In battle, this ability to rapidly pass through the observation-orientation-decision-action loop (the Boyd cycle) gave American pilots a slight time advantage. If one views a dogfight as a series of Boyd cycles, one sees that the Americans would repeatedly gain a time advantage each cycle, until the enemy’s actions became totally inappropriate for the changing situations.
Robert Leonhard, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle
Boyd was sent to Korea in the winter of 1952–1953, assigned to the 51st Wing, 25th Squadron. What Boyd learned and did there constituted the basis for nearly everything he thought and did later. It was a truly transforming experience and provided the foundation for all of his later contributions, not only in air-to-air tactics, energy maneuverability, and aircraft design but also in his development of OODA loops, his thinking on strategy and maneuver warfare, and ultimately his thought on time and thinking itself. Boyd’s thoughts were grounded in empirical observations and data. He was a true scientist, always testing hypotheses and refining them before constructing a theoretical compression of what he had learned. The serendipitous connection between the data and observations on the one hand and the imagination, insight, and innovation on the other is what made him unique. It is no overstatement to say that it all flowed from his experience in air-to-air combat in Korea.
Boyd was intrigued by the observation that even though the MiG-15 was faster, had a higher operational ceiling, and could turn tighter than the F-86, the kill ratio was 10:1 in favor of the F-86 during the Korean War. True, it fluctuated wildly (from 4.9:1 when Russian pilots flew the MiGs to 20:1 in the last six months of the war after the Russian pilots were pulled out in January 1953),1 but why, wondered Boyd, did the F-86 do so well? According to information supplied by Col. Jim Hagerstrom, USAF (a triple ace from World War II and Korea), Col. C. E. “Chuck” Myers, and others, the factors most responsible for successful air-to-air kills are several. “In order of importance they are (1) obtain the first sighting, (2) outnumber the enemy in the air, (3) outmaneuver the adversary to gain firing position, and (4) have the ability to achieve split-second kills.”2 The F-86 had a bubble canopy that allowed superior visibility compared with the MiG-15 pilot’s view, which has been likened to “looking through a Coke bottle.”3 Hence, the F-86 provided much better visibility and a decided advantage in aerial dogfights with MiG-15s. Though the USAF was at a distinct numerical disadvantage at the war’s outbreak, by the end of the war it enjoyed superiority. Still, in many engagements the F-86s were outnumbered but scored superior kill ratios. They had superior pilots with superior training, many having had combat experience in World War II, but there were many new pilots like Boyd flying in Korea too. The lopsided kill ratio seemed to involve something more.
It is true that on paper the MiG-15 surpassed the F-86 in some performance characteristics, but there are some subtle differences that must be considered. As Boyd was to prove later, an aircraft’s capabilities are not merely a question of how high, how far, and how fast it goes. The MiG was the superior high-altitude plane, but the F-86’s ability to transition from one maneuver to another, in particular to roll and transition from left turn to right or vice versa, was better than the MiG-15’s. The F-86 could do a horizontal scissors causing the MiG (usually diving from behind and above) to overshoot and find the F-86 in firing position. An added capability was attributable to the ability to move the entire horizontal surface of the tail, the so-called flying-tail power system first operational in the F-86E. This advantage, utilized effectively by American pilots, meant that they could more easily outmaneuver the MiG-15. Their advantage was reinforced by a combination of the F-86’s full-power hydraulic flight controls, much better visibility, and superior pilot training.
The injunctions of air-to-air combat are simple. Don’t be predictable, and end the engagement as quickly as possible. You are most likely to be shot down by an adversary you don’t see who takes advantage of a random opportunity while you are occupied elsewhere. This is so important that the Navy Fighter Weapons School developed a nine-second rule: never fly in one direction for more than nine seconds in an aerial engagement.4 The quality of pilots is as important or more important than the quality of the plane. Compared with the North Koreans, U.S. pilots were better trained, and many had combat experience from World War II. Surviving long enough to get the experience to enable one to survive was a “Catch 22.” Many did, some did not.
As James Burton puts it: “Fighter pilots in those days were wild, aggressive, irreverent, self-confident and independent—they had to be in order to survive. The training was so aggressive and realistic that pilots killed themselves left and right.”5 What was true of the group in general applied to Boyd in spades. Boyd never thought he’d reach his fortieth birthday because he would die in a plane crash “doing some wild-ass maneuver.” In the 1950s, an era when scores of fighter pilots died every year in plane crashes while training, that outlook was a fair assessment of the risks.
