There were a lot of aerodynamic types of analysis on how to design aircraft. These evolved from a standpoint of analyzing the ability to fly at certain speeds or pull so much g, but energy maneuverability doesn’t limit itself to these factors. As far as the factors that we can address now, yes, other types of analysis are now obsolete. You have proof of that when you know that just about every aircraft company in this country, and most other countries, now applies these techniques.
Tom Christie, U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview
Boyd’s departure from the Fighter Weapons School was about as atypical as his arrival. He seemed to be a walking example of unorthodox inclinations. He had applied to the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) to go back to school, paid for by the Air Force, at a civilian institution. Since Boyd had an undergraduate degree in economics, AFIT wanted to send him to graduate school in economics or business administration. That was entirely reasonable and the way the system worked, but it didn’t suit Boyd. He wanted to learn what he thought he needed to know to appreciate fully and explore further the implications of what he had begun at Nellis. He needed to start over. Boyd told AFIT, “I want to go back to undergraduate school and get a degree in engineering.”
AFIT’s reply was “We don’t have any provisions for that.”
It was a standoff. AFIT didn’t do what Boyd wanted to do, and Boyd had no use for a master’s in business administration. He wanted to study mathematics and engineering. Then, fate intervened. Boyd got a call from AFIT in the fall. “Remember that letter you sent a few months ago stating that you wanted to do undergraduate work in engineering? Well, we can give you a waiver on that now because people are needed in that field. We normally do not do this, but in your case, we will give you a waiver. We have your records, and the general has already approved it. All you have to do is tell us yes by letter that you are willing to go.”
Boyd was ecstatic. He had originally considered going to Edwards Air Force Base in California and getting into test and evaluation as a test pilot, but the more he worked at Nellis, the more he knew he needed formal training in mathematics or engineering to understand what he had discovered. He would have preferred math, but engineering was acceptable. Boyd decided on industrial engineering because he could learn a lot about several different fields. He remembered thinking at the time, “It covers physics, math, production lines, et cetera. I really like this; it really appeals to me.”
So in the summer of 1960, Boyd, Mary, and their four children moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where John would spend the next two years getting a degree in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech. Here his earlier experiences and insights would be synthesized and refined in ways that would color nearly all his later work. Boyd was excited, ready for a change, and more than a little out of place compared with his fellow students. A good fourteen years older than most, he should have been in graduate school, not getting another undergraduate degree. Adding to the stress, his fifth child was born in the midst of the two-year program. Going to school and working late hours on homework projects while raising five children was no picnic, but he loved what he was learning.
The work was alternately tedious and exhilarating. Boyd still had some bad habits from his high school and undergraduate days. Instead of working harder on what he didn’t like, Boyd apportioned his effort by spending more time on what he liked and sloughing off what he disliked. Academically, he had always started slowly and finished fast. Several times he failed a first test and then did consistently better throughout the course, much to the astonishment of his teachers. He didn’t exactly revel in learning, but studying how and why things worked as they did and being in a place where he could find new ideas and formulate new syntheses was interesting. He gravitated toward the big ideas, the general concepts. The mathematical details were not fun for him as they were for others. What he relished were the concepts.
At Tech, Boyd encountered the usual: a few good professors, a few also-rans. Boyd was fortunate, though, to be taken under the wing of two professors, Dr. Ewalt and Dr. Jacob Mandelker. Mandelker, a physics professor and a refugee from war-torn Germany, became his mentor, the first real one since his swimming coaches Art Wieble and Doc Councilman. He worked with Boyd, encouraged him, talked with him about his ideas, and guided his study. Ewalt taught thermodynamics and saw in Boyd something other students didn’t have.
Boyd really worked hard on Mandelker’s first test and scored only a C. When he went to talk to the professor about his difficulties, Mandelker praised his performance. Most of the students had failed the test. Mandelker told Boyd that he worked through things differently, that compared to others he did them backward. He reasoned by selective analogies and then tested and refined them. This, he told Boyd, provided a richer and deeper understanding of physics and was a real asset. Synthesis was not only okay, it was a better way of thinking. Thus reinforced, Boyd redoubled his efforts and pursued his study of physics with real dedication.1
A nineteen-year-old fellow student named Chuck Cooper hung around Boyd and helped him with thermodynamics and other course work in exchange for a steady stream of war stories about Korea, flying, and the Air Force in general. Young Chuck Cooper idolized Boyd. Loud, profane, worldly, Boyd had countless stories to relate to those who wanted to listen. As Cooper recalls, “He was a nut. He was the most profane man I ever knew. I loved the hell out of him, but I wouldn’t introduce him to my mother.”2 Though brilliant on some subjects, Boyd struggled at times and was, according to Cooper, an average student at Tech in those years. He grasped material better discussing it with students after class than he did listening to lectures in class. Much of the work was just something that had to be accomplished, an instrumental goal for a higher purpose later. When the lightbulbs came on, though, everything changed. It was in the spring of 1962. Boyd was busy studying for finals and worrying about his next assignment.
