Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

“One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

But in 1959, when he was just a young captain, John Boyd became the first man to codify the elusive and mysterious ways of air-to-air combat. He developed and wrote the “Aerial Attack Study,” a document that became official Air Force doctrine, the bible of air combat—first in America, and then, when it was declassified, for air forces around the world.

Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory.

Never tell people what you don’t want repeated, she preached. People will seek out your weaknesses and faults, so tell them only of your strong points. No family matters must ever be mentioned beyond the front door.

One of John’s favorite stories, one he was to tell all his life, revolved around entering high school on September 2, 1942. He said he took a series of tests, one of which showed he had an IQ of only ninety. When offered the chance to retake the test, he refused. The test gave John what he later said was a great tactical advantage in dealing with bureaucrats—when he told them he had an IQ of only ninety, they always underestimated him.

To be called a tiger meant you had stainless-steel testicles that dragged the ground and struck sparks when you walked. To be called a tiger meant you were a pure fighter pilot and that you would not hesitate to tell a bird colonel to get fucked.

Eric Hartman, the famous German pilot of World War II, simply pounced on slow bombers, unsuspecting fighters, or any crippled aircraft from behind. He was a back-shooter who shot down 352 airplanes and became the leading ace of all time.

The student sitting next to him in the classroom on the second floor of the mechanical engineering building was an older guy who walked around the campus as if it was his personal property and who talked as if he learned the English language in a New Orleans whore-house. The older man introduced himself as John Boyd.

That thing is a piece of shit. It’s too big to be a fighter and that goddamn little wing it’s got, it must take two states to turn the thing around. I’ll tell you something else. The pilot can’t see behind and he can’t see out the right window. He has to depend on his copilot to tell him what’s out there.”

“It’s too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It’s just not worth a good goddamn.” He moved closer to Hillaker. His voice rose. “How much extra weight does that swing wing add to the airplane? Twenty percent?” Boyd didn’t wait for an answer. He poked Hillaker in the chest again. “The entire weight of the wing goes through that pivot pin and you hide it all in that big glove. You’ll be getting fatigue and stress cracks in that fucker before it’s got five hundred hours on it. And the amount of drag you’ve created is aerodynamic bullshit. That pivot adds weight and degrades performance, plus you can’t sweep the wing back fast enough in combat to make a difference. The low-speed performance is lousy, the high-speed performance is worse, and the goddamn thing won’t maneuver.”

Hillaker pulled out a chair. “Sit down, John.” Hillaker was supervising construction of what would turn out to be one of the most scandal-ridden aircraft in U.S. history. Boyd was the first to publicly say what in a few years everyone would know. The Air Force was seduced by swing-wing technology, a technology that ultimately would ruin two generations of airplanes. (The under-powered Navy F-14 Tomcat is a swing wing and the performance is so poor that pilots call it the “Tom Turkey.”

As Boyd probed deeper into the comparisons between American and Soviet aircraft, he began to notice a disturbing trend in the chart overlays. Blue was good and red was bad and there was entirely too much red in many of the charts. This meant that in a big part of the performance envelope, Soviet aircraft were superior to U.S. aircraft. This could not be true. U.S. fighter aircraft were the best in the world. If Boyd briefed this—if he showed, for instance, that the F-4 Phantom was too heavy and did not have enough wing to win a turning fight with a MiG-21 at high altitude—and he was wrong, it would be the end of E-M. If he said, as the E-M charts showed, that the only place for an F-4 to successfully fight the MiG-21 was at low altitude and high speed, he had better be right.

Perhaps the most colorful member of the group was Bobby Kan, a Korean who signed documents as “WGOFP”—World’s Greatest Oriental Fighter Pilot. Kan was shot down in Vietnam, and when the rescue helicopter came to pick him up, the crew saw his Asian features and thought a North Vietnamese was trying to get aboard. The helicopter quickly departed. Kan released such a stream of creative profanity over the radio that the helicopter crew knew the man on the ground had to be an American and returned to pick him up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Sweeney. “Sir, your aide said we had twenty minutes. We’ve used up our time.” “Continue the brief.” “Yes, Sir.” Sweeney turned to his aide. “Cancel my appointments for today.” He glared at Boyd. “What you’re saying can’t be right.” “I believe it to be correct, sir.” “Who else have you briefed on this? What was their reaction?” Boyd told Sweeney whom he had briefed and said their reaction was “the same as yours, General.” Sweeney turned to one of his staff members and said, “Get my intelligence guy on this. And call those people in Foreign Tech and make sure these numbers are right.” A few minutes later Sweeney’s intelligence specialist returned and said, “They have a copy of Major Boyd’s brief, Sir. They say his data is correct.” “How many airplanes did you run this on?” Sweeney asked. “All of them, Sir. I’ve just shown you the interesting ones so far. But I’ll be glad to run them all for you.” “Continue.”

