Boyd
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In August, Boyd finished a six-and-one-half-page draft of the Development Planning Report. It is significant in two respects. First, astonishingly, it marks the first time the Air Force ever had guidelines about matching planning needs with available budgets. Second, the report says if combat tasks are to be of any use to planners, the tasks should be related to needed hardware. Boyd explains that in combat, both at the highest command level and at the lowest, individuals first orient themselves so they can understand the situation, then they make a decision to direct their activities, and then they take action. These three ingredients—orientation, decision, and action—would be seen in Boyd’s work again.
Boyd’s E-M work was being diluted by the bureaucracy at WrightPat, so he never missed an opportunity to brief anyone, military and civilian, on the capabilities and potential of E-M. One such briefing was to the Defense Science Board, a collection of the most prestigious scientists in America, whose job is to advise the secretary of defense. Most members of the board were interested and receptive to Boyd’s ideas. But when he told of the poor performance of missiles in Vietnam and said fighters should be more maneuverable, a physics professor took umbrage.
“Colonel, I heard what you briefed,” the professor said. “But the maneuverability should be built into the missile and not the aircraft.”
Boyd patiently explained again how this had not worked in Vietnam.
“Colonel, for your information, I am talking about a different kind of missile, a missile whose performance is such that it doesn’t matter about the capabilities of the delivery aircraft.”
“Oh, and what kind of missile would that be, Professor?”
“I’m talking about a lenticular missile.”
“Sir, I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I have to ask you what a “lenticular missile” is.”
The professor’s disdain for this slow-witted fighter pilot was obvious when he said, “It’s shaped like a lens, like a saucer.”
Boyd nodded and said, “Oh, I get it.” He appeared to be thinking for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Professor, you have a pretty good idea there. Might I offer an idea for a modification?”
“Of course.”
“Instead of saucer shaped, why don’t you make it boomerang shaped? That way, you can fling the goddamn thing out there and if it misses it will come back and you can fling it again.”
Members of the board laughed so hard the chairman had to call a recess. For months afterward Boyd was known as “Boomerang Boyd” in honor of his latest cape job. The lenticular missile was never heard of again, except at happy hour on Wednesday nights.
In October 1974, the B-1 again came to the forefront when word leaked out of Wright-Pat that the airplane would cost $100 million per copy, far more than Leopold’s early $68 million estimate. This was a lot of money at a time when the F-15 cost about $15 million, the lightweight fighter $6 million, and the A-10—which finally was under construction—$3 million. Air Force leadership knew they were facing a crisis. Ray Leopold had developed a graph of the real cost of future purchases, what he called a “procurement bow wave,” that showed the unbridgeable chasm between what the Air Force was committing to and the money Congress was appropriating for the purchase. This meant that every year, more and more unpaid bills were pushed into the future. Not even the United States could afford to buy some two hundred bombers costing $100 million each. Nevertheless, the Air Force wanted the B-1; as a general told Leopold, “Our job is to see that the flow of money to the contractor is not interrupted.”
So the Air Force took two actions to save the B-1. First, a general directed that Boyd write a paper championing the bomber. It would carry immeasurable weight in Congress if the officer responsible for the E-M Theory and the F-15 wrote a paper saying he thought the B-1 was a great airplane. Boyd refused. Exactly what he said is not known, but given his proclivity for bluntness and complete distaste for posturing, it is likely he was rather straightforward. The general then gave him a direct order to write the paper.
Boyd complied. Then he wrote a memorandum explaining in detail why he disagreed with his own paper. And he told the general he considered the two papers a package; if the first one were released, he would release the second.
The general never released the first paper. Afterward he frequently was heard to mutter the same words used by so many other generals: “That fucking Boyd.”
The second thing the Air Force did was to convene a Corona. This is a rare gathering of four-stars that happens only for the most serious of issues. A three-star—Boyd’s boss—would brief the four-stars. Boyd was at Wright-Pat, so it fell to Burton and Leopold and Spinney to prepare the briefing. Leopold was about to go home on leave, so Spinney took the lead.
While Spinney was working on the briefing, Leopold received a phone call saying the four-star in charge of the Tactical Air Command had requested him by name for a new assignment. There are few higher honors for a captain than to be “name requested” by a four-star commander. Leopold needed this affirmation. His name had been taken off the list for early promotion to major. Boyd had told him at the time, “Your name was taken off the list because of me. They can’t get at me so they get you. Don’t feel bad about it. You are doing great work.”
Now Leopold called Boyd, who began to suggest that Leopold had become a different type of officer than he had been a year or so earlier and that this fast-track assignment might not be best for him.
Leopold broke in and said, “I will not accept the job. And if they insist I take it, I will resign my commission.”
Leopold could almost see Boyd’s smile of approval. A man who would put his career on the line ranked high with Boyd. Leopold knew at that moment his life was forever changed. Within days Boyd engineered another name request from another four-star, and Leopold had a job teaching at the Air Force Academy.
