Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

eulogy. He quoted Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

Boyd’s friends smiled broadly, a few even chuckled, as they recalled Boyd at his loud, arm-waving, irrepressible best. The chuckles must have puzzled the chaplain. A military funeral with full honors is marked by dignity and solemnity.

There is no such thing as an ex–fighter pilot. Once a young man straps on a jet aircraft and climbs into the heavens to do battle, it sears his psyche forever. At some point he will hang up his flight suit—eventually they all do—and in the autumn of his years his eyes may dim and he may be stooped with age. But ask him about his life, and his eyes flash and his back straightens and his hands demonstrate aerial maneuvers and every conversation begins with “There I was at…” and he is young again. He remembers the days when he sky-danced through the heavens, when he could press a button and summon the lightning and invoke the thunder, the days when he was a prince of the earth and a lord of the heavens. He remembers his glory days and he is young again.

Boyd never achieved the one thing he wanted most. He died thinking the people in his hometown never knew of his contributions to national defense. He died thinking he would be remembered, if at all, as a crackpot and a failure, as a man who never made general, and a man whose ideas were not understood and whose accomplishments were not important.

Placing the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps on a grave is the highest honor a Marine can bestow. It is rarely seen, even at the funeral of decorated combat Marines, and it may have been the first time in history an Air Force pilot received the honor.

Erie is the only port town in Pennsylvania. Even people in other parts of the state often are surprised to learn that until the last year or so it was their third largest municipality, after the elegant and history-wrapped city of Philadelphia and the brawny sophistication of Pittsburgh.

If Mrs. Boyd granted her children unusual freedoms within her house, she was more than diligent in imparting rules for outside the house. She inculcated her children with a protective mechanism they remembered all their lives. Over and over again she said if people knew too much about the Boyd family they would use the knowledge in a critical manner. 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. This resulted in the Boyd children being extraordinarily reticent about all but the most inconsequential of family matters, even when they reached old age.

She wrapped her arms around him and said, “Don’t let it bother you. Say to yourself over and over, ‘It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me.’ Remember you have something no one else in the class has. You have principle and integrity. That means you will be criticized and attacked. But in the end you will win. Don’t let it bother you.”

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.

The winter of 1945–1946 was particularly cold and wet in Japan. On the former Japanese air base where Boyd was stationed, officers lived in warm quarters, slept in beds, and ate hot food, while enlisted ranks lived in tents, slept on the ground, and ate K rations. Large wooden hangars suitable for barracks-type housing stood empty and unused. Fed up with this situation, Boyd led a revolt. He and his fellow soldiers tore down two hangars and used the wood to build fires so they could stay warm. Soon after, the Army inventoried base property and discovered the hangars had gone missing. Boyd was identified as the leader of the perpetrators and brought up on charges. A court-martial loomed. Officers believed this would be the quick and uncontested trial of an enlisted man who clearly was guilty. But Private Boyd went on the attack and turned the pending court-martial into a referendum on officer leadership and responsibility. He asked the investigating officer if the Army’s general orders were in effect at the time he used wood from the hangars to build fires. When he was told that of course the general orders were in effect, he said one of the general orders stated that the first responsibility of an officer was to take care of his men. Officers were not doing that, not if enlisted personnel were sleeping on the ground while suitable quarters stood empty. Boyd said that if the court-martial proceeded, he would raise the issue of officer responsibility with higher authorities....

One of the more humbling aspects of higher education, both in athletics and in academics, is when a student finds that just because he trailed clouds of glory in high school does not mean he will do the same in college. If Boyd went out for the swim team when the season began in January 1948, he did not make it.