Training has evolved considerably. Visibility was critical, but it expanded over time into what is now called “situational awareness.” Historically, at least through the Vietnam War, most sightings were visual, not by radar. The great majority of downed pilots did not see their attackers before they were hit. In Vietnam especially, the majority of those hit (by missiles and gunfire from the ground as well as the air) didn’t even know they were under attack until hit by enemy ordnance. Several improvements over the years changed that considerably. The technology of attack warning indicators (showing that a missile had locked on to you as a target) improved situational awareness, and more realistic training of aircrews (with the founding of Top Gun and Red Flag) greatly improved combat skills and competence from the early 1970s. The whole business of air-to-air combat was changed by those factors, the introduction of far more sophisticated radar, air-to-air missiles, and surface-to-air missiles.
Despite U.S. claims to the contrary and United Nations assurances that U.N. and U.S. forces would not cross the Yalu River border with China, Boyd and a great many others frequently went north of the Yalu to find MiGs and mix it up. Many of the U.S. pilots shot down in the Korean War were lost over China, not North Korea.6 So much for national niceties in war and precedents in international politics regarding the sanctity of borders and sanctuaries for the enemy. Individual pilots did the same thing later in Southeast Asia, flying over supposedly restricted airspace in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Press reports are one thing. Realities of war are another.
One of Boyd’s best days in the war was one in which no shots were fired in the engagement. He and Jock Maitland, an RAF exchange officer, decided to sneak across the border so Jock, who was about to return home, could see if he could get a kill. Off they went. As they crossed the Yalu, they turned off the IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe). They knew MiGs were in the area, and they went high to look for them. No MiGs. Then they went low. Coming down through 19,000 feet, they found them. Eager for combat and ignoring the odds, Boyd and Maitland in a two-ship formation dove into fourteen to sixteen MiGs. The purpose of the effort was to get Maitland a kill; Boyd was to protect him while he did. Maitland swooped in on an enemy MiG with Boyd covering him. He was only 200 feet off the MiG’s tail and hadn’t fired. Boyd called on the radio, “Damn, Jock, why don’t you shoot? Goddamn, Jock, those other guys are coming, you have to hose that guy!” No response.
“I figured, Oh-oh, I goofed. He must have switched channels and I missed that goddamned channel change.” Boyd called Communications Operations and asked them to try and raise Maitland and call him back so he could switch to the right channel. “We cannot pick him up,” was the reply.
“I figured he had a radio failure. Meanwhile, guys are whistling in from behind and were shooting, so I hooked fast and rolled over to get them off Jock. Jock was still chasing the same guy! I thought, What in the hell is he doing? We are both going to get hosed down.” What Boyd didn’t know was that Maitland had suffered not just a radio failure but a complete electrical failure—his guns couldn’t shoot.
“Boy, was I pissed,” Boyd recalled.
Maitland waggled his wings, and Boyd thought, “Oh, my God! Somebody has snuck in on me. I thought he had made a break and someone had snuck in behind me. What I did not know was that Jock was trying to get me to take the lead and hose the guy.”
Soon, a lot of antiaircraft artillery fire came up, and the MiGs just took off. Low on fuel, Boyd and Maitland headed for home.
“We did not get anything, not one kill! That was terrible.”
That was one of the last times that Boyd was to have such an opportunity. He had only three other missions after that encounter. The war was winding down, and the truce would be signed that summer. Boyd never got to fly lead, because the standard operating procedure was 30 missions under your belt before you could fly lead instead of wingman. Boyd had only 22 missions when the war ended. Not much, but he made the most of it and developed important tactical insights from his limited experience.
As the war ended, the guys in the 51st practiced against each other. Boyd could beat them all, regardless of rank, age, or experience. They made him the wing tactics officer. Some told him he should lay out all his tactics stuff and teach it to others. Unintentionally, those now nameless compatriots changed the course of history.
“I had never really thought much about it before,” said Boyd, “so I kind of mulled it over in my mind, then I began to make notes on different things, putting briefings together, etc. I really got into tactics, along with some gunnery.”
At the beginning of 1954, Boyd was assigned to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. There, his career almost came to an end before it really got started. Soon after arrival, Boyd was told he would be assigned to a maintenance squadron. He raised hell.
“Bullshit on maintenance. I don’t want anything to do with it.” He was a pilot, not a maintenance officer, and though the Air Force in its infinite wisdom would keep trying to put him in maintenance, Boyd never condoned the idea. Unlike many USAF pilots who served tours in maintenance, he always managed to beat the system. He was to end up with some of the best flying one could get in an Air Force career, for the next five and a half years.
