Chet Richards

Chet Richards was a close associate of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd from the mid-1970s until Boyd s death in 1997. Boyd had asked him to review the mathematical portions of his first civilian paper, Destruction, and Creation, and this led to a collaboration that eventually included applications to the business world.

Chet Richards's career began at the Pentagon in 1971 and has included employment with Northrop, the professional services company CACI in Washington, DC, and Lockheed. A consultant since 1999, he has maintained his practice in strategy for business, marketing, and communications through Tarkenton & Addams, Inc., a public relations firm in Atlanta, GA.

Chet is the author of several publications, all involving applications of Boyd s strategies. His most recent, A Swift, Elusive Sword, addresses how we can re-fashion the US Defense Department to defend ourselves against the types of non-traditional enemies we will likely face in the 21st Century. It was published by the Centers for Defense Information shortly before 9/11, has been translated into Russian, and is now in its second printing. 

He has lectured on this subject to commercial organizations in the US and abroad, including the US Army Command and Staff College and the Air War College. He is the only person to have delivered Boyd s Patterns of Conflict since Boyd s death. Chet is also a retired colonel in the US Air Force Reserve, where he served for many years as the Reserve Air Attaché to Saudi Arabia. Prior to that, he was a reservist on the Air Staff in Washington, where he built computer models of fighter aircraft effectiveness. He was commissioned in 1969 through the Army ROTC program at the University of Mississippi.

Chet and his wife, Ginger, live in Atlanta, where, in addition to their work with Tarkenton & Addams, they build custom websites to support the marketing communications needs of their clients. They also own and operate two sites devoted to John Boyd s strategic legacy, Defense and the National Interest (http://www.d-n-i.net) and Belisarius.com (http://www.belisarius.com.) They have two daughters who, as this is written, are both in graduate school in Georgia and one very overweight cat.