Boyd (39 page)

Boyd loved to tell the story of what happened. He looked at the drag curves and shook his head in apparent awe. “This is amazing,”
he said. “I just can’t believe this.”

The designer smiled. His retinue of engineers smiled. The famous John Boyd, for all of his reputation from E-M, was still
a fighter pilot. And fighter pilots are easy to confuse when they are out of the cockpit.

Boyd leaned over the lift and drag chart and his fingers moved to the left, beyond the edges of the chart. He looked up, wide-eyed.
“I can extrapolate this thing back to where the wing has zero lift. Wow. This airplane is so good that not only does it have
zero lift, it has negative drag.”

The designer no longer was smiling. Perhaps he had underestimated this Colonel Boyd. Perhaps he should have spent more time
on the design. Boyd was only warming to his subject. “If this thing has negative drag, that means it has thrust without turning
on the engines.” He paused as if in deep thought. “That means when it is on
the ramp with all that thrust, even with the engine turned off, you got to tie the goddamn thing down or it will take off
by itself.”

The designer glowered at Boyd. Who would have thought anyone would extrapolate the curves back to zero and show, using the
contractor’s own data, that the engines had thrust even before ignition?

Boyd shoved the papers across the desk. “Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.” According to Boyd, the designer called
the next day and invited him to lunch and asked him not to tell his superiors about the spurious design. “I have to tell them,”
Boyd said. Then the engineer made an offer that, stripped of all the circumlocutions and delicate language, amounted to a
bribe for Boyd to keep silent. “That won’t take,” Boyd responded. Then came an open threat that the designer would use his
company’s considerable clout with the Department of Defense to have Boyd fired. “Take your best shot, you son of a bitch,”
Boyd said.

A week later the famous designer and his company withdrew their design from consideration.

Once an officer is promoted to colonel, he is automatically considered for general the next time the promotion board meets.
It might be several months after his promotion or it might be a year. To be passed over the first time is not significant.
But when a man is passed over the second time, he begins to have doubts. If he is passed over a third time, his chances have
gone. Thus, the first ER after making colonel is crucial. It is here the colonel has the first intimation of whether or not
generals want to admit him to their fraternity.

On October 13, 1971, Boyd received his first ER after making full colonel and it was devastating. On the front side he was
downgraded in three categories. The narrative is a classic example of an ER that, to the uninitiated, is unsurpassed. “Colonel
Boyd has continued to make outstanding, major contributions to the Air Force’s analytical approach toward optimizing the design
characteristics of aircraft.” Here Boyd is praised for his
old
work. And “outstanding, major contributions” is nowhere near as strong as previous comments about the innovative, groundbreaking
aspects of his work, or of his leadership role. The reviewing officer recommends Boyd return to school to obtain a doctorate
and then teach at the Air Force Academy. This seems to indicate belief in an officer potential. But to a colonel with
twenty years of service it is demeaning. Boyd has only an undergraduate degree. It would take him three or four years to get
a Ph.D. For a colonel to be taken out of the operational loop for four years is to end his career. Even worse, generals do
not teach at the Academy; they command the Academy. Finally, if superior officers think a colonel might one day wear stars
on his shoulders, his ER talks of leadership, hints at his political abilities, his statecraft. It recommends him for an assignment
that qualifies him to be a general. Boyd’s ER has none of that. Boyd’s fate is sealed by an additional indorsement from a
major general who says simply, “I concur with the evaluation and recommendations of the reporting and indorsing officer.”

John Boyd had contributed as much to fighter tactics, aeronautical engineering, science, the Air Force, and his country as
any man in Air Force history. A list of Air Force original thinkers—and this is a short list—would begin with his name. But
his enemies prevailed. He had shot down too many generals ever to become a general. This must have been a time of despair
for Boyd. As always he sought solace in his work. And it was then that he had another epiphany, a marvelous and far-reaching
epiphany.

In doing advanced conceptual design work on the lightweight fighter, he went over all his notes from the past, from as far
back as Korea. He remembered his early E-M work and how difficult it was to prepare accurate E-M charts for the F-86. He remembered
the F-86’s countless battles with MiGs. He remembered how, on paper, the MiG was a superior aircraft in almost every respect.
But the F-86 had a ten-to-one kill ratio against the MiG. Why?

