Another datapoint: I do occasional meetups for my blog, Naval Gazing. (It's mostly about ships.) Over the first three, the number of women who came who were neither cooking staff (they volunteered, I promise) or married to me was zero. We do have a couple more coming in for the fourth in a few months, but they're all married to people who are also coming, and maybe one would have come on her own for "two days of talking about airplanes".
Jane, I don't know how to take your comment. Were you alluding to me, even a little? If so, should I be proud or shamed? As mentioned previously, I am a shallow person.
“Dudes love talking about airplanes” is factually correct for my son, who is licensed both as a pilot and an airframe & power-plant mechanic. I am a loser when it comes to that kind of talk. I just don't know the stuff; so, I do not try unless politeness requires it. Otherwise, I'm a dude, proud, shameless, and shallow.
The book was fine, but: in practice, the F-15 did great, and the F-35 is doing great right now.
The A-10 was NOT great at its nominal purpose (smoking Soviet tanks with its gigantic peni-I mean, cannon)-see here: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA084155.pdf -and in practice is more useful as a platform for Maverick missiles. It was originally snuck through because the Vietnam War showed that fast movers are not great at spotting targets on the ground, especially under cover/foliage, and the forward air controller planes whose job was circling around and designating targets for the fast movers tended to get shot to shit by those targets, which weren't wild about getting designated. Presumably, in the European theater of operations, there would be a lot more ground fire from things like the ZSU-23 Shilka, the Tunguska and other Soviet stuff which the NVA didn't have. Therefore, a very heavily armored forward air control platform was called for. For reasons, the Air Force didn't want to pay for one, nor for the Army to build its own, so they built the A-10 as a ground attack aircraft. In practice, the FAC job is done by drones today, and the A-10 has been relegated to places where enemy air defense has been suppressed or never existed in the first place.
To expand a bit: you know, these rah-rah bios are all great, but could really use a big picture view.
For instance, Boyd's theory of the OODA loop might be great or might be bullshit, hard to tell, but definitely everything since the Gulf War indicates that the F-16 isn't any better in practice than the F-15 or F-35.
Boyd wrote a bunch of stuff about innovation, building new things out of existing components, but missed the biggest piece of innovation that was right in front of his eyes: drones. Avraham Karem, a much more modest and less flashy guy, was building them with significant overlap with Boyd's career. But drones aren't sexy.
A bit of a funny comparison, considering that at least 60% of the F-35s job is to be a F-16 replacement. And the F-15 is effectively complementary to the F-16, and many airforces that have the budget run both at the same time.
Also, it turns out that relying on eyeballs is not a fantastic way of identifying things in a modern combat environment - or at all! There are a lot of stories about A-10 friendly fire in Desert Storm because the pilots were trying to eyeball whether a vehicle was an iraqi tank or a friendly one rather than relying on available technology for IFF functions.
Every platform has had its share of friendly fire. This is another case where drones are better, because there's not so much urgency-it might get shot down, who cares, no friendly lives will be lost.
WTF you’re an aircraft engineer now? “The A-10 wasn’t great at…”. STFU and go back to doublewide yurts. The A10 won its war (Desert Storm) and has served very well since.
Yes Hagiography is annoying , but slagging the dead or other men’s proven achievements is offensive.
I'm slightly confused how the A-10 won Desert Storm, given that it was not the leading killer of tanks, and how many got damaged running around on the deck.
(And if "being an aircraft engineer" is required to take part in this, hi!)
The “leading killer of tanks” was actually the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. You know, the one that Hollywood made a whole movie claiming it was a worthless shit show.
I was thinking about the F-111 instead of the Bradley, mostly because that's a much easier comparison to make. With you on Pentagon Wars being hot garbage. Rarely have I encountered a more irritating movie.
Not just Holywood: specifically Burton and the Reformers, including Pierre Sprey who this book showers with praise despite being an incorrigible liar and blowhard who designed nothing and whose singular skillset was self-promotion at the expense of actual engineers and military officers.
Yes! As I noted in another comment, Sprey’s Big Idea was really nimble single engine dogfighting jets with no radar and almost no capacity to carry munitions for any other role. Effectively, Sprey wanted to recreate the Japanese Zero with a jet engine. You know, the one that totally outclassed the big, lumbering Hellcat, managing to kill one Hellcat for every 19 Zeros lost.
And he hated the F15, the plane with an air-to-air record of something like 119-0, the same plane they’re making a new variant of now, fifty years from its initial deployment. And the F117, the plane that managed to fly over Baghdad in the opening of Desert Storm. Not to mention the F35, which admittedly costs a lot and took too long, but which is probably going to be the dominant platform of the early 21st century.
The vast majority of A-10 kills during the Gulf War were with the Maverick missile. Absolutely nothing would have been lost if they’d just laser designated for bombers. Since then, it’s all been gun runs on mud huts.