“For some reason, I just did not like double E [electrical engineering]. I was bored by all those circuits and fields, and trying to get that stupid eight-digit answer after looking at the problem for a whole goddamn minute. Bullshit!”
An easy sort of camaraderie developed as the guys helped each other through the hard slogging of detailed course work. Some were better at thermodynamics than double E, others the reverse. They held group prep sessions for the exams. After a session one night, they decided to take a break and go get a hamburger and a beer. Over their beers and burgers (nearly all of Boyd’s major insights seem to be associated with bars and scribbling on cocktail napkins and tablecloths), the flash of insight that became the energy maneuverability theory occurred. It started out innocently enough, and Boyd didn’t even realize what was happening until it was almost over, but it was a transforming event. Someone in the study group asked Boyd what he did before coming to Tech. Boyd always wore civilian clothes, so his classmates did not know he was an Air Force officer. They just thought he had waited a long time to go to college. He explained that he was a fighter pilot and the Air Force was sending him to school so they could use the skills he acquired later in his career. Over their beer, they were discussing the transfer of energy from one form to another and what it was like to be a fighter pilot. Suddenly, the two fused as Boyd tried to match his frame of reference with what they were studying. He was looking for the right analogies to explain flying to them.
“Let me explain it this way,” he began. “We’ve been talking about the transfer of energy from one form to another, whether it’s chemical, mechanical, or electrical—there is always some kind of energy transformation.… Now, when you are in the air, what is altitude? Isn’t that potential energy? What about airspeed? Isn’t that kinetic energy?”
“Right.”
“Fine. Let’s maneuver. You might have to give up a little altitude, a little airspeed, or both. If you have a lot of power and you soften a maneuver, you can gather in altitude, gather in airspeed, or both.”
Then it hit him.
“Jesus Christ, wait a minute! I can look at air-to-air combat in terms of energy relationships. I can lay out situations, I can do it formally now.… You guys don’t know what you have done for me!”
A casual effort to answer an offhand question had led to a startling discovery. “After they left, my mind was really buzzing, going every which way. After I stabilized, I went over to the library and took notes for the rest of the evening. Then I went home and wrote down more notes. At three o’clock in the morning, I was deriving equations, laying the whole thing out. I said, Goddamn, this thing is right. I just know it.” He was on a roll and kept on working.
He was feverishly extending the initial insight, testing the relationships mathematically and thinking through this set of relationships. Boyd stayed up and wrote down a list of questions that his insights raised while his mind was still active. He made a list of ways to test pieces of his emerging theory. After filling three or four sheets of a yellow legal pad, at six in the morning he called Sprad Spradling, his friend in the Academic Section of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis. It was 3 AM Sprad’s time, but that didn’t matter. “Hey Sprad, I’ve had a breakthrough. Listen to this.” For the next hour and a half, Boyd described the mathematics underpinning what would become the energy maneuverability theory. Poor Sprad hung on doggedly, trying to follow what John was laying out. He knew Boyd and understood what was happening. Boyd had a breakthrough and had to share it with someone. “I’ll do some graphs and send them to you so you can use it at the school,” promised Boyd.3 He crashed and got some sleep before his exam that day. Then he hit what he called his drawdown period.
Boyd felt a sense of contentment in that he had figured something out on his own, but he no longer believed his insight was unique, because it was too logical and simple. Surely somebody else must have done this before. It was interesting but not pathbreaking. It couldn’t be that good, that novel. There had to be a precedent of which he was unaware.
“Then all of a sudden my dumb brain said, Wait a minute, if that had been done before and had been related to tactics, that means I would have had access to it at Nellis. That kind of information would have had to come through there; it would have grabbed everybody’s attention. I know it was not used there at school, so it probably has not been done before, otherwise I would have seen it. If it has been done, it has been done in such an obscure fashion that it has never surfaced.”
