Elusive Sword

SECOND EDITION
A Swift,
Elusive Sword
W H A T I F S U N T Z U A N D J O H N B O Y D
D I D A N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E R E V I E W ?
ch’i
cheng
CHESTER W. RICHARDS

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This study is a product of the Center for Defense Information’s new Military Reform
Project. The project’s goal is to regenerate vigorous debate over the uses, strategy,
doctrine, and forces of the U.S. military, and to address the deep institutional
problems currently vexing the military. The project intends to serve as a home for
military reformers, and its products are being designed as tools for expression of a
wide range of analysis and views. Interested parties are invited to contact the project
for further information: http://www.cdi.org/mrp/, Marcus Corbin,
mcorbin@cdi.org, 202-797-5282.
A draft of this study was discussed at a seminar held at the Center for Defense
Information on March 28, 2001. The author and CDI would like to thank the
attendees for their invaluable contributions and input. The study represents
the views of the author alone, not of the attendees nor the Department of
Defense or other organizations the attendees are affiliated with. Participants
included General Pat Garvey, NYNM, Charles A. Leader, Franklin C. Spinney,
Major Don Vandergriff, U.S.A., Colonel Michael Wyly, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), and
Major Chris Yunker, U.S.M.C. (Ret.). Thanks also go to Gen. Charles Krulak,
U.S.M.C. (Ret.), former Commandant of the Marine Corps, for reviewing the
manuscript and providing helpful comments. Again, the views in the final
product are those of the author.
The author would like to thank Marcus Corbin for his encouragement and
especially for the flash of creativity that envisioned Sun Tzu and Boyd ever
doing a national defense review and that led to this study. Special thanks to
Theresa Hitchens, Senior Advisor at the Center for Defense Information, for
editing the study.
To encourage the intellectual freedom of the staff, the Center for Defense
Information does not hold organizational positions on public policy issues.
The views expressed in CDI publications are those of the author.
Center for Defense Information
1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036-2109
© 2003 Center for Defense Information

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A Swift,
Elusive Sword
W H AT I F S U N T Z U A N D J O H N B O Y D
D I D A N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E R E V I E W ?
SECOND EDITION
CHESTER W. RICHARDS
Prepared for the Center for Defense Information
February 2003

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About the Author
Chet Richards was an associate of the late Col. John Boyd
from 1973 until Boyd’s death in 1997. He reviewed all of
Boyd’s major works and worked closely with him on apply-
ing the concepts of maneuver warfare to business. Dr.
Richards has consulted in this area since the early 1990s
and operates a web site devoted to making Boyd’s strategies
accessible to businesses: http://www.belisarius.com. He
holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and recently retired as a colo-
nel in the Air Force Reserve, where he was the Air Attaché
(Reserve) to Saudi Arabia.
Always moving, do not sit down, do not say “I have
done enough.” Keep on; see what else you can do
to raise the devil with the enemy.
— Gen. George Patton1

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Table of Contents
Foreword ................................................................................................ 5
Executive Summary ................................................................................. 9
Introduction ........................................................................................... 13
Sun Tzu and John Boyd .......................................................................... 17
Sun Tzu ............................................................................................. 17
Sun Tzu 101 .................................................................................. 18
Sun Tzu and Intelligence ............................................................... 19
John Boyd .......................................................................................... 20
Boyd and Intelligence .................................................................... 23
Role of Military Force ............................................................................ 25
Threats to U.S. National Security ....................................................... 26
Sun Tzu and Boyd on the Utility of Military Force ............................. 27
Contemporary Justifications for Military Forces ................................. 29
Military vis-à-vis Other Options ........................................................ 32
Peacekeeping ..................................................................................... 35
What Makes a Military Force “Effective”? ............................................. 37
Sun Tzu’s and Boyd’s Perspective ....................................................... 37
Boyd on Force Effectiveness ............................................................... 39
Cheng and Ch’i ................................................................................. 42
Other Concepts of Effectiveness ........................................................ 44
Creating Forces ...................................................................................... 49
Maneuver Warfare ............................................................................. 51
People Issues in Maneuver Warfare .................................................... 53
Cohesion ....................................................................................... 55
Training ........................................................................................ 56
Leadership .................................................................................... 57
The Officer Corps ......................................................................... 58
Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare ......................... 59
Force Structure Options ..................................................................... 61
Strike Forces .................................................................................. 64
Fire Support .................................................................................. 65
Strategic and Mobility Forces ........................................................ 67
Assessing Effectiveness .................................................................. 67
Intelligence .................................................................................... 69
Application: National Missile Defense (NMD) .................................. 71
Conclusions ........................................................................................... 75
Endnotes ................................................................................................ 77

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Foreword to the Second Edition
ASwift, Elusive Sword was published in July 2001. At that time,
“fourth generation warfare” (4GW) was an esoteric concept prac-
ticed in distant countries by bearded religious fanatics. The de-
fense budget bobbed along just below its Cold War average, which seemed
adequate given that the mighty Soviet Union had collapsed a decade before.
And “transformation” was the talk of Washington, D.C., driven by a cagey
Secretary of Defense who had the dual advantage of previous experience in
the job and of running complex high-tech companies for a generation since
he last looked out from the E-ring of the Pentagon.
Since then, nothing of substance has changed, and so I have not changed
the text of A Swift, Elusive Sword.
That a group of people willing to use whatever level of violence they thought
necessary was able to seize four civilian airliners and fly three of them into
buildings was riveting, but it did not lead to Islamic revolution in the Middle
East. Thugs have always been able to commit horrendous acts — it is what
society does to punish them and prevent or deter others that is important. So
far the verdict is mixed.
We easily threw out the existing government of Afghanistan, but then so
did the Soviets in 1979, and it is too early to know if we will fare any better
after the novelty wears off. The Taliban were certainly accessories to the 9/11
crime, but it appears now that a large fraction of the perpetrators — al Qaeda
— escaped. Most of the al Qaeda we caught in Afghanistan were jihadi
wannabes who, like John Walker Lindh, ended up as conventional troops
fighting against the Northern Alliance. As of this writing, nobody knows

