They Passed Him Over for General Because He Cursed in Front of the Wrong People. Twenty-Nine Years After His Death, the Pentagon Is Quietly Borrowing His Strategy to Defeat Iran.

The greatest fighter pilot in American history never made general, never made money, and died in 1997. His war plan is on the President's desk this week.

Wait. Hold on. Before we get into Boyd, I must tell you something. Not about him. About us. Five minutes. Then we'll get to the fighter pilot.

The Capital Mischief Founding Member Who Held the U.S. Speedreading Record for Thirty Years Tells Me, in Person, “I Can’t Keep Up.”

He set the U.S. speedreading record at 4,000 words a minute. It stood for thirty years. He held it because no one could touch him, including me, and I am not exactly slow. This week he looked me in the eye and surrendered.

Folks. We have a situation. And before I tell you what it is, I need you to know one thing about me, because the story doesn’t make sense without it.

Reading fast with high retention is one of my superpowers.

I’m not bragging. I’m establishing facts.

The average adult reads 250 words a minute. I trained at the Air Force Academy and clocked 120 words a minute on a typewriter, which sounds normal until you remember nobody else was even close. And I went after the U.S. speedreading record in college.

I hit 3,825 words a minute.

That is roughly fifteen times the speed of an average reader. That is faster than any commercial pilot will ever read a checklist. That is faster than most people think.

It wasn’t enough.

He hit 4,000.

One hundred seventy-five words a minute separated us. That is two-thirds of a printed page. He read two-thirds of a page more than I did, every single minute, with the same comprehension threshold.

Over a thirty-minute test, that is twenty additional pages he covered while still answering the questions correctly.

He beat me. I went home.

And he held that record for thirty years.

The U.S. champion read at four thousand. And before you tell me speedreading is a joke, understand how it works. You don’t just read fast. You take a comprehension test afterwards and you have to score at least ninety percent. Or you’re disqualified.

So this kid, in college, read sixteen times faster than the rest of America and passed an oral exam on it. The record stood for THIRTY YEARS.

Then a British woman named Anne Jones broke it in 2007, on the night the last Harry Potter came out. She walked into a bookstore at midnight, got a copy of Deathly Hallows, and read all 199,797 words in forty-seven minutes.

Then she stood in front of reporters and summarized the entire plot. 4,251 words per minute. Beat the U.S. record by 251 words a minute on a Saturday night while everyone else was waiting for the wizard kid to die.

Six-time World Champion. The only person on planet Earth who reads faster than the man who beat me.

That guy. The American. The one whose record only Anne Jones could touch. Is a Founding Member of Capital Mischief.

And this week, sitting across from me, he looked me in the eye and told me he cannot keep up.

The man who beat me by 175 words a minute. In college. Defeated. By me. Forty years later. With a Substack.

With a SUBSTACK, folks.

They should put me on a watchlist. The universe is finally evening the score.

And it gets better.

Because the people who DON’T read, the ones who said “I will let the robot do it while I drive my Lexus around Boca,” THOSE people are also having a meltdown.

Substack’s audio robot has been malfunctioning all week. It cuts out. It skips paragraphs. It pronounces “Khamenei” like it learned English from a German tourist at Frankfurt airport.

And these guys are emailing me. As if I’m in a server farm with a wrench.

Take it up with the robot, Steve. I cannot help you.

So we’ve got the champion, defeated. The robot, dying. And then we’ve got today.

Today is, and I am not exaggerating, one of the most cursed days in the American calendar.

Half the country is in Omaha.

OMAHA. They flew there voluntarily. This is the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, also known as the Woodstock of Capitalism. Forty thousand people in a hockey arena to watch Greg Abel give his first speech as CEO since Warren Buffett retired.

Warren is ninety-five. He’s been eating McDonald’s for breakfast since the Carter administration.

These pilgrims flew to Nebraska to watch the Canadian accountant take over.

I lived in Omaha. I’m not kidding.

I worked at Strategic Air Command as an intelligence officer, plotting B-52 routes into China in the event of a nuclear war. Specifically, routes that wouldn’t get the bombers shot down by surface-to-air missiles before they delivered the payload.

That was my reason for being in Nebraska.

Forty thousand of you are flying there to listen to a guy from Edmonton talk about insurance float.

I don’t know what to tell you.

But here’s what I will tell you, because it’s relevant.

You think the Woodstock of Capitalism in Omaha and the Run for the Roses in Louisville are two different events. They’re not.

They are the same event in different costumes. And the man who wrote the playbook that connects them is the same man who handed over the keys four months ago.

Long before Warren Buffett became the world’s greatest value investor, he was an eleven-year-old kid in Omaha, hammering on a Royal typewriter, selling tip sheets called Stable Boy Selections for a quarter outside Ak-Sar-Ben racetrack.

Ak-Sar-Ben. Nebraska spelled backward.

The kind of wordplay that counted as clever in 1941.

Little Warren and a buddy ran the operation until the track bosses got wise and ran the kids off.

But here’s the part that matters. Buffett wasn’t betting on horses. He was betting on information. He was eleven years old and he was already a tiny human Bloomberg terminal.

He had a side hustle called “stooping.” He’d dig through the sawdust and cigarette butts on the floor of the track, looking for discarded place and show tickets that nervous bettors had thrown away thinking only the winners paid.

That’s the entire cigar-butt investment philosophy in one sentence. Eleven years old. On a track floor. In Nebraska.

He noticed two kinds of bettors at Ak-Sar-Ben. Speed handicappers, who bet purely on fastest times. Class handicappers, who favored horses that had been tested against stronger fields.