Boyd continued to push the limits of rules and the Air Force’s tolerance for breaking them, and he created a larger-than-life image, in keeping with the fighter-pilot mystique of the era. It was a different Air Force from the one we have today. Life was a bit wilder than it is now until well into the 1980s, when women became an increasingly larger portion of the U.S. military. In many ways, it resembled a college fraternity party. The officer’s clubs routinely had strippers (men for the women and women for the men), wet T-shirt contests, wild parties, and lots of cheap beer and booze at happy hour as a part of the weekly schedule. Fighter pilots were supposed to work hard and play harder. They had an image to maintain. Pushing the limits and breaking the rules—and sometimes their necks—came with the territory, both on duty in uniform and off duty and out of uniform. It was part of the ethos of being a fighter jock.
Eventually Boyd was assigned to the 97th Squadron, the Thunderbird Squadron, as an instructor. It was then he started to develop his repertoire of tactics and techniques. After a year there, he was assigned to the Fighter Weapons School, where he stayed as an instructor until 1960 (with the exception of one brief interlude). Boyd flew and studied for nearly six years, refining his tactics and teaching for air-to-air combat. He accumulated hundreds of hours of mock air-to-air combat. No one proved himself better. Boyd’s experience and questioning of air-to-air tactics were the guts of his real education. Through a series of accidents, the first of Boyd’s revolutions began. It resulted in the first comprehensive manual on jet aircraft combat, Aerial Attack Study.
Boyd was appalled that the Fighter Weapons School in 1954 was largely a gunnery school. Pilots spent much of their time shooting at a 6-by-30-foot banner towed for target practice. It hardly resembled air-to-air combat. He thought the school should combine flying skills as well as gunnery. He continually revised his notes and developed outlines for four additional courses of study and application. At the time, the Fighter Weapons School was divided into three sections: Academics, Operations, and TR&D (Training, Research, and Development). In the scale of assignments, everyone wanted to be in TR&D or Operations. No one wanted to be in Academics. Boyd went to Col. John Giraudo, commander of the school, and said, “I have a bargain for you. You need a guy over in Academics, right? I will honestly volunteer if you will allow me to try one thing. With your approval I want to put tactics in the Weapons Squadron.”
Giraudo, familiar with Boyd’s work and reputation, agreed. Remember, Boyd had only been commissioned in 1951, and now he was a first lieutenant making radical suggestions to a full colonel for how the Air Force should train fighter pilots. Call it confidence or arrogance, he took on the system to change it.
Boyd laid out his courses, developed mission cards, taught mock classes, and prepared. “Most mission cards said how we taxied out and how we would come back, with only about five minutes of what we could do in the air. Bullshit! I wanted five minutes clocking out, five minutes coming back, and fifty minutes on a preflight briefing to discuss what was to be done on the mission and how well the guy was trained to do all these different things.”
He didn’t stop there. Boyd made an even more radical proposal. “Instead of flinging a guy in a four-ship flight where nobody knows what the hell is going on, I wanted to have one instructor and one student in the initial flight. That was a hard fight; they just did not want to do that. I said I want to give these guys individual attention. Those first few rides are so important. From there on, it becomes easy. If they were taken in formation, it would go much faster. The sorties would not be wasted either.”
Adding flying hours was a concern. Each unit got so much money for so many flying hours. Additional hours didn’t necessarily mean more money. Usually there wasn’t enough money to pay for the flying hours the commander thought necessary, so commanders became expert at not spending money on other things in order to fund their flying hours. Finding more money would be hard to do. Boyd came up with a second-best solution: “We will just take the guys up and have two guys stand off and work with one guy, then work with another guy, and then with a third guy. In other words, have the guys watch what is going on rather than have everybody just mix it up.”
Individual attention and the chance to observe were both critical to improving flying skills, but first they needed a cadre course to upgrade the skills of the instructors. They were going to be teaching new things, in novel ways, and with a new aircraft, the F-100 Super Saber, which had entered service in 1955. The F-100 was a very difficult plane to fly and maintain. Though it was the first USAF fighter to go supersonic in level flight, it was nearly twice as heavy as the F-86 (18,185 pounds empty versus 10,890 pounds), and its nickname was “the Lead Sled.” Nearly one fourth of the total number of F-100s produced were lost in accidents resulting from maintenance problems or pilot error.7 Learning how to fly it well and milk all the performance one could get out of it in such a short time frame was a tall order.