The next quarter started, and Boyd had to focus on the tasks at hand, getting through his courses. Plus, he had to worry about his next assignment. Boyd had wanted to return to Nellis, but he received orders assigning him to Air Force Systems Command, not the Tactical Air Command. Once again, he was not at all happy about the system’s plans for him, and he set about trying to do something about it. He got into a big skunk fight trying to change his assignment. As he recalled it, a general in Systems Command telephoned him to say, “You are going to get court-martialed unless you stop that shit. You are going to Systems Command. Drop all that other goddamn hanky-panky you are playing. Now, we want to be fair about this assignment. If you can choose the base you want, will you stop all that crap you are pulling?”
“Yes, I would like to go to Eglin.”
“You have it. We will send a message out there. Now is it all over?”
“Yes, sir. Fine.”
“Glad to have you onboard.”
Boyd was ready to leave Atlanta and move on. Many over the years were impressed with Boyd’s intellectual breadth and depth, assuming that he had at least one if not more graduate degrees, probably a math and physics background with a degree in engineering or aeronautics and perhaps even military history. Few schooled in economics and industrial engineering are nearly as eclectic in their interests, as capable in their reasoning, or so widely read. For Boyd, however, being autodidactic (largely self-taught and exceptionally well read) was a lifelong condition. There was little time to explore knowledge during his Air Force career, given the nature of his assignments and the detailed examinations of specific problems that they entailed. It was not until later in life that Boyd really came alive intellectually. Most of his real education occurred after he retired from the Air Force. His expertise developed slowly over a long period of time and was the result of a huge synthesis of nearly everything he learned, formally and informally.
So Boyd and his family moved to Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida. He was out of school, and his two-year civilian respite was over. There would be some difficulties as he went back into the Air Force; it would take some readjusting to get used to uniforms, regulations, and the ways of the bureaucracy. As soon as he reported, his unhappiness and the disagreements over assignments started again.
“When I arrived at Eglin, they put me in maintenance again. People love to put John Boyd in maintenance, and John Boyd does not like maintenance. I said, Wait a minute, I’ve been through this once before.”
Boyd was told that after a two-year stint as a civilian student funded by the Air Force, he should be grateful. In return, the Air Force would do with him what the Air Force thought best; he owed the Air Force, not the other way round. He now had a controlled assignment for the next four years, and it was in a maintenance billet. The Air Force would exact its pound of flesh whether he liked it or not. Boyd went looking for his superior and told him what he was going to do. “I am going to get out of this job in six months, and I am going to get the job I want. I want to let you know it so that you will know ahead of time. If you write me a bad OER [Officer Effectiveness Report], it makes no difference to me. I am going to show you how to get out of a job if it is controlled or not.”
That was Boyd. He had an in-your-face form of vendetta, which he announced as “not professional, just strictly personal.” In his case, “in your face” is not merely the use of the vernacular. As James Fallows describes him, “John Boyd laughed often, yet when he turned serious, his preferred speaking distance was three inches from your face.”4 Boyd’s confrontational style of argument was to corner someone (literally if possible), get as close as possible, and dare him to argue, or even fight, by asking sarcastic questions and demeaning his intellect, credibility, and character in the process. With words and spittle flying, decibel level rising, and eyes glaring, Boyd would bore in for the kill. Combined with the smoke from his foul-smelling cigars, such encounters were bound to be unpleasant physically, and they were often intellectually and emotionally distressing as well. No wonder he made so many enemies, particularly since he won most of the battles and usually got his way. Boyd did his first job during the day and his second one at night until he got out of the maintenance billet and into another job.
From then on he worked on creating what became the energy maneuverability theory. EM, as it came to be called, was a way to plot not just the basic characteristics (how far, how fast, how high) of a given airplane but also the mathematically plotted maneuverability of it at different altitudes, g forces, turning radii, and so on. He could plot a graph for each plane and specify the conditions. Furthermore, he could compare the graphs of different planes and determine at what points (altitude, g force, speed, etc.) one plane had an advantage over another. Such information would obviously be valuable to pilots in air-to-air combat. It was also a new way to compare capabilities between nations before the actual encounters took place in air-to-air combat. By using these diagrams, designers could see exactly where, when, how, and under what conditions one plane could gain an advantage over another. It was the sort of breakthrough thinking that could revolutionize fighter design.