More tanks were destroyed by F-111 than the A-10 despite the less maneuverable non CAS platform that is the F-111 is not by any means a dedicated tank killer, which the A-10 is
The Rand Corporation post Gulf War analysis suggested that the A10’s effectiveness at killing tanks was exaggerated and that its vulnerability due to slow speed. And remember, this is an environment of air superiority and significant suppression of enemy air defenses.
The thing is dogfights will never happen again and victory will be determined by who has the biggest radar and the longest-ranged missiles.
The idea of the aviation boards about the future was largely correct but somewhat premature which is something that happens constantly with new technologies, see the dotcom bubble and the current AI bubble.
Current day fighters are platforms for radars and BVR missiles, not for engaging in dogfights so being small and nimble is less important than being able to carry a decent radar, targeting, EW and communications equipment and big long range missiles.
The teen fighters were saved by electronic miniaturization that allows them to be upgraded effectively despite their cramped designs.
Boyd and the Fighter Mafia fell in the common mistake of preparing to fight the previous war not the next one.
Not necessarily even the last one. I know it’s a Navy air war (mostly), but the Hellcat didn’t beat the Japanese Zero because it was more nimble or better at maneuvering. It beat the Zero because it could climb better, was faster (but not quicker), handled high altitudes better, had armor and self-sealing gas tanks, and guns that could shred a Zero. Instead of quick turning engagements at low speed, Hellcats would dive into Japanese formations, hit them, and run away. Rinse and repeat until you have a 19 to 1 kill ratio.
Oh and the Zeros were actually usually stripped of radios, because what does a Samurai need with a radio? Except US Navy and Marine pilots could actually work as a team.
That's a lot of venom towards the Air Force. I'm not sure how much is from the book and how much from the reviewer, but I feel compelled to offer a partial defense of the Pentagon. (Very partial. I am a frequent critic of theirs, but from a place somewhat closer and more detailed.) There's enough here that I'm going to just focus on Pierre Spey and adjacent subjects because otherwise I will be here all day.
>Sprey became one of McNamara’s “whiz kids” and was sent to Washington to analyze the Pentagon budget. He immediately wrote a report that imperiled two thirds of the Air Force budget.
Working as a "whiz kid" should be warning enough. McNamara was probably the worst thing ever to happen to the DoD, and should be the poster child for "being good at one thing does not make you good at others". Much of the analysis being done was not particularly honest (things like excluding fuel logistics when deciding on nuclear or oil power) and sometimes it was downright insane (proposing to shut down the SAR program in Vietnam because it was more expensive than training new pilots). I'm extremely sympathetic to the generals here.
Spey didn't invent the idea about being ruthless with requirements. The first person to put it into wide use AFAIK was Ed Heinemann, who was at General Dynamics when the F-16 was developed, although it's not clear how much he had to do with it, and he didn't really claim it in his autobiography. But the A-3 and A-4 were both examples of this done earlier, well and with a lot less drama.
As for the F-16, Spey's influence there is greatly overstated. He wanted a bunch of radarless day fighters to go and dogfight the enemy. We built something significantly more sophisticated and more capable, and he claimed credit when it worked. But there's a reason nobody buys radarless day fighters any more.
And then we come to the A-10. I'm happy to give Spey all the credit he wants for that one. I get the aesthetic appeal of the plane, and it's a fun story to tell, but it's almost entirely wrong. The problem is that the environment the A-10 was built to fight in, running around at low level strafing things, was never really a safe way to operate. With MANPADS and AA guns, that's just way too dangerous, and while an A-10 is more likely to get home, it's probably going to be pretty beat up, which means it's not flying tomorrow. They were forced to medium altitude in both 1991 and 2003, after taking substantial losses and lots of damage, and these days are widely acknowledged to be unsurvivable in any hostile environment. Sure, it's better than an F-16 over Iran at medium altitude (or at least cheaper to operate there) but you know what else is even cheaper? A converted crop duster.
I'll just make a note here that my other experience with Coram's work is Brute, where Coram consistently does a great job of telling inspiring stories about Brute Krulak's rebel mindset that in reality make you wonder about his honesty (lying about being saved by JFK during the War to ingratiate himself with the new President being a pretty prime example).
I'm going to push back a bit on the idea that the F-35 is mediocre. Perhaps it is compared to the set of ideal fifth generation fighters built uniquely for each specific role. We don't really know because there are no fifth generation fighters built that way. We can only compare it to planes that actually exist. From what I've read by pilots who actually fly the F-35, they love it. The only role where we can clearly say it's inferior to other aircraft is CAS, where the A-10 retains the title. But the A-10 can't operate in an environment where we haven't achieved air superiority. All those other roles that the F-35 can do well have to be done first.
Something like 11,000 munitions dropped on Iran and no fixed wing aircraft losses (except the FF by the Kuwaitis) seems like a good outcome to me. Not an expert but I've read that the initial destruction of ground radar and air defenses was handled in part by US and Israeli F-35s.
The A10 is awful at CAS, with no electronic sensors and limited comms it struggles to differentiate between friendly and enemy positions. It can do ground-attack missions competently, but if there are friendlies in the viscinity they are often victims of blue-on-blue. So many Brits were killed by A10s in Afghanistan that their military command requested they be banned from operating in British AORs.
