And when I was reading your biography, I laughed out loud at some of these confrontations he

00:10:29.980 had or just some of these little glitches he had that was part of his personality.

00:10:35.040 Can you talk about what some of his idiosyncrasies were and were there any stories in particular

00:10:39.180 that stuck out in his life where his personality clashed with others?

00:10:44.080 Well, let me list some of his better-known characteristics.

00:10:48.140 He was ill-mannered.

00:10:49.480 He was unkempt, loud, opinionated, intolerant of anybody who disagreed with him.

00:10:56.420 He had the table manners of a five-year-old.

00:10:59.520 He was profane, one of the most profane men you'll ever meet, abrasive. 0.71

00:11:04.740 He was a terrible father and a worse husband.

00:11:07.040 He had a habit of chewing on the quick of his fingers, and when he started working out with 0.95

00:11:13.460 the weights, the calluses on his hand, he would chew on those and spit them out during

00:11:17.320 meetings, which was sort of disconcerting to other people in the room.

00:11:21.620 He smoked cigars, and several times we'd get so engrossed in the conversation, he would

00:11:27.200 stick his cigar into the tie or the shirt of the person he was talking with.

00:11:31.980 After he retired, he was 48 years old, and he looked like a homeless person after that.

00:11:38.900 He kept his glasses in an old sock.

00:11:42.280 He drove a rattle trap of a car.

00:11:44.600 He said only two kinds of people can be truly independent, and that's those who have unlimited

00:11:49.620 resources and those who have no resources, because if you have no resources, people can't

00:11:57.980 oppress you or do anything to bend you to their will, and you're as independent as someone

00:12:05.100 who's quite wealthy.

00:12:08.580 And Boyd was, when he worked in his later years as an unpaid Pentagon consultant, he wore these

00:12:17.120 old bandline flare-bottomed pants and a shirt that was tatty, and he truly looked like a homeless

00:12:23.620 person, but he was one of those men who wanted to get as close to the truth as possible, and

00:12:29.820 that was the only thing in his life that mattered.

00:12:32.420 There is no absolute truth, but he came closer than most people to finding it, and he saw himself

00:12:38.440 as an outsider, as a man of virtue who was babbling superiors who were devoid of virtue.

00:12:45.080 And going back to having a cause, it's something I think every man, especially young men, want

00:12:50.800 is a cause, and those of us who can find a cause are fortunate indeed, and Boyd found

00:12:58.060 a cause and didn't care about all the other stuff.

00:13:02.920 He was, one definition of genius is the ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion

00:13:08.600 of all others, and Boyd concentrated about 100% on his work.

00:13:14.180 He ignored his family.

00:13:15.080 He was, he was terrible, he was embarrassing to his friends, the way he ignored his family,

00:13:21.760 but, you know, not everybody can make that sort of trade-off, but, but Boyd did, and his

00:13:28.080 work, work lives on.

00:13:30.160 As I read your biography, I was trying to think, what was driving Boyd?

00:13:33.240 Was it just like he wanted the truth?

00:13:34.940 Like, was it for country?

00:13:36.340 Was it for, I mean, it wasn't for money, obviously.

00:13:38.380 He could have made a lot of money being a consultant.

00:13:40.220 Right.

00:13:40.940 And doing lectures and the sort.

00:13:44.100 But was it patriotism, or was it just like he just wanted to figure this thing out?

00:13:47.800 That was it.

00:13:49.020 Well, it started out, he went into the military to be a fighter pilot, and all of his work,

00:13:54.260 everything, flowed from what he learned as a fighter pilot in Korea in the early 50s,

00:13:59.920 flying an F-86 Sabrejet, which had a 10 to 1 victory ratio over the MiG, and the MiG in

00:14:06.160 many ways was a superior aircraft.

00:14:09.140 So when you work for Uncle Sam, especially in the military, you've got virtually unlimited

00:14:14.640 resources.

00:14:15.740 And Boyd could not have done several of the things that he did, the energy maneuverability

00:14:21.360 study, the fighter aviation survey.

00:14:25.740 Had he not been in the military, I mean, how can you strap a computer in the back of a fighter

00:14:31.640 jet to test the principles of the energy maneuverability theory?

00:14:35.800 A civilian simply couldn't do that.

00:14:38.520 So a lot of Boyd's engineering kind of work, if you will, was done while he was in the military.

00:14:44.760 And he had a fiduciary responsibility as a rather senior officer in the Pentagon.