Once again, it was Boyd’s flying skills that backed up the boasts and changed the Air Force’s way of doing things. Boyd figured out how to get the most out of the F-100 in only four rides. He learned how to use something called opposite stick to cope with an annoying tendency of the F-100 to exhibit negative yaw. Under certain conditions, the pilot had to move the stick in the opposite direction from the way the plane was supposed to go. The plane was unforgiving, and it took good pilots to fly it well. Boyd was one of the best.
“I figured out how the ailerons worked. I figured out how they rolled off one way. I thought about it in the classroom one day and said: I am moving the aileron this way and if it goes all right, that means it is acting as a speed board. All I have to do is use a cross control technique for the goddamn thing to really hook around or just neutralize the aileron, the rudder being the primary control. So I went up and tried it, and sure enough, it actually worked. I practiced a number of times and took a couple of guys up with me. We did it in rolls and everything else. Anyway, I was the first guy to accomplish that, to develop those techniques. The company engineers said it could not be done.”
North American, the company that built the F-100, sent someone down to the school, and he came back convinced that Boyd and company knew what they were talking about and began rewriting the manuals. Boyd also made believers out of others by showing off with the F-100 in other ways. Ron Catton, a former student of Boyd’s at the Fighter Weapons School and later a pilot with the Air Force demonstration team the Thunderbirds, contributed this curious accolade to the reflections at Boyd’s memorial service at Arlington: “John Boyd could fly an airplane slower, faster than anybody else in the world.”8 Boyd could go from 500 knots to stall speed, practically stopping the plane in midair, which would force any aircraft on his tail to overshoot him and thus gain the advantage for Boyd. In another trick, he would stand the F-100 on its tail and slide down the pillar of its own exhaust. Fire would come out of the intake in the nose of the aircraft and the tailpipe simultaneously. A seemingly impossible feat, it was challenged by others. Boyd went to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where NASA had two fully instrumented F-100 aircraft, and demonstrated it and other techniques to a series of nonbelievers. The test pilot at Edwards who challenged him at the time was a fellow by the name of Neil Armstrong.9
Boyd’s relationship with Thunderbird pilot Ron Catton bears review. It shows another side of Boyd, not only as a brash, bold, and capable pilot but also as an insightful leader, a good teacher, an important mentor. Catton, a pretty good stick himself, had come to Nellis to attend the Fighter Weapons School on the recommendation of his wing commander (who was sticking his neck out by recommending him, knowing that Catton was sometimes undependable and had a drinking problem). Catton arrived at Nellis—a hot young fighter pilot driving his new Corvette—determined to use this opportunity to turn his career around and make something of himself. Unfortunately, the first week he was there, a bunch of guys from his old unit came through town and invited him to a party at the officers’ quarters. He accepted. Later that evening, Catton was stopped by the police for driving under the influence and thrown in jail until the next morning.
After being released, he was called before Col. Ralph F. Newman, the commander of the Fighter Weapons School, along with his flight instructor, the director of Operations, and Boyd as head of Academics. He had a hangover, was humiliated, and was at the end of his rope as Colonel Newman filled out the court-martial forms. When Catton gave the name of his commanding officer at his old unit, as required on the form, Newman stopped, leaned back in his chair, and told Catton this was the luckiest day of his life. In World War II, Catton’s wing commander had chased an ME-109 off the tail of his flight leader, the very same Colonel Newman who now held Catton’s Air Force career in his hands. In partial payment of a debt to Catton’s former commander, Catton got a second chance. He was forbidden to go into Las Vegas, and he had to turn in the keys to his Corvette. If he was seen in a taxi or accepted a ride from anyone, he would be court-martialed. He also had to lay off the booze. It would be tough going for Catton.
After that meeting, Catton went to see Boyd. He recapped his career and his problems, the difficulties he had had with alcohol and his passion for flying. He knew he was a good pilot and wanted desperately to complete the course and to have the chance to become an instructor at the Fighter Weapons School. Catton explained that his attendance at the school was to have been the occasion for his resurrection, for turning his career around. Now, with a single, thoughtless act, he had blown everything. Was there anything, he asked Boyd, that he could do?
Catton was bright, a good pilot and a nice guy. He was worth saving for the Air Force, if it could be done. Boyd liked him. Boyd could have lectured him about taking responsibility for his life, getting a grip on his drinking problem, shaping up, accepting his circumstances like a man, resigning himself to what he had done, or dished out countless other conventional forms of advice, but he didn’t. Realizing Catton’s sincerity and commitment to becoming a truly exceptional pilot, Boyd made a single suggestion, with just the right inflection: “Well, you might go through the school with 100 percent in academics. Nobody has ever done that before. That might get their attention.”