Berkshire Hathaway today is a blend of both. Robust fundamentals. Proven resilience against tough competition. Strong horses. Strong fields.

The framework that runs the largest insurance and energy conglomerate in the United States was field-tested by a sixth-grader on a track floor in Nebraska in 1941.

Last year I proved it still works.

I called MarketWatch. Sister publication to the Wall Street Journal. Owned by Dow Jones. They’re in San Francisco.

Which is its own situation, I’m not even gonna get into it.

I said: I want to tell five million MarketWatch readers in my “Street Sense” column what horse to bet on. Morning of the Derby. Using Warren Buffett’s rules.

Silence on the line.

Then this voice goes, “Charlie. We’re a financial news organization.”

I said, “Yeah. And I’m telling you a financial story. About a horse. The horse is the asset.”

More silence.

I said it slow. “The horse... I’m picking to show... is named... Journalism.“

Quiet on the line.

The horse. In the Kentucky Derby. Is named Journalism.

And I am pitching a column. To a journalism outlet. About using Buffett’s rules. To bet. On a horse. Named Journalism.

I looked up at the ceiling. I said, “Lord. I’m an old man trying to make a living. I’m writing an honest column for honest people. And you setting me up like I’m a mark in my own story.”

The Lord didn’t answer. The Lord just sits up there and watches.

And then I look back down at my notes.

The other horse I’m picking. Sitting right there in my own handwriting.

Sovereignty.

I said, “Lord. Now you’re showing off.”

Because I write about two things in this life. Journalism. And sovereignty. Who reports the story. Who controls the country. That’s the whole job.

That’s what I do every Monday and every Wednesday. And the Kentucky Derby, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, decided to put both of them in the same race.

On the same day. So I could bet on them. With Warren Buffett’s rules.

This is what God does to you in your sixties, man. He doesn’t strike you down. No.

He just plants little jokes only you can hear, and He sits back and waits to see if you walk into them. Then I walked into both of them.

Then the lawyers got on.

The lawyers in San Francisco have therapists for their therapists. One of them, I swear to God, asked me had I considered the karmic implications of telling people to bet money.

The KARMIC implications. On horses named Journalism and Sovereignty.

They said it wasn’t kosher.

In SAN FRANCISCO. THESE people are telling ME what’s kosher.

They argued for days.

Meanwhile the horse, in Kentucky, is in a barn eating oats, not knowing a Pacific Heights attorney named Bradley is reviewing his life choices.

But finally, FINALLY, they let it fly.

So on the morning of the race, MarketWatch’s readers, all five million of them, woke up to a column from me titled “How Warren Buffett went from picking horses to picking stocks.”

My allocation was 50%, 30%, 10%, 10%, 5%, 5%. The editors did not print this part.

They explained that publishing specific position sizes on horses crossed the line from financial commentary into a tip sheet, which is, in the editorial vocabulary of MarketWatch, the gravest of sins. Not journalism.

Which is unfortunate, because the position sizes were the whole point.

I broke a $100 bet into six tickets. Two show tickets on the top two. Journalism, the 3-1 favorite, at fifty percent. Sovereignty, the 5-1 second choice, at thirty percent.

Both Buffett-style margin-of-safety bets. They didn’t need to win.

They just needed to come in no worse than third.

Then four win tickets on longshots. Ten, ten, five, and five. Lottery tickets.

Total downside on the longshot bucket capped at thirty bucks. Buffett did the same thing as a kid in the trash on the floor of Ak-Sar-Ben. The cigar butts. Most paid nothing. Some paid enough to cover the rest.

Sloppy track. Relentless rain. Tenth time in 151 Derby’s.

Journalism came in second.

Sovereignty came in first.

Every $100 ticket came back $176.

One reader. One guy. Bets ten thousand dollars. Walks out with seventeen-six.

Two minutes.

He wrote me a letter. HANDWRITTEN. Like a love letter. Told me what he did with the seventy-six hundred.

I’m not telling you what he did with it. That’s between him and the Lord.

Note: The lawyers in San Francisco didn’t write me to thank me. They were in a sound bath. Probably arguing about whether oxygen was kosher.

The Derby and the annual meeting are the same cult with different liquor.

Both are run on a framework an eleven-year-old built by digging through trash on a Nebraska track floor.

The OTHER half of the country is in Louisville right now.

Wearing hats the size of satellite dishes. Drinking bourbon at nine in the morning. Betting on a horse named LITMUS TEST.

There is a horse in this race named Further Ado.

Bob Baffert is there, again, because horse racing is a cartel run by sixteen families in Kentucky and what are you gonna do about it.

This is America on May 2, 2026.

Hats and bourbon, balance sheets and bourbon, bourbon bourbon bourbon.

And in the middle of all this, my readers are supposed to sit down and read seven thousand words about Iran.

I love you guys. I’m trying.

So this week. Mercy. One book. Down from three.

A length even the champion can clear. A length even the robot might survive.

Seven thousand words.

A Saturday Library you can read between the third mint julep and the moment Greg Abel says the word “synergy” and your father-in-law has a panic attack.

But let me tell you something, because I love you and I’m not going to lie to you.

The train doesn’t stop, folks. It never stopped. It’s not going to stop.

The world keeps moving and the people who fell behind one Saturday in May because they were too busy in a hat in Kentucky are still trying to catch up in 2031 and they’re going to die confused.

I’m slowing down for one stop. I’m not parking the train. Don’t get cute with me.

Catch up this week. I made it easy on purpose.

I won’t always.

A profane, broke fighter pilot from Erie defeated every challenger in 40 seconds, designed the F-16 by stealing computer time, set fire to a general’s necktie, and wrote the plan for the second wave against Iran thirty years before it happened.

