Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

by Robert Coram

At the time the findings of the Fitzhugh Commission must have been very much on Packard’s mind. The commission had been appointed in 1969 to take a hard look at DoD management and the acquisition process. The group issued a report recommending that when building new weapons systems, the DoD should develop and test a prototype before sending the weapons system into production. This is because in almost every instance, a defense contractor underestimates costs and overestimates performance. (The practice of underestimating costs is so common that it has a name: “front-loading.”) A prototype reveals design flaws, performance inadequacies, and true costs. This was not a new idea. Before World War II most new fighters appeared first as prototypes. It made sense to test a design, decide whether it was good or bad, make modifications, redesign it, and then put it on the production line. But then came jet engines and swept wings and ever more exotic avionics, all of which caused larger Air Force and contractor bureaucracies. The development staff of an airplane went from maybe a hundred people to a thousand or more. Defense contractors said the business had become too complex and too expensive to make prototypes. Air Force bureaucracies agreed. They did not want tests that might cancel their projects. McNamara played into their hands when he brought to the Pentagon something called “Total Package Procurement Concept.” He thought all the analysis and quantification could be done on...

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