I suspect Coram was overly credulous of some of his sources; e.g. I believe that account of Sprey's role in the A-10 greatly exaggerates his contributions.
Yes, the more I think about the review the more I begin to worry that Sprey was a major source for Coram. I'd need to read the book and dig into its citations to be sure, but if so that would be a serious issue given his well-established reputation as a self-aggrandizing fabulist.
The subtext I took from Osinga's book on Boyd's intellectual efforts was that Boyd eventually accreted a layer of hangers-on of various degrees of honesty and perspicacity, unified by their incapacity (or unwillingness) to arrest his slow slide into near-crankery. Osinga himself seemed unqualified to recognize this, merely relating Boyd's airy, pop-science informed speculations about thermodynamics, Godel incompleteness, etc. as though they were a testament to his genius.
It's tragic because Boyd might have been a genuine first-rate thinker if he had sought the opportunity to sharpen his more developed ideas against critical savants instead of having them polished by toadies.
Boyd was running those 40 second contests for six years, right? Let's assume at least a hundred iterations of that contest over the course of that time as a rough estimate.
I'm starting with the strong bias that no one is good enough to win a fair fight that many times, over that many iterations, against that varied a skill level of opponents. At some point, the odds just stop making sense, particularly for someone who was not previously noted as having been a freak of talent, and especially particularly for someone sufficiently old that reflex loss should have started to have an effect. This is compounded by the fact that he supposedly was starting from a position of significant tactical disadvantage.
This makes me think it was a rigged contest; so let's look at it from that angle. The specific starting conditions stand out - the fighters start out in a very specific configuration with a known set of variables and the actions close out in a relatively short period of time; likely not enough for an iterated contest of skill.
This leads me to the hypothesis that Boyd had developed a particular technique that worked in the very specific set of circumstances he then built the contest around. It doesn't shock me that a cross section of pilots, hopefully those never exposed to that technique would, upon their first exposure to it in a training scenario, not be able to defeat it.
Doing some research, I see claims that he'd regularly do something called "flat plating the bird" to rapidly lose speed during these simulated engagements, and some critique of him having over used this maneuver.
From this, it seems to need that he was less the master of the skies, and more the master of one very specific trick that, in one very specific and controlled scenario against people not previously exposed to it, could win combat.
A comment not about Boyd, but about the OODA loop. If that sort of thing interests you, I recommend the Chinese sci fi procedural thriller on Netflix called Mobius. Every so often, a detective finds himself caught in a time loop in which the same day repeats five times. This gives him an enormous advantage in solving crimes that occur on that day - he can examine all angles, follow all leads, make bad mistakes without consequence as each day resets until time moves forward again. But what happens when the unknown perpetrator also has conscious awareness of the time loop? Each day, a few new details are changed, vastly complicating the cat and mouse game as the adversaries circle around each other without knowing who, exactly, their loop-aware opponent is. It's a cerebral brain-bender for viewers who can handle extreme levels of complexity.
Another Chinese fantasy series with a vaguely related theme is "Reset" (2022). A college girl finds herself caught in a time-loop on a bus that has a fatal crash -- repeatedly waking up on the bus. With the aid of another passenger, they manage to prevent the fatal crash -- and then the bus gets blown up by a bomb. They attempt to warn the police -- and end up getting pursued as terrorists. It is a well-made series, and quite short by Chinese standards -- only 15 episodes.
Just my personal taste, but Rich & Janos's book on Skunk Works is the superior aircraft design pop-sci book. And F-117 > A-10. But de gustibus non est disputandum, and all that.
I have beef with that one, too. It is a book extremely well calibrated to cater to the angry teenage proto-engineer, often at the cost of the truth. I think his interaction with the Navy was particularly hilarious, when he says "we solved submarine stealth, and they were too stupid to take us up on it", and I can respond with two words, "flow noise".
Decades ago a nearly crazy but very smart cousin gave me a copy of Coram's book with enthusiastic praise for Boyd and his loop. I read it — and got all the way through, since the story was entertaining. I am a shallow person.
I even read the dreaded appendix with all its concentrated wisdom. My bullshit detector began clanging and did not stop. This part, written by the great man himself, should have convinced me of his greatness. The actual effect was contrary. So, I was left with the impression that Boyd had a good hand for jet fighters and that he was prize-winningly obnoxious. However, the oodaloop manual was a combo of trivial truths and bullshit, but mostly bullshit.
The respect I had for my cousin never quite recovered.
Fighter jets, like all military equipment, have strategic-level design considerations that go beyond the individual engagement/mission. Past a certain point logistical streamlining dominates everything else, and this (plus the stealth tech) is the real advantage of the F35. An A10 might be better at killing tanks and an F16 better at shooting down planes, but your forward airbase or carrier group or whatever can only support so many planes in the theater and having 20 planes that are kind of good at killing other planes is a lot better than having 10 planes that are really good at it and 10 planes that are absolutely useless. Of course the macro-level statistical advantage isn't much comfort to the individual pilot getting shot to bits by the superior specialized enemy machine, but that's how war is.
