Boyd’s first objective was to cut back on the weight of the F-X. This would both lower the cost and improve maneuverability.
“You pay for airplanes just like you do for potatoes,” he said. “The bigger they are, the more expensive they are.” The more
Boyd studied the
F-X plans, the more he realized that everything the Air Force had done would have to be tossed out. Everything prepared by
generals and bureaucrats at Wright-Pat, everything from the generals of the Tactical Air Command and the Systems Command and
their staffs—it all had to go. 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.”
Boyd wanted a far smaller aircraft, maybe with only one engine, a high-performance hot rod of an airplane with a thrust-to-weight
ratio that would make it the purest air-to-air machine the world had ever seen, an airplane that could dump and regain energy
faster than any aircraft ever known, a fighter so maneuverable it could, in Boyd’s less-than-elegant but highly descriptive
phrase, “fly up its own asshole.” Boyd did not care about Bigger-Higher-Faster-Farther. He wanted only one thing: a fighter
that would dominate the skies for decades.
He was thrumming with excitement when he returned to the colonel’s office. He stacked the reports and design studies neatly
on a table. He brought in no new papers, no easel to hold the flip charts, no slides, no projector, no stacks of documents.
He simply returned what he had been given and said he was reporting as ordered.
“Where is your report?” the colonel asked.
Boyd smiled and tapped a long forefinger against his temple.
The colonel’s eyebrows rose. The most crucial acquisition project in the Air Force was at stake. He wanted to see something
new and startling about how to save the F-X. And this boy wizard from Eglin was standing there, grinning and tapping his temple.
“You don’t have a briefing?”
“Sir, you asked me to review the design package and report to you. I’m ready to do so.”
“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.”
An outspoken and confrontational officer such as Boyd rarely lasts long in the Building. In later years one of Boyd’s favorite
stories—which may or may not have been true—was how he was fired soon after coming to the Pentagon. Being fired in the military
can mean the officer was simply transferred from one job to another. But it also means the officer’s career has ended.
All his life Boyd told the story of how a colonel not only fired him, but humiliated him by conducting the firing in front
of a half-dozen people. Boyd was banished to another office to perform unknown duties. He languished in exile while the F-X
and the Air Force were threatened by the Navy. Then the chief of staff heard about the firing, said Boyd was irreplaceable
on the F-X project, and ordered the colonel to bring Boyd back. Boyd said the colonel offered him his old job but that he
refused unless the colonel publicly rehired him in front of the same group present when he was fired. Boyd always ended the
story by laughing and saying, “I got my pound of flesh.”
Boyd’s ERs do not reflect his being shifted from one job to another. Nor does Christie remember the name of the colonel who
supposedly fired Boyd. And given that Boyd was the fair-haired boy sent to the Pentagon to save the F-X, it seems improbable
he was fired, especially by a colonel whose own job depended in part on how well Boyd performed.
None of this matters. Because this story, like the story of tearing down the barracks in Japan, is more revealing if it is
not true.
Boyd was in the Building several months when he was called on to silence a white-haired “Whiz Kid” named Pierre Sprey, who
had become a thorn in the Air Force’s side. This brilliant young civilian from Systems Analysis, an office that reported to
the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), had spent a year preparing a report for the secretary of defense and the president
on the Air Force’s structure and budget for waging war in Europe. The Air Force force structure was based on the World War
II doctrine—“interdiction bombing,” it is now called—of bombing bridges, railroads, highways, industry,
and infrastructure to prevent Soviet forces from overrunning Europe. The civilian’s heretical report said the interdiction
mission was flawed, that even if the Air Force had three times as many aircraft, it could not keep Soviet forces from pouring
into Europe. The report said the role of tactical air forces in Europe should be twofold: supporting ground troops—close air
support, or CAS, as it is called—and maintaining air superiority so that the CAS airplanes could do their jobs without interference.
Interdiction should be a minor mission, if pursued at all.
Even among McNamara’s Whiz Kids—the highly educated and extraordinarily bright young men brought into the Building with a
mandate to impose rational thought on both the military and the military budget—Pierre Sprey stood out. Some Whiz Kids traveled
on their reputations. Not Sprey. He entered Yale at fifteen and graduated four years later with a curious double major: French
literature and mechanical engineering. Then he went to Cornell and studied mathematical statistics and operational research.
At twenty-two he was running a statistical consulting shop at Grumman Aviation. He wanted to design aircraft but knew it would
be years before Grumman gave him that freedom, so he went to work for Alain Enthoven, the leader and best known of the Whiz
Kids.
Sprey is not a physically imposing man. He is about 5’8” and slight of build. His white hair sweeps back theatrically from
a high forehead. His speech is slow and considered. He speaks French and German fluently. Women find him gallant and rakish.
Men often find him intimidating. He has an intellect as clear and cold as polar ice. If one of Sprey’s friends is asked to
describe him, the respondent’s first words are about how smart Sprey is. Some very smart people are said to have a computer
for a brain. Sprey is an atomic clock, relentlessly dependable at penetrating to the essence of a subject or a person and
laying both bare. He is an absolutist in all things. Sprey’s wit is both biting and erudite. He has an immediate recall of
almost everything he has ever read. He knows more about tactical aviation and the history of warfare than do 99 percent of
the people in the Air Force. More than one bombastic and patronizing general has been stopped short after a single exchange
with Sprey. He is a rarity, a civilian who can take on the Air Force on its own turf and prevail. Unlike many civilians who
worked in the Pentagon, Sprey was not intimidated by
rank; in fact he thought there was an inverse relationship between the number of stars on a man’s shoulders and his intelligence.