SECOND lieutenants, called “butter bars” because of the single gold bar they wear as an insignia of rank, often are given the most menial of jobs, tasks that must be done by officers but that higher-ranking officers would not deign to perform. This is particularly true for second lieutenants about to begin flight training. These young men believe they are Godlike beings, and to nonrated officers they are not only insufferable but will grow more so once they complete flight training and pin silver wings over their left-breast pocket. If there is any group on Earth with healthier egos than fighter pilots, they have yet to be discovered. Bureaucrats who run the Air Force personnel system believe that a menial job might teach humility to these fledglings. Over the years they have discovered this belief is founded more on hope than on reality—no fighter pilot ever has been or ever will be humble. But the bureaucrats keep trying.

The common expression was, “There are two kinds of T-6 pilots: those who have ground-looped it and those who are going to ground-loop it.”

Back in flight training, Boyd quickly went through basic maneuvers and soloed. And then he went out and threw the T-6 around the sky in such a fearless manner that it seemed to others as if he had done it a thousand times. It was difficult for his classmates to accept that he was a student just as they were, that he had never had flying lessons until now. He was, quite simply, a master of the T-6. To realize the significance of this, one must understand that the first time a young man slides into the cockpit of an aircraft and looks at the strange collection of instruments, a feeling of awe washes over him. No matter how intensely he wants to be a pilot, there is an inherent sense of wonder simply sitting in the cockpit. And when he goes aloft for the first time and realizes he is moving in a three-dimensional world, when he realizes that a moment of inattention can lead to a crash and a fiery explosion, he sometimes finds he has too much respect for the airplane. A pilot can be too cautious. He can be too methodical. He reads and memorizes the specifications, knows the boundaries of the performance envelope, and is careful never to nudge up against the performance limits. But Boyd did not believe the performance specs and had no fear of the aircraft. He jostled the T-6; he pushed it and horsed it around the sky. He flung the airplane up against the outside edges of the performance envelope and then beyond. If the book said the aircraft should never exceed 260 mph, Boyd pu...

Many civilians and those who have never looked through the gun sight—then called a pipper—at an enemy aircraft have a romantic perception, no doubt influenced by books and movies about World War I, that pilots are knights of the air, chivalrous men who salute their opponents before engaging in a fight that always is fair. They believe that elaborate rules of aerial courtesy prevail and that battle in the clear pure upper regions somehow is different, more glorified and rarefied, than battle in the mud. This is arrant nonsense. If anything, aerial combat is far meaner and grittier than ground combat. It is a primitive form of battle that happens to take place in the air. Fighter pilots—that is, the ones who survive air combat—are not gentlemen; they are back-stabbing assassins. They come out of the sun and attack an enemy when he is blind. They sneak up behind or underneath or “bounce” the enemy from above or flop into position on his tail—his sixo’clock position—and “tap” him before he knows they are there. That is why fighter pilots jink and weave and dart about like water bugs in a mason jar. They never hold a heading or a position longer than six or eight seconds. Aerial combat is brutally unforgiving. To come in second place is to die, usually in a rather spectacular manner. Most casualties never know they are targets until they are riddled with bullets, covered with flames, and on the way to creating a big hole in the ground. Those who want to engage in the romanticiz...

So at Nellis the idea was to push the aircraft beyond the envelope, to make the training as much like combat as possible. The saying of the time was “The more you bleed in peace time, the less you bleed in war.” This is another way of saying that normal rules of safety and common sense often were ignored. The thinking among pilots was “If you survive Nellis, Korea will be easy.”

Bigger-Faster-Higher-Farther. Air Force generals were taking a cold look at fighter pilots. The high speed of jet combat caused generals to believe drastic changes were in order. With the merge speed of fighter aircraft greater than 1,000 mph, guns were a thing of the past, they said. Missiles were the answer.

SAC was led by General Curtis LeMay. And if anyone wanted to know what God would look like in a flight suit, let them gaze upon General LeMay. “Flying fighters is fun. Flying bombers is important,” he said.

