Boyd
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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.
Chapter Eighteen
A Short-Legged Bird
AMERICA’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.
As mind-boggling as it sounds, the Air Force looked at the total amount of fuel carried and never considered the fuel fraction. The school of Bigger-Higher-Faster-Farther was so firmly ingrained that it was almost genetic: big airplanes have more range than small airplanes. The MiG-21 was a small aircraft and
notoriously short-legged. So was the F-5, another small fighter. If the Blue Suiters had considered birds, rather than airplanes, they might have found a better example. There is a hummingbird that can fly across the Gulf of Mexico, while birds many times its size can fly only a few miles. The hummingbird has a high fuel fraction.
Boyd told Sprey, “Tiger, they are gonna use what they see as the lack of range to try to kill this airplane. Let ’em. Let that be their main focus. At the right time we will tell them otherwise and they will have nothing left. We will hose them.”
Boyd was right. Air Force generals and congressional critics and reporters friendly to the Pentagon looked at the amount of fuel the lightweight fighter contained and began describing it as “short-legged,” a plane of such limited range it could defend only the airfield from which it took off, the “home drome.” The focus of criticism against the lightweight fighter became its limited range, as predicted. Boyd once delivered a briefing on the lightweight fighter and afterward a general looked around, smiled, and said, “That’s a short-legged little fucker, isn’t it, Colonel?”
“Sir, it looks that way,” Boyd said, ignoring the derisive grins of those in the room.
The Navy loathed Sprey, as did the Air Force, and had coached Senate Armed Services committee members on how to fight him. He was bitterly attacked when he testified to the committee about how the military was gold-plating the F-14 and the F-15 with parts that could be bought for civilian aircraft at one-tenth what the military was paying. He said the lightweight fighter being prototyped by the Air Force was the proper course for the military. A Navy official said Sprey’s work was filled with “fallacious assumptions, half truths, distortions, and erroneous extrapolations.” The Navy questioned the proposed performance of the lightweight fighter and said for an airplane to have the sort of thrust-to-weight ratio that Sprey described, the aircraft would have to weigh at least fifty thousand pounds. No toy fighter could do what Sprey said the new fighter would do.
It would be several years before the Air Force realized that the lightweight fighter not only had greater range than the F-15 but had greater range than any other fighter in the Air Force. That knowledge would cause more than a dozen generals to explode in anger. Keeping secret the range of the lightweight fighter was one of Boyd’s greatest cape jobs.
Rarely in Air Force history has the design of an Air Force fighter been supervised by such a vigilant eye. Any suggested design change by the contractors meant a deviation from Boyd’s requirements. Every suggestion caused him to “come apart,” as Christie described it. Boyd lost one significant design battle. He wanted each of the competing aircraft to have only one engine. But a three-star at WrightPat found it impossible to imagine a single-engine fighter. Thus, the YF-16 on the drawing board at General Dynamics could remain a single-engine, but the YF-17 at Northrop would be a twin-engine.
Boyd’s determination to keep the lightweight fighter pure had one unusual side effect. A colonel whose specialty was preparing computer models to evaluate airplanes clearly favored the Northrop design. He developed a model showing the YF-17 was the better aircraft and tried to have the model made part of the source-selection process, a highly improper action. One day Sprey was in the colonel’s office when the phone rang. Sprey realized that whoever was on the other end was telling the colonel that his computer model was being cut from the selection process. As the colonel argued he grew more and more excited and began sputtering and then a froth of saliva appeared at the corners of his mouth. He turned white and fell out of his chair. Sprey rushed around the desk to assist. After a moment the colonel shook himself and motioned for Sprey to leave the office. A few minutes later Sprey ran into Boyd and said, “The most amazing thing just happened. I was with…”—he named the colonel—“… when he got a phone call. Then all at once he fell out of his chair and began foaming at the mouth. I thought he was dying.”
Boyd looked at Sprey and said, “That was me on the line. I wondered why the phone went dead.”
Afterward the incident became known as the “air-to-rug maneuver,” and the Acolytes shook their heads in amazement that even on the telephone Boyd could cause a Blue Suiter to fall out of his chair. The story of the air-to-rug maneuver became a favorite at happy hour, especially after the colonel became a four-star and then the Air Force chief of staff.