Several members of Sweeney’s staff began to ask questions designed to embarrass Boyd, to throw off his timing, to reveal how shallow this new theory was. That was fine with Boyd. He looked on the questions as if they were bullets fired during an air-to-air engagement. Before more than a few words were out of a man’s mouth, Boyd knew where a question was going, and he knew how to respond. Like any fighter pilot he turned into the fight, confronting every question head-on. And because he knew his material better than any other person in the room, no one touched him.

The briefing was winding down, but Sweeney had one more question. “Major, yesterday you said you had run the numbers on all U.S. aircraft. But nowhere did you mention the F-111. Did your research cover that aircraft? If so, what conclusions did you draw?” Boyd clicked the slide projector. His final slide was an E-M diagram of the F-111. Boyd did not speak. The general and his staff had seen enough E-M diagrams in the past two days to grasp the implications of the F-111 display. Even so, they studied the solid-red slide and then looked at Boyd in disbelief. Boyd gave them the numbers that showed how at any altitude, any speed, any G-load, any part of the flight-performance envelope, the F-111 was inferior to the Soviet threat. If the F-111 faced a MiG, it would be shot down. Period. End of story. The F-111 was, in the traditional phrase of fighter pilots, a dog.

“Major, based on your extensive research, do you have any recommendations regarding this aircraft?” Boyd did not miss a beat. “General, I’d pull the wings off, install benches in the bomb bay, paint the goddamn thing yellow, and turn it into a high-speed line taxi.”

“This brilliant young officer is an original thinker,” said the ER. “His production comes from about 10% inspiration and 90% a grueling pace that his cohorts find difficult if not impossible to keep up with. He is extremely intolerant of inefficiency and those who attempt to impede his program.” It ends with, “Maj. Boyd should be promoted to Lt. Col. below the zone of primary eligibility at the first opportunity.”

The air war in Vietnam was white-hot. F-105s were going up North to the area around Hanoi—“Route Pack VI” it was called—where they were being shot down by the dozens. The previous year, 171 American aircraft were lost in North Vietnam. That year the number would rise to 318.

As Boyd later explained, “You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”

(Aviation aficionados often say the P-51 of World War II and the F-86 of Korea were pure fighters. But the P-51 was designed for range and speed, not maneuvering. It became the premier fighter of World War II only because the British—over the vehement objections of the WrightPat bureaucracy—replaced its puny power plant with a big Rolls-Royce engine. The F-86 was designed as a high-altitude interceptor. To reach high altitude, it had to have big wings, and because it had big wings, it became, serendipitously, a great maneuvering fighter.)

while Boyd worked daily to remove things from the F-X, seemingly everyone else in the Air Force—the fire-control people, missile people, electronic-warfare people—wanted to add something. Maintenance people even insisted the aircraft carry a built-in maintenance ladder. They said the aircraft might operate in a forward area where there would be no ladders for mechanics. “Tell them to get some goddamn orange crates and climb on those,” Boyd growled, trying with little success to explain the term growth factor. A twenty-pound maintenance ladder does not simply add twenty pounds to the aircraft—not if the aircraft is to maintain the same performance. Dozens of subtle additions are caused by the ladder until finally the ladder adds not twenty pounds but perhaps two hundred.

When contractors said some of Boyd’s engineering specifications could not be met or that a fighter could not do what Boyd wanted it to do, he listened, chewed on his hand, and stared unblinkingly at the contractor. When he had enough he stopped chewing, spit out pieces of skin, jabbed the contractor in the chest, and exploded. “You are the dumbest son of a bitch God ever made” or “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” or “You stupid fuck. That will never work.”

“Major Boyd, I have just one question,” the general said. “Did you tell that colonel at Wright-Pat he was a lying fucker?” “Yes, Sir, I did.” “You are out of here. You are being transferred.” The general launched his own chewing-out session about respecting senior officers and insubordination and how lucky Boyd was that he was only being transferred. When he paused, Boyd said, “Sir, do you want to know why I said that?” “No.” “I think you do. Give me one minute.” He opened his briefcase. Reluctantly, the general looked at the drag polars. “Know how to read these, General?” “Yes.” The general moved his finger over the polars. “They’re saying…” “Yes, Sir, they are saying the smaller the wing, the greater the lift.” “That means…” “Yes, Sir, that means the greatest lift would come if there were no wing at all.” The general picked up his telephone and called Wright-Pat. And Boyd swears that as the general picked up the phone, he muttered, “They are lying fuckers.”