In the mid-50s, most of the test pilots started out as fighter pilots, but they were fighter pilots gone astray. More and more of the test pilots were engineers who were conservative, anal, by-the-book types, not hell-raising warriors. Test pilots were evaluators. Fighter pilots were applicators. Test pilots were pessimists who tried to find something wrong with an airplane. Fighter pilots were optimists who looked for something great in an airplane. Test pilots were detached from the airplane they flew. Fighter pilots fell in love with their airplane.

And if you have to ask who the best is, it sure as hell ain’t you.

Fighter pilots fly with their fangs out and their hair on fire and they look death in the face every day and you ain’t shit if you ain’t done it.

The summer of 1954, when Stephen contracted polio, was the last summer America experienced a polio epidemic. Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine that year. In 1955 the U.S. government approved polio vaccinations, and for all practical purposes polio disappeared from America. It was good news for America and for the world, but what was even more important news to Boyd was that Dr. Salk said polio was a virus—the disease was not hereditary. Boyd was not responsible. But Stephen would never walk.

But at the lowest point in his young career, Boyd was accepted as a student at the Fighter Weapons School (FWS) for the class beginning in April. There, he would learn to train instructors in advanced techniques of aerial combat. The FWS was formed at Nellis in 1949. It had various names and permutations over the years, especially in the mid- and late 50s, but it remained true to its founding belief that air-to-air combat is the noblest and purest use for a fighter aircraft. The idea was to graduate the best fighter pilots in the world and to send those pilots back to their home squadrons to train their fellow pilots in the finer points of aerial combat. But the emphasis on nuclear-bomb delivery and the small number of students attending each three-month class—about a dozen—diluted the potential of the school. (For years Navy and Marine pilots attended the FWS to learn how to become gunslingers. Twenty years after the FWS was formed, the Navy copied the school and called it Top Gun. Because of the movie Top Gun, most of the public knows only of the Navy school.)

The FWS is more than a post–graduate school for fighter pilots. And it is more than the top finishing school in the Air Force. The FWS is the temple of fighter aviation. It is for those who believe that fighter aviation is a sacred calling. As is true in most temples of learning, not all who enter complete the course. Those who graduate and march out the front door are awarded respect and honor. Those who “bust out” find that a promising career has ended. The danger of “busting out” adds a certain frisson of trepidation when the highly prized invitation comes to join the FWS. If the FWS is a temple and if its graduates are priests, then FWS instructors are high priests. They are grand masters of a three-dimensional, high-speed death dance, the most rapidly changing form of combat ever devised. An FWS instructor has all the outward appearances of a mortal. But he wears the patch. In Boyd’s day the instructors wore a large badge-shaped patch on the breast of their green flight suits, and in the center of the patch was a crosshair sitting atop a bull’s-eye. Across the top of the patch in bold letters was the title: INSTRUCTOR. In most places of higher learning, an instructor is at the bottom of the academic pecking order. But at Nellis there is no more prestigious title. An FWS instructor may go on to become a general; many have. But ask him what gave him the most pride—becoming an FWS instructor or being promoted to general—and he will not hesitate. A general wears stars. Bu...

“The only way to get a fighter pilot’s attention is to whip his ass,”

Nothing in Boyd’s long and tumultuous career causes such a violent reaction among old fighter pilots as hearing about the invincible Forty-Second Boyd. It sets their teeth on edge. They say all this business about being the best is a boy’s game and that there is no “world’s greatest fighter pilot”—that even the very best pilot can have a bad day. They quote the adage, “There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode and there never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed.” But if they went through Nellis in the mid- and late 50s, they knew there was someone better. And it still rankles.