Burton was about to deliver his briefing to a two-star, who in turn would brief a three-star. The two-star clearly felt it was his job to keep the B-1, and he ordered Spinney to change the estimate of how much money Congress might appropriate in the future to make it more optimistic. Burton was stunned. He had been in the Air Force fourteen years and this was the first time a general ordered him to doctor a briefing in order to save an Air Force program. He was being ordered to lie.
Spinney came up with the idea of following the two-star’s orders but also including the much less optimistic new findings. During the briefing, when the three-star looked at the charts, he was bewildered by the confusing array of assumptions. He said the Corona would want a simpler, more clearly defined course of action. He turned to Spinney and said, “Which set of numbers do you like?”
Spinney pointed to the numbers that showed the true cost of the B-1. The two-star disagreed, saying Spinney’s numbers were too conservative and that Congress would appropriate enough money for the B-1, F-15, lightweight fighter, and A-10.
The three-star saw that his deputy was pressuring Spinney. He gathered together the charts and said, “We’ll go with the captain’s numbers.”
What takes place in a Corona is known only to four-stars. Boyd speculated that the Air Force realized it had no choice: the B-1 had to go. But the Air Force does not kill its young in public. Someone else has to do it. The official position of the Air Force remained that the B-1 cost $25 million each. In early 1977, when Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency, one of his first acts would be to kill the B-1. No Air Force generals would resign or complain to Congress or wage a guerrilla war to keep the program.
What Spinney remembers most about the B-1 episode is his call to Boyd to tell him what happened at the briefing. When Boyd heard that the three-star had used Spinney’s charts over the strong objections of the two-star, he was exultant.
“My captain fucked a two-star?” he roared. And then he laughed and said, “Way to go, Tiger.”
Chapter Twenty - Two
The Buttonhook Turn
IN January 1975, the Air Force announced that the YF-
16 won the lightweight fighter fly-off. Differences between the YF-16 and the YF-17 were so great that the fly-off had hardly been a contest; the YF-16 was the unanimous choice of pilots who flew both aircraft.
The results confused Boyd: E-M data and computer modeling predicted a much closer contest. Boyd met with the pilots and they got down to basics. They used their hands to demonstrate combat maneuvers and they used highly technical fighter-pilot terminology such as “shit hot” to describe the YF-16, and it did not take long for a consensus to emerge. They preferred the YF-16 because it could perform what they called a “buttonhook turn.” It could flick from one maneuver to another faster than any aircraft they ever flew. It was born to turn and burn—the most nimble little banking and yanking aircraft the world had ever seen. When a pilot was being pursued by an adversary during simulated aerial combat, the ability to snap from one maneuver to another made it much easier to force the adversary to overshoot. It was, as the writer James Fallows later described it, a knife fighter of an airplane, perfect for up-close-and-personal combat.
Until the YF-16 came along, energy dumping—that is, pulling the aircraft into such a tight turn that it quickly lost airspeed and altitude —was a desperation maneuver. This was the last resort when a pilot could not shake an enemy from his six. He dumped energy and hoped he would get a shot as the crowd went by. But the lightweight fighter had such an extraordinary thrust-to-weight ratio and could recover energy so quickly that energy dumping became a tactic of choice rather than of desperation. A pilot could dump energy, then pump the stick back and forth as he regained the initiative—“dumping and pumping,” it was called.
Now that the fly-off was decided, the “Y” designation was dropped and the winning aircraft became the F-16. In later years, when aviation magazines or fighter pilots listed the ten greatest fighters of all time, the F-16 always was near the top of the list. But in those early days, before the aircraft became so prized by the Air Force and before so many others began to take credit for it, Boyd was blamed rather than given credit. Air Force generals did not equivocate: the cheap little fighter was Boyd’s airplane, Boyd’s and the damned Fighter Mafia’s. Few in the Air Force ever paused to consider that had Boyd’s original version of the F-15, or even the modified Red Bird, been accepted, he would have been happy and there never would have been a lightweight fighter.
By now the woods and open fields around the apartment on Beauregard were gone and in their place were new and cheap apartments filled with the young and the poor. One day Boyd came to work and told Spinney, “You know, I keep reading in the paper about all the burglaries and robberies around where I live, but nothing ever happens to people in my building. Then I realized that’s because all the burglars and robbers live in my building. I see these people every day and they nod to me and speak and are civil.”
Boyd knew that Stephen had a deep interest in repairing electronic equipment. But he had only a vague awareness that, to improve his craft, Stephen repaired television sets and tape recorders and record players for people in the building free of charge. Many of these items had what their owners called “shipping damage.” It was little wonder that Boyd and his family lived in an island of safety amidst a sea of burglars and robbers.
Boyd began referring to himself as the “ghetto colonel.” His sister Marion in New York did not like the appellation. Neither did his brother Gerry. His mother’s “forgetfulness” had swirled downward into dementia and forced her from Gerry’s condominium into a nursing home. So she did not care what her son called himself.