The legendary Robin Olds, commander of the “Wolfpack”—the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon, Thailand—grew weary with the F-105 mortality rate and came up with the plan for Mission Bolo. Like most great battle plans, it was simple in the extreme: his F-4s would pretend to be F-105s. Their target (via the heart of the infamous Route Pack VI, the deadliest collection of AAA, missiles, and enemy fighters the world has ever known) was the North Vietnamese air base at Phuc Yen.

of all the tactical weapons employed in Vietnam, air-to-air missiles ranked among the most disappointing.

The MiG pilot was good, but he was rat-racing with the man who invented the Raspberry Roll and he never had a chance. Razz gained the advantage.

The Navy theory about interservice politics is that once the enemy is down, they should slash his throat, burn his remains, bury the ashes, then sow salt over the land where the ashes are buried.

History has proven Boyd correct in picking the fixed-wing design. The variable-sweep wing was one of the major aviation engineering blunders of the century. Hollywood and the movie Top Gun notwithstanding, the F-14 Tomcat is a lumbering, poor performing, aerial truck. It weighs about fifty-four thousand pounds.

He began by wanting to know what functions were needed in a CAS airplane. To find out he sought out A-1 pilots who flew CAS missions in Vietnam. These young officers were energized by the chance to have their recent combat experience considered in designing the first designated CAS airplane the Air Force ever had. None of this “one pass, haul ass” stuff for these guys—to protect troops on the ground they needed loiter time over a target. They needed an airplane, they said, with long legs. Much of the time hard-to-see targets and the smoke and haze of the battlefield means a CAS pilot must work low and tight and slow, so they wanted maneuverability at slow speeds. When friendly forces are in dire straits, they need an airplane that can wreak hell, death, and destruction, an airplane the very sight of which will turn an enemy soldier’s bowels to water, so they wanted lethal weapons, preferably cannon. Working low and tight as a good CAS pilot must do means the “gomers” will shoot at them with everything from rifles to AAA to missiles, so they wanted an airplane that could take hits and still bring its pilot home. They wanted survivability. Survivability was an issue that particularly resonated with Sprey. In doing research for his interdiction study, he read how more than 85 percent of all aircraft losses in World War II and Korea were from fire or loss of control. Several bullets in the right place and crucial aircraft systems were burned or destroyed. It was almost impossi...

Sprey was fascinated by Hans Rudel, the legendary tank-killing German pilot of World War II who still is considered the greatest CAS pilot of all time. Sprey insisted that everyone on the A-X project read Stuka Pilot, Rudel’s wartime biography that told how he flew 2,530 missions and destroyed 511 tanks.

request for proposal (RFP) was sent out. In the RFP, Sprey told the contractors they could not respond with the usual two-foot-tall stack of documents. The response had to be limited to thirty pages and confined to pure design—no smoke and mirrors. Even more unprecedented, airplanes from two contractors would be picked and the Air Force would supervise a combat-type fly-off between two flying prototypes. Specifications demanded that the fuel and the engine be in separate parts of the aircraft. Fuel tanks had to be explosion-proof. To make sure this was done, sections of the wing and fuselage would be fired at with Soviet weapons. And, oh yes, this must be done under simulated flight conditions with wind blowing over the prototypes being fired upon. Wright-Pat said no facility existed for such tests and that the resulting explosions would be too dangerous. Sprey told them to take the propeller engine off a World War II B-50, attach it firmly to a solid stand, run up the engine, and let the prop wash go over the fuselage and wings. They did and several years later proudly took credit for what they termed the world’s first ballistic wind tunnel.

Both Riccioni’s brilliance and naïveté were manifested at the Academy when he wrote a book called Tigers Airborne, a book on aerial tactics. In the book Riccioni said Air Force tactics not only were stupid, but could get pilots killed in combat.