Boyd pored over the notes again and again. Could there be something else, some other element, perhaps an element not covered
by E-M, that held the answer? Boyd made a list of attributes of the MiG and the F-86. For days he went into frequent trances
as he groped for the answer. In the end he came up with two significant advantages the F-86 had over the MiG. First, the F-86
had a bubble canopy that gave the pilot a 360-degree field of vision, while the MiG pilot’s view to the rear was blocked.
Thus, the F-86 pilot had a much easier time observing his enemy than the enemy had observing him. Second, the F-86 had full
hydraulic controls, while the MiG did not. This meant that the F-86 pilot could control his aircraft with one finger, while
controlling the MiG was so difficult that MiG pilots often lifted
weights between flights in order to gain strength. The unboosted controls of the MiG meant that its pilot grew fatigued more
quickly than the F-86 pilot but, far more importantly, the F-86 driver could go from one maneuver to another more quickly
than the MiG driver. In a practical sense this meant the F-86 pilot could go through a series of either offensive or defensive
maneuvers quicker than could his adversary. And with each maneuver he gained a half second or a second on his enemy until
he could either break for separation or be in position for a kill. The MiG was faster in raw acceleration and in turning ability,
but the F-86 was quicker in changing maneuvers. And in combat, quicker is more important.

These advantages—better observation and greater agility—would make the lightweight fighter an even more extraordinary aircraft.
This concept of agility was an intimation of what in another few years would be the best-known part of Boyd’s legacy.

A
MERICA
’
S
newest fighter aircraft continued to take hits.

The news media wrote story after story about the extraordinary expense of the F-15 and the abysmal performance of the F-14.
Senator William Proxmire, who was the bane of the military, issued reports savaging both aircraft. He echoed the idea that
money be appropriated to fund a lightweight fighter. As the Proxmire reports contained confidential information about both
the F-15 and the F-14, the Pentagon suspected, but could not prove, that Proxmire’s source was the Fighter Mafia. That nonsense
about the lightweight fighter could have come from nowhere else. Criticism of the two aircraft reached such a peak that the
Nixon Administration ordered Secretary of Defense Laird to whip the military purchasing system into shape. Laird assigned
the job to his deputy, David Packard.

At the time the findings of the Fitzhugh Commission must have been very much on Packard’s mind. The commission had been appointed
in 1969 to take a hard look at DoD management and the acquisition process. The group issued a report recommending that when
building new weapons systems, the DoD should develop and test a prototype before sending the weapons system into production.
This is because in almost every instance, a defense contractor underestimates
costs and overestimates performance. (The practice of underestimating costs is so common that it has a name: “front-loading.”)
A prototype reveals design flaws, performance inadequacies, and true costs.

This was not a new idea. Before World War II most new fighters appeared first as prototypes. It made sense to test a design,
decide whether it was good or bad, make modifications, redesign it, and then put it on the production line. But then came
jet engines and swept wings and ever more exotic avionics, all of which caused larger Air Force and contractor bureaucracies.
The development staff of an airplane went from maybe a hundred people to a thousand or more. Defense contractors said the
business had become too complex and too expensive to make prototypes. Air Force bureaucracies agreed. They did not want tests
that might cancel their projects. McNamara played into their hands when he brought to the Pentagon something called “Total
Package Procurement Concept.” He thought all the analysis and quantification could be done on paper. Design teams grew to
two thousand people, then three thousand. And the cost of developing a new fighter rose to around $1 billion.

In the summer of 1971, Packard announced a budget of $200 million to be spent on prototypes from all branches of the services.
The Air Force put together a group to pick projects to be prototyped with the intention of grabbing as much of the $200 million
as possible. Colonel Lyle Cameron was in charge of the group. He came out of OSD where he was one of the few career officers
to earn the respect of the Whiz Kids. Not only did he have the respect of that intimidating group but Pierre Sprey was one
of his closest friends. Cameron combed the Air Force’s Research and Development labs and found more than two thousand possible
candidates. The Air Force told Cameron to move fast. By August, Cameron recommended a short takeoff and landing (STOL) transport
aircraft and the lightweight fighter. He picked these two because they were far enough down the design pipeline that they
were ready for contracts to be issued. Packard approved both and in December the Air Force launched the lightweight-fighter
prototype program.