It was all Catton needed to hear. With Vegas and the officer’s club offlimits, no car, and no partying or drinking, Catton had plenty of time for intense academic study, and he jumped at the chance to save himself. He was the first and the only (as of the time Boyd left Nellis in 1960) student to get a 100-percent rating on the extremely demanding academic portion of the school. He also finished third in the class in flying skills, second overall. It was an amazing turnaround. As far as Ron Catton is concerned, he owes his life, his Air Force career, and his success as a financial adviser to that encounter with John Boyd and his mentoring and tutelage at Nellis.10 He was probably the first but certainly not the last to feel that way.
Shortly thereafter, Boyd was told he would be moving from Academics. He assumed he would go to TR&D, but instead he was assigned to a new shop called Training Analysis and Development (TA&D). Boyd was appalled. “A headquarters weenie! No way.”
He was told that another officer whom he respected, Maj. Leroy Clifton, would join him to start the section. After learning more about the opportunity before him, he cooled down a bit. They would review all the lesson plans, check on the training, and see that the programs fit together appropriately. It was essentially curriculum development for the entire Fighter Weapons School. Boyd agreed. He accepted the assignment with renewed zeal, and his influence increased accordingly.
In 1957 Boyd wrote up some of what he had been working on in his courses and notes developed from Korea and at the Fighter Weapons School and published it in the Fighter Weapons School Newsletter under the title “Air Combat Maneuvering.”11 There, disdaining the rigid choreography of the aerial dances known as dogfights, Boyd laid out what he called “fluid separation.” It was one of the first TA&D reports.
The problem, as with most military bureaucracies, was that the system wanted to standardize everything, to have a checklist of reactions for every action, a school solution for every circumstance. Boyd wanted to show people a variety of moves and countermoves to have in a repertoire and let them decide when and how to do what they thought needed to be done in a given situation. Hence, he developed terms for formations such as “fluid separation” to give latitude to the individual pilot. It was the first time he used the term “fluid” in his thinking about tactics or strategy. It would not be the last. It became one of his favorite analogies.
It was also in 1957 that Boyd met Vernon “Sprad” Spradling. Sprad was a World War II pilot and former schoolteacher who had moved to Las Vegas for his son’s health; he worked at the Fighter Weapons School as a civilian. They became good friends, and Sprad helped Boyd put ideas on paper, formalize lesson plans, write up his insights, and produce Aerial Attack Study. Sprad remembers Boyd as a naturally gifted teacher, someone who could explain very complex things in ways most could understand, a master in the use of analogies to clarify concepts for his students. He was also a strong disciplinarian who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Sprad recounted a classroom incident when a student asked a series of three stupid questions. The guy was pretending to be serious but wasting class time as a joke, showing off by jerking the instructor’s chain. Boyd stopped, glared at the fellow, and then said, “Look, you silly S.O.B., we’re here to learn. You are not helping our efforts. You keep asking stupid questions. You can shut up or get out.” The class broke into applause. Boyd never had any problems of that sort again.12
Later in 1957 Boyd went to Maxwell Air Force Base for a few weeks of training in officership at the Squadron Officers School (SOS). Group activities, sports, and competition play a big part in the SOS experience, which is a combination of classroom study and carefully selected team-building activities. Boyd loved the athletic competition and thought the classroom instruction a waste of time. Lessons were scripted for the instructors and moved in lock-step fashion. It was boring. Each flight (seminar), however, played all the others in various competitions and accumulated points for all that they did (academics, athletics, inspections, etc.), competing to be the best flight in that class.
Volleyball was one of the sports. Tall, limber, and a ferocious competitor, Boyd was good at it. The instructor heading the seminar took a lot of heat from the class members for the way he coached and substituted during the games. When the flight asked him to let Boyd run the games, he agreed. Boyd played the same six men in the next matches without substituting anyone, contrary to the ethic of participation by all members of the flight.
The instructor called Boyd on it, which led to a rather public row. “I thought you wanted to win and get the most points,” said Boyd. “If you want to win, let me do it my way. If you want to make everybody participate while they lose, then do it your way.” The instructor blew up, saying he had had just about enough of all these hotshots from Nellis and Boyd would be put in his place. From that day on, he went out of his way to make life difficult for Boyd. Boyd put up with it and persevered but eventually got his revenge. When the instructor tried to embarrass him at a social function at the end of the class by remarking on his lackluster academic performance, Boyd turned the tables. Noting that he had put up with this instructor’s crap with reasonably good grace, all things considered, Boyd said he would not be lectured to in public about how to perform as an Air Force officer and pilot when the instructor was the one who had washed out of flight school. It would become a trademark of Boyd’s: no unnecessary fights, but if someone pushes too hard or too long, bury the S.O.B., preferably with public humiliation.13
After the interlude at Maxwell, it was back to Nellis. There, nobody seemed to know quite what to do with the Fighter Weapons School within the Air Force organization. Should ATC (Air Training Command) or TAC (Tactical Air Command) run it? People were being raided out of the school, and the whole operation was in limbo. Captain Boyd went to see Colonel Hinton and told him of his concerns. “Damn, here you have a wonderful school, and you are going to let the whole thing go down the tubes. Well, you know, once it is gone, you will never get it back again. It would take too long a process to build it back to where it is.”