Another example: In WW2 the Germans built all sorts of bespoke armored vehicles that were precision engineered to their specific role while the Americans generally slapped something on a Sherman chassis and called it good enough. The end result was a bunch of German afvs that theoretically outclassed their American counterparts watching those same counterparts driving past while they themselves sat broken down next to the highway.
Not a pilot, but the anecdote that Boyd Was the first person to move Air Force tactics beyond Who could turn faster in a dog fight is clearly disproven by the well known Thach Weave.
Also, real fighter pilots hated dogfights. The best ones were ambush predators - surprise attack for maximum damage, then away at max speed. Fair fights are for suckers.
"I think I learned about the OODA loop from Venkatesh Rao, and it seemed sort of cool, but also like I just explained it in two paragraphs."
That is a great review! Praise from someone who read the book a while ago.
But in honor of the OODA loop -- it is one of those concepts which seem obvious once pointed out ... but were not so obvious before someone had articulated them. It is also a concept which is easier to state than to implement -- like "Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself", from another person who made himself unpopular with the hierarchy.
Before this review I had a vague sense Boyd was about 75% genius, 25% self-promoting bullshit artist, but this moves my priors to 75% self-promoting bullshit artist, 25% genius. His association with Pierre Sprey is what does it for me, because the late Mr. Sprey was 100% bullshit artist who was literally wrong about everything. His Big Idea was that we should build small nimble fighters with no radar (!!!) and just have them dogfight using Mark 1 eyeballs. In effect, recreate a jet version of the Japanese Zero. How did that work out for Japan? He exaggerated his own involvement with the A-10 and F16, and he was a fierce opponent of the F15 and F35. Oh, he also hated the F117.
It’s not entirely due to design, but the F15 has something like a 105-0 air-to-air combat record. It’s the plane so bad that they’re actually making a New and Improved Beast Version now to haul missiles. Maybe our adventures in Iraq were a mistake, but the F117 surely wasn’t. And the F35 looks like it’s going to be the dominant air frame of the early 21st Century.
Pierre Sprey is the defense equivalent of the San Francisco 49ers GM who passed on Tom Brady to select Giovanni Carmazzi.
I’m not sure it’s possible for great men to be good husbands. We shouldn’t care overmuch. Humanity needs great men more than it needs good husbands.
(Strictly speaking, of course, it needs a stable equilibrium of both.)
Here is something I happened to read just now, Willa Cather on the Carlyles:
“It is well known that Carlyle’s married life was not strictly a happy one, and the Mrs. Carlyle sometimes complained bitterly of his indifference to her. The wife of an artist, if he continues to be an artist, must always be a secondary consideration with him; she should realize that from the outset.”
Women will nonetheless always be attracted to men who stand out, even in as disparate ways as Carlyle and Boyd. The exact level of ill-treatment they accept will depend on the man’s status and the woman’s forbearance. It is what it is.
I've actually noted that being a good husband is often a good way to differentiate the men who did great things that actually worked out for the best (e.g. Stalin and Mao were famously terrible husbands; Deng and LKY were good ones).
I think it's a deep ancient instinct for women to seek to tailor their offspring's genetic profile advantageously to survive and thrive under prevailing conditions, as unconscious as men's instinctive attraction to women with the small waist-to-hip ratio that indicates she's unlikely to already be pregnant. There's an evolutionary reason for such instincts, but on a human social level they can sure make our lives miserable.
Evolution doesn't care about the relationship or the man himself after he delivers the genes she wants for the next generation. He is then expendable.
Only our socially imposed values and artificial economic system forces her to continue to associate with him on a personal level, when he's being a pain in the ass. Fortunately that is finally changing. A woman will want to stay with a good man, but she doesn't have to tolerate a bad one.
Unless, of course, the bad ones manage to reverse progress back to the "good old days" when she was deprived of choice in the matter.
"evolution doesn't care ..." But it does, inasmuch as the offspring need to survive, grow and have offspring of their own who also survive, grow and have their own and so on ad infinitum. We're not fish who dump their gametes in the water and swim away.
Yes, you're right, Alex. I was being too abstract, thinking in terms of the animal realm where sires are not involved in rearing the young. Yours is an essential reminder that human children take very much longer to reach self-sufficiency, and having two parents involved vastly improves their ability to survive and thrive.
The next time someone questions my claims about men vs. women, I will direct them to this comment section.
We're just as God made us, Ma'am.
Another datapoint: I do occasional meetups for my blog, Naval Gazing. (It's mostly about ships.) Over the first three, the number of women who came who were neither cooking staff (they volunteered, I promise) or married to me was zero. We do have a couple more coming in for the fourth in a few months, but they're all married to people who are also coming, and maybe one would have come on her own for "two days of talking about airplanes".
