(08-20-2016, 02:48 AM)Vincent Massi Wrote: Ever since they were invented, tanks have been able to travel about as fast as automobiles. But if you send tanks ahead of ground troops, they can be destroyed by hidden soldiers with specialized weapons. If you send them on a raid behind enemy lines, they are easy targets for aircraft. The enemy can plant anti-tank mines, dig concealed pits for the tanks to fall into, and hide cannon to ambush the tanks. Obviously, you cannot send tanks into a heavily-fortified enemy city like Baghdad.
Fearing another Vietnam War, the US called John Boyd out of retirement for the war against Iraq. And Boyd found something everyone else had missed. Baghdad had well-build super-highways that could support tanks. Iraq had not mined its own highways. The US had complete control of the air. If tanks zoomed up the super-highways at 60 mph, they could raid Baghdad and then escape before the crumbling Iraqi defenses could respond.
And so...
Wow!, I already figured you had gone straight from the Hyles koolaide to the Boyd elixir after I read your OP in this thread. In virtually every post you have given him credit for single handedly saving all branches of the U.S. Military from both defeat and embarrassment in every engagement they have fought from Korea to Vietnam - Grenada and even Operation Desert Storm.
But I had no idea your infatuation with the man would lead you to believe he could rise from the dead to lead American forces to victory in yet
another war.
One that wasn't even envisioned until 4 years after his death and didn't start until another 2.
What is it about Fundamentalists,
even some former ones, that makes them so desperate to put men on pedestals and worship them like gods?
Having succumbed to cancer in 1997, Boyd had been dead for 6 years before the first U.S. tank rolled into Baghdad in 2003. Boyd had absolutely nothing to do with the strategy devised at the Pentagon that sent them there.
Before that,
a year prior to the first Gulf War in 1991, Boyd, along with every other high ranking officer in the U.S. Military was summoned to Washington to discuss recent developments and give any advice they might have on how to best use their respective branches of the service. It's common protocol. Hundreds of officers were interviewed and consulted.
Boyds applying the acronymn OODA Loop.. (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) .. to something combat pilots and other military combatants who survived warfare had learned to do instinctively was very valuable indeed to the U.S. Military and strategy with regard to the aerial warfare in Desert Storm, as was many other aerial combat principles learned and taught by other pilots. Some who had actually been in combat and others who like Boyd were accademic stategists.
But it was Norman Schwarzkopf who was given command and then both designed and carried out the final battle plan that brought victory to U.S. forces in the Iraqi Desert.
That's right. The DESERT. Not a single U.S. tank laid track on an Iraqi highway in the first Gulf War until they crossed the infamous highway of death to survey what was left of the Iraqi convoy that had fled Kuwait only to be ambushed by U.S. armor from the desert to the south, and strafed by U.S. A-10s and Apache helicopters from the air.
And U.S. tanks didn't advance much further than that either - after that highway of death engagement.
Much of which actually occurred in Kuwait. Iraqi soldiers surrendered by the thousands both and after that engagement, and Hussein agreed to terms long before a move on the ground towards Baghdad even became necessary. And even when tanks did advance on Baghdad in 2003 the majority of them did not travel on Iraqi highways. They moved across open country,
or more precisely open desert, in the way tanks do best.
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(Side note - I'm not sure if you are aware of this - But when it's necessary to move a main battle tank long distances up a paved highway - it is not driven there on it's own tracks. It is loaded on heavy truck and trailer and transported to where it needs to be and unloaded again. It's true here in the States and it is also true even in most war zones. The Army doesn't like wearing out it's primary weapons before they can even be deployed. And since tanks burn fuel at the rate of gallons per mile you don't drive them any further than you have to even if you have a clear road ahead. It's also more efficient to transport them by truck until you need them.)
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Once inside Baghdad,
and other cities along the way, they took to the streets supported by infantry and Bradley fighting vehicles with EOD personnel constantly on the look out for mines and other explosive devices they knew the Iraqis had and which could only be detected and dealt with, or ruled out as not deployed, by EOD personnel on the ground. Not by officers sitting in air-conditioned and carpeted offices at the Pentagon half a world away.
I don't know where you are getting your information from. But it's not from reliable sources. And certainly not
documented sources either.
And as far as the plan Norman Schwarskopf developed which proved successful in Desert Storm, He himself said it was based on contributions he had gathered from many generals and military experts (including Boyd) but primarily beginning with Hannibal and then going all the way up to those who were Schwarzkopfs contemporaries. Not to mention lessons he had learned himself when he commanded U.S. troops as a junior officer in Vietnam.
