Dr Ray Leopold*

Of course, defense spending numbers are being manipulated: It’s in the DNA of those most intimately involved. That type of manipulation is well beyond the natural human concept which says that if you measure something, you change it. It is far more insidious.

I daresay that most of those in-the-know never expected anything other than manipulated numbers.  They’re not really jaded, they’re just behaving as Europeans, and a few others, have dealt with one another for centuries!

In a more colloquial context, I consider myself a veteran of three wars:  The Pentagon Wars, The Spectrum Wars, and The Telecommunications Wars, and I think you may find what I’m about to write is a bit different than you’ve seen before.  Jim Burton — who used the title The Pentagon Wars — along with many of you, too, have done a great job of covering The Pentagon Wars, but IMHO they were kids’ play compared to the Spectrum Wars and the Telecommunications Wars, and these other two will probably survive the walls of the Pentagon.  (Spectrum, of course, relates to ‘wireless’ while Telecom relates to all commercial communications.) 

For better context, maybe some of you are not aware that I was in the middle of ‘making the right things happen’ at WARC-92 in Spain, which allocated spectrum for HDTV, next-generation cellular phones, and Non-Geostationary Satellite Services (NGSS), and I was also in the midst of our FCC’s 1993 Negotiated Rulemaking for that NGSS spectrum, which much of the world had then also adopted.   FYI, WARC = World Administrative Radio Conference, held by the The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is an arm of the UN.

Strategy, Tactics and Documented Warfare precede Sun Tzu, but when you get to putting numbers on resources and then get involved in planning, no-planning (in the Boyd context), counting, accounting and reporting on those things, I think we’re in the nth iteration, where n = the number of generations of humanity.

When it comes to Europe, I will tell you that these kinds of things go back at least 450 or 500 years to revenue sharing associated with the money from postage stamps among those same countries.  When the telegraph was created, some people may think that it was aligned with railroads, but I think you will find that, even though telegraph lines oftentimes went along railroad lines, the revenue side of telegraphy was assigned to the post offices.  

In Europe, they created their PTs — their national and international postal & telegraph offices.  Then, of course, those PTs evolved as PTT s when the telephone came along, and those rules they created for those postal activities, then postal and telegraph activities, and finally postal, telegraph and telephone activities are still embedded in all that is done at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland.

So, when NATO and the UN came along shortly after WWII, those bureaucrats who began to staff their offices were already well-schooled in dealing internationally with numbers and revenue streams, with all of the skullduggery of centuries of their versions of rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures for officially cooking the books to their individual likings.  They were also well aware that their different nations didn’t necessarily calculate things or interpret them in a common way, but they always got along until they didn’t!!  

(Little wonder that they had so many wars and how many searched for a New World!  What surprises me more is how many folks here in America become so enamored with that Old World.)

On a personal note, there is also little wonder how John Boyd quickly concluded that we had to focus on the budget when we launched our development planning work on The Air Staff in June of 1973.  I do still have a paper copy of that planning and budget set of charts that he and I had used together when we had first briefed our work across the Air Staff from Nov 5, 1973 to May 31, 1974, and I’m especially glad that Chuck Spinney got excited about it, too; otherwise I may have never gotten back to engineering and those other two wars.  

When he and I had done those briefings together, John Boyd (who was spending most of his own time on the lightweight fighter) used to point out how I was the only full-time AF-wide development planner on the Air Staff (until Chuck came along to become the second), then I left amidst a rather interesting battle among a couple of four stars. and caught my breath again teaching engineering at the AF Academy, and Chuck became the only one; but Boyd got me back to the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) Staff (where Chuck was, too) for the early ’80s.  I had learned much from John which then made me unusually effective in those other wars, too. 

There may now be quite enough books written about all of that, and I’m especially pleased with the books the two of you (Winslow Wheeler & Chet) have written!**

*Robert Coram included Dr. Ray Leopold among Boyd’s acolytes in Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, and provided a brief description of his career after the Air Force (p. 441). Among his many accomplishments, Ray is perhaps best known in these times for being one of the primary creators of the Iridium system, which is still going strong to this very day. You may also be interested Ray’s thoughts on Boyd, Robin Olds, and Operation Bolo included in an earlier post.

**Here are a couple of the better known: The Wastrels of Defense and If We Can Keep It, respectively. You can download a PDF of IWCKI from our Articles page.