Boydmania

Air & Space Power Journal, Fall, 2004 by David R. Mets

It appears to me that both Coram and Hammond have a serious flaw in their view of the military world. Maybe, as Coram hints, it indeed would be more accurate to suggest that without Goliath's tolerant hand reaching out to Boyd, he would not have made colonel. But wait, wait--Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the greatest strategist in American history, also did not go to West Point and certainly never got an engineering degree. If a rail-splitter from Illinois can reach such lofty heights, why can't a business major from Iowa change the art of war?

   Myth Three:

   Boyd asserts (as do his acolytes)
   that he overcame the Neanderthal
   Air Force establishment to bring
   about large numbers of low-cost,
   lightweight, very agile fighters that
   repaired the service's defects during
   the Vietnam era. He thus established
   the long day of US air dominance
   with the gun-armed F-16.

This myth includes a number of corollaries:

* John Boyd was instrumental in bringing about the F-15, but Goliath corrupted the aircraft by adding extras that made it too heavy.

* Strategic Air Command (SAC) and its commander, Gen Curtis LeMay, denied the gun weapon to Vietnam-era fighters.

* SAC and LeMay imposed missiles on fighter pilots.

* The Vietnam air war proves that Goliath had lost the lessons of Korea in that the missile-armed fighters used in Southeast Asia lacked agility and rearward visibility, were too big, and smoked too much, all of which resulted in poor performance and the near loss of air superiority. (14)

* Those problems, together with the timid Goliaths who served as colonels in the 1950s, denied true fighter pilots the realistic training in dogfighting they needed to conquer the North Vietnamese air force.

* The Communists were smarter than our Goliaths because they invented the small, light, and very agile MiGs.

* The huge F-111 was the ultimate expression of the ignorance of the Goliaths, who were determined to gold-plate everything and turn even the F-15 into an Aardvark (F-111) clone.

* SAC leadership of the 1950s was responsible for the failure of the F-105, designed for high-speed nuclear delivery, in the guerrilla war in Vietnam.

* The Navy, in all its wisdom, came up with the A-1E Skyraider--far superior to the F-105 for the air war in Vietnam. Taking note of this development, Boyd acolyte Pierre Sprey developed the purpose-designed A-10 (which the Air Force has tried to decommission ever since)--notwithstanding the fact that the Skyraider was designed for torpedo attack at sea rather than close air support (CAS).

In the 1970s, Boyd and his acolytes prophesied doom for the United States due to the errors of the Goliaths in charge of the Air Force. Many in Boyd's coterie have weighed in with glowing reviews of Coram's book and continue cultivating the martyrdom of John Boyd--but with precious little attention to the history that has happened since Vietnam. (15)

How did it come out? Did the great dogfighting ability of the agile F-15 and F-16 rescue us from doom? I doubt it. As of this writing, Air Force F-15s, the demons of the acolytes, had killed 59 targets--all of them with air-to-air missiles. Air Force F-16s have killed seven--none of them with the fine M-61 gun. In fact, the Viper has seen its effectiveness greatly enhanced by the addition of the advanced medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM), which gives most F-16s a beyond-visual-range (BVR) capability for the first time. The F-16 has used this missile for some of its kills--the rest have been with the updated Sidewinder, not nearly as dependent on the agility it used to require in Vietnam because it now has a near-all-aspect capability. So far, the Korea-style dogfight seems to have all but disappeared from the air-to-air battle. The agility of both aircraft remains highly useful in dodging surface-to-air missiles, but that is not what Boyd and the acolytes had in mind. But wait! The "reformers," appalled by the excessive sophistication of the F-15, did succeed in obtaining the cheaper and simpler F-16 rather than the two-engine F-17 (which later evolved into the Navy's F-18). (16) What of it?