Jane, I don't know how to take your comment. Were you alluding to me, even a little? If so, should I be proud or shamed? As mentioned previously, I am a shallow person.
“Dudes love talking about airplanes” is just factually correct!
Jane Psmith
5h
“Dudes love talking about airplanes” is factually correct for my son, who is licensed both as a pilot and an airframe & power-plant mechanic. I am a loser when it comes to that kind of talk. I just don't know the stuff; so, I do not try unless politeness requires it. Otherwise, I'm a dude, proud, shameless, and shallow.
The book was fine, but: in practice, the F-15 did great, and the F-35 is doing great right now.
The A-10 was NOT great at its nominal purpose (smoking Soviet tanks with its gigantic peni-I mean, cannon)-see here: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA084155.pdf -and in practice is more useful as a platform for Maverick missiles. It was originally snuck through because the Vietnam War showed that fast movers are not great at spotting targets on the ground, especially under cover/foliage, and the forward air controller planes whose job was circling around and designating targets for the fast movers tended to get shot to shit by those targets, which weren't wild about getting designated. Presumably, in the European theater of operations, there would be a lot more ground fire from things like the ZSU-23 Shilka, the Tunguska and other Soviet stuff which the NVA didn't have. Therefore, a very heavily armored forward air control platform was called for. For reasons, the Air Force didn't want to pay for one, nor for the Army to build its own, so they built the A-10 as a ground attack aircraft. In practice, the FAC job is done by drones today, and the A-10 has been relegated to places where enemy air defense has been suppressed or never existed in the first place.
To expand a bit: you know, these rah-rah bios are all great, but could really use a big picture view.
For instance, Boyd's theory of the OODA loop might be great or might be bullshit, hard to tell, but definitely everything since the Gulf War indicates that the F-16 isn't any better in practice than the F-15 or F-35.
Boyd wrote a bunch of stuff about innovation, building new things out of existing components, but missed the biggest piece of innovation that was right in front of his eyes: drones. Avraham Karem, a much more modest and less flashy guy, was building them with significant overlap with Boyd's career. But drones aren't sexy.
A bit of a funny comparison, considering that at least 60% of the F-35s job is to be a F-16 replacement. And the F-15 is effectively complementary to the F-16, and many airforces that have the budget run both at the same time.
Also, it turns out that relying on eyeballs is not a fantastic way of identifying things in a modern combat environment - or at all! There are a lot of stories about A-10 friendly fire in Desert Storm because the pilots were trying to eyeball whether a vehicle was an iraqi tank or a friendly one rather than relying on available technology for IFF functions.
Every platform has had its share of friendly fire. This is another case where drones are better, because there's not so much urgency-it might get shot down, who cares, no friendly lives will be lost.
Hey it’s just drones won’t age well…
Enough criticism.
WTF you’re an aircraft engineer now? “The A-10 wasn’t great at…”. STFU and go back to doublewide yurts. The A10 won its war (Desert Storm) and has served very well since.
Yes Hagiography is annoying , but slagging the dead or other men’s proven achievements is offensive.
I'm slightly confused how the A-10 won Desert Storm, given that it was not the leading killer of tanks, and how many got damaged running around on the deck.
(And if "being an aircraft engineer" is required to take part in this, hi!)
The “leading killer of tanks” was actually the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. You know, the one that Hollywood made a whole movie claiming it was a worthless shit show.
I was thinking about the F-111 instead of the Bradley, mostly because that's a much easier comparison to make. With you on Pentagon Wars being hot garbage. Rarely have I encountered a more irritating movie.
Not just Holywood: specifically Burton and the Reformers, including Pierre Sprey who this book showers with praise despite being an incorrigible liar and blowhard who designed nothing and whose singular skillset was self-promotion at the expense of actual engineers and military officers.
Yes! As I noted in another comment, Sprey’s Big Idea was really nimble single engine dogfighting jets with no radar and almost no capacity to carry munitions for any other role. Effectively, Sprey wanted to recreate the Japanese Zero with a jet engine. You know, the one that totally outclassed the big, lumbering Hellcat, managing to kill one Hellcat for every 19 Zeros lost.
And he hated the F15, the plane with an air-to-air record of something like 119-0, the same plane they’re making a new variant of now, fifty years from its initial deployment. And the F117, the plane that managed to fly over Baghdad in the opening of Desert Storm. Not to mention the F35, which admittedly costs a lot and took too long, but which is probably going to be the dominant platform of the early 21st century.
The vast majority of A-10 kills during the Gulf War were with the Maverick missile. Absolutely nothing would have been lost if they’d just laser designated for bombers. Since then, it’s all been gun runs on mud huts.
More tanks were destroyed by F-111 than the A-10 despite the less maneuverable non CAS platform that is the F-111 is not by any means a dedicated tank killer, which the A-10 is
The Rand Corporation post Gulf War analysis suggested that the A10’s effectiveness at killing tanks was exaggerated and that its vulnerability due to slow speed. And remember, this is an environment of air superiority and significant suppression of enemy air defenses.