In early 1960 the Las Vegas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) told the mayor of Las Vegas that southern-style marches would begin unless the Strip was desegregated within thirty days. Mafia dons who then owned and operated many of the Las Vegas casinos thought black people were after a piece of the action. Dr. James McMillan was a dentist and leader of the Las Vegas civil rights movement. He recalled that a casino owner called the NAACP and passed along the word from Mafia leaders. The word, as it usually was when it came from Mafia leaders, was blunt: back off or you’ll be found floating facedown in Lake Mead. Dr. McMillan replied that he was not trying to cut into the casino business. All he wanted was to make Las Vegas more cosmopolitan. Opening casinos and restaurants to blacks, a new market, would make more money for the casino owners. Desegregation would be good for business. This the Mafia understood. A few days later the casino owner called Dr. McMillan again. “It’s okay. They’re going to integrate this town.” The national media picked up the story. Las Vegas would no longer discriminate in public accommodations. Black people could stay at Strip hotels and eat at restaurants there. A formal agreement desegregating all hotel / casinos on the Strip was signed in March 1960, and that is the date usually accepted for the desegregation of hotels and restaurants in Las Vegas. But three years earlier, John Boyd forced the desegregation of ...

As the students pondered, Boyd placed the F-100 models on his desk, turned back to the class, and said, “The world is divided into hosers and hosees. Your job as fighter pilots is to be a hoser.” A feral grin split his face. He leaned toward the class and added, “I, of course, am the ultimate hoser.”

There are two kinds of mistakes a student pilot could make when delivering bombs or rockets: “pussy errors” and “tiger errors.” Pussy errors are the result of coming in high, shallow, and slow: the pilot is tentative. Tiger errors are the result of coming in low, steep, and fast: the pilot is overly aggressive. Nobody wanted to be known as the pilot who committed pussy errors.

The Corvette was the car of choice for fighter pilots in the 1950s. It would not go severely supersonic but it could get close enough, and from the way this one was being driven, it was obvious a fighter pilot was at the wheel.

By the end of that day, everyone in the FWS knew of his misadventure and was laughing about how he threw up at the police station. He was wounded, and a wounded man has little chance in the FWS. Competition is brutal. He knew what was ahead: students and instructors alike would treat him like a pariah. His fellow students would offer no help and instructors would go out of their way to see that he busted out. There was little chance that he would wear the patch, much less wear the black-and-gold checkerboard scarf. What could he do? Who could help him? There was only one person.

Southerners and fighter pilots know the story is more important than the facts.

President John F. Kennedy had been profoundly influenced by Maxwell Taylor’s book The Uncertain Trumpet, in which Taylor asserted that the Massive Retaliation approach to war, the Eisenhower Doctrine, actually increased the possibility of conventional war. Taylor said because the United States lacked a capability for conventional warfare, it would be extremely cautious about risking nuclear war on trivial matters. The book so influenced Kennedy that he decided America must have a more balanced approach to warfare; America needed options, and conventional warfare must be a big part of future plans. Replacing the doctrine of Massive Retaliation with one of Flexible Response put the bomber generals and the Kennedy Administration on a collision course.

About this time the first copy machine came to Eglin. Until then, in order to make multiple copies of a document, secretaries cut a stencil and ran it through a mimeograph machine. Now a document could be placed in the new machine, a button pressed, and out came numerous copies. When Boyd first saw the new machine, he stared, thought for a moment, then said, “What do you call this machine?” This is a copy machine, he was told. He shook his head and said, “No, that’s an antisecurity machine.” Boyd instantly sensed that people who would not go to the trouble to cut a stencil to make copies of a document could now easily make copies, or, as Boyd called them, “little brothers and sisters.” And he was right. Ultimately the copy machine had more to do with opening up government than did the Freedom of Information Act.

He was the adult child of an alcoholic and he knew how to operate below the radar of those who could shoot down his projects. While older and senior Air Force officers fumed at their failures, Christie quietly achieved his goals. His voice was so soft and his manner so self-effacing that few saw him as a potential rival. He was such a brilliant navigator of bureaucratic swamps that one of his nicknames was the “Finagler.” He could get anything done. And he could do it in such a gentle unobtrusive way that few ever became angry or jealous.

Tactically, the ability to quickly slow down is as important as the ability to quickly speed up.