00:14:52.860 And he did not like the culture of the Pentagon and created a lot of confusion and discord among

00:15:02.560 defense contractors.

00:15:03.940 But his greatest legacy, his intellectual war, came after he retired.

00:15:09.280 He was in his 50s when he developed patterns of conflict in the interlude.

00:15:14.440 So, yes, talk about the culture of the Pentagon, when Boyd eventually ended up working in the

00:15:21.480 Pentagon.

00:15:22.680 Can you describe what the culture was at the time?

00:15:25.920 Because it seems like it was, you know, he described, he's kind of talking about like

00:15:29.740 sort of a lot of butt kissing and backstabbing, infighting, and that Boyd really wanted to

00:15:35.280 change that.

00:15:35.940 Well, he tried to change it, but it's even worse today than it was when Boyd was there.

00:15:44.380 People outside the military think of the Pentagon as a place where all these patriots are building

00:15:51.280 weapons to defend America.

00:15:53.360 And there are great patriots, in principle, men and women who work in the Pentagon.

00:15:58.420 But the fundamental purpose of the military, industrial, political complex is not about

00:16:05.380 protecting America.

00:16:06.420 It's about funneling money to defense contractors. 0.73

00:16:09.980 The Pentagon's books have not been audited in decades.

00:16:13.680 It's for the simple reasons they deliberately made the books so complicated, no one can figure

00:16:19.320 them out.

00:16:19.920 There's so much money involved in so many—the F-35, for instance, the joint strike fighter that's

00:16:25.800 being developed now has hundreds of subcontractors, and they're in most congressional districts

00:16:32.280 in every state in the union.

00:16:34.160 And the constituents of the congressmen and the senators there want to keep those jobs.

00:16:40.020 So this horribly expensive airplane, for which there is no threat in the—they're trying

00:16:46.580 to kill the A-10 to make room in the budget for the F-35.

00:16:53.740 It's a corrupt, venal, terrible institution, and most people think of it as—they're there

00:17:03.940 to help us and protect us, and they're not.

00:17:06.780 And many of the two- and three-star generals who retire, something like 70 percent go to work

00:17:11.920 for defense contractors when they retire.

00:17:14.440 They're going to work for the same people that they have regulated or whose projects

00:17:18.780 they have controlled as two- and three-star generals. 0.66

00:17:22.440 It's a venal, corrupt system.

00:17:27.040 Yeah.

00:17:27.240 You describe in the book that one of the things that Boyd would do—he kind of used the OODA

00:17:32.580 loop within the Pentagon, I feel like, some of the things that he was theorizing at the

00:17:38.260 time to sort of create discord and confusion, and you called it like a—you called it like

00:17:43.380 he would—he called it a cape job, right, whenever he pulled the wool over someone's

00:17:48.160 eyes within the Pentagon?

00:17:49.900 Well, a cape job was when he—for instance, when he was delivering the briefings on the

00:17:55.240 energy maneuverability study, and he was confronted during the briefing, and someone tried to diminish

00:18:04.440 his work and say, this has all been done, and he would say, okay, tell me your source for that.

00:18:09.800 He used other people's words and information against them, which is devastating if you can do it.

00:18:16.100 And he would ask the person to tell me the source for that.

00:18:19.180 Where did you get this information?

00:18:21.060 You tell me who did this work before, and if you're correct, I'll step aside.

00:18:25.140 And, of course, nobody had done the work before.

00:18:27.040 So Boyd said that by asking leading questions like that, he was holding out a cape, and the

00:18:33.860 bull charged and went headlong over the cliff, and he was a master of that technique.

00:18:39.740 So I guess the question is, like, why—Boyd seemed like someone who didn't really fit in

00:18:45.440 with hierarchy.

00:18:46.180 And I guess it was that whole fighter pilot mentality.

00:18:49.880 It seems like that was sort of the culture amongst fighter pilots at the time, and I guess

00:18:53.240 still today, but, you know, in a military, it's very hierarchical, very structured.

00:18:59.980 Why did he stick around instead of pursuing civilian work?

00:19:03.880 And did he ever think about pursuing civilian work?

00:19:05.320 I mean, did he ever have those moments, like, I'm just done with this.

00:19:07.200 I want to go do something else?

00:19:10.040 Yeah, he made a couple of feints at retiring, but what he was doing was too important for the

00:19:14.660 country, and he knew that, and he stayed, and he knew he would never be promoted beyond

00:19:20.240 colonel.