Then, in early 1963, Boyd was at another happy hour on Friday at the officer’s club bar when, once again, fate intervened. Some friends introduced him to Tom Christie, a civilian mathematician working at Eglin. Quiet but also bright, he and Boyd were to become fast friends and even partners in crime over the next two years. Boyd proceeded to explain the basics of his ideas, covering a tablecloth with equations and formulae. Christie’s response was low key but positive. “That makes sense. I think you are right, but we’re going to have to run all that stuff out.”
Then Boyd began talking about curves and data on aircraft performance and such. Christie had access to an IBM 7094 computer, a large one at the time. He and Boyd began to write the necessary computer programs, debug them, and start to work on the data they collected. They became very close and formed an almost symbiotic relationship. Boyd learned a lot about mathematics, computers, and programming from Christie. Christie learned a lot about air combat, fighter performance, and a host of other topics from Boyd. Christie gained a respect and admiration for Boyd that only grew over the years. Each went out of his way to pay homage to the other for the relationship they had, the significance of their shared insights, and what they accomplished. Whenever Boyd talked about EM in public, he always mentioned Tom Christie. Christie maintains that what he learned from Boyd was more important than what Boyd may have learned from him. It was Tom Christie who hosted a long and rather liquid gathering for Boyd’s friends and family at his home following Boyd’s funeral. There were many anecdotes, memories, tears, and laughter that afternoon. One was struck by the genuine affection that so many people of diverse backgrounds had for Boyd.
After working on the EM project for some time, Boyd and Christie decided it would be good to get data on foreign aircraft to compare with American planes. So Boyd grabbed a T-bird (a T-33 jet trainer) and flew up to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, home of the Foreign Technology Center, to collect data on foreign (Soviet) aircraft. He had some friends from Nellis there, and they collected what he needed, despite thinking he was a little off the wall when he told them what he was up to. He flew back to Eglin, where he and Christie started reviewing the data and crunching the numbers—again.
“I expected to see our airplanes, like the F-4 and all of those, look a lot better than the Soviet airplanes. I was really convinced in my mind—the way the writing went—that we were much better. Then we ran our first plots off. I said, Gee, Tom, wait a minute. The Soviet airplanes are better. I think we made a mistake.”
Not able to accept the contrary findings, Boyd called the Foreign Technology Center people and double-checked the data he had been given. He and Christie checked and rechecked their programs. Boyd went back to Wright Patterson and reviewed the Soviet data with the people there. Christie went through the entire program again. They kept getting the same results. Unknown to anyone else, working offline on a project that didn’t really exist, Boyd and Christie had stumbled onto the indisputable but highly controversial conclusion: Soviet combat aircraft, all of them, were better—in the sense that they were more maneuverable—than their American counterparts. So much for vaunted American military technology. Boyd and Christie knew their data were correct, but they still found it hard to believe. The implications were huge.
Still with a good reputation in TAC and some contacts there, Boyd informally briefed some people from TAC who were visiting Eglin. They liked it and were excited about it. That was a relief to Boyd, because others he had tried to discuss it with at Eglin, with few exceptions, thought he was nuts and wasting his time. They didn’t appreciate the degree to which fine-tuning these concepts would allow them to plot the comparative performance envelopes of different aircraft against each other. They could then derive the tactics for successful engagements by utilizing those performance areas and characteristics inherently advantageous to their own planes, not the adversary’s. He kept pushing and refining his ideas, crunching the numbers, checking the programs, and sifting the data. It was just like being back at Nellis, in terms of figuring out comparative combat advantage so he could teach it to others. Boyd was spending long hours but having a ball.
Boyd’s competitive juices flowed routinely, and he took out his frustrations during allegedly touch football games at lunchtime at Eglin. He played as he worked: fiercely, competitively, and with abandon. Occasionally, the guys he played with would try to stack the deck against him by insuring that he had the losers on his team. Boyd would rant and rave and then threaten to quit because the game had been rigged. Often as not, he would just play harder, turning touch into a more brutal game of tackle without the benefit of pads and helmets. Tom Christie recalled that “as a major, John was hell. He would challenge everybody on everything. To Boyd, competition is the milk of life, and if there wasn’t enough routinely, he’d go make some more.”5 Hard work and hard play filled most of his days and nights, including some drinking at the Eglin Officers Club. Christie has a collection of more than 2,000 cocktail-napkin cartoons drawn at those sessions by different participants; it was bound and presented to Christie as a going-away present when he moved to Washington.
