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.
