JOURNAL: The Ghost of Boyd Invoked

Secretary of Defense Gates invoked the late John Boyd in his recent battles with the Air Force brass over future funding. That's a good thing if he actually means it. More creativity across all the services is needed to meet future threats without bankrupting the treasury, especially within the Air Force (where I earned my wings). Time Magazine:

To the horror of some in the Air Force, Gates cited the late John Boyd, who attained the rank of Air Force colonel, as an example young officers should emulate. Gates called him "a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn character" who had to bulldoze his way through the Air Force hierarchy to launch the F-16 fighter, now regarded as perhaps the best value in the skies. Gates lionized Boyd for telling colleagues they could think in traditional Air Force ways that "will get you promoted and get good assignments," or do the right thing "and do something for your country, and for your Air Force, and for yourself." The Defense Secretary added that "an unconventional era of warfare requires unconventional thinkers." Gates made clear change won't be easy for the Air Force, whose key victories, he suggested, happened long ago. "The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago," he noted, "and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam."

Personally, I think that with a deep rethink of the future threat environment, the Air Force could become a decisive player in 21st Century conflicts.

Final thoughts: Unfortunately, that's not the direction we are going. Instead of unconventional thinking we get internally-focused IO (information ops/public diplomacy) and talking pointy heads. A better approach is to think of the public discourse over war and peace as an information marketplace. IF we do, we can use a lesson derived from the ongoing malfunction in the ~$400 Trillion shadow banking system. The lesson is: if you game the system too much, you can taint the market's price discovery mechanism (akin to the mechanism of finding common ground in the case of public discourse). If that happens, trust evaporates and the underlying systems the market controls will careen from failure to failure.

Comments

[zenpundit]

It would be exceedingly wise of the next president, regardless of party, to keep Gates on as SecDef. At least for a year, if not their first term.

The new POTUS, in the midst of a complex war, would hit the ground running on the thorniest FP problem, avoid a likely high voltage confirmation battle that would waste political capital and have an honest broker SecDef who puts the country and the longterm good of the military above his own career

[Duncan Kinder]

This sort of thing is not new. Billy Mitchell was actually court martialed because he advocated using airplanes to sink battleships.

[Scott]

The Air Force's current situation is not surprising considering that it has not faced a dangerous opponent in combat in more than thirty years. In a sense, the AF is a solution looking for a problem. Using B-1's for CAS in Afghanistan is a nifty reuse of a plane that was a failure for its design mission.