THE SWORD
To understand Boyd’s first breakthrough (and how it impacts the much larger and more relevant second one that runs the battlefield of today), a very short history lesson is in order.
The first jet combat took place in the skies over Korea in the early 1950’s. American pilots, flying the F-86 Sabre, are credited with at least a 10:1 kill ratio over the Soviet-designed MiG-15. It may have been as high as 14:1.
That is not a trivial success ratio, especially for two aircraft that appear virtually identical:
Now it didn't take much to convince Pentagon procurement officers to assume that a good part of this edge was due to the ‘obvious’ American advantage in aeronautics. So it came as quite a surprise – not to say an embarrassment and a hell of shock – when it became known that in many important aspects the MiG-15 was the superior airplane. Much lighter, and with greater thrust to boot, it could climb far faster than the Sabre and fly higher – high enough to avoid a fight altogether, if the pilot so chose. And at most airspeeds and altitudes, the MiG had the great single fighter advantage: it could out-turn the F-86.
Certainly, the Sabre was nothing like ten times better than the MiG. The difference had to be in the pilots, in the flying skill and tactical superiority of the Americans.
This certainly was the case. Most of them were combat-hardened, experienced fighter pilots recalled to service after cutting their teeth in the skies over Germany and the Pacific a mere five years before. There too, American pilots flying Navy F4F Wildcats were horribly outmatched by the Japanese A6M Zero – which, like the Mig-15 was a light, maneuverable Katana in the hands of an experienced pilot. (Indeed, in the early months of the Pacific War, the Wildcats were so badly outclassed that it was only the tactical brilliance of another American fighter pilot, John S. Thach, who kept us in the fight by implementing the famous “Thach Weave.”)
But in the cold high air over Korea, the Americans had, in the F-86 Sabre, a weapon worthy of their skill.
This sadly did not last. For in the years following the Korean War, with the ascension of Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command and the “Bomber Generals” in control of the Air Force, American fighter planes flew straight in the face of all of the painful experience won in WWII and Korea. The Pentagon started to procure “fighters” that got ever heavier, more sluggish and more expensive. Believing them to be little better than missile launching platforms, by the time Vietnam rolled around they no longer even carried guns… dogfights being considered a thing of the past by Whiz-Kid non-pilots like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
So by the mid sixties, the two primary American fighter-bombers were the F-105 Thunderchief and the F-4 Phantom II, aircraft whose performance is best summed up by the nicknames given them by their own pilots: The Lead Sled or the Thud for the F-105 and The Smoking Thunderhog for the F-4.
And so, with appalling air-to-air missile performance and no dogfighting training (or the guns to use in one), the American air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in Korea down to nearly 1:1 – parity! -- in Vietnam.
So much for the history.
Now: Imagine you are John Boyd, former Fighter Weapons School Instructor and now an Air Force desk jockey. You are watching good friends die in the skies over Southeast Asia because they are being sent into combat armed primarily with unreliable long-range missiles but under orders not to fire until they made visual contact! Visual contact with closure rates of 1,000 mph and more means you are in a close-range knife fight before you can see the red stars on the wings and tails. You lose a lot of sleep knowing good men are dying because of American tactical doctrine so convinced of its own technical superiority that it simply flat-out refused to see that our pilots were being shot down by light, agile, gunfighters which – despite the Pentagon line – are in just about every meaningful way superior to those of the USAF, USN and USMC.
Those old fighter jocks in nimble little rapiers like the Mustang, the Corsair and the Sabre are long gone. Now Bomber Generals are sending fighter pilots off to die in Lead Sleds with no guns, no training and useless missiles, and to Forty Second Boyd this looks perilously close to flat-out treason.
And so Boyd went back to college, and bootstrapped himself from Fighter Jock to Aeronautical Engineer to try and find a theory that would show exactly at which airspeeds and altitudes enemy planes were superior.
The result was a series of briefing slides that showed, on an aircraft-by-aircraft basis, where the Soviet fighters were superior (in red) and conversely, at which airspeeds and altitudes the American designs (in blue) had the advantage.