00:19:20.940 If you look at the awards he won and his contributions to the military, a few people in military history

00:19:28.320 have contributed as much as he did, but he worked outside the system.

00:19:33.000 He stood up and was recognized as an opponent to a lot of senior officers, so his career

00:19:39.800 came to an end.

00:19:40.740 The irony here is—and I've discussed this with Air Force Academy people—and they say

00:19:46.460 that all the service academies do this, they teach their cadets and their students to be

00:19:52.100 principled people and people of honor, to always do the right thing.

00:19:55.840 But what they don't teach them is that when they stand up and be like Boyd, that there's

00:20:00.620 a price to pay.

00:20:02.040 When you do the right thing, there's always a price to pay.

00:20:05.180 And many of these young officers who graduated and were fans of Boyd find out to their utter

00:20:12.140 dismay that their careers have gotten sidetracked by doing what they thought was the right thing.

00:20:17.640 You know, something we haven't talked about is Boyd's career as a fighter pilot, and before

00:20:25.080 he got into all the energy maneuverability theory and the OODA loop, but he was actually

00:20:30.900 one of the best fighter pilots in the history of the Air Force.

00:20:34.380 They called him 42nd Boyd or 22nd Boyd?

00:20:36.760 Yeah, that was in the 60s after he came back from Korea.

00:20:41.440 And when you look at his career, you can't connect the dots until you look back.

00:20:45.920 And when you look back at his career, you can see the stepping stones and how he developed

00:20:51.380 and evolved always in an upward fashion.

00:20:54.020 And when he came back from Korea, he just had a passion about trying to figure out why the

00:21:02.900 F-86 had such a high victory ratio when it was an inferior aircraft, and he would put

00:21:09.060 all that to play as an instructor in what was then called a fighter weapons school at

00:21:14.280 Mellon's Air Force Base near Las Vegas.

00:21:17.940 And he had a standing offer to let any student, and these are the best fighter pilots in the

00:21:25.020 Air Force who come out to the fighter weapons school, he would put them on his tail in the

00:21:29.320 six o'clock position, and guaranteed that in 40 seconds, he could reverse their positions

00:21:36.060 and be on their tail.

00:21:37.560 And he did it by a rather drastic maneuver that nobody else had the courage to emulate.

00:21:44.120 And he won every one of those engagements.

00:21:47.940 Wow.

00:21:48.620 And whenever you get up behind someone, you'd say, guns, guns, guns.

00:21:51.880 That's like...

00:21:52.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:53.480 Because you need something like three seconds saying guns, guns, guns.

00:21:56.940 It's equivalent to 16 films of gun camera film, which is considered enough for a kill.

00:22:03.600 And just as a student was getting ready to hose him, he would reverse positions, and he

00:22:09.940 would be on their six screaming, guns, guns, guns.

00:22:13.020 Yeah.

00:22:13.520 I think there's a few instances where he did that to, like, planes who weren't even involved

00:22:17.160 in training.

00:22:18.300 He would just, like, sneak up behind them and just scare the crap out of them.

00:22:22.620 The one was a B-52 landing at Eglin.

00:22:25.680 And those, back in the day, the B-52s flew these long 10-, 12-, 14-hour missions.

00:22:31.980 And this guy was coming in to land, and he was in the landing pattern, and these guys

00:22:35.940 were exhausted.

00:22:36.780 They wanted to just go through the debriefing and go home and sleep for two days.

00:22:41.360 And, boy, it makes a head-on pass at the B-52 and rolls inverted right in front of it

00:22:46.440 and goes under it.

00:22:47.780 He was so close, they could count the rivets on his belly, and he was screaming, guns, guns,

00:22:52.660 guns.

00:22:53.020 And the aircraft commander got really upset and was just raising cane over the radio.

00:22:59.020 And Boyd decided he needed another lesson about what amazing people fighter pilots were.

00:23:05.340 So he made an attack from the side, a deflection attack, and came right across the cockpit.

00:23:10.540 And he got grounded because of that, but the B-52 pilots learned a little bit more about

00:23:18.980 fighter pilots.

00:23:22.100 I found this amazing.

00:23:23.760 Despite his contributions to military strategy, and particularly to designing new generations

00:23:29.740 of war planes and just basically revolutionizing air combat, when Boyd died, there was no member

00:23:37.080 of the Air Force that attended his funeral.

00:23:41.360 Do they claim him?