It was, however, exceptionally good at killing coalition troops in Afghanistan. No other platform came close.
The thing is dogfights will never happen again and victory will be determined by who has the biggest radar and the longest-ranged missiles.
The idea of the aviation boards about the future was largely correct but somewhat premature which is something that happens constantly with new technologies, see the dotcom bubble and the current AI bubble.
Current day fighters are platforms for radars and BVR missiles, not for engaging in dogfights so being small and nimble is less important than being able to carry a decent radar, targeting, EW and communications equipment and big long range missiles.
The teen fighters were saved by electronic miniaturization that allows them to be upgraded effectively despite their cramped designs.
Boyd and the Fighter Mafia fell in the common mistake of preparing to fight the previous war not the next one.
Not necessarily even the last one. I know it’s a Navy air war (mostly), but the Hellcat didn’t beat the Japanese Zero because it was more nimble or better at maneuvering. It beat the Zero because it could climb better, was faster (but not quicker), handled high altitudes better, had armor and self-sealing gas tanks, and guns that could shred a Zero. Instead of quick turning engagements at low speed, Hellcats would dive into Japanese formations, hit them, and run away. Rinse and repeat until you have a 19 to 1 kill ratio.
Oh and the Zeros were actually usually stripped of radios, because what does a Samurai need with a radio? Except US Navy and Marine pilots could actually work as a team.
That's a lot of venom towards the Air Force. I'm not sure how much is from the book and how much from the reviewer, but I feel compelled to offer a partial defense of the Pentagon. (Very partial. I am a frequent critic of theirs, but from a place somewhat closer and more detailed.) There's enough here that I'm going to just focus on Pierre Spey and adjacent subjects because otherwise I will be here all day.
>Sprey became one of McNamara’s “whiz kids” and was sent to Washington to analyze the Pentagon budget. He immediately wrote a report that imperiled two thirds of the Air Force budget.
Working as a "whiz kid" should be warning enough. McNamara was probably the worst thing ever to happen to the DoD, and should be the poster child for "being good at one thing does not make you good at others". Much of the analysis being done was not particularly honest (things like excluding fuel logistics when deciding on nuclear or oil power) and sometimes it was downright insane (proposing to shut down the SAR program in Vietnam because it was more expensive than training new pilots). I'm extremely sympathetic to the generals here.
Spey didn't invent the idea about being ruthless with requirements. The first person to put it into wide use AFAIK was Ed Heinemann, who was at General Dynamics when the F-16 was developed, although it's not clear how much he had to do with it, and he didn't really claim it in his autobiography. But the A-3 and A-4 were both examples of this done earlier, well and with a lot less drama.
I think most of the F-35 criticism is wrong, for reasons I outline at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Case-for-the-F-35.
As for the F-16, Spey's influence there is greatly overstated. He wanted a bunch of radarless day fighters to go and dogfight the enemy. We built something significantly more sophisticated and more capable, and he claimed credit when it worked. But there's a reason nobody buys radarless day fighters any more.
And then we come to the A-10. I'm happy to give Spey all the credit he wants for that one. I get the aesthetic appeal of the plane, and it's a fun story to tell, but it's almost entirely wrong. The problem is that the environment the A-10 was built to fight in, running around at low level strafing things, was never really a safe way to operate. With MANPADS and AA guns, that's just way too dangerous, and while an A-10 is more likely to get home, it's probably going to be pretty beat up, which means it's not flying tomorrow. They were forced to medium altitude in both 1991 and 2003, after taking substantial losses and lots of damage, and these days are widely acknowledged to be unsurvivable in any hostile environment. Sure, it's better than an F-16 over Iran at medium altitude (or at least cheaper to operate there) but you know what else is even cheaper? A converted crop duster.
Hi Bean! Good to see you here!
I'll just make a note here that my other experience with Coram's work is Brute, where Coram consistently does a great job of telling inspiring stories about Brute Krulak's rebel mindset that in reality make you wonder about his honesty (lying about being saved by JFK during the War to ingratiate himself with the new President being a pretty prime example).
I'm going to push back a bit on the idea that the F-35 is mediocre. Perhaps it is compared to the set of ideal fifth generation fighters built uniquely for each specific role. We don't really know because there are no fifth generation fighters built that way. We can only compare it to planes that actually exist. From what I've read by pilots who actually fly the F-35, they love it. The only role where we can clearly say it's inferior to other aircraft is CAS, where the A-10 retains the title. But the A-10 can't operate in an environment where we haven't achieved air superiority. All those other roles that the F-35 can do well have to be done first.
Something like 11,000 munitions dropped on Iran and no fixed wing aircraft losses (except the FF by the Kuwaitis) seems like a good outcome to me. Not an expert but I've read that the initial destruction of ground radar and air defenses was handled in part by US and Israeli F-35s.
The A10 is awful at CAS, with no electronic sensors and limited comms it struggles to differentiate between friendly and enemy positions. It can do ground-attack missions competently, but if there are friendlies in the viscinity they are often victims of blue-on-blue. So many Brits were killed by A10s in Afghanistan that their military command requested they be banned from operating in British AORs.