TAC eventually took over the operation. A new commander, Lt. Col. Floyd W. White, made Boyd head of Academics. It was then, in 1958, that he really began to work on integrating all his notions about air-to-air combat. He had a draft of his “Air Combat Maneuvers,” but it was episodic, insightful but incomplete. Boyd and others redid the curriculum and training, mission cards, and courses. For the next two years Boyd also worked on what would become Aerial Attack Study, first published in 1960 and revised in 1964, the basis for most of the air-to-air combat manuals for the Air Force since then. Many a fighter pilot, whether he knows it or not, owes his life to Boyd and the development of the tactics and maneuvers explained in that manual. Though not an ace, 40-Second Boyd was regarded by many as one of the best pilots this country produced.
Spradling recalled one incident in particular from among the numerous challenges to Boyd’s “forty seconds or forty dollars” bet. A certain Marine Corps captain, Hal Vincent, came up from China Lake, California, while flying a mission near Nellis and challenged Boyd to an aerial duel. “I hear you’ve got some standing bet about being able to slam someone on your six in forty seconds or less,” Vincent said. Boyd said it was true. “Well, I don’t have time or fuel on today’s mission, but let’s make a date and see how good you are.”
At the appointed time and place, Vincent in his F8U Crusader met Boyd in an F-100. Boyd allowed Vincent to get on his tail and try to stick with him. It was over in less than 10 seconds. Boyd was on Vincent’s tail. They repeated the game three times with the same results each time. “You’ve convinced me,” said Vincent. “I’ll apply for a slot in your school.”
He eventually went through the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis and proved to be a superb pilot—after the course and Boyd’s tutelage. He finished number one in air-to-ground, number one in air-to-air, and number one in academics, quite an accomplishment.14
Boyd would be reassigned in the summer of 1960. Before he could go, he had to convert all his notes into a curriculum for the Fighter Weapons School, a mammoth task, especially for someone who wanted to fly as much as possible in his remaining months at Nellis. Boyd didn’t see how he could get it all done, so he went looking for the colonel in charge. In the base coffee shop, Boyd asked for time off to complete the task. When the colonel said no, Boyd became livid and launched into a heated exchange in front of the coffee-shop crowd. It ended when Boyd got right in the colonel’s face and screamed, “God damn you, I’ll do it on my own time!” Fortunately, he didn’t get court-martialed for his behavior.
His good friend Sprad had the solution. Boyd could dictate his notes and thoughts and the section secretary, Mrs. Sugars, would transcribe them and then cut and paste as required before typing the final product. They put it on mimeograph forms, and then Sprad, one chapter at a time, bootlegged it through the base print shop. The process was by no means fun, but it was a godsend to Boyd, who was always more verbal anyway. It took Boyd a month just to outline the project and several months of dictating. Relying on Navy manuals, formulae from math books he was reading, and his own ideas for how to illustrate the maneuvers, he synthesized it all into the final product, giving credit where it was due for all the other material he had utilized. It was his first great synthesis, and he loved it. Thus was born what became the essence of the Fighter Weapons School curriculum and the Aerial Attack Study. Sprad still has some of the transcripts of the tapes.
