1 - The Mad Major

John Boyd was born in the hardscrabble town of Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1927. His father died when he was three, at the onset of the Great Depression, and he was brought up by his widowed mother, who worked three jobs to rear him and his siblings, one of whom was stricken by polio and another by schizophrenia. Toward the end of World War 2, John enlisted in the US Army Air Forces but was rejected for flight training because of 'low aptitude'[1]; instead, he became an Army swimming instructor in occupied Japan.

Discharged in 1947, he matriculated as an engineering student at the University of Iowa. ‘Academically,’ his biographer Grant Hammond tells us, ‘Boyd was competent but inconsistent, undisciplined, and occasionally just not interested.’[2] He switched his concentration to economics, partied, swam competitively—and joined the officer training program then ubiquitous on American campuses. In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, Boyd earned his bachelor’s degree and a second lieutenant’s commission in the newly fledged US Air Force. This time, he demonstrated a considerable aptitude for flight, throwing his North American T-6 trainer ‘around the sky in such a fearless manner that it seemed to others as if he had done it a thousand times'.[3] 

Transitioning to jet fighters, he was equally aggressive: ‘I had to bend the shit out of that airplane,’ he said of mock combat with his instructors.[4] ‘We didn’t have any rules when I went into it [flight training]. It was fantastic. Of course we killed a lot of guys. We killed more guys in training than we did in Korea.’[5] The Air Force did have rules, of course, but Boyd preferred to ignore them.

Oddly, for a man often called America’s greatest fighter pilot, Boyd would never be credited with an air-to-air victory over an enemy aircraft. He reached Korea in March 1953, and the armistice was signed in July, before he accumulated the 30 missions that would qualify him as a ‘shooter’, rather than a wingman tasked with guarding his flight leader.

Postwar, Boyd was assigned to the USAF Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, first as a student, then an instructor. He was a demanding teacher: ‘If the guy really wants to learn and has some problem, you do not have to give him the 2x4 [club]. But if the guy has an obstruction’—i.e., had an overly high opinion of his abilities—‘I would cut his balls off in 10 seconds.'[6]  The castration took the form of an air-to-air humiliation, in which Boyd would start out with the student directly behind him—‘on his six’, as pilots say—and in under forty seconds change places, meanwhile shouting ‘Guns, guns, guns!’ to let him know that in the real world he would have been dead.

Boyd loved the freedom he found in aerial combat. In the air with his students, or a fellow instructor, or a challenger from another airbase, he made one of those connections for which he would become famous: ‘I had a degree in economics’, as he recalled toward the end of his life. What a fighter pilot did in the clear Nevada air, he decided, was much the same as John D. Rockefeller did with Standard Oil or E. H. Harriman with the Union Pacific railroad. ‘This is like 19th century capitalism in the sky! All we’re doing is free-booting. We’re buccaneers. This is fantastic. We can do whatever in the hell we goddam please. Those generals don’t know what the hell we’re doing.’[7] 

In an oral history interview after he retired, Boyd describes that mock combat over the Nevada desert in terms that illuminates the way his mind worked:

I would see myself in a vast ball—I would be inside the ball—and I could visualize all the actions taking place around the ball [whilst] all the time of course I am maneuvering.... I could visualize from two reference points. When I was fighting air-to-air, I could see myself as a detached observer looking at myself, plus all the others around me.[8]

Unusually, in an American military that believed in regular rotations, Boyd stayed at Nellis AFB for six years, teaching a generation of American and foreign fighter pilots. Meanwhile, he changed the school’s emphasis from gunnery to tactics, taught himself calculus at night, and dictated what would be his only significant publication. The mimeographed Aerial Attack Study was the first to present air combat maneuvers as an interlinked series of moves and countermoves, one flowing logically into the next.[9] ‘Within a decade Boyd’s [monograph] had become the tactics manual for air forces around the world,’ writes Jarmo Lindberg of the Finnish Air Force. ‘It forever changed the way they fought.’[10] And note the title: Boyd wanted his pilots always to play offence.

Energy Manuverability

Typically, if an Air Force captain hopes to be promoted, he must first earn an advanced degree. When the education assignment came to John Boyd, he opted instead for a second bachelor’s, this time in industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It was in Atlanta, as a 35-year-old father of five, that he was asked what exactly a fighter pilot did when he met an enemy aircraft. The questioner was Charles Cooper, little more than half Boyd’s age. They were classmates in thermodynamics, so Boyd used their common background to explain that, just as a generator transforms mechanical motion into electrical energy, so can a pilot transform higher altitude into greater speed … or either one into the ability to maneuver. ‘'Then it hit me, ‘ as he told the story years later; ‘Jesus Christ, wait a minute! I can look at air-to-air combat in terms of energy relationships. I can lay out equations. I can do it formally now.'[11] He spent the rest of the night laying out the equations, and when he was done he had the basis for would become known as his Energy Maneuverability theory, or E-M. As he later explained:

'Maneuverability means altitude, airspeed, and direction, in any combination. You can use energy to measure those changes. In other words, quantify. Obviously, you can do it for two competing airplanes and some numbers are higher for one airplane over the other.'[12]

Duly promoted, he was assigned to Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, where he continued to plot aircraft performance, develop his E-M charts, and cultivate the civilians who would design the next-generation fighter aircraft. (His computer runs correctly predicted that America’s new and gargantuan F-111 Aardvark at 51 tonnes gross weight would be inferior in almost every respect to the latest Soviet fighters.) He proved to be an inspired briefer, whether to F-105 pilots in Vietnam, wing commanders in Europe, or—crucially—the four-star generals charged with procuring future aircraft. He also acquired a not altogether complimentary nickname: the Mad Major.  In an argument (and there were many arguments), he famously kept his face three inches from his adversary’s, meanwhile tapping the man’s chest with two fingers that held a Dutch Master cigar. On at least two occasions, Boyd supposedly burned a hole in the other man’s tie. ‘Around Eglin’, as Robert Coram archly writes, ‘he was getting the reputation of a man who might not have both oars in the water.’[13]