In the midst of all this, there was nearly a family tragedy. Boyd’s oldest son, Steven, who had had polio while they were at Nellis, developed appendicitis. For several days, it was touch and go, and they didn’t know whether he would live or not. For that period, Boyd was human in his concern for his son, but he focused on his son’s illness with the same intensity he had devoted to his work. It consumed him for nearly a week. He and Mary were taking care of the children or at the hospital with Steven. It was a difficult time for Boyd, a situation over which he had absolutely no control. There was nothing he could do to save his son. Luckily, Steven rallied and survived. When it was over and Steven returned home, Boyd turned his laserlike concentration back to his work, rather than his family. It was just the way he did things. He had two speeds, on and off. It was only the target of his concentration that varied from time to time.
What was so revolutionary about energy maneuverability? It was a fundamental definition of maneuverability, expressed in mathematical terms using physics constructs. The term had been used for years without being precisely defined in scientific terms in the aircraft business. Boyd’s approach plotted the ability to change altitude (potential energy), airspeed (kinetic energy), and direction (turn rate, radius, or g) in any combination for each airplane in the U.S. fighter inventory. More important, Boyd devised a way to compare them with each other and against any Soviet aircraft or other plane one wished. According to Jim Stevenson, energy maneuverability theory was “the first quantitative global analysis by which one could accurately compare one aircraft against another throughout their performance envelopes.”6 Maneuverability could be measured, but Boyd figured out how to measure it in a manner that allowed uniform comparisons, with precise graphs and pictures of where in the performance envelope one plane could outmaneuver another.
We should pause for a moment and realize what has happened. Boyd became interested in flying. Once he learned to fly, he became interested in air-to-air tactics. Because of his interest in aerial tactics, he wrote the Air Combat Maneuvering Manual and Aerial Attack Study while teaching at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis. He went back to school to learn more math and physics to understand more fully what he had been able to demonstrate at Nellis. He and Tom Christie then developed energy maneuverability, which led him ultimately to aircraft design. From the perspective of many people, that was backward. Boyd did things in the reverse of the way they are supposed to happen. One should begin with the theory, learn the relationships it uncovers, and apply them to specific needs and problems. Most learn about aircraft design to appreciate handling characteristics that would lead in turn to training and doctrine appropriate for that aircraft. Boyd, rarely the traditionalist, managed to do this upside down and outside in. It was odd, but it was characteristically Boyd.
On one level, EM was basic physics, not much more than the application of equations of motion; but conceptualizing those sets of equations as aircraft performance maps was genius, for it created another way to assess aircraft performance and compare it. In that sense, EM was truly revolutionary, not only as an assessment tool but also as a design parameter in the development of tactics and doctrine for combat engagements. It could not have been done before because there were no large high-speed computers to handle the computational matrices that constructed the plotting for the visual representation of performance envelopes. True to form, Boyd insisted that every time a new dimension of EM was discovered or refined, all the computer programs and the findings be turned over to the aircraft companies. It made other types of analysis obsolete. The outcomes were both undeniable and shocking. Higher, farther, faster—the traditional benchmarks of aircraft performance—do not necessarily translate as better. Maneuverability is critical, and the ability and speed with which a plane and pilot can transition from one maneuver to another may well hold the difference between life and death, between winning and losing in an air-to-air engagement. EM was fundamental and profound.
EM provided dynamic rather than static analysis pictures of aircraft performance across a range of altitudes, g forces, and turning radii and gave a composite scorecard of its maneuver capabilities. It did not assess a pilot’s skills, but it did add to them by telling the pilot exactly where his aircraft’s performance profile gave him an advantage against a particular adversary. As Tom Christie explained it: “The point is that EM theory provides you with a way of at least designing certain factors into the aircraft which will permit you to have better hardware to outperform the other aircraft in a maneuvering situation, in a fuel conservation situation, or whatever your ‘measure of merit’ is. A better pilot with better hardware is certainly going to beat a better pilot with inferior hardware.”7 EM provided the way to understand how to give American fighters an edge, and Boyd had produced the data to explain it to them and the tactics to teach them how to utilize it. It was a truly revolutionary way to assess capabilities and to teach tactics.