Boyd arrived late for World War II, late for the Korean conflict, and late for the Vietnam War. It was not until the end of 1971 that Boyd received orders sending him to Thailand, to one of the most highly classified military bases in Southeast Asia, where he would be working on a project so secretive he could discuss it only with a few people who had both a need to know and a security clearance beyond “top secret”—a code-word clearance.
A man going off to war has a need to revisit his roots. So in February1972, Boyd went home to Erie, where he was greeted by ice and snow and the perpetual gloom of an Erie winter. Boyd visited his mother, but their relationship was strained, almost formal, ever since that visit when Elsie would not allow Boyd and Mary and the children in her house and they had to stay in a motel.
As always Boyd looked up Frank Pettinato and tracked down two or three close friends. He told them about the F-15 and the lightweight fighter and all the generals he had to fight and what a constant battle it was to produce the greatest fighter aircraft in history. But he was there, right in the middle of it, and he was making sure it went well. He would win in the end; he knew he would. Pettinato nodded and smiled in approval. Much of this was far too complex for him. But Boyd was like his son and he believed what the man said. Many of Boyd’s friends did not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they said, not bothering to hide their disbelief that someone from Erie could ever do such things. Great story, John. And they looked at each other and grinned. Pure bullshit, their expressions said. Oh, and by the way, John, when pilots go to war, they fly jet fighters. So what will you be flying over there? Well, this is not a flying assignment, he said, I’m running an operation. What operation is that? Can’t talk about it. They laughed again. Can’t be too important, they said. It if were, a general would be running it and you sure as hell are not a general. Boyd was silent for a moment, then he changed the subject. He and his friends talked of the old times, of growing up in Erie, of boyhood pranks, of the milkshakes they bought at Stinson’s.
When Boyd returned to Washington, he had only a few weeks to have a physical examination and to take care of the countless preparations involved in being assigned to a combat zone. In the middle of these preparations came his last ER from Andrews AFB. The reporting officer, a two-star, downgraded him in three categories on the front side. But a three-star wrote an indorsement that slammed the reviewing officer by upgrading Boyd in four categories on the front side. It is rare that one general humiliates another in this fashion. But once again a higher-ranking officer had salvaged Boyd’s ER.
By now scholarly journals or papers presented at scientific conferences had begun to take note of Boyd’s E-M Theory. In the January–February 1970 issue of Journal of Aircraft was an article entitled “Energy Climbs, Energy Turns, and Asymptotic Expansions” that made reference to Boyd. In 1972, papers or articles on “Differential Turns,” “Supersonic Aircraft Energy Turns,” and “Aircraft Maneuver Optimization by Reduced-Order Approximation” all used Boyd’s work. And while Boyd was in Thailand, attendees at various scientific conferences heard papers on such topics as “Applications of Reachable Sets Techniques to Air Combat Analysis,” “Long-Range Energy-State Maneuvers for Minimum Time to Specified Terminal Conditions,” and “Energy Management Rules for Turning Flight,” all of which were based largely on Boyd’s work.
And it wasn’t just theory. There would have been an F-15 even if there had never been a John Boyd, but it would have been an altogether different creature—probably a misshapen F-111–like airplane that more than likely would have died in the process and thus forced the Air Force to adopt a Navy airplane. Boyd’s E-M Theory so shaped the F-15 that many we
re calling him the “Father of the F-15.” Finally, there was the lightweight fighter. On April 13, 1972, about the time Boyd left for Thailand, Secretary of Defense Laird gave the Air Force approval to build the prototype aircraft for the lightweight-fighter program. This meant that, for the first time since World War II, the U.S. Air Force had three new tactical aircraft in production at the same time—the F-15, the lightweight fighter, and the A-10. All were from Air Force designs and not foisted off by the Navy. Boyd was largely responsible for two of them and Sprey the other.
When Boyd left for Thailand, he embarked on the first and only command assignment of his career. It was his last war, so he had to make the most of everything. He had to perform his duties in an outstanding fashion—no more critical ERs. While he was away, prototypes of the lightweight fighter would be built. The fly-offs would take place about the time he returned and he wanted to have a role in deciding which of the two aircraft the Air Force would buy.