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Gates Celebrates DissentThe generals quash it.

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, April 23, 2008, at 2:04 PM ET

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Fred Kaplan has written previous columns about Gates' critical speeches.

In his speech to the Air War College, at Maxwell Air Force Base, Gates urged the young officers to emulate the career of John Boyd, an Air Force colonel and former fighter pilot. As Gates noted, Boyd (who died of cancer in 1997) rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat, helped design the F-16 and F-15 fighter planes, and—above all—devised a theory of warfare (laid out in a six-hour briefing titled "Patterns of Conflict") that influenced significant reforms in Army and Marine Corps combat doctrine—reforms that still resonate today.

Gates described Boyd as "a brilliant, eccentric and stubborn character [who] had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility." That understates matters; Boyd never did "overcome" his many foes. I knew Boyd well when I was a congressional aide in the late 1970s and a newspaper reporter through the '80s, and let me tell you: The Air Force brass hated Boyd and worked as hard as they could to dismantle the reforms that he briefly managed to put in motion. (The Marine Corps was the service that adopted his ideas. Gen. Alfred Gray, the Marine commandant during the 1991 Gulf War, explicitly based his ground-war strategy on Boyd's briefing. When Boyd died, the Marine Corps University at Quantico—not the Air War College at Maxwell—begged for his papers.)

In his speech, Gates came back repeatedly to Boyd as "a historical exemplar," even reciting at length a piece of advice that Boyd passed on to many of his colleagues and acolytes:

Boyd would say—and I quote—"One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make your compromises and … turn your back on your friends, but you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. … You may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won't have to compromise yourself. … In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision: to be or to do."

Gates went on: "For the kinds of challenges America faces and will face, the armed forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders, men and women who, as Boyd put it, want to do something, not be somebody. An unconventional era of warfare requires unconventional thinkers."

This is a noble sentiment that also happens to be true. But Boyd was an unusual man. Tireless, fanatically principled, and always buoyant, he grew up in poverty, lived very modestly, and was genuinely indifferent to rank, external incentives, or material comfort. Most officers—most people—are not like that. This is not a criticism; it's simply a fact. And as long as junior officers see (as Gates put it) "principled, creative, reform-minded leaders" like Paul Yingling assigned to lowly positions, the military will not nourish many more Yinglings or Boyds.