He’s been dead since 1997.

Sometime in the next several days, the President of the United States will sit in the Situation Room and decide whether to launch the second wave against Iran.

The first wave was clean. Khamenei dead in his compound.

Air defenses gutted before the air defenses understood they were being gutted. Six thousand sorties, Iran’s missile production “functionally destroyed,” three carrier strike groups parked in CENTCOM, and a Strait of Hormuz so thoroughly mined the Iranians can’t even leave their own driveway.

A ceasefire holds. Then expires. Then is extended again because Tehran cannot produce a counterproposal coherent enough to sign.

Iran is, in the language of military theory, in a degraded decision cycle.

Their loop has slowed.

Ours, perhaps, has not.

That last sentence is the entire intellectual estate of a man who died of cancer in West Palm Beach twenty-nine years ago. He never made general.

He lived in apartments his colleagues called ghettos.

Two of his five children grew up shadowed by depression. He once burned a hole in a senior officer’s necktie with a lit cigar, on purpose, to make a point about a procurement decision.

He is in the room with the President this week.

He is in the room whether the President knows it or not.

His name is John Boyd, and Iran should be more afraid of his ghost than of our Tomahawks.

The Patron Saint of Loud Profanity

Most Americans have never heard of him. There are reasons for this, and most of them involve the United States Air Force, which would prefer you didn’t.

Some remember him as the greatest American fighter pilot who ever lived. From a position of complete disadvantage, with the enemy already on his six and locked for a kill, he could flip the engagement and kill the other guy in under forty seconds. He had a standing forty-dollar wager on it for years. He retired with the bet undefeated.

Some remember him as the father of the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the two most successful fighter aircraft in history, both of which are flying combat sorties for our side over Iran this morning.

Some remember him as the most influential military theorist since Sun Tzu, a man whose strategic ideas are now stitched into the fighting doctrine of every serious army on earth.

They know about a third of the story.

Boyd, more than any other person, saved fighter aviation from the bomber generals. His tactics manual changed how every air force in the world flies and fights.

He invented a physics-based theory of fighter design that made the Soviets obsolete.

He built, almost single-handedly, the modern theory of how the United States Marine Corps wages war. And then, having done all of that, he taught the Pentagon how to win the Gulf War.

The Pentagon, in return, passed him over for promotion to general.

He didn’t care. He was that most American of heroes.

He was a rebel who didn’t give a damn about his reputation or his fortune. He gave a damn about his country.

That’s the short version. The long version is funnier, sadder, and considerably more useful if you’re trying to figure out what the President should do next.

A Boyhood Best Described as Character-Building

He was born January 23, 1927, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the fourth of five children. His father Hubert was a paper-company sales executive. His mother Elsie was a strict German Presbyterian who had married a Catholic and was prepared, when necessary, to argue with God about it.

The Boyds were comfortable.

They stayed comfortable until John’s third birthday.

On that day in January 1930, Hubert dropped dead of pneumonia.

The Boyds went from being one of Erie’s nicer families to a widow with five kids and a Great Depression closing in. Elsie was forty-one.

She refused to let the social workers take her children to an orphanage, which was the era’s preferred solution to her problem.

She took in laundry. She ran small businesses out of the house. She watched the pennies. And she watched as the neighborhood, with the polite cruelty of small-town America, crossed the street to avoid them.

The street-crossing got worse when John’s youngest sister Ann contracted polio.

This was the late 1930s. Nobody understood polio. The neighbors believed it was contagious through air, water, and proximity. They were wrong about the science. They were not wrong about how they treated the Boyd kids. The family was, in effect, quarantined and ostracized at the same time.

You can read the rest of John Boyd’s life in this paragraph. He grew up watching the strong abandon the weak. He grew up understanding that institutions, including neighborhoods and schools and churches, will let you down when it costs them anything to do otherwise. He grew up with a contempt for respectability that he never lost.

And he grew up watching exactly one person, his mother, refuse to compromise an inch on what she owed her children.

He spent the rest of his life behaving like Elsie Boyd.

He was good in the water. At Strong Vincent High School he starred in swimming and water polo, took second in the state, and worked summers as a lifeguard at Presque Isle Beach. He commuted to the peninsula by rowing across the bay or, when he didn’t feel like rowing, by swimming it.

He learned a lesson in the water he would later articulate as a strategic principle.

It is more effective to do something correctly with less energy than to do it poorly with more.

The first hint of efficiency as strategy. Already there in a teenager doing scissor-kicks across Erie Bay.

He enlisted in the Army Air Forces in October 1944, while still a junior in high school. He wanted to fly. He arrived too late for the war.

What he got instead was Japan in winter.

The First Court-Martial (Not the Last)

Sergeant Boyd, age nineteen, was assigned to a unit of “mud soldiers” doing occupation duty in northern Japan in the winter of 1945-46. Low-ranking enlisted men. Billeted in tents in the snow.

The officers, in keeping with the United States Army’s century-old commitment to comfortable officers, had warm wooden quarters.

The wood was on the wrong side of the camp.

The men were freezing.

Boyd led the inevitable revolt. The mud soldiers chopped down a wooden hangar and burned the lumber for heat.

The Army, being the Army, court-martialed him for destroying government property.

Boyd, being Boyd, did something the Army hadn’t seen coming. He didn’t plead. He didn’t beg for leniency. He turned the courtroom into a referendum on the leadership of his unit. He argued, more or less, that the real failure was not his decision to burn the hangar but his officers’ indifference to whether their troops froze to death.

The officers lost.

The troops got hot chow.