Hillaker tilted his head toward the bar and said, “Now there’s a man who thinks he’s the greatest fighter pilot in the world.” His host looked toward the bar, then turned back to Hillaker and smiled. “He might well be. That’s John Boyd.” Hillaker shrugged. “Never heard of him.” “I’ll introduce you.” “No thanks. I don’t like loudmouths.” But the officer had already moved toward the bar and was talking to Boyd, telling him about the VIP, and asking Boyd to meet him.

He had the answer; he knew how to translate the reams of charts and formulas and engineering data from Wright-Pat into a simple form. He would show graphs of the differences between each American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas represented where the differences favored the American fighter, red where the Soviet fighter had the advantage. Blue is good. Red is bad. Even a goddamn general can understand that.

The colonel knew not to give reason to one general to call another and complain. The fraternity of generals is tight and closed. A colonel who wants to be promoted does not fare well by confronting a general.

A military briefing is a slow, antiquated, and terribly inefficient way to present information. Nevertheless, it is an art form upon which an officer’s career can rise or fall. Many men have risen to high rank on their ability to, as the military says, “give a good brief.” A certain charm school manner surrounds a good briefer. He almost always is junior in rank to those being briefed, but not too junior. Generals, for instance, usually are briefed by a lower-ranking general or by a full colonel. A brief is wrapped in unwritten rules. The briefer has a pointer, which he should not use too often. He stands on a stage but should not move about too much. He has a lectern upon which he should not lean. He has slides or charts but is expected to know the material far beyond what is displayed. He tells the higher-ranking officers what he is going to tell them, then he tells them, then he tells them what he has told them, and finally, if he hasn’t been ripped to shreds by adversarial questions, he closes. One of the most rigid of the unwritten rules is that the briefer be prepared to answer every question quickly and confidently. A man who cannot answer a question asked by a superior officer has a mental picture of his career going down in flames. It is obvious that most people can read and assimilate information faster than they can learn something by listening to a dog and pony show. But the U.S. military culture is an oral culture and the bedrock of that culture is the briefin...

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. And the F-111 chart was one that would cause serious heartburn to any general who saw it—the chart was solid red: Soviet aircraft could defeat the F-111 at any altitude, at any airspeed, in any part of the flight envelope.

Boyd was becoming widely known in the Air Force as a man who could be difficult to get along with. Sometimes it seemed he went out of his way to be obstreperous. The man just would not bend, even on things that did not matter to most people. One example was when the Air Force launched a Zero Defects Campaign, and the base commander at Eglin wanted every person on base to sign a pledge saying he would make no mistakes during the coming year. Most organizations at Eglin already flew a flag saying the office was 100% FOR ZERO DEFECTS. But Boyd knew, as did almost everyone who signed the pledge, that he and everyone else would make mistakes. He thought Zero Defects was a stupid idea and refused to sign. A group of lieutenants working for Christie not only followed his lead but raised a flag that proudly proclaimed they were 100% AGAINST ZERO DEFECTS. Hints that people would be fired and threats of courts-martial drifted down from above. But then Boyd sent word that if there were any retaliations he would, in his words, “create an epic shit storm.” The base commander decided it was okay to have a few mavericks at Eglin.

There are officers of great patriotism, however, who are appalled by what they see in the Pentagon. They say to themselves, “I’ll go along for now. But when I get to be colonel, I’m going to change things.” What they don’t realize is that they will be promoted to colonel only if their superiors think they won’t make changes. Study after study shows that the higher in rank a military officer ascends, the less likely he is to make change. It is sad indeed to look upon a patriot whose ideals have been destroyed by the Pentagon. But even sadder are those who simply stand aside and do or say nothing, allowing those who sold their souls to have their way.