Crucial to the briefing of these complicated ideas and comparisons was the manner in which they were presented. Here, Boyd had a stroke of genius. He plotted the characteristics of maneuver performance of one aircraft against another at certain sectors of the performance envelope. Turning rate and g forces might be plotted at a certain altitude and speed. Boyd decided to show U.S. aircraft in blue and enemy aircraft in red, a fairly standard approach, but where they overlapped, he used purple. The visual presentation made explicit in an instant what it might take hours to explain in scientific detail. Simply stated, the larger the area of purple on a given vu-graph, the less the advantage of one plane over the other. Ideally, what he wanted were graphs with large blue areas, small purple zones, and no red areas of superior maneuverability. What the U.S. aircraft often got were graphs with large red areas, small purple areas, and almost no blue areas of superiority. Thus complex mathematics, computer programming, physics principles, equations of motion, and comparative data in carefully specified conditions could be reduced to the relative sizes of color on a graph. No one had to understand all the science to appreciate the outcome, and size and color were the perfect graphic medium to express the results. Even those with little knowledge of or appreciation for aeronautical design and flight characteristics could see the results of these comparisons and understand what was being portrayed.
Boyd and Christie went back to Wright Patterson to talk with the Foreign Technology Center about their findings. According to their data, the U.S. planes (F-4, F-104, F-105, and F-106) were inferior in maneuverability to the Soviet ones (the MiG-17, MiG-19, and MiG-21). The people at the Foreign Technology Center went back and scoured the data again and came up with some changes. Boyd and Christie ran the data again. The Soviet planes were still better. “The margin was still huge, but not quite as huge as before,” Boyd recalled. The outcomes were still surprising.
Now what? Boyd’s colleagues in TAC had an inkling of what was going on, but nobody in Systems Command knew what he was doing. The guys in TAC, contrary to Boyd’s instructions, had started talking about his work at Eglin, which eventually resulted in a request from TAC for a briefing on EM. When the word got out, everyone in the Air Force would be shocked by the results. How was Boyd to break the news, and to whom? How was he to explain how he came up with these results? Boyd did not have much time, and he would have to come clean to his superiors. The effort to do everything quickly and in the right order was reminiscent of the Keystone Kops. The story goes like this.
More folks from TAC showed up at Eglin, and Boyd and Christie showed them their study. All agreed that when the senior brass heard about this, they would come unglued. Shortly thereafter, Boyd got a message from Gen. Walter C. Sweeney, commander of TAC, saying he wanted to hear Boyd’s briefing on energy maneuverability. Boyd went to his boss, a Colonel Ryan, and told him what had happened. It was Thursday, and he had just been ordered to brief a four-star general at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on the following Monday. Unfortunately, no one in Systems Command, save Colonel Ryan, had been informed of what Boyd and Christie had done or the results of their work. Ryan was convinced they would all be fired. Boyd suggested that he brief Gen. John W. Roberts and his staff in Systems Command as soon as possible the next day. “Tell him it’s vitally important that he hears the briefing before it is presented to TAC. If they want to chew me out, fine. I will take the blame. But they have to hear it. Tell the general it is very urgent. Otherwise, he will not know how to respond to some nasty phone calls he may start receiving from TAC after I brief them.”
The general and his whole staff assembled, and General Roberts was not in a good mood. Nor were the other officers in the room (all senior to Boyd) pleased to be called to an urgent, “must attend” briefing by a major. It was a Friday afternoon, no less, with the usual end-of-week gatherings and social engagements to attend. After Boyd explained how he had gotten into the fix he was in, the general complained that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. As Boyd proceeded with the briefing, however, the color on the general’s face changed perceptibly, and his blood pressure and displeasure rose apace. The implications of the findings, military and political, began to dawn on him and the others in the room. First, the direction in which Systems Command and TAC were going was wrong. Their planes were not good enough. Years of effort, cherished assumptions about aircraft design, confidence in the caliber of the Air Force, all were being trashed. Second, if Boyd had briefed Sweeney at TAC first, he would have gone to Gen. Bernard Schriever, head of Air Force Systems Command, and heads would have rolled quickly.
Brig. Gen. Allman Culbertson said he wanted to check out the data and called the people at Wright Patterson to confirm what Boyd had just told them. He came back into the room even more pissed off than before. They had confirmed the data and Boyd’s conclusions. Then Culbertson began looking through his project books to find a listing for the energy maneuverability study with its budget and description. It wasn’t there. Boyd told him so. He was incredulous. “What are you trying to tell me, the project is not here? I just heard you say a few minutes ago about the computers you had to use, the resources you had to get, et cetera, to make this thing go, but there’s no way you can get those computer resources without having a project number and a budget for it.”