And the United States military got its first look at the man it would spend the next half-century failing to understand.

He came home, took the GI Bill to the University of Iowa, met his wife Mary Bruce, joined ROTC because he needed twenty-seven dollars a month, and was commissioned into the newly created United States Air Force in 1951.

By March 1953 he was over MiG Alley.

Forty Seconds, Forty Bucks, Zero Losses

He flew twenty-two combat missions in the F-86 Sabre. He was a wingman. He never fired his guns. The armistice came before he became a flight lead, which is to say, before he became a shooter.

He left Korea without a kill.

He left Korea with an obsession.

He had noticed something nobody else had quite articulated. The American F-86 and the Soviet MiG-15 were roughly comparable airplanes, but the Americans were running up a kill ratio of about ten to one.

American pilots were better trained, sure. But Boyd, who was already pulling planes apart in his head, sensed there was more.

The F-86 had hydraulic flight controls. The MiG had cable-and-pulley. The F-86 had a bubble canopy. The MiG didn’t.

So the F-86 pilot could observe more, decide faster, and act sooner than his Soviet-trained adversary, even when the airframes were essentially a wash.

This is, although Boyd did not yet have the vocabulary, the first sketch of the OODA loop.

The Air Force, having too many fighter pilots after Korea, was about to ship Boyd off to a bomber wing or a maintenance depot. Boyd, in characteristic style, screamed and threw a fit and demanded special treatment, and somehow ended up at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, at the Fighter Weapons School.

This was the original Top Gun, before Top Gun.

Boyd graduated at the top of his class. They invited him to stay as an instructor. He became Director of Academics. He set out to do for fighter tactics what Newton had done for falling apples.

The bet was forty bucks.

Any challenger could meet him over a designated patch of Nevada sky. The challenger started in maximum advantage: directly behind him, on his six, locked for a kill. Boyd had forty seconds to flip the engagement and put the other man in his gunsight. If he failed, he paid forty dollars.

He never failed.

The bet ran for years against students, instructors, visiting Navy pilots, foreign exchange officers, anybody who was willing to put the money up.

They started calling him Forty-Second Boyd.

In 1960, having decided his successors at the Fighter Weapons School should not have to figure all this out from scratch, he wrote down everything he knew. He called the document the Aerial Attack Study.

It was the first systematic, scientific treatment of air-to-air combat ever produced.

The Air Force classified it immediately, then made it official doctrine, then watched as every other air force in the world found a way to read it and adopted it as their own.

Pilots climbing into Iranian-built drones and Saudi F-15s today are, whether they know it or not, students of John Boyd.

The Air Force did not promote him. He was a lieutenant colonel, working a desk in Florida, with a degree in economics and no engineering credential.

That was the next problem.

How to Steal an IBM 704

The Air Force, having identified Boyd as a man with an unusual mind, made the predictable mistake. They sent him to Georgia Tech to get a second degree, this one in industrial engineering, presumably so he would calm down.

He came back in 1962 with the degree and a worse case of intellectual restlessness.

They posted him to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, where the Air Force tested bombs.

Eglin was not where you went to design airplanes. Airplane design happened in Dayton, at Wright-Patterson, the Mecca of American aeronautical engineering.

Eglin was the redneck cousin.

At Eglin, Major Boyd met a civilian mathematician named Thomas Christie. Christie controlled the calendar for the IBM 704 mainframe, which is what people used in 1962 when they wanted to do millions of calculations and didn’t have a few decades to do them by hand.

Boyd had an idea.

He thought he could express the performance of any fighter aircraft, in any flight condition, as a single mathematical relationship between thrust, drag, weight, and velocity.

He thought he could plot this relationship across the entire performance envelope of an aircraft and produce a topographical map showing where the airplane was strong and where it was weak.

He thought, finally, that you could overlay one plane’s map on another’s and see, instantly, at any altitude and any airspeed, which one was the predator and which one was the prey.

He called it Energy-Maneuverability Theory. Or E-M.

This was a beautiful idea.

It was also, on the strict procedural rules of the United States Air Force, an idea Major Boyd had no business pursuing. Eglin tested bombs. Aircraft design happened in Ohio. Computer time was expensive and rationed.

The civilian who controlled the calendar said no.

So Boyd, with Christie’s quiet help, simply stole the time. He worked nights. He filed his calculations under whatever existing project numbers Christie could provide cover for. He ran his theory across hundreds, then thousands, then by some accounts millions of calculations.

He produced his maps.

He compared the F-100, the F-105, the F-4, the MiG-21, the MiG-19. He found, to his alarm, that the United States was building airplanes that lost the maps. The American fighters of the early 1960s were big, heavy, cluttered. The Soviet fighters were small, light, agile.

In many regimes of altitude and airspeed, the MiG was the predator.

Eventually somebody noticed the mainframe was being used for something nobody could account for. The Inspector General came down to investigate. The bureaucracy mobilized to crush the man who had stolen its electricity.

What happened instead was what Boyd called a cape job.

He invited the inspectors in. He hung a slide. He delivered a briefing of such alarming clarity that, by the end, the IG was no longer investigating him. He was congratulating him.

The Air Force, faced with a finished theory it could not refute, did what bureaucracies do.

It pretended it had liked the idea all along.

They gave Boyd the Air Force Systems Command Scientific Achievement Award. Then the Air Force Research and Development Award for Aeronautical Engineering. Then they classified E-M Theory.

When it was eventually declassified, it became the world standard for fighter aircraft design.

Every modern fighter, including the F-22 and the F-35, is built using calculations that descend in a direct genetic line from the ones a major was running, in the middle of the night, on a stolen mainframe in Florida, while his wife and five kids slept in a small house on his major’s pay.