I suspect Coram was overly credulous of some of his sources; e.g. I believe that account of Sprey's role in the A-10 greatly exaggerates his contributions.
And his "role" on the F-15 as well.
Yes, the more I think about the review the more I begin to worry that Sprey was a major source for Coram. I'd need to read the book and dig into its citations to be sure, but if so that would be a serious issue given his well-established reputation as a self-aggrandizing fabulist.
The subtext I took from Osinga's book on Boyd's intellectual efforts was that Boyd eventually accreted a layer of hangers-on of various degrees of honesty and perspicacity, unified by their incapacity (or unwillingness) to arrest his slow slide into near-crankery. Osinga himself seemed unqualified to recognize this, merely relating Boyd's airy, pop-science informed speculations about thermodynamics, Godel incompleteness, etc. as though they were a testament to his genius.
It's tragic because Boyd might have been a genuine first-rate thinker if he had sought the opportunity to sharpen his more developed ideas against critical savants instead of having them polished by toadies.
Sprey had fuck all to do with the A-10. While the A-X program was going on Sprey was an analyst at Grumman who didn't submit anything to the program.
The A-10 *Thunderbolt II was designed by Alexander Kartveli. An aircraft design icon.
Honestly not surprising you'd swallow that lie hook line and sinker.
Boyd was running those 40 second contests for six years, right? Let's assume at least a hundred iterations of that contest over the course of that time as a rough estimate.
I'm starting with the strong bias that no one is good enough to win a fair fight that many times, over that many iterations, against that varied a skill level of opponents. At some point, the odds just stop making sense, particularly for someone who was not previously noted as having been a freak of talent, and especially particularly for someone sufficiently old that reflex loss should have started to have an effect. This is compounded by the fact that he supposedly was starting from a position of significant tactical disadvantage.
This makes me think it was a rigged contest; so let's look at it from that angle. The specific starting conditions stand out - the fighters start out in a very specific configuration with a known set of variables and the actions close out in a relatively short period of time; likely not enough for an iterated contest of skill.
This leads me to the hypothesis that Boyd had developed a particular technique that worked in the very specific set of circumstances he then built the contest around. It doesn't shock me that a cross section of pilots, hopefully those never exposed to that technique would, upon their first exposure to it in a training scenario, not be able to defeat it.
Doing some research, I see claims that he'd regularly do something called "flat plating the bird" to rapidly lose speed during these simulated engagements, and some critique of him having over used this maneuver.
From this, it seems to need that he was less the master of the skies, and more the master of one very specific trick that, in one very specific and controlled scenario against people not previously exposed to it, could win combat.
A comment not about Boyd, but about the OODA loop. If that sort of thing interests you, I recommend the Chinese sci fi procedural thriller on Netflix called Mobius. Every so often, a detective finds himself caught in a time loop in which the same day repeats five times. This gives him an enormous advantage in solving crimes that occur on that day - he can examine all angles, follow all leads, make bad mistakes without consequence as each day resets until time moves forward again. But what happens when the unknown perpetrator also has conscious awareness of the time loop? Each day, a few new details are changed, vastly complicating the cat and mouse game as the adversaries circle around each other without knowing who, exactly, their loop-aware opponent is. It's a cerebral brain-bender for viewers who can handle extreme levels of complexity.
Another Chinese fantasy series with a vaguely related theme is "Reset" (2022). A college girl finds herself caught in a time-loop on a bus that has a fatal crash -- repeatedly waking up on the bus. With the aid of another passenger, they manage to prevent the fatal crash -- and then the bus gets blown up by a bomb. They attempt to warn the police -- and end up getting pursued as terrorists. It is a well-made series, and quite short by Chinese standards -- only 15 episodes.
Just my personal taste, but Rich & Janos's book on Skunk Works is the superior aircraft design pop-sci book. And F-117 > A-10. But de gustibus non est disputandum, and all that.
I have beef with that one, too. It is a book extremely well calibrated to cater to the angry teenage proto-engineer, often at the cost of the truth. I think his interaction with the Navy was particularly hilarious, when he says "we solved submarine stealth, and they were too stupid to take us up on it", and I can respond with two words, "flow noise".
Huh, TIL! Thank you for letting me know - as a life-long humanities dude I am not well placed to catch stuff like that.
Decades ago a nearly crazy but very smart cousin gave me a copy of Coram's book with enthusiastic praise for Boyd and his loop. I read it — and got all the way through, since the story was entertaining. I am a shallow person.
I even read the dreaded appendix with all its concentrated wisdom. My bullshit detector began clanging and did not stop. This part, written by the great man himself, should have convinced me of his greatness. The actual effect was contrary. So, I was left with the impression that Boyd had a good hand for jet fighters and that he was prize-winningly obnoxious. However, the oodaloop manual was a combo of trivial truths and bullshit, but mostly bullshit.
The respect I had for my cousin never quite recovered.