Aerial Attack Study is an impressive piece of work, detailing every maneuver possible for a pilot to use in a dogfight. It is meticulously researched, explained, and illustrated with old ribbon diagrams that had to be painstakingly drawn on mimeograph forms for reproduction in the manual. It has been described as the first comprehensive logical explanation of all known (and some hitherto unknown) fighter tactics in terms of moves and countermoves. Previous tactics manuals were just a bag of tricks, without the logic of move and countermove. Boyd did not advocate one maneuver over another but represented the options (and the logic for selecting them) available to a pilot to counter any move his opponent made. The study represented the first time that anyone had based fighter tactics on three-dimensional, rather than two-dimensional, maneuvers.15
It was all Boyd knew about air combat maneuvers and remains the core of what is known today, despite tremendous improvements in fighter aircraft, avionics, and computer-assisted fly-by-wire designs. As Air Force major Barry Watts put it: “The moves and countermoves laid out in this study formed the basis for all fighter tactics used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine fighter pilots in Southeast Asia. It is still the basis for tactics used in all jet fighter air forces today.… According to the Navy Fighter Weapons School journal Top Gun, since Boyd’s 1960 treatise ‘not even one truly new move has been uncovered.’ ”16
It was a tour de force, 147 pages of single-spaced manuscript that covered all jet fighter air-to-air tactics. There were sections on virtually everything one needed to know, including Fighter versus Fighter; Maneuver, Counter Maneuver; The Overhead Attack; How You Execute the Attack; What the Advantages Are in G, High Side, Underside; Non-Maneuvering Targets; Flight Tactics; Basic Limitations of the AIM-9 against Maneuvering Targets; Defending Turns; Procedures for Adverse Yaw—everything. All were laid out and supported by diagrams, calculations, and precious advice drawn from years of experience. But the work almost didn’t survive.
First the Air Force classified it. Then, his superiors thanked Boyd and told him they would be using another manual. Boyd exploded on both counts. “It was classified. They classified the damn thing! I got madder than hell and said I don’t want to classify it, I want it unclassified. They said, ‘No, you have to have it classified because you are talking about the damn tactics we are going to use in combat.’ I said, ‘Hell, if you classify it, then nobody will get to use it. So, damn, what good is it?’ ”
Before the classification process was completed, however, a number of copies disappeared. Then some 600 copies were printed without the Fighter Weapons School logo or documentation—just the author’s name, Capt. John R. Boyd. Copying an unclassified document was not a violation of regulations. I have met several retired fighter pilots who have copies of the 1960 and 1964 versions in their homes. Though not a solution, it was what the military calls “a work around.”
Much of Aerial Attack Study eventually became part of Air Force Manual 3-1 (now Major Command Manual 3-1), on air-to-air tactics. Many a pilot who flew in Vietnam owes his life to Boyd, and several, from each of the services, called to tell him so over the years. It was perhaps his greatest satisfaction. Given the thousands of allied pilots trained in the United States from scores of nations, Boyd’s dedication in conveying what he learned to others has created a lasting legacy to pilots the world over. He accomplished it as a captain at age 33 and, in many ways, against the wishes of the U.S. Air Force.
The adoption of the manual was a bit trickier. As Boyd recalls the process in his Air Force oral history, after completing Aerial Attack Study he took the manual to Colonel Newman. “Here’s your new manual.”
“Well, we’re not going to use your manual.”
“Why not?” retorted Boyd. “You’re not going to find a better one.”
He was informed that they would be using a 15-page manual from TR&D because they had a charter to produce one and Boyd did not. Boyd decided he could play that game too. He contacted Maj. Leroy Clifton, his cohort at Nellis earlier. Clifton, now stationed at TAC in the tactics shop, was to visit Nellis shortly, and Boyd arranged for him to review his manual and the TR&D one. Clifton thought Boyd’s clearly the superior product, but Boyd didn’t want to use his friendship with Clifton in that way. Instead, he asked Clifton to arrange an independent review of the two manuals. A TAC panel was convened. A while later, Colonel Newman received a message stating, “We are going to publish Boyd’s. We have decided to use his as the training prospectus at the Fighter Weapons School for students coming in, or for any other squadron that might want to use it.”
Boyd went to see Newman and told him, “You ought to be glad. This way you end up with a better book. It is a reflection on you as commander. Why are you protecting a goddamn bunch of losers over there who cannot even do their homework? You know they did not do as good a job as me.”
Newman threw Boyd out of his office. The next day he called Boyd back. “I want to apologize to you. I really never read your manual until last night. Yours really is much better than the one from TR&D.”17 Boyd respected him for having the honesty to admit he was wrong. More important, he had the courage to tell Boyd that face to face. Meanwhile, the guys at TR&D had their ass chewed by Newman for producing a lousy product and telling him Boyd’s was lousy when it was far superior. Boyd had won all his air-to-air battles and most of them on the ground as well. He could now leave Nellis with a sense of genuine accomplishment.