That is the man.

The Fighter Mafia (A Conspiracy in the National Interest)

In 1966 the Air Force suddenly needed Boyd. The F-X program, which was supposed to produce a new fighter to counter the alarmingly maneuverable Soviet MiG-25, had become a disaster. The proposed airplane was too heavy, too expensive, too complicated, and too slow in the regimes where actual air combat happens.

Boyd’s deployment orders to Vietnam were canceled.

He was forty years old, a major in a building full of generals, and he behaved as if he owned the place.

He paced.

He shouted.

He took meetings with two-stars and treated them like undergraduates.

He smoked cigars constantly, even in the era when the Pentagon still permitted it, and used the lit ends as pointers.

He fixed the F-X.

The airplane became the F-15 Eagle. It entered service in 1972. In fifty-plus years and dozens of conflicts, it has never been shot down in air-to-air combat. It is the airplane the Israelis and Saudis flew in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury on February 28th. It established air superiority over Iran inside twelve hours.

Boyd was not satisfied. The Eagle, he thought, was still too big and too expensive.

He wanted an Air Force of small, simple, lethal daggers.

Together with Colonel Everest Riccioni and a brilliant Whiz Kid civilian named Pierre Sprey, he formed an underground advocacy group inside the Pentagon. They called themselves the Fighter Mafia.

They wore the name like a private joke.

They worked nights and weekends and pre-dawn mornings to push the Air Force toward what they called a Lightweight Fighter, a stripped-down clear-weather knife of an airplane that would, in Boyd’s evocative phrase, “fly up its own asshole and hose MiGs all day.”

The Lightweight Fighter program was the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

It first flew in 1974.

It is still in production fifty-two years later.

There are roughly forty-five hundred F-16s in service across the world’s air forces. They are flying combat sorties this week over Lebanon and Iran. The Ukrainians fly them. The Pakistanis fly them. The Greeks fly them. The Egyptians fly them. The Israelis fly them.

Every one of them is, in some sense, a piece of John Boyd, lifted off a runway and flown into a war.

The way Boyd got the F-16 built is one of the great unauthorized acts in the history of American defense procurement.

He bypassed nearly every formal step of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System.

He rigged the program so that two prototypes were bought at fixed cost, with most specifications left to the contractor.

He used personal back-channels to two successive Secretaries of Defense.

When James Schlesinger asked him for an honest assessment of the new Soviet Backfire bomber that was driving the SALT arms-control negotiations, Boyd told him the Backfire was “a piece of shit, a glorified F-111.”

The arms negotiations adjusted accordingly.

Through all of this, Boyd refused to leverage his position for personal gain. The major contractors offered him senior jobs at six-figure salaries. He turned them all down.

When he finally retired in 1975, after the Air Force had passed him over for general because he had personally offended every man in the building who could promote him, he stayed on at the Pentagon as a consultant.

He insisted on being paid as little as the rules permitted.

He told Mary, more than once, that there were only two ways for a man to be free. He could amass great wealth, which Boyd had no interest in doing.

Or he could reduce his needs to zero, so that there was nothing anyone could take from him and nothing anyone could do to hurt him.

He chose the second.

The family lived in a small apartment in Crystal City, near the Pentagon, well below their means. The wallpaper peeled. The carpets were thin.

His friends called him the Ghetto Colonel.

He answered to it.

The Cigar That Burned a Pentagon Necktie

There are a thousand Boyd stories. Two will do.

He once cornered a general at a briefing, started poking the man’s sternum with a lit cigar to emphasize a procurement point, and burned a hole straight through the general’s necktie.

He once made a different general literally foam at the mouth and slide out of his chair during a phone call.

His friends, on his birthday, gave him garden hoses. This was a joke at the Pentagon’s expense. Boyd’s verb for what he did to bad ideas, and to the generals who carried them, was to hose.

He hosed for a living.

Secretaries got reduced to tears by his profanity. His wife and children watched him neglect his birthdays and miss his anniversaries.

He worked seven days a week. He read three hundred and twenty-three books in retirement, by his Acolytes’ count, and called those Acolytes at three in the morning when he had finished one and wanted to talk about it.

He was, in the words of his Acolyte Jim Burton, “the most intense man I’ve ever met or known.”

Half the people who worked with him think he was a genius and a saint.

The other half think he was a difficult bastard.

Both halves are right.

To Be or To Do, You Pencil-Necked Bureaucrat

The most important thing John Boyd ever said to anyone, he said in private, in conversation, to a young officer on the rise.

The young officer was usually being asked to do something risky inside the Pentagon. Something that would almost certainly delay or destroy his career. Boyd would call him into his office, or out for coffee, and start with the same line.

Tiger. He called all of them Tiger.

Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road.

He would raise his hand and point in one direction.

If you go that way, you can be somebody. You will get the assignments. You will get the promotions. You will get the stars on your shoulder. You will be a member of the club. But you will have to make compromises. You will have to turn your back on your friends. And in the end, you will be one more general nobody remembers.

He would point in the other direction.

Or you can go that way. And you can do something. Something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you go that way, you may not get promoted. You will not be a member of the club. You will have to fight for everything. But Tiger, you will be able to look in the mirror.

He would lower his hand.

To be somebody, or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. You’re going to have to make a decision. Which way will you go?

It was Boyd’s catechism. The Tiger Speech is the philosophical foundation of the entire Reform Movement that grew up around him.

His Acolytes paid the price he warned them about.