Sprey brought his searing intellect and unbending rectitude to the Building at the height of the McNamara era. His hours were
those of a vampire. Whatever issues he raised had to be taken seriously by the military because, like other issues raised
by Systems Analysis, they were codified in Draft Presidential Memos sent to McNamara and then to President Johnson. The military
services hated and were afraid of Systems Analysis, and they were especially afraid of Pierre Sprey. He was one of the most
formidable men in the Building.
Air Force generals read Sprey’s report and became almost apoplectic. Interdiction bombing was sacred doctrine. It was the
rationale for separating the Air Force from the Army back in 1947. Close air support, ever since those days, was anathema,
for it reminded the Air Force that its primary purpose had once been to assist ground forces. There was nothing of the wild
blue yonder about close air support, no white scarves, no glory.
Sprey’s report imperiled two-thirds of the Air Force budget, including $8 billion allocated for the F-X. Thus, the report
was not only a dangerous violation of sacred doctrine but, even worse, it threatened the Air Force’s budget and top fighter
project. Debunking his report was a top priority of Air Force leadership.
But there were two big problems. First, Sprey had used targeting information from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Attacking the
targeting part of the study would be to attack the Joint Chiefs, and that simply was not done. Second, the data on the number
of bombs needed to destroy a given target had come from the Joint Munitions Effectiveness Manuals (JMEMs) computed by Tom
Christie down at Eglin. Christie—thanks partially to his work on E-M—was a rising civilian star in the Air Force, and his
research was so meticulous that all four services had signed off on the JMEMs at the four-star level.
Nevertheless, a colonel was ordered by superior officers to declare war on both the report and the civilian who wrote it.
Pull out all the stops. We don’t want to know the details; just do whatever it takes to get the job done. But neutralize that
civilian son of a bitch.
The colonel went to Sprey and said, in effect, “This report is not bad work. But it involves lots of tedious hand calculations.
Let’s agree on a computer model and then let the computer verify your work.”
But Sprey knew the ways of the Building. He knew the colonel had a large staff and that he could program computers to spit
out whatever results he wanted. “Not unless I can do the same calculations by hand,” he said. It proved to be a wise move.
He began having nighttime visits from conscience-stricken young captains and majors who worked for the colonel and who said
they had been ordered to program the computers to give false results in order to discredit the report. Sprey demanded a meeting
with the colonel. He could not keep the disgust from his voice as he cited chapter and verse on how the colonel doctored the
numbers. “Your numbers are a lie,” he told the colonel in front of a packed conference room.
The colonel was furious at being embarrassed by a young whip-persnapper, particularly a civilian analyst. He responded in
the way of most military men: he attacked. He went up the chain of command all the way to Secretary McNamara and said Sprey
had insulted his dignity. He demanded an apology. Word came down for the colonel and the civilian to work out their differences.
Sprey not only refused to apologize but stepped up his attacks, saying the colonel was a “slimy creature” who “oozed mendacity.”
Sprey was nonrated; that is, he was not a pilot. And he had never been a member of the armed services. The outraged colonel
therefore assumed he knew nothing of fighter tactics and Air Force doctrine and shifted his attack accordingly. Remembering
that this new guy in the Building, this Major John Boyd, was the Air Force’s resident expert on fighter tactics, the colonel
decided Boyd’s rare combination of operational experience and intellectual accomplishment could demolish this pesky civilian.
The colonel who arranged the meeting between Boyd and Sprey must have been like a man locking up two heavyweight champions
in a room, then backing up and listening for sounds of battle. He must have wanted to be the fly on the wall and feel the
tension, hear the first volleys, and see the blood on the floor.
If so, he would have been terribly disappointed. He had only a one-dimensional understanding of both Boyd and Sprey. Boyd
was not influenced by other people’s judgments. The very idea of being told to attack a man’s intellectual accomplishment
simply because it
threatened the Air Force budget was humorous. Boyd was anything but hostile that day.
And the colonel was so locked into his judgment of Sprey as an uncontrollable attack dog that he did not know two of Sprey’s
more important attributes. First, Sprey had great respect for the officers he met whom he considered men of integrity. Second,
Sprey was a curious man. He was aware of Boyd’s reputation and wondered if Boyd really knew the inner working of air combat
or if he simply was there to parrot the Air Force line.
The meeting was anticlimactic.
As background for his interdiction study, Sprey had read widely about the combat histories of World War II and Korea. He could
talk for hours about air-to-ground and air-to-air combat. So the two men quickly found common interests. When Sprey talked
of the combat records of various fighter aces, Boyd’s eyes lit up and he leaned forward, amazed at Sprey’s interest and understanding
of an area so dear to him. When Sprey mentioned Richard Bong as America’s leading ace in World War II, Boyd nodded in agreement
but then lifted an admonishing finger as he told Sprey that Bong was a one-trick pony. When Sprey said the Air Force needed
air-superiority fighters to protect aircraft flying close air support, Boyd agreed. But then he added, “We can’t fly those
air-superiority missions in a predictable way; we can’t be like a taxi going up there on schedule. We have to be unpredictable.”
The conversation went on for hours. Sprey lobbed an idea and Boyd fleshed it out, added perspective, and bounced it back.
Boyd told Sprey about the F-X and how he proposed to change it. Ideas ping-ponged between the two men, each adding a twist
or new bounce until both sat back with smiles on their faces and respect in their eyes. Boyd was fascinated by Sprey’s knowledge
of math and statistics. Sprey could help him hone the E-M Theory into a tool for designing the finest fighter aircraft the
world had ever known. And Sprey was excited by Boyd’s profound ideas about fighter combat and by his intellect and rectitude.
He had finally met an Air Force officer of fire and conviction. Sprey was not the sort of man who followed other men, but
he could follow Boyd.
Boyd had met the second of the Acolytes.