The first set of legends about John Boyd dates mainly from his years at Nellis. A hotshot fighter pilot who loved to fly and teach his students to beat the other instructors, Boyd was wild, daring, sometimes reckless and arrogant. Despite having a wife and four children, he was a leading member of the older but still adolescentlike fraternity of fighter jocks who worked hard, played hard, drank long and hard, and never shrank from a dare. For better or worse, much of that ethos (especially the drinking) has been banished from the Air Force, or at least is no longer officially sanctioned. But the attitude persists. If you want a good fighter pilot, you want someone who is bright, cocky, self-confident, aggressive; someone who pushes the performance envelope, and takes calculated risks. That attitude combined with exceptional aptitude makes an ace.
Even the drinking played an important role. Alcohol took a toll on one’s body, and the problems it caused no doubt were severe, but it provided a medium and a place—the officer’s club bar at happy hour—for learning about the Air Force and being socialized into the fraternity. The young officers could mix with senior officers easily and routinely. The lore of the colonels could be passed to the captains, and the bonding and socialization that are so important to military units could take place. Given the health-kick, diet-watching, weight-conscious, workout-oriented military today, this no longer happens. It’s hard to imagine the boys swapping yarns, true or not, over carrot juice in the weight room. The golf course has become even more important as a result, at least for the Air Force, but it still lacks in both quality and quantity compared with the happy hours of yore.
Even then, Boyd was making a name for himself as a character on the ground as well as in the air. Seized with an intensity and concentration unimaginable to most, he was known for a gaze that could burn holes in the eyes of the person he stared at. People in the academic section told students to “Boyd it,” meaning to focus and concentrate until the task was done right. Boyd didn’t go looking for fights necessarily, but he never backed away from one, in the air or on the ground, physical or mental. He so loved competition, and once in a contest, he would destroy an opponent. The great prizefighter Jack Dempsey was once asked, “When you are about to hit a man, do you aim for his chin or his nose?” “Neither,” Dempsey replied. “I aim for the back of his head.” So too with Boyd: he always, mentally and physically, drove his point, or his fist, all the way home.
Boyd always pushed the envelope and bucked the system. On 1 June 1960, just before leaving Nellis, he was flying an F-100 that lost all hydraulic pressure, including backup. Rather than ride the plane down with no controls, Boyd punched out and the plane crashed. Brig. Gen. John N. Ewbank, the commander at Nellis and not a Boyd booster, immediately grounded Boyd for losing an airplane. Boyd protested, saying it wasn’t his fault, that he was flying within the plane’s performance envelope and that there was a design flaw in the plane that caused the crash. General Ewbank was convinced otherwise. Boyd pleaded his case and offered to run an experiment to demonstrate what he believed to be the problem. Under certain stresses during certain maneuvers, the pop-off valves in the hydraulics system would be under so much pressure that they would do what they are supposed to do—pop off—but both the primary and secondary systems could be blown simultaneously, something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Boyd offered to demonstrate. Ewbank didn’t want to lose another airplane. Boyd said the circumstances could be demonstrated on the ground. Ewbank, still suspicious, said okay, they could do a test, but Boyd was not to be in the cockpit. A crew chief would run the test.
The day for the test came, and rather than doing it with a plane Boyd had selected, General Ewbank walked out on the flight line and picked the tail number of the plane to be used. As luck would have it, students from one of the classes were assembled nearby, where they watched the demonstration. The crew chief started the engine and then maneuvered the power and controls as Boyd had instructed. The hydraulic system failed exactly as he had predicted, and the fluid drained out on the tarmac. To insure that he hadn’t been set up, General Ewbank selected another plane and had the test repeated, with the same results. “All right, Boyd,” he snarled, “you’re reinstated to flying status,” and stalked off. Present in the class observing this were two future chiefs of staff of the Air Force, Mike Dugan and Merrill “Tony” McPeak.18
What Boyd left behind was much more substantive than the stories of his run-ins with authority and the skills he displayed in flying. He changed the Fighter Weapons School. He changed the way flying skills were taught. Students mixed it up in group encounters as well as one-on-one, and others observed in the air what happened and how it occurred. On the ground, they studied why it had happened. Boyd changed the emphasis from gunnery alone to aerial tactics. He changed the way students were taught, both in the air and on the ground, theoretically and practically.
Boyd had changed himself, too. He learned to teach others and found that he liked it and took satisfaction and pride in doing so. He began to write, something that he had never done before. He wrote articles for the Fighter Weapons School Newsletter and Aerial Attack Study. He learned that he was different in how he thought about things and how he solved problems, and he started to think about that. Thinking about thinking and how one learned certain things was a novel and intriguing pastime. He would devote more time to such insights over the next 30 years than he ever imagined possible at Nellis. He had established a remarkable symbiotic relationship, the first of many he would uncover. Boyd had transformed air-to-air combat, and air-to-air combat had transformed him.