Chuck Spinney was investigated and sidelined. Jim Burton was nearly cashiered. Sprey was permanently exiled from the polite circles of the defense establishment. Ray Leopold, who got the speech first, never made full colonel inside the Air Force.

None of them ever got a star.

None of them ever cared.

323 Books and a Six-Hour Briefing

After Boyd retired in 1975, he disappeared into his books.

He read three hundred and twenty-three of them, and that’s just what his Acolytes counted. He read Sun Tzu repeatedly.

Sun Tzu was the only theorist Boyd never found a fundamental flaw in.

He read Carl von Clausewitz repeatedly and found four.

He read Jomini, Genghis Khan’s biographers, Belisarius’s biographers, Hannibal’s biographers, Miyamoto Musashi, Mao on guerrilla war, Heinz Guderian on the Blitzkrieg, T.E. Lawrence on the Arab Revolt, Liddell Hart on the indirect approach.

He read Kurt Gödel on the limits of formal systems. He read Werner Heisenberg on the limits of measurement. He read Claude Shannon on information theory. He read Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures. He read W. Edwards Deming on industrial quality control.

He read for ten and twelve hours a day.

He synthesized.

What came out the other end of this autodidact’s seminar was a body of work so important he refused to publish it as a book. He didn’t trust books. Books, he thought, became dogma the moment they were bound.

So he gave briefings.

The master briefing was called Patterns of Conflict. It started at ninety minutes. By the late 1970s it was four hours. By the mid-1980s, six.

He would give it to anyone with the patience to sit through it, but only on his terms. No abridged version. No slides without the man.

You sat in the chair. And you took it.

The architecture is a survey of the entire history of warfare from Sun Tzu through Vietnam, looking for what Boyd called the invariants. What had worked across two and a half thousand years of armed conflict? What had been true in 400 B.C. that was still true at Stalingrad, at Inchon, at Khe Sanh, and would still be true tomorrow?

His answer, when stripped to the bone:

The side which generates and exploits more uncertainty than the other side, faster, wins.

Not the side with more men. Not the side with more steel. Not even necessarily the side with the better cause.

The side which can observe what is happening, orient itself to that observation, decide what to do, and then act on that decision more rapidly than its opponent can will, sooner or later, induce in its opponent a state of psychological and organizational paralysis.

The opponent will, in Boyd’s deliberate language, unravel.

He will lose cohesion. He will lose trust in his own command. His units will stop believing their orders. He will begin to make decisions that bear no relationship to the situation he is in, because he no longer understands the situation he is in.

He will, eventually, collapse from within.

This is the OODA loop.

Boyd was not telling generals to speed up. He was telling them to create change faster than the enemy could absorb.

“All I have to do is be faster than my adversary,” he liked to say. “I can be slow as long as I slow him down even more.”

He named the deeper thing he was after moral conflict.

By moral he did not mean ethical, although ethics were never far from his mind. He meant the cohesion of the bond between leaders and their men, between governments and their peoples, between an army and the cause it believes it serves.

The strongest force in war, Boyd argued, is shared trust.

The most decisive blow you can land on an adversary is to fracture his trust. In his commanders. In his comrades. In his cause.

Once that trust is gone, the enemy does not need to be defeated.

He defeats himself.

He stops fighting. He surrenders. Or he runs. Or he quietly stops obeying orders and goes home.

Read that paragraph again. Now read the news from Tehran.

An Air Force Pilot Becomes an Honorary Marine

In January 1980 Boyd was invited to deliver Patterns of Conflict at the Marine Corps’ Amphibious Warfare School in Quantico.

The instructor of record was a young Marine named Michael Wyly. Wyly had been wounded twice in Vietnam and was, like many of the smarter junior officers in his service, deeply troubled by what he had seen there.

The Marines, in Vietnam, had fought the way they always fought. Advance in line. Trade bodies for terrain.

Wyly had spent the years since looking for an alternative.

Boyd gave Wyly the briefing.

Wyly recognized, immediately, that he had found what he was looking for.

What followed is one of the great institutional conversions in American military history.

By 1989, with the support of Marine Commandant Alfred M. Gray, the new doctrine was codified in Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1: Warfighting, drafted by Captain John Schmitt with Boyd’s direct collaboration.

The Marines, the most tradition-bound and sentimental of the four services, became the first American fighting force to make Boyd’s ideas official scripture.

They never looked back.

Warfighting is still in print. Every Marine officer in the United States today has read it. It is, in everything but name, John Boyd’s book.

The Air Force, which Boyd had served for thirty years, continued to ignore him.

This is the supreme irony of his life.

The man who designed the F-15 and the F-16 went to his grave with no real institutional memorial in the United States Air Force.

There is a small building at Nellis named for him, and a road at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama called the OODA Loop. That is approximately the entire honor.

Meanwhile, in Quantico, the Marines keep his papers in their Research Center. The Marines invite his Acolytes to lecture at their service schools.

The Marines, the moment Boyd died in 1997, called Mary Boyd within forty-eight hours and asked permission to take all of the colonel’s books and notebooks and briefing slides home.

The deepest joke about John Boyd is that he was an Air Force pilot who became an honorary Marine.

Cheney Makes a Phone Call

In 1981 a junior congressman from Wyoming sat through Patterns of Conflict.

The congressman’s name was Richard B. Cheney. He was a former White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford. He was on his way to becoming Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, and then the most consequential vice president in modern American history.

He sat through the four-hour version.

He kept the slides.

He didn’t forget.

In late 1990, Cheney was the Secretary of Defense and the Bush administration was preparing to evict Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. The original plan, drafted under General Norman Schwarzkopf, was a head-on assault into the teeth of the Iraqi defenses.

Cheney looked at the plan and didn’t like it.