00:23:42.720 But in fact, it was filled with Marines.

00:23:45.860 But can you explain, like, why were Marines, like, and kind of went there to honor, pay respects

00:23:52.100 to Boyd if the Air Force didn't?

00:23:53.420 Let me back up again to when the book came out.

00:23:58.040 The venom toward me and toward the book from the Air Force was just startling.

00:24:03.160 I never expected that.

00:24:04.400 But Chuck Spinney, one of Boyd's friends, still worked in the Pentagon at the time.

00:24:09.980 And he called and said, you better stand by for some incoming fire thereafter.

00:24:15.120 He said two full colonels in the Air Force had been assigned the job of debunking the book.

00:24:21.540 And they didn't have much luck with that.

00:24:24.580 But there was also a professor over at the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, who

00:24:31.600 is the only person to write a really mean, nasty, critical review about the Boyd book.

00:24:37.280 And today, even today, they hide Boyd material at the Air War College because they think these

00:24:43.940 young majors and lieutenant colonels will have their minds poisoned by a reading board.

00:24:49.920 And at the Air Force Academy, they have what they call a class exemplar for each class.

00:24:56.460 And this is to pick someone who is a role model of what these young cadets want to be in their

00:25:03.160 careers.

00:25:03.880 And four or five times, the senior class has tried to pick Boyd as the exemplar.

00:25:09.640 In every instance, senior officers have stopped them from doing that.

00:25:13.660 And so even today, here's a story about that.

00:25:18.800 I wrote another military biography about a Colonel Bud Day, who's the most highly decorated officer

00:25:25.500 and a great story about his being a POW in Vietnam.

00:25:29.140 And I was at a reunion of pilots.

00:25:32.680 And the chief of staff of the Air Force was there.

00:25:35.400 And he came over and he said, thank you for writing the Bud Day book.

00:25:39.120 The Air Force needs to recognize his heroes.

00:25:43.080 And I said, well, why don't you recognize John Boyd?

00:25:45.780 And he spun on his heels and walked away.

00:25:49.280 Even today, the Air Force refuses to give him the institutional recognition he deserves.

00:25:57.140 And I get emails from young officers two or three times a week.

00:26:01.500 And they've read the book and they said, well, when we get to be senior officers, we're going

00:26:05.220 to change that.

00:26:05.800 We're going to recognize Boyd.

00:26:08.640 And what they don't understand is that they will never be really senior officers until

00:26:13.680 they drink the Kool-Aid.

00:26:14.920 And that means they're not going to recognize Boyd.

00:26:17.940 So I'm not sure the Air Force will ever honor and recognize Boyd.

00:26:23.440 And that's OK.

00:26:24.980 The Army's recognizing him.

00:26:26.580 But the Marine Corps, most of all, because the Marine Corps is always fighting for its

00:26:30.380 severe existence.

00:26:31.300 And they're always looking for something new and something innovative.

00:26:35.560 They really led stone to Boyd's ideas.

00:26:38.800 And because of him, the Marine Corps changed the whole way it went to war because of Boyd.

00:26:43.720 And he's today is one of the iconic figures in the Marine Corps.

00:26:48.520 An Air Force pilot who's recognized as a great military theorist by the Marine Corps, which

00:26:55.480 is, if you know military culture, that's impossible to grasp.

00:27:00.400 Yeah.

00:27:00.520 And I think he said at his funeral, there was actually, like at his burial, they, the Marines

00:27:05.980 did something that they don't, they only do for Marines, but they did it for John Boyd.

00:27:09.220 And one of the Marine colonel, a highly decorated combat officer, took the Eagle Globe and anchor,

00:27:15.520 which is the insignia of the Marine Corps, and put it on the urn at Boyd's funeral.

00:27:23.120 And that's unprecedented.

00:27:25.540 It's rarely done at the funerals of Marines.

00:27:28.020 And to do it for a retired Air Force colonel, there's no precedent for that.

00:27:32.700 But the Marines love John Boyd.

00:27:35.240 Yeah, because I guess they went on in the first desert storm in the 90s.

00:27:43.720 They used a lot of Boyd strategies to basically take down Kuwait, like in a few days, right? 0.97

00:27:50.620 Or take back Kuwait. 0.86

00:27:52.240 Boyd had retired by then, but Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense, had been a young

00:27:57.460 congressman when Boyd first started working on his ideas.

00:28:00.940 And as a congressman, had been to a number of Boyd's briefings, and he knew Boyd and liked

00:28:07.080 him and had a pretty good understanding of his work.