Fighter jets, like all military equipment, have strategic-level design considerations that go beyond the individual engagement/mission. Past a certain point logistical streamlining dominates everything else, and this (plus the stealth tech) is the real advantage of the F35. An A10 might be better at killing tanks and an F16 better at shooting down planes, but your forward airbase or carrier group or whatever can only support so many planes in the theater and having 20 planes that are kind of good at killing other planes is a lot better than having 10 planes that are really good at it and 10 planes that are absolutely useless. Of course the macro-level statistical advantage isn't much comfort to the individual pilot getting shot to bits by the superior specialized enemy machine, but that's how war is.
Another example: In WW2 the Germans built all sorts of bespoke armored vehicles that were precision engineered to their specific role while the Americans generally slapped something on a Sherman chassis and called it good enough. The end result was a bunch of German afvs that theoretically outclassed their American counterparts watching those same counterparts driving past while they themselves sat broken down next to the highway.
Not a pilot, but the anecdote that Boyd Was the first person to move Air Force tactics beyond Who could turn faster in a dog fight is clearly disproven by the well known Thach Weave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave
Also, real fighter pilots hated dogfights. The best ones were ambush predators - surprise attack for maximum damage, then away at max speed. Fair fights are for suckers.
iirc, Yeager got his first ME262 kill from above while it was on short final.
"I think I learned about the OODA loop from Venkatesh Rao, and it seemed sort of cool, but also like I just explained it in two paragraphs."
That is a great review! Praise from someone who read the book a while ago.
But in honor of the OODA loop -- it is one of those concepts which seem obvious once pointed out ... but were not so obvious before someone had articulated them. It is also a concept which is easier to state than to implement -- like "Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself", from another person who made himself unpopular with the hierarchy.
Before this review I had a vague sense Boyd was about 75% genius, 25% self-promoting bullshit artist, but this moves my priors to 75% self-promoting bullshit artist, 25% genius. His association with Pierre Sprey is what does it for me, because the late Mr. Sprey was 100% bullshit artist who was literally wrong about everything. His Big Idea was that we should build small nimble fighters with no radar (!!!) and just have them dogfight using Mark 1 eyeballs. In effect, recreate a jet version of the Japanese Zero. How did that work out for Japan? He exaggerated his own involvement with the A-10 and F16, and he was a fierce opponent of the F15 and F35. Oh, he also hated the F117.
It’s not entirely due to design, but the F15 has something like a 105-0 air-to-air combat record. It’s the plane so bad that they’re actually making a New and Improved Beast Version now to haul missiles. Maybe our adventures in Iraq were a mistake, but the F117 surely wasn’t. And the F35 looks like it’s going to be the dominant air frame of the early 21st Century.
Pierre Sprey is the defense equivalent of the San Francisco 49ers GM who passed on Tom Brady to select Giovanni Carmazzi.
I’m not sure it’s possible for great men to be good husbands. We shouldn’t care overmuch. Humanity needs great men more than it needs good husbands.
(Strictly speaking, of course, it needs a stable equilibrium of both.)
Here is something I happened to read just now, Willa Cather on the Carlyles:
“It is well known that Carlyle’s married life was not strictly a happy one, and the Mrs. Carlyle sometimes complained bitterly of his indifference to her. The wife of an artist, if he continues to be an artist, must always be a secondary consideration with him; she should realize that from the outset.”
Women will nonetheless always be attracted to men who stand out, even in as disparate ways as Carlyle and Boyd. The exact level of ill-treatment they accept will depend on the man’s status and the woman’s forbearance. It is what it is.
I learned a lot from this book review — thanks.
I've actually noted that being a good husband is often a good way to differentiate the men who did great things that actually worked out for the best (e.g. Stalin and Mao were famously terrible husbands; Deng and LKY were good ones).
I think it's a deep ancient instinct for women to seek to tailor their offspring's genetic profile advantageously to survive and thrive under prevailing conditions, as unconscious as men's instinctive attraction to women with the small waist-to-hip ratio that indicates she's unlikely to already be pregnant. There's an evolutionary reason for such instincts, but on a human social level they can sure make our lives miserable.
Evolution doesn't care about the relationship or the man himself after he delivers the genes she wants for the next generation. He is then expendable.
Only our socially imposed values and artificial economic system forces her to continue to associate with him on a personal level, when he's being a pain in the ass. Fortunately that is finally changing. A woman will want to stay with a good man, but she doesn't have to tolerate a bad one.
Unless, of course, the bad ones manage to reverse progress back to the "good old days" when she was deprived of choice in the matter.
"evolution doesn't care ..." But it does, inasmuch as the offspring need to survive, grow and have offspring of their own who also survive, grow and have their own and so on ad infinitum. We're not fish who dump their gametes in the water and swim away.
Yes, you're right, Alex. I was being too abstract, thinking in terms of the animal realm where sires are not involved in rearing the young. Yours is an essential reminder that human children take very much longer to reach self-sufficiency, and having two parents involved vastly improves their ability to survive and thrive.