He picked up the phone and called Florida.

Boyd, by then, had moved to Delray Beach to be near better medical care. The cancer was already gnawing at him. He was sixty-three. He was officially out of government.

Cheney called him and asked him to come back.

Boyd came back.

What he and his Acolytes contributed to the Desert Storm planning is, even now, a matter of dispute, because the Pentagon is institutionally allergic to crediting retired colonels for victories. But the historical record is reasonably clear.

The plan that emerged from the autumn of 1990 was no longer a frontal assault. It was a deception layered on top of a flanking maneuver.

The Marines, on the coast, would feint a great amphibious landing into Kuwait, fixing the Iraqi army’s attention to the east. The Army’s heaviest formations would meanwhile sweep west into the open desert, then turn north, then turn east again.

The Left Hook.

After thirty-eight days of air war, the ground war lasted one hundred hours. The Iraqi army did not so much fight as dissolve. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers surrendered, often to news cameras, often without firing a shot.

A Pentagon spokesman, in a moment of accidental candor at the post-victory press conference, told the assembled reporters that “we kind of got inside his decision cycle.”

That was Boyd. Word for word.

Most journalists in the room had no idea what the spokesman was quoting. Boyd, a thousand miles south in his peeling apartment, would have known.

General Charles Krulak, then the Marine Corps Commandant, certainly knew. He sat down a few years later and wrote a letter to Inside the Pentagon in which he said:

“The Iraqi army collapsed morally and intellectually under the onslaught of American and Coalition forces. John Boyd was an architect of that victory as surely as if he’d commanded a fighter wing or a maneuver division in the desert.”

Krulak had not lost his mind.

He was telling the truth.

The Air Force Sent the Wrong General to the Funeral

He died of cancer on March 9, 1997, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was seventy years old.

His funeral was held on March 20 at Arlington National Cemetery. Section 60, Gravesite 3660.

The Air Force, his service of record, sent the band, the honor guard, and one three-star general who, by the testimony of those present, had no idea who Boyd was and was merely there because someone had told him to attend.

There were a few civilians, a small contingent of Navy and Army officers, and Boyd’s Acolytes, weeping openly.

And the Marines came.

They came in numbers that astonished the few Air Force people there. They came in dress blues. They came as a delegation.

After the casket was lowered, a senior Marine colonel knelt by the urn and laid down his Globe and Anchor, the most personal and sacred symbol a Marine carries.

There are no honorary Marines.

The title has to be earned.

The colonel, by laying down that pin, was saying, in the only way a Marine knows how, that John Boyd had earned it.

What Forty-Second Boyd Would Tell the President This Week

Which brings us back to where we started. The President. The second wave.

The Iranians, in a degraded decision cycle, unable to produce a coherent counterproposal, while three of our carrier strike groups float in CENTCOM and Witkoff and Kushner shuttle to Islamabad with a Pakistani prime minister and a Pakistani army chief brokering whatever a brokerage looks like in this kind of war.

Here is what John Boyd, dead twenty-nine years, would tell the President if you put him in the room with a cigar and a whiteboard.

He would tell him, loud, with feeling.

One. The question is not whether to launch the second wave. The question is whether you are still inside the adversary’s loop.

If you are, you don’t have to launch a second wave.

The first wave is still propagating. The Iranians are still trying to orient themselves to a world in which their Supreme Leader is dead, their air defenses are down, their missile production is broken, their proxies are diminished, and a third of Kharg Island has been precision-struck while the oil terminals were deliberately spared.

Their factions are at one another’s throats. The IRGC says one thing, the foreign ministry says another, the Supreme National Security Council says a third.

Their orientation is broken.

Every additional day of confusion is, for them, an additional day of moral disintegration.

Two. If you launch the second wave, launch it for the right reason.

The right reason is not to inflict more damage. The right reason is to keep them in paralysis. You launch when, and only when, the first wave’s effects are starting to fade and the adversary is starting to reorient.

Earlier than that, you waste ammo.

Later than that, you have already let him recover.

Boyd called this the rhythm of a fight.

Great commanders feel it the way great fighter pilots feel the airplane.

Three. The moral dimension is everything.

The hardest blow you can land on Tehran is not against Kharg.

It is against the trust binding the regime to its own people, the IRGC to its own conscripts, the Basij to its own commanders.

Every day the regime fails to deliver basic services, fails to retaliate effectively, fails to protect its own elites, fails to control its own borders, the bond fractures a little more.

Design every move, kinetic and diplomatic, to maximize the rate at which that bond fractures.

If a ceasefire deal can deliver that collapse, take the deal.

If a deal lets the regime reconsolidate, do not take the deal.

Boyd was indifferent to the optics of victory. He cared only about the substance.

Four. Do not fall in love with your own model.

This was his great lesson from his long argument with Clausewitz.

“If you think you’re just going to use Clausewitz as the lens filter to look at the problem, you’re going to make a horrible mistake. It’s a disaster. Because all you’ve told me is your thinking hasn’t proceeded beyond 1832, and a lot of things have happened since 1832.”

The Iranians are not the Iraqis of 1991.

They are not the Afghans of 2001.

They are not the North Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Wehrmacht, or the Persian Empire.

They are themselves.

Anyone in the Situation Room running the Iran problem through the 1991 playbook is asking to be ambushed.

Five. Machines do not fight wars. People do.

This was the line Boyd hammered into every audience that sat through Patterns of Conflict.

“Terrain does not fight wars. Machines don’t fight wars. People do it and they use their minds. So you better understand the people, because if you don’t understand them, you ain’t going to make it, period.”