00:28:11.180 And when he was Secretary of Defense and Schwarzkopf was beating his chest and pounding and jumping

00:28:16.180 up and down, Cheney called Boyd out of retirement and brought him to Washington.

00:28:21.900 And they talked about how to conduct warfare.

00:28:26.300 And that left hook and the feint by the Marines, the whole battle plan came from John Boyd.

00:28:33.820 And when Cheney was vice president and I was working on the book, I made arrangements.

00:28:39.880 To my surprise, he took about 15 or 20 minutes to talk to me about Boyd.

00:28:44.820 And he was open in his acknowledgement of Boyd's contributions to him as Secretary of Defense.

00:28:53.400 So Boyd would famously tell the young men he mentored something all the time.

00:28:59.700 It's a phrase that sticks out to me, that stuck out to me even in the book.

00:29:04.320 And it was that you can either be somebody or you can do something.

00:29:09.960 What did John Boyd mean by that?

00:29:12.020 Brad, you picked out the one part of the book that probably has drawn the single greatest response.

00:29:19.200 I would say most of the emails I get from men, and 95% of my emails about the book are from men.

00:29:27.120 The thing that most of them glom onto is the to be or to do speech.

00:29:31.540 And in essence, he would take a young officer and he would say that in life there's a roll call

00:29:37.640 and you have to decide what you want to do.

00:29:40.240 And he would point off to one side and say, if you want to be somebody, you can go that way.

00:29:46.780 Your friends will like you and you'll get good assignments and promoted faster and your career will be good.

00:29:53.280 But at the end of the day, end of your career, the end of your life, you might wonder what the hell it was all about.

00:30:00.100 And then he would point the other way and say, if you want to do something, you can go this way.

00:30:04.720 And you will not be popular and you may not get promoted and you won't get good assignments.

00:30:09.180 But you will have done something for yourself, for your branch of the service, and for the country.

00:30:15.920 And he said, every man comes to a fork in the road and you have to decide if you want to be somebody or to do something.

00:30:24.320 And which way do you want to go?

00:30:26.360 And when I was writing, I didn't realize the impact of that.

00:30:32.960 But again, you picked out the single part of the book that most people respond to.

00:30:40.060 Yeah, it's a really powerful, powerful speech.

00:30:44.560 It's convicting, is what it is.

00:30:46.820 What did you personally learn about being a man, whatever that means to you, from studying Boyd's life and writing about it?

00:31:01.260 Let me respond on two levels.

00:31:04.040 Professionally, Boyd changed my life.

00:31:08.640 As I said, my career was sort of bottomed out when I wrote that book.

00:31:14.300 But when the publisher got the book, he sent me a contract for two more books, a two-book contract.

00:31:20.540 And it stipulated that each book be a military biography.

00:31:25.060 And I never planned on this.

00:31:26.780 I didn't see myself writing military biographies.

00:31:30.660 And I went back and reread Boyd to try to figure out, you know, what was it about him that made the publisher want two more books about military people?

00:31:40.540 And I think we've talked about how Boyd loved the truth.

00:31:44.900 He was a man of commitment and passion and principle.

00:31:48.940 He was somebody who wanted to do something.

00:31:51.920 And, Brett, the irony is that my heroes have always been men of conviction, men of belief, men who sacrificed for their beliefs, who suffered.

00:32:02.420 Sir Thomas More has always been a great hero of mine.

00:32:05.780 And so was St. Gregory, who spent years in jail for his beliefs, and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was jailed and later killed by the Nazis.

00:32:15.480 These are my heroes.

00:32:16.380 And then I wind up writing books about people who manifest those same characteristics.

00:32:25.460 So Colonel Bud Day, who was a subject of my second book, was a POW in Vietnam.

00:32:33.380 And there's a chapter in that book I still can't read without weeping.

00:32:36.960 And it's the chapter when Bud was being tortured.

00:32:40.420 And they were going to kill him.

00:32:42.840 And he would have died for his beliefs.

00:32:45.280 And what gets me is it would have been so easy for him to stop the torture.

00:32:50.020 All he had to do was to sign a paper saying he thought the war in Vietnam was unfair, unjust.

00:32:57.660 And everybody in America was saying that.

00:32:59.680 The attorney general of the United States said it was an unjust war.

00:33:03.780 Half the members of Congress were saying that.

00:33:06.480 And that great exemplar of all things good and noble, Jane Fonda, was saying the same.

