Boyd (46 page)

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.”

I
N
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.