In August 1974, a congressional directive had ordered the Navy to accept the winner of the lightweight fighter fly-off as a Navy airplane, but in the aftermath of the Air Force acceptance of the F-16, the Navy announced it would not buy the aircraft. Instead the Navy took the aircraft that lost the competition—the YF-17—changed its name to the F-18, and said the name change meant this was a new airplane and the one the Navy wanted. The Navy loaded it with extra fuel, electronics, and hard points—the external fixtures to which missiles and bombs are attached—redesigned the air frame, and turned it into another big, beefy airplane.
Boyd took little notice. He had returned to studying the button-hook turn. Oftentimes when a man makes a contribution to science, his work—at least to him—becomes sacrosanct and he fights off attempts to correct or modify it. Boyd was not of that ilk. E-M did not anticipate the buttonhook turn and the difference it made in performance. He began researching a briefing called “New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat” that focused on what he called “asymmetric fast transients” (his name for the buttonhook turns). Boyd had thought about this new variable, that of “quickness” or “agility,” when he had studied the F-86, but now he began to think about it John Boyd style—that is, obsessively.
Soon, however, he was forced to turn his attention from the puzzle of the buttonhook turn back to the F-16. Now that the aircraft was going into engineering development, the Air Force set about to “missionize” it. This was a deliberate attempt to make the F-16 a bomber and keep it from competing with the F-15. About three thousand pounds of electronics were added, a large ground-mapping radar, and hard points and pylons on the wings. With all sorts of things hanging out in the slipstream, the airplane was getting “dirty,” every addition degrading its performance. Then the Air Force had to add more fuel to make up for the increased drag and decreased range caused by the external additions. A fuselage extension was added to accommodate the fuel. The nose was fattened to accommodate the big radar. All of this increased the aircraft’s weight and wing loading and necessitated expanding the wing area in an effort to recapture the maneuverability of the original design.
The F-16 was an altogether different creature than the YF-16; the thoroughbred was becoming a draft horse.
Boyd fought every change. He called Christie and Sprey and ranted about what the Air Force was doing to his airplane. He screamed to Leopold and Spinney and Burton that his pure and nimble little fighter was turning into another goddamned gold-plated multimission aircraft.
The Air Force failure to increase the wing area finally caused Boyd to turn his back on the F-16. The original F-16 wing was 280 square feet. Boyd thought that if the wing area were increased to 320 square feet, much of the original performance could be retained. But the Air Force wanted a wing of only 300 square feet. Rather, it wanted to make sure the F-16 could not outperform the F-15. Boyd had a friend, a young officer, at the F-16 development office. Perhaps the officer would use the authority of his office to fight for 320 square feet. Boyd called and for weeks the two men talked on a daily basis. Then after one phone call Boyd turned to Spinney, pointed at the phone, and said, “He flunked roll call.” In the end the young officer had gone along with his superiors and settled on 300 square feet; he had decided to be someone rather than to do something. Years later, when the young officer was rewarded by being promoted to general, he called Boyd. He had been drinking and was contrite and apologetic about the decision he made on the F-16 wing. He asked, in effect, to come back into the fold and be Boyd’s friend.
Boyd hung up on him.
Boyd’s anger at what the Air Force did to the F-16 never abated. He had lost the last great battle of his Air Force career. And perhaps his bitterness at the defeat was the final catalyst in shifting his attention from hardware toward more cerebral pursuits.
Boyd’s learning theory was now a partially formed paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” but his efforts to finish it were pushed aside by events at the office. Two of the Acolytes were about to leave the fold. Spinney was disenchanted, both personally and professionally. His marriage was disintegrating and, as is often the case in such instances, he felt the need for professional changes. The idealism he felt since childhood toward the Air Force had been shredded when the two-star general told him to fudge the numbers on the B-1 in order to save the project. Not long afterward a general had called Spinney into his office, closed the door, and said, “When I wa
s a captain, if I had gone through what you did with the B-1 budget, I would have resigned.” Spinney was thinking of doing that.
Leopold was teaching at the Air Force Academy and began inviting Boyd out as a guest lecturer. Boyd began what would become years of teaching at the Academy by delivering early versions of “Destruction and Creation” to cadets. He listened to their response and to Leopold’s comments, and when he returned to the Pentagon he asked Burton and Spinney for their thoughts as well. Then he made changes to the paper. It was always fluid. Sprad had found that it was almost impossible for Boyd to finish the “Aerial Attack Study” and Christie discovered the same thing with the E-M Theory. Boyd never wanted to finish an intellectual effort. He made changes and those changes made him see another fallacy or another place for elaboration, and the process began all over. But the value of this process, arduous though it was to all around Boyd, was apparent, both with the “Destruction and Creation” paper and the earlier “Development Planning Study.”
Boyd spent much of 1974 trying to educate Jim Burton about the true nature of the Building and its denizens. Burton took it all in but there appeared to be no change in his thinking. Spinney and Leopold were convinced Burton would always be a Blue Suiter, that he was simply biding his time and doing what he had to do in order to get a good ER, that he would always be an officer who wanted to be somebody rather than an officer who wanted to do something.