Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Page A

whether or not they actually work. That the office exists at all owes a lot in inspiration to John Boyd, the air force colonel who had arrived at Task Force Alpha in the waning days of the Vietnam War, shot the wild dogs, and closed down the essentially futile multibillion-dollar operation. Returning from Southeast Asia, Boyd had begun extrapolating the lessons he had deduced from earlier experiences as a supremely successful fighter pilot into a general theory of conflict that would ultimately earn him the title of the American Sun Tzu, after the legendary Chinese strategist. At the core of his conclusions was the concept of the OODA (the acronym for observation, orientation, decision, and action) Loop, the repeating cycle through which each side in a conflict passes. In air combat, for example, pilots see an enemy, orient themselves (meaning they subconsciously process their observation based on prior combat experience, intelligence, training, etc.), decide what to do, act on that decision, observe the results of that action, and continue retracing the loop. History shows that those who could adapt to changing circumstances—the antagonists’ own maneuvers and countermaneuvers—by continually moving through this cycle faster than their adversaries would prevail. Thus Boyd discerned that the F-86 fighter he flew in the Korean War outfought Soviet MiGs because its bubble canopy allowed the pilot a more complete view, while the plane could also transition from one maneuver to another faster than a MiG (partly because its power-assisted controls were easier to shift quickly than the muscle-powered controls on the MiG).
    In applying his ideas to organizations, as opposed to one-man machines, Boyd found that the same principles applied and that the overarching need for rapid adaptability to changing circumstances had to be based on a system of command and control that was as simple and harmonious as possible. It was extremely dangerous for the higher commander to try to get involved in the rapid pace and details of the firefight and thereby lose his focus on and grasp of the overall battle. Above all, Boyd stressed the importance of the human, as opposed to the technological, factor in warfare. One of his favorite quotations was Napoleon’s: “In war, the moral is to the material as three is to one.”
    As we have seen in the examples of Task Force Alpha, the Gulf War, and Kosovo, the U.S. military believes very strongly indeed in material, the more complex and technically ambitious the better. Thus Boyd’s ideas as well as his emphasis on personal integrity were most certainly not in harmony with the prevailing ideology. Nevertheless, since he applied those ideas with great skill, not to say rigor (once causing a general literally to faint with rage in the course of a telephone discussion), in bureaucratic combat inside the Pentagon, he achieved considerable success in chosen objectives.
    Though highly unpopular in the commanding heights of the defense establishment, Boyd’s ideas had attracted a growing following in the military, especially among junior officers, as well as in the press and in Congress, giving rise in the late 1970s to what became known as the “military reform movement.” This alliance mounted serial campaigns against costly weapons programs of dubious utility, and the customs and practices of the weapons-buying culture that produced and nurtured them, exposing which involved revelations from whistle-blowers prepared, in many cases, to risk or sacrifice their careers for the greater good. For the most part these efforts were eventually defeated by entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex, but the movement, which for a time enjoyed potent support in Congress, did succeed in creating the post of Director, Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, mandated by law to test new weapons systems as a corrective to the services’ sorry record of buying systems that worked badly or not at all