Like I said before, Boyd was known for being a shameless self promoter. Also known for continuous attempts to take credit for work other people had done. But it appears someone else is taking up now where he left off - and is trying to beautify the man post mortem into something worthy of sainthood - capable of raising himself from the dead and performing miracles.
It's not Boyd credentials you are posting here. And certainly not military history. What you are reciting is more like Boyd propaganda. It was a little bit humorous at first. But now it's becoming nauseating.
(08-19-2016, 01:46 AM)Vincent Massi Wrote: I enjoyed your post and picture, Aleshanee. Despite a couple of decades as a military buff, I had never heard of John Boyd either. He held strongly that we should build cheap, short-term fighters and then replace them within a few years with better ones--that's the strategy that we used in the 1950's. He was a noted opponent of the F-4 Phantom. He strongly opposed the improvements made to his original F-16, which made it better but more expensive. However, by the 1960's, both the US and the USSR were concentrating on expensive jets that could be upgraded for decades.
But the most amazing thing I learned from John Boyd is his three main principles, which explain MUCH of what went wrong with HAC ,the IFBs, and Bible colleges in general. I'm giving his credentials first, though.
There is a very good reason the Pentagon rejected Boyd's idea of flooding the skies with cheap, simple, and easily replaceable aircraft rather than going with the sophisticated but very costly designs we have today. --> There are Americans flying those planes who lives are not cheap, and who are not so easy to replace.
Having never actually flown into combat himself Boyd could probably be excused for being ignorant of the technological advances made in surface to air defenses since the Korean War. But he could not be excused for attempting to ignore experienced combat pilots who had flown against those defenses and objected to his ideas, nor could he be excused for having such a callous disregard for the lives of American pilots and other servicemen.
Military aircraft, including his beloved little F-16, became more expensive and more sophisticated because they had to. It was the only way they were going to survive above todays battle field,
and thus save American lives, in conflicts where even third world countries posses the ability to shoot from the sky any aircraft their radar can see.
The WW2 and Korean War days where most fighter aircraft were downed by other aircraft have been gone since Vietnam.
In Vietnam far more U.S. warplanes,
and American pilots, were lost to surface to air missiles than were shot down by North Vietnamese MIGS. And in the years since then surface to air defense systems have only gotten better. So.. Aircraft had to get better in order to avoid being detected by those advanced systems. And that means stealth technology - which means big money - which also means going with fewer but much more capable aircraft that can be upgraded as the need arises and the surface to air capabilities improve even further.
For a guy who his supporters claim preached reality in the face of outdated methods - that was one reality John Boyd never could seem to grasp. Maybe it was because he had no way to know what it was like to be sneaking up on another fighter jet, thinking he had it "bounced" - while a Soviet made SAM flew up his tailpipe and detonated. Or to be talking to a fellow pilot one minute, in another fighter jet a short distance away,.. only to see that jet shot down, and the pilots life extinguished a few minutes later. Boyd couldn't even imagine those things because he had never experienced them, or anything like them. And he lacked the humility required to learn from those who had the experience and who had actually been there.
That is what happens when you live life constantly in the abstract and seldom venture out into the real world. You tell yourself your abstract world is more real than the world of those around you who are
seated in reality - and eventually you start to believe it. That was John Boyd in his later years. It was why he got nicknamed
the Mad Major, long after he dubbed
himself 40 Second Boyd.
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I have never really been what you would call a military buff. And was never in the military myself. I did however grow up in a U.S. Military family. Mostly Naval officers and a few Marines. Then married into another U.S. Military family consisting of mostly Army officers. And I worked for many years doing side work to my regular paramedic job helping to train U.S. Navy corpsmen that deployed with the Marines and also training Marine infantry in emergency field procedures they could perform if the medic assigned to their unit was lost. But I have never attempted to train anyone in any procedure or technique I had not already done dozens if not hundreds of times myself during a real emergency or crisis.
I am not attempting here to detract from the many valuable contributions John Boyd made to the U.S. Military. They are well documented in factual archives
(not internet propaganda) and cannot be denied. But it is a little difficult if not downright impossible for me to take someone like Boyd, who teaches others to do things he never did himself, seriously 100% of the time. And when I am told even by people who knew him personally that he frequently assumed credit for things other people had done it makes me trust him even less. I would rather trust the word of people who actually performed the tasks Boyd mused about, and actually flew the planes into combat that he said he designed, and who successfully flew
other planes into combat he claimed couldn't survive where they took them anyway,.. and came back from.
Actually being there. That is what having a grasp on reality is all about.