There is also the story of John Boyd

I wrote my thesis at King’s College London on the maverick Air Force officer and military strategist, John Boyd. So I was pleased to know that the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, held him up as a model of sorts to the cadets at the Air Force Academy recently:

“There is also the story of John Boyd – a brilliant, eccentric, stubborn, and frequently profane character who was the bane of the Air Force establishment for decades. As with [Billy] Mitchell, tact wasn’t Boyd’s strong suit – and he certainly shouldn’t be used as a model for military bearing or courtesy. After all, this is a guy who once lit a general on fire with his cigar.

“As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat and earned the nickname “40-second” Boyd for the time it took him to win a dogfight. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he developed the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant and a secretary of defense for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War.

“It strikes me that the significance of Mitchell, [Hap] Arnold, [Bernard] Schreiver, and Boyd and their travails was not that they were always right. What strikes me is that they had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed. They understood the implications of that change, and they pressed ahead in the face of incredibly fierce institutional resistance.”

Blue skies! – Dan Ford