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6 | A Swift, Elusive Sword
where Osama bin Laden and his hardcore followers are. What is worse, al
Qaeda is not the oldest, may not be the best organized, and is probably not
even the most dangerous of the violent groups targeting the West. It is not
even clear if it is a real “organization” or some type of loose federation that
provides financing and networking to operationally dispersed cells. Eighteen
months after September 11, 2001, we just don’t know.
With the sole exception of reinforcing cockpit doors, none of the changes
to our commercial air system would have bothered Mohammad Atta and his
associates in any way. They carried nothing illegal through airport security,
and they showed proper identification whenever asked. What did change,
and it changed over western Pennsylvania that very morning, was that it will
be much more difficult to take control of an airplane from a passive group of
passengers and flight crew. But this has nothing to do with the defense issues
in this book, other than to illustrate the strange nature of fourth generation
warfare. The communists got one thing right when they described what we
call the fourth generation as “people’s war.”
If you have not already read the seminal paper on the subject by Bill Lind,
LtCol GI Wilson (USMCR), COL Keith Nightengale (USA), COL Joseph
W. Sutton (USA), and Capt John Schmitt (USMC), I urge you to do so now.
You can find it, along with a wealth of other material on 4GW at http://
www.d-n-i.net/second_level/fourth_generation_warfare.htm.
One thing did appear to change, although we might question how viable
it ever was: transformation is dead. Donald Rumsfeld fought the good fight;
for this we must give him credit. For the first time since Dick Cheney held
the office, a secretary of defense succeeded in shutting down a major Cold
War era program, in this case the lumbering Crusader artillery system, which
could charitably be described as a weapon for second generation warfare.
And there transformation stopped. The American political system is lubri-
cated by pork, and nobody truly believes there will ever be another war
against a formidable adversary, so providing effective defense remains sec-
ondary to ensuring reelection.
Looking back, “transformation” the way it was defined was not going to
solve our defense problems. “Skipping a generation of weapons,” had it oc-
curred, would have starved the defense industries’ production base and in the
end swapped one brand of pork for another. True transformation doesn’t fo-
cus on weapons, the least important factor in combat effectiveness, but puts

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Foreword | 7
emphasis on people and ideas. This is well understood by those who have to
do the fighting. Adding to the growing literature on the people factor, Army
MAJ Don Vandergriff published the latest in his series on personnel man-
agement, The Path to Victory, in May 2002 (Presidio).
Are we closer to the quick striking force envisioned in A Swift, Elusive
Sword? You might think so, just looking at the hardware: The Army wants to
field Stryker wheeled fighting vehicles that would be much lighter than tanks,
and the Marines have programs underway to develop even more advanced
light armor. But the hardware wish list tells very little. We could conduct
operations as described in this book very well with the hardware we have
today. Our failure is a lack of ideas and enough people with the vision to
execute them.
As I am writing this, we are completing a months-long buildup of another
massive conventional army, said to eventually number 150,000 troops, for a
second round at the only person on the planet dumb enough to sit and watch
us do it, again. By the time you read this, you will know if we attacked and
how well our forces did. The question of whether such a strategy of tele-
graphing our intentions months in advance would work against anybody else
is still open. One suspects it would not impress John Boyd or Sun Tzu.
Finally, we seem to have lost ground in the arena of grand strategy, that is,
of ensuring the support of our allies and attracting the uncommitted to our
side, while building up our own internal cohesion and most important, isolat-
ing our adversaries. An effective grand strategy is essential for carrying out
the rapier-like operations advocated in this book. As of mid-February 2003,
we are receiving unqualified support largely from newly-minted allies in coun-
tries most Americans could not locate on a map, and whose devotion is, one
suspects, driven by as much by our money and hope of future assistance as by
the rightness of our cause.
Perhaps the only real change since mid-2001 is that John Boyd, the late
Air Force colonel whose ideas form the strategic framework for this book, is
finally beginning to receive some of the credit he deserved in life. At about
the same time this book appeared, Prof. Grant Hammond, chair of Strategy
and Technology at the Air War College, published The Mind of War
(Smithsonian Institution, May 2001), a quite readable summary of Boyd’s
career and exegesis of his ideas. One year later, Keith Hammonds wrote a
long piece on Boyd for managers and entrepreneurs entitled, logically, “Strat-

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8 | A Swift, Elusive Sword
egy of the Fighter Pilot,” (Fast Company, June 2002). Capping this spate of
posthumous recognition, novelist and journalist Robert Coram published a
magnificent biography of Boyd’s entire life, Boyd: the Fighter Pilot Who
Changed the Art of War, in November 2002 (Little, Brown). The two web
sites that promote Boyd’s strategy, www.belisarius.com and www.d-n-i.net,
draw roughly one million visitors per year.
Nothing that has happened in the last two years, however, changes the
primary conclusion of the book: that our defense strategy is unsustainable
fiscally and increasingly less effective militarily. Since the inauguration of the
new administration, we have swung from paying down the national debt to
adding to it in amounts not seen since the Reagan era. Much of this still goes
to buy weapons designed to defeat the Soviet Union and to provide forces that
seem to move in slow motion. In the meantime, more baby boomers (includ-
ing this one) are approaching retirement, and the non-military components
of national power — health, education, diplomacy, the strength of our
economy, the checks and balances that preserve our liberties, and respect for
and enforcement of the law — continue to erode.
Chet Richards
Atlanta, Georgia
February 2003

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