Boyd would not be impressed by our Tomahawk inventory.

He would want to know whether we understand the seventy million Iranians watching their regime fail in real time, and whether we have done the imaginative work to address ourselves to them rather than to a regime that may already be dying on its own.

The Ghetto Colonel Is Still in the Room

Watch the daily traffic from Operation Epic Fury and try not to see his fingerprints.

The pre-dawn decapitation strike. The deliberate sparing of Kharg’s oil. The interlocking carrier deployments. The mining of the Strait.

The simultaneous pressure on the regime from outside and inside. The exploitation of factional fractures within the Iranian leadership.

The patient, almost cruel willingness to let the Iranians bleed inwardly while we negotiate at arm’s length through Pakistani intermediaries.

If you handed John Boyd the Operation Epic Fury planning order in 1985, he would have recognized it immediately.

He would have said, That’s mine.

He would have said it loudly.

He would have said it while waving a cigar at a general’s tie.

The Air Force he served has still not built him a real memorial.

The Marines who buried him still keep his papers in Quantico.

The Acolytes he taught are mostly in their seventies and eighties now. The OODA loop has become, for better and considerably worse, a corporate slogan you can hear in venture-capital pitches and management consulting decks.

It has been diluted. It has been misused. It has been reduced to be fast.

Boyd, if he had to listen to most of that, would walk out and slam the door.

But somewhere in the planning cells at CENTCOM, somewhere in the J-3 directorate of the Joint Staff, somewhere in the Tank when the Joint Chiefs assemble, somewhere in the Situation Room when the President has to choose, the real thing is still alive.

The real OODA loop. The real Patterns of Conflict. The real questions Boyd taught his Acolytes to ask.

Not how big is the package or how many sorties.

But where is the adversary’s mind right now and how do we stay one cycle ahead of him until he breaks.

Whatever the President decides about the second wave, that decision will be made inside the intellectual world Boyd built.

So will the future shape of the regime in Tehran. So will the shape of the Strait of Hormuz. So will the shape of the global oil price. So will the shape of every portfolio reading this.

The Ghetto Colonel is still with us.

He is in the room.

He is in every room.

He told his Acolytes, every one of them, that they would come to a fork in the road. He told them they would have to decide whether to be somebody or to do something. He told them most people choose the wrong fork.

He chose the right one.

He never made general. He never owned a nice car. He never made any real money. He never became a household name.

But the wars America fights now are wars he taught us how to fight. The airplanes we fly are airplanes he insisted we build. The doctrine our Marines die by is a doctrine he wrote, in everything but signature.

That is the lesson he leaves the rest of us, whether we are running a fighter wing, a portfolio, a newsletter, or a life.

The roll call comes.

You can spend your years polishing your reputation.

Or you can spend them doing the work, and let history sort out the rest.

History, as it usually does, has sorted out John Boyd.

It will sort out the second wave too.

My Derby Bet. Do Not Copy Me.

Folks. Today is the Kentucky Derby.

The one day a year America pretends it has aristocrats.

Women in hats the size of satellite dishes. Men in seersucker. Mint juleps served to people who normally complain their Starbucks is too sweet.

I love every second of it.

And I am betting on it.

Here is what I am doing with one hundred American dollars, which used to be worth something.

Thirty dollars to place on Further Ado.

Thirty dollars to place on Commandment.

Twenty dollars to show on Danon Bourbon.

Twenty dollars to show on Chief Wallabee.

Two place bets on the two Brad Cox horses, who between them have the highest speed figures in the field and came out of the two best prep races on the calendar.

Two show bets on the horses I think have the best chance of finishing third at prices that pay you for the risk.

Now about Danon Bourbon.

The horse is named after bourbon. And he is undefeated. Four for four.

You are telling me. On Kentucky Derby Day. With Old Pappy 23 in my hand and a Montecristo lit. That I should not bet the undefeated horse named after bourbon.

What am I, a Methodist?

The handicapping logic is there too. Tactical speed. Clean post. Japanese shipper the public is sleeping on.

But I want to be honest. If this horse were named Bourbon I would bet him. He is named Danon Bourbon. I am sending it.

Twenty to show on Chief Wallabee. Bill Mott trained last year's winner. Junior Alvarado rode him. The horse finished third in the Florida Derby behind Commandment by half a length. Adding blinkers today. The simplest bet on the program.

Now. The disclaimer.

Do not copy this bet. I am begging you.

I am a guy with opinions and a Substack.

I am not a financial advisor.

I am not your daddy.

The Kentucky Derby is twenty horses going a mile and a quarter at thirty-five miles an hour. Any one of them can step in a divot and finish twelfth.

Anyone who tells you they know what is going to happen is lying to you. Or to themselves. Or both.

Do your own homework. Bet what you can afford to lose. If you cannot afford to lose any of it, do not bet.

Watch the race. Drink the bourbon. Have a wonderful Saturday.

If I win, I am taking Cristina to dinner.

If I lose, I am writing a MarketWatch column about how the entire system is rigged, which it probably is, but in ways that have nothing to do with horse racing.

Either way I am back on tomorrow with “Dear Charlie #28”.

May the Mischief be with you.

Charlie

Three favors before you go.

Hit the ❤️. The algorithm is a slot machine and hearts are quarters.

Hit the 🔄 restack. Your friends are out there betting horses by name and color. Help them.

Hit 📤 share. Somebody in your network is staring at a program right now with no idea what they are doing. Be the friend who sends it.

Drop a comment below. I read every one and I reply. Half of what I know about this race I learned from readers. The other half I made up.

If you found value here, somebody in your network needs to see it. Pass it on. That is how this game works.

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