Practically every slide was almost pure red. It was only in very narrow speed ranges, at specific altitudes, that American fighters had the advantage.
Boyd called these Energy-Maneuverability graphs, and in the process of producing them, Boyd developed the first of his two Earth-shattering breakthroughs: E-M Theory.
Boyd realized – through years of intense and lonely study on his own time and often in direct contravention of orders – that the key to the Perfect Sword lay not in speed, or service ceiling, or rate of climb, or even turning ability. All of these were red herrings that had been chased for decades.
Boyd’s first breakthrough was that the perfect fighter plane’s key characteristic was agility.
Agility. The ability to change its energy state rapidly. To turn, or climb, or accelerate faster than its opponent. And most importantly, to keep up that high energy state in the grueling, high-G turns that rapidly bled out speed and options.
Let’s say two aircraft are in a turning fight, each trying to get behind the other for a gun or missile shot. Due to many design differences between the two adversaries (but primarily due to wing loading) one aircraft may have its best rate of turn at 250 kts, while its opponent’s best turn is at 400 kts. Boyd realized that the ideal fighter was one that could accelerate, climb or turn the quickest, to move the fight into the airspeed (and altitude) where it has the advantage.
Quickness in the roll was one element. Lots of thrust to get up to best speed and stay there in a high-drag turn was another. Low weight meant that it could accelerate and decelerate faster, and above all, because a banked aircraft is essentially ‘climbing’ into its turn, the perfect fighter needed a big wing with lots of reserve lift. This big wing area meant that it would own the turning fight in just about every regime.
Believe it or not, Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability Theory was the first to give aircraft designers a real victory target: an aircraft that would own the skies; the light, swift and deadly rapier that would be unbeatable in air-to-air combat. And remember: he who wins in air-to-air owns the skies. He who owns the skies owns the battlefield. Air Supremacy is the one great, single, essential requirement for victory on the modern battlefield. You can still lose if you have it, but you have no chance to win if you do not.
The Pentagon Brass – with precious few exceptions – fought him tooth and nail. The only reason Boyd was able to gain the credibility to force his ideas upon the next generation of fighters was because he was getting results. Boyd's E-M Theory showed American pilots how to move the fight into those narrow and rare regimens where E-M numbers showed an American advantage, and to avoid like the plague those vast red swatches where dogfights were likely to be fatal. And it gave him that above-the-maze perspective to produce a fighter design the likes of which the world had never seen before.
Boyd’s E-M theory – this being the lesser of his two breakthrough ideas – would eventually lead, through many pitched bureaucratic battles, to the design of the F-15 Eagle – which, depending on your source, has exceeded the Vietnam era fighters 1:1 kill ratio somewhat spectacularly, it’s current record being in the vicinity of 105 wins against zero air-to-air losses. Boyd demanded a big wing on the F-15, a wing big enough to provide the lift it needed to win in the turning fight at any airspeed or altitude. In this he succeeded rather more than he could have imagined. He gave the F-15 Eagle so much reserve lift that after a mid-air collision an Israeli pilot flew an Eagle home and landed it with one entire wing torn off!
But Boyd found even the F-15 compromised. His fondest achievement was the F-16 Falcon, a nimble little beauty bearing more than a passing resemblance to the P-51 Mustang, and like it, fast, agile and lethal. It had the additional advantage of being relatively cheap, which means you can buy a lot of them. The Soviets listened to Stalin when he said “quantity has a quality all its own.”
Boyd listened too.
Pope John and his Fighter Mafia saw that the ultimate weapon was not a bludgeon or an iron mace, not the Lead Sled at all, but in fact just the opposite: light, fast, precise, agile and deadly.
Now you hold that thought! You hold that thought because Boyd held it for many, many years. He held it and worked it and then began to realize that what worked for fighter aircraft may work for entire armies as well.
And here is where things get really interesting, because out of Boyd’s quest for the perfect Sword came his understanding of the perfect Swordsman.
