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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 first heard about Boyd because my boss asked me to read Certain to Win, which is "Boydian strategy for business" basically. I reviewed it back in 2024: https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/strategy-and-a-pilot-named-boyd-part and we had a good discussion in the comments with @billseitz426010 and @ianargent561723 (is Substack gonna connect this or is this gonna look dumb?) but this book sounds like a much more interesting story about his life (and I am VERY glad you dug into that essay and the bits about his household). What I've always found sort of ironic about everyone in business raving about him is that no one I know from the Air Force has heard of him. I'd honestly really love to read a more even-handed piece about him, and not an obsessive hagiography.
One of many stories from American history that I wish Hollywood would pick up. You have this acerbic son-of-a-bitch who dogfights and swears at everyone around him. The first half can be an action-packed dogfighting tentpole and the second half is a character drama about Boyd and his compatriots against the bureaucracy. This is all set against the backdrop of his family life in tatters. You need to cast a homely actress to be his wife so the audience intuitively understands why Boyd ignores her to fly jets; Zendaya will do.
Instead we will get Transformers 8 and it will feature no dogfighting but will have Zendaya.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Alexsander Kartveli. An aircraft design icon.
Honestly not surprising you'd swallow that lie hook line and sinker.
I first heard about Boyd because my boss asked me to read Certain to Win, which is "Boydian strategy for business" basically. I reviewed it back in 2024: https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/strategy-and-a-pilot-named-boyd-part and we had a good discussion in the comments with @billseitz426010 and @ianargent561723 (is Substack gonna connect this or is this gonna look dumb?) but this book sounds like a much more interesting story about his life (and I am VERY glad you dug into that essay and the bits about his household). What I've always found sort of ironic about everyone in business raving about him is that no one I know from the Air Force has heard of him. I'd honestly really love to read a more even-handed piece about him, and not an obsessive hagiography.
I don’t know which USAF vets you are talking to but Boyd and his OODA loop are in the officer PME
mostly older guys, tbh. All my "young officer" friends are navy.
One of many stories from American history that I wish Hollywood would pick up. You have this acerbic son-of-a-bitch who dogfights and swears at everyone around him. The first half can be an action-packed dogfighting tentpole and the second half is a character drama about Boyd and his compatriots against the bureaucracy. This is all set against the backdrop of his family life in tatters. You need to cast a homely actress to be his wife so the audience intuitively understands why Boyd ignores her to fly jets; Zendaya will do.
Instead we will get Transformers 8 and it will feature no dogfighting but will have Zendaya.