00:33:11.620 Everybody was saying that.

00:33:12.700 But Colonel Day was a serving officer in the hands of the enemy in a time of war.

00:33:18.620 And he did not have that luxury.

00:33:20.240 And he would have died before he had broken his oath.

00:33:24.060 And then the next book, finding a subject is always the hardest part of what I do.

00:33:28.420 And the next book was about Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, Brut Krulak.

00:33:33.760 And the essence of his life is that he was a three-star general about to receive his fourth star and become commandant of the Marine Corps.

00:33:43.360 And of his own volition, and that's a crucial thing, he went to the White House of his own volition.

00:33:49.740 He was the only senior officer in the military during that long war in Vietnam who went to the White House and confronted President Johnson over the prosecution of the war.

00:34:00.400 And he said, you're doing this wrong, and unless you change everything you're doing, you're going to lose the war, and you're going to lose the next election.

00:34:10.680 And Johnson was so annoyed, he stood up and put his hand in the small of Krulak's back and physically pushed him out of the Oval Office.

00:34:19.900 And Brut Krulak, because of being a man of principle, did not get his fourth star.

00:34:25.180 He did not become commandant of the Marine Corps.

00:34:27.340 His life's dream was gone because he acted on principle.

00:34:33.240 And that's how he's remembered today.

00:34:35.280 And I don't think Lyndon Johnson is remembered by history in the same light.

00:34:40.020 So moving on to a personal thing, what Boyd taught me about being a man,

00:34:47.400 that I saw in these, first in Boyd and then in Colonel Day and then General Krulak, the same attributes,

00:34:57.140 the devotion to duty, commitment, never making an excuse, doing the job no matter the cost.

00:35:04.620 My dad spent 31 years in the Army, and he and I didn't get along.

00:35:08.580 And for most of my life, I was running from everything he represented.

00:35:14.220 But when I started 50 years after my dad died, writing about military people,

00:35:21.420 I realized my dad had the same virtues, qualities, attributes that these people had that I was writing about.

00:35:28.680 I was writing about my dad, and late in life, I realized I had rejected a rather priceless gift from my father.

00:35:40.880 And I got right with him on that.

00:35:43.840 I visit him in the cemetery every time I go home and we have a talk.

00:35:47.500 And so I have learned both, Boyd turned my life around professionally and enabled me to a much higher level of understanding,

00:35:58.080 not only about my dad, but about military people in general.

00:36:01.000 So Boyd changed my life.

00:36:04.500 All right.

00:36:04.800 Well, Robert Corum, thank you so much for your time.

00:36:07.320 This has been an absolute pleasure.

00:36:09.540 You're welcome.

00:36:10.840 Our guest today was Robert Corum.

00:36:12.200 He's the author of the book, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.

00:36:16.300 He's also written a whole bunch of other books as well.

00:36:18.320 You can find all of those on Amazon.com.

00:36:20.420 Highly recommend you pick up the Boyd biography.

00:36:22.200 Super interesting.

00:36:23.440 You also find out more about Robert's work at robertcorum.com.

00:36:27.680 That's Corum with a C.

00:36:31.200 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:36:34.900 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:36:40.300 And again, I really appreciate your feedback on the podcast.

00:36:42.560 If you can give it a rating on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it is you use to listen to the podcast, we listen to that.

00:36:48.220 I've been trying to improve the sound quality on that, some of the balance.

00:36:51.880 I've had a lot of complaints about that.

00:36:53.680 I think we're getting there.

00:36:55.060 I'll also let you know what I'm doing.

00:36:56.680 I've bought some equipment that will make recording telephone interviews much better and sound better.

00:37:02.600 Because I know there's been a few complaints about that as well.

00:37:05.560 Hopefully we'll get that fixed.

00:37:06.740 We're always trying to improve the podcast, so your feedback is welcome.

00:37:09.480 And also, I'd love for you to go to the post that we publish the podcast on, on Art of Manliness,

00:37:14.660 and leave a comment about the podcast and also suggestions for future podcast episodes.

00:37:20.160 Who do you like me to interview?

00:37:21.160 I like to interview people, not just have me blather.

00:37:24.160 So if you have anybody you'd like me to talk to and reach out, let me know.

00:37:26.620 I'd really appreciate that.

00:37:28.260 Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

00:37:32.060 I'll see you next time.

The Art of Manliness - February 12, 2015

#101： The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War With Robert Coram

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