Air Force leaders were stunned to discover that big, expensive, complex F-4s and F-105s were the wrong aircraft for that war. Not only that, but in a development predicted by Boyd and ignored by Air Force tacticians, the vaunted missiles that were to have ended the era of the gunfighter had proven highly unreliable. A pilot was lucky to get one hit out of every ten missiles launched. The Air Force had long advocated that maneuverability be built into the missile rather than the airplane, and now it suffered the consequences. If a gun-firing enemy is on his six, a fighter pilot can disengage and go for separation. He can dive and outrun the enemy. But a jet can’t outrun a missile. Vietnam proved that a pilot has to be able to turn and burn in order to defeat a missile chasing him across the heavens. In fact, missiles meant that fighter aircraft should be more maneuverable than in the past.

The Air Force simply was going about this the wrong way. As Boyd later explained, “You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”

“If you have no briefing or no report, you are not prepared.” “That is incorrect, Sir. I have a report—a well thought-out report.” The colonel stared long and hard at Boyd. He leaned back in his chair. “Proceed, Major.” Boyd rocked on his heels. He looked the colonel squarely in the eye. In his most earnest and sincere tone he said, “Sir, I’ve never designed a fighter plane before.” Then he paused and nodded toward the design studies stacked on the table. “But I could fuck up and do better than that.”

Boyd was guided in his work by one simple principle: he wanted to give pilots a fighter that would outmaneuver any enemy. He did not become fixated on technology or “one-point” numerical solutions. For instance, he did not say the F-X had to have a certain top speed or a certain turning capability. He knew that it must have a high thrust-to-weight ratio if it were to have neck-snapping acceleration. And he knew it had to have lots of wing in order to maneuver quickly into the firing envelope. It had to have the energy to disengage, go for separation, then come back into the fight with an advantage. It had to have the fuel to penetrate deep into enemy territory and sustain a prolonged turning fight. But all these criteria were vague. The closest Boyd came to defining a specific technical solution was when he said the aircraft should pull enough Gs at 30,000 feet to “roll down your goddamn socks.”

The guns versus missiles argument is one of the most emotional arguments in the Air Force. It is utterly incomprehensible to non-pilots, most of whom probably think missiles are the best possible armament for a fighter. The rules of engagement in Vietnam, combined with poor-performing missiles, had shown what happened when fighter aircraft had no guns. The rules dictated that a U.S. pilot visually identify an enemy aircraft before firing a missile. But the minimum missile-launch range was far greater than the range at which an aircraft could be identified as friend or foe. That meant the pilot had to get in close, identify the enemy, then back off far enough to launch his missiles. Missiles could be evaded by the simplest of countermeasures. There was no countermeasure for a gun. Signs began showing up on the walls in the Pentagon: “It takes a fighter with a gun to kill a MiG-21.”

The apartment on Beauregard Street became a symbol of how Boyd’s family suffered because of his devotion to his work. In the years following the move, Boyd’s family life devolved into a state of disarray from which it never recovered. Stephen began repairing television sets and stereos and various electronics. His sadness about his handicap had left him withdrawn and fiercely independent. Kathy’s quiet and gentle nature slowly changed into a clinical depression. Jeff, shy and gentle, was hammered in discussions with his father. He found refuge with his collection of spiders and poisonous snakes. John Scott and Boyd had tumultuous arguments that turned into scuffles and, in at least one instance, into a fight. Mary Ellen was more like her father than any of the others; she was his “Snookums,” and she broke his heart when she became ensnared in the drug culture. For years they did not speak. And all the children say today that their anger toward their father is rooted in his insistence on living in the tiny apartment.

Then Boyd’s uncanny ability to look ahead and plan move and countermove gave him another thought. If high-tech equipment was not going to work on the F-15 and if performance criteria were not going to be met, wasn’t it possible that the Navy’s F-14 was facing the same problems? And if so, might not the Navy be thinking of an alternative to the F-14? Riccioni drafted a memo to a general in charge of Research and Development and dangled the threat of a small, high-performance Navy aircraft. Nothing galvanized an Air Force general more than being told the Navy was on his six. The general told Riccioni to press on. Boyd laughed. “We don’t care what the Russians are doing. We only care about what the Navy is doing.”