The generals laughed and said the lightweight fighter, if it was like every other small airplane, would have such a limited
range it would be good only for a five-minute demonstration at an air show. Let
them build their prototypes. That will be the end of it because that little toy fighter will never go into production. The
Fighter Mafia can even fly the prototypes a few times. When the excitement had worn off the generals would park the things
in an Air Force museum and get on with the business of America.

Defense contractors with big ongoing projects groaned about going back to prototyping. But contractors without big projects
loved it. Boyd and Sprey thought they were entering the most exciting time in aviation industry in more than twenty years.
Now was the moment for the Fighter Mafia to streamline everything, remove most of the bureaucracy. Boyd borrowed many of the
ideas Sprey had implemented with the A-10. The request for proposal, for example, was fifty pages rather than the usual three
hundred or so, and the industry response was limited to fifty pages. Not only was he going to develop an airplane that would
be superior to the F-15, he would show the Pentagon a production process that would be as lean and mean as the lightweight
fighter itself. He was going to develop an airplane that, for the first time in Air Force history, would cost less than its
predecessor.

It was Sprey’s idea to have a fly-off between the prototypes, as he had done with the A-X, so Boyd turned Sprey loose to devise
the rigid, real-world scenario. There would be simulated aerial dogfights. Each prototype would fly against a MiG kept at
a secret base near Nellis. Each prototype would also go up against the F-4. Sprey did not want Edwards pilots as test pilots;
he wanted real fighter pilots who would bank and yank without worrying about their clipboards, guys who could stand an airplane
on its tail and make it sky-dance without worrying if they were writing down all the numbers, guys who did not need some engineering
geek on the ground to radio instructions on how to turn and burn. And once the pilots flew the YF-16, they would move over
and fly the YF-17. Having the same men fly both airplanes takes out any possibility of pilot bias.

Edwards pilots wailed, first at not being allowed to fly the air-combat tests and then at the idea of pilots going from one
airplane to the other. Too risky, they said—a pilot can’t go from the cockpit of one new airplane to the cockpit of another.
Boyd laughed. Maybe you Edwards pukes can’t, he said, but fighter pilots can.

When the fly-off was over, when one of the two new fighters emerged as the superior aircraft, it would be winner-take-all.
And the best part was that the Navy might also have to adopt the winning design. The Navy was about to eat an Air Force airplane.

Which, John Boyd thought, was the way it was supposed to be.

Design studies showed the lightweight fighter would be superior in performance to the F-15, but this had to be kept secret.
The Air Force would not allow even a prototype to outperform the F-15. But the biggest secret, the single most innovative
and startling aspect of the design, was that the new fighter would have greater range than the F-15. Sprey and Boyd fought
for months over this. Sprey, ever the purist, wanted less fuel. Less fuel means less weight and less weight means better performance.
Boyd, as always, had planned move and countermove, and he saw a way to have enough fuel to beat the F-15 in range. This knowledge
gave him a big stick. Usually if a man in a bureaucracy has a big stick, he uses it. But Boyd decided to hide his. He knew
there would come a time, perhaps in a year or even two years, when the stick could be used to greater advantage.

The fuel fraction is derived by considering the weight of the fuel relative to the combat weight of the aircraft. The crucial
thing about understanding fuel fraction is that it is the
relative
fuel and not the
absolute
fuel that is important in determining how far an airplane flies. That is, the percentage of fuel relative to the weight of
the aircraft is more important than the absolute gallons of fuel carried. Boyd was adamant that the fuel fraction for the
lightweight fighter not go below 30 percent. That was the sacred number, not to be violated, doubtless because the fuel fraction
of the F-15 was 25 percent and Boyd wanted the lightweight fighter to be better. The new fighter would have about six thousand
five hundred pounds of fuel, for a fuel fraction of 31.5 percent.