In his oral history interview, Boyd seems to say that he became interested in the German concept of blitzkrieg whilst working at Eglin, though his biographers would put that study ten years in the future.[14] However that may be, his more pressing concern was to apply his E-M concept to the design of future aircraft. His advocacy was certainly effective, for in 1966 he was transferred to the Pentagon with the mission of developing a fighter to replace the F-105 Thunderchiefs and F-4 Phantoms that were proving inadequate against Russian-built aircraft over North Vietnam.[15]

A challenging aspect of Boyd’s E-M charts was their clear demonstration that the F-86 Sabre he had flown in Korea was inferior to the MiG-15 used by North Korean and Chinese pilots. The Russian-built fighter could fly faster, climb higher, turn tighter, and out-accelerate the F-86 … yet the American pilots had claimed a 10:1 victory ratio over their opponents. Why did the F-86 prevail? Better training could have accounted for only part of the Americans’ edge.  ‘For days’, Robert Coram tells us, Boyd ‘went into frequent trances as he groped for the answer.’[16] In the end, he realized that the F-86 had two characteristics that in combination outweighed the MiG’s advantages. First, a clear bubble canopy gave the pilot better ‘situational awareness’: if the eyesight of the two men were equal, the American could spot the MiG before its pilot saw him. Second, the F-86 had fully hydraulic controls that allowed the American to transition faster from one maneuver to another. Boyd would label these advantages observation and fast transients, and the insight would lead him in time to the OODA Loop—the concept that all combat, indeed all human competition, involves a continuous cycle of Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. 

The Fighter Mafia

When he took up his assignment at the Pentagon, Boyd found the Air Force about to commit millions of dollars to designing a fighter that his E-M calculations showed would be ‘overweight and underwinged, too complex, and far too expensive’.[17] With his acolytes—mostly civilian employees—he sweated the behemoth down to a plane whose empty weight was less than half what the Pentagon had intended.  ‘Boyd’s E-M theory’, writes the Finnish commander Jarmo Lindbergh, ‘made it possible for the first time in fighter design history to analyze the whole maneuvering envelope of a fighter still in design and even prior to the first flight of the prototype.’[18] Taken into service as the F-15 Eagle—gross weight 58 tonnes—the new fighter has served as America’s air superiority weapon for more than thirty years.

Boyd’s group, by now called the Fighter Mafia, followed up with an even smaller aircraft, the F-16 Falcon. Edward Luttwak has complained that scientists and engineers seldom support the development of ‘diverse second-best equipment’, even though that is often the better policy.[19] The light and comparatively cheap F-16 was just such an acquisition. (To be sure, these are relative concepts, especially when it comes to Pentagon procurement: the second-best fighter weighed nearly 20 tonnes and cost $10 million a copy.)

The F-16 proved an ideal multi-role aircraft, and by 2008—35 years after its debut—it was serving in the inventory of twenty-five air forces around the world. Among its admirers is the Dutch scholar-pilot Frans Osinga, who wrote the definitive study of Boyd’s intellectual journey. Colonel Osinga remembers the plane as ‘wonderfully agile. I was first trained as [an] F-5 pilot and the transition to the F-16 was just mindblowing.’[20] Unique to the aircraft is a thrust-to-weight ratio so great that the pilot can ‘dump’ speed in an increasingly tight turn, forcing a pursuer to shoot past him, then accelerate so quickly that the F-16 is now on the other man’s six. This trick is known as the ‘buttonhook turn’, and the F-16 as ‘the most maneuverable fighter ever designed’.[21]

The Fighter Mafia also took up the cause of a third warplane, the ground attack machine that became the A-10 Warthog. Boyd’s E-M theory was central to the A-10’s development, but he had no direct role in the project … nor did he have much empathy for the mission. 'Air-to-ground is bull shit’, he argued. ‘I just do not feel that I am in control of the situation.... In the air, I can kind of mark the cards.’[22]  The Air Force felt much the same way about ground support mission, but it wanted the mission nevertheless, for otherwise it would be flown by ‘brown suit’ Army pilots in a new assault helicopter.

So Pierre Sprey, one of the Fighter Mafia, was tasked with designing the USAF’s first dedicated ground support aircraft—one that could ‘carry a large payload over a reasonable distance, loiter in the target area for a considerable time, operate under low ceilings in reduced visability [sic] … support troops in contact’, and kill enemy tanks.[23] As part of his research, as he told Grant Hammond in 1997, Sprey brought German WW2 veterans to ‘CIA safe houses on Maryland’s eastern shore’ to brief the design team on the air-ground techniques that were central to German battlefield successes up to the battle of Kursk in 1943.[24]  However that may be—what need to conceal German assistance, a generation after the war’s end?—they did indeed exploit the German experience. The briefers included former Panzer (tank) commanders Hermann Balck and Freidrich von Mellenthin; Stuka pilots Hans-Ulrich Rudel (credited with destroying 519 enemy tanks) and Paul-Werner Hozzel; and perhaps the fighter commander Adolf Galland.[25]  Pierre Sprey was fluent in German, and a bowdlerized version of Rudel’s war diary, called Stuka Pilot in translation, was required reading for the design team.[26]

Despite Boyd’s aversion to the ground-attack role, the A-10 project would have great significance for his research. Fascinated by the Germany military’s successes against equivalent or even superior forces through much of World War 2, Sprey convinced the older man to make a serious study of the blitzkrieg experience.