Reduced to its basics, the Grand Strategy was to take on the U.S. Air Force, develop the new lightweight fighter in secret, build a prototype, then force the Air Force to adopt the aircraft. It was one of the most audacious plots ever hatched against a military service and it was done under the noses of men who, if they had the slightest idea what it was about, not only would have stopped it instantly, but would have orders cut reassigning Boyd to the other side of the globe. Boyd knew this. He told Sprey and Riccioni they should never make a reference, on the phone or even in private conversation, to the fighter they were designing. Anything and everything to do with the lightweight fighter should be referred to as the “Lord’s work.”

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.”

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.”

Boyd shoved the papers across the desk. “Goddamn airplane is made out of balonium.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Vietnam war that base was Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai AFB, commonly known as NKP or, by the more irreverent, as Naked Fanny.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a network of trails and dirt roads that formed the main route by which North Vietnamese forces operating in South Vietnam were resupplied by cargo-carrying bicycles and small trucks. Seeding the trail with sensors had been the idea of Defense Secretary McNamara’s R&D technocrats, and the project became known as the “McNamara Line.” The $2.5 billion operation was a huge windfall for IBM. The technocrats convinced McNamara that if the trail were wired—as one Task Force Alpha worker said, like a “pinball machine”—the supply chain could be broken and America could win the war. This was America’s first electronic battlefield. It was one of the most highly classified operations of the Vietnam War.

The acoustic sensors could not pinpoint the gun location quickly enough. By the time attack aircraft arrived on the scene, the gun was silent or had been relocated. Boyd developed a grid system for implanting sensors. Now, sometimes less than five minutes after the first enemy shell was lobbed, FAC pilots were firing marking rockets and the jets were lining up to bomb the artillery position.

What Boyd was obsessing about—and that is not too strong a word—was trying to understand the nature of creativity. This had actually begun several years earlier as he wondered how he came up with the E-M Theory. E-M is at heart such a simple thing; why had no one else discovered it? What was there about his thinking that enabled him to be the first? His search ranged far afield. From the base library he checked out every available book on philosophy and physics and math and economics and science and Taoism and a half dozen other disciplines. He was all over the map, searching but not quite knowing for what. He hints at what he is working on when, in a letter dated September 28, he again writes Mary that he is on the “verge of a fantastic breakthrough” in the thinking process and how it applies to life.

Boyd put on his hard face and wagged a long forefinger at the sergeants. “Here’s what I’m gonna do,” he said he told the sergeants. “First, I’m going to have the latrines repainted. Then I’m going to dig a trench off base, out in front of the main gate. And the first goddamn time I see any more obscenity on the walls I’m going to padlock every enlisted latrine on this base. If somebody wants to piss or shit—day or night, rain or shine—he’s going to have to do it in that trench. In front of every Thai person passing by.” He paused to let his message sink in. He knew what the sergeants were thinking. The busiest street in town led straight to the base. A trench dug in front of the main gate would be in sight of hundreds of people. Thais were notoriously finicky about personal cleanliness and privacy. Any Americans seen using the trench would be subjected to considerable disdain. Plus, it was the rainy season, a miserable time in Southeast Asia.

Thai women are extraordinarily beautiful and many American officers formed close relationships with them. But this particular officer was married and soon was overcome with guilt. He broke off the relationship. The woman in question was the daughter of an influential village official who felt his family lost face when his daughter was spurned. He was about to charge the young officer with rape. Boyd said he called in the young officer and gave him the big picture of how many base activities depended on the good will of Thai officials. He ordered the young officer, guilty or not, to continue the relationship. “I’m giving you a direct order to screw her every night until you are transferred out of here,” Boyd said he told the officer. “Sir, I don’t believe that is a lawful order,” the officer said. “Goddammit, I issued it and you better obey it. We’re at war and bigger things are at stake here than your guilt. Your dick can cause you problems but it is not going to cause problems for America. You do as I say or I will make your life a living hell for as long as you are in the Air Force.”

And it was at night that he worked long hours on his “learning theory.” It would be almost five years before this search culminated in one of the few things Boyd ever wrote, an eleven-page paper he called “Destruction and Creation,” an unpublished work that some think is his most significant intellectual achievement.

He wanted to examine the B-1. His instincts told him something was terribly wrong with that project, and if he was right, that meant a skunk fight with the Air Force. There was nothing Boyd loved more than a good skunk fight. It kept the juices flowing. It kept him at a combat edge. Without a skunk fight, life was boring.

The captain reported in June. He saluted and said, “Sir, Captain Raymond Leopold reporting for duty.” Boyd glowered over a cigar. He looked at a tall slender officer and bellowed, “Boyd. Like bird in Brooklynese. Got it?” A Ph.D. can figure out such things. “Yes, Sir.”