Boyd answered, “Do you really believe that now? I can steal computer time on any computer you have in this whole command and you would never know it if I did not want you to.”
General Roberts intervened. “Everybody except Boyd leave the room.”
Roberts proceeded to tell Boyd that what he had discovered was important, but how he had done it was wrong, and he sure hoped he was right in his findings. If wrong, he would be court-martialed. Boyd agreed on all counts: “That sounds fair. I knew when I first began that I would not get any support, that the risk was totally mine, but we believed in the theory and had to move with it, so we just grabbed what fucking resources we could.”
General Roberts told Boyd that he could be destroyed for doing what he had done, but he also paid Boyd a compliment. “You know, I didn’t know we had many officers like you left in the Air Force.” Unfortunately, what was true then, in 1964, is even truer today. Few people buck the system to do what is right. Messengers with bad news are metaphorically shot with some frequency. In most cases, data that do not support conventional wisdom, service policy, or current funding priorities are buried anonymously. There are even fewer officers who test the system routinely. Those who do have a very tough time unless they have some sympathetic top cover to assist them in their efforts. As things turned out, Boyd did.
Boyd’s briefing to TAC was delayed. In the meantime, he briefed the Systems Command hierarchy. It was a terrible meeting, and Boyd recalled being called nearly every name in the book by nearly all those present. The implication was that Systems Command didn’t know how to design its planes, was wasting money to buy a second-rate air force, and wasn’t even aware of how poorly it was doing. Then some colonel told Boyd that this sort of thing had been done before, and it was wrong theoretically. Boyd gave him enough rope to hang himself and then asked where and when the work had been done. The reply was “at Edwards Air Force Base a few years back.” Boyd then asked for the source document. There wasn’t one. Another general officer who had been at Edwards for years admitted no such study existed at Edwards. The EM theory was novel.
The TAC reaction to Boyd’s briefing was the same as Systems Command’s. People canceled meetings, called the Foreign Technology Center at Wright Patterson, called in other experts, and reluctantly concluded that Boyd’s data were correct. As the analysis slowly penetrated the system, people began to see the full implications. The Air Force had purchased planes with poor maneuverability and was designing future aircraft without proper attention to maneuverability. Ultimately, Boyd’s data suggested that we had and were continuing to build an inferior air force. There had to be a better way of designing new airplanes, or the Air Force would be in trouble in a head-to-head engagement. It was a shocking revelation, not what anyone wanted to hear in the depths of the Cold War.
A minor incident during all this reveals Boyd’s commitment to others and his willingness to buck the system to get things done. During one of his trips back and forth to the Pentagon, Boyd ended up with the wrong data from Eglin and needed to have a complicated set of graphics plots redone, photoreduced, and colored for his presentation—on a weekend. A woman named Betty Jo Salter in the graphics section of the Pentagon was the one to help get this done. On a Friday, Boyd tried to see her boss to arrange the work. He was playing golf. Boyd told her if she would make the emergency fixes, he would see that she got paid for the overtime. They worked all weekend and redid the whole briefing.
Come Monday, however, Salter came to Boyd in tears. She said her boss, a certain Colonel Lawson, had just told her that not only would she not get the extra pay but he was also considering firing her for doing work he hadn’t authorized, and then he chewed her out in front of her coworkers. Boyd’s request for overtime pay was denied. Boyd went to Lawson’s boss, Col. Red Grumbles, a friend from his days at Nellis. Grumbles told Boyd not to worry, he’d take care of things. He did. Briefings to four-star general officers were serious business, and Lawson’s action had been less than supportive. Lawson was told if he didn’t authorize the overtime pay, he could pay Salter out of his own pocket. Furthermore, he was instructed to gather those who worked in the section and publicly praise Salter for her selfless devotion to duty. If he did not, he would be fired.
Lawson did as instructed, and overtime pay was authorized. Just to make sure that there would be no retribution against Salter, Boyd took the matter up with General Roberts, who had been the commander at Nellis and was now head of the Proving Ground Command at Eglin. Roberts thought the treatment of Salter shabby and Lawson arrogant. Colonel Lawson was transferred in less than a month. Following what was later dubbed “the Kennedy maxim of politics,” Boyd did not get mad; he got even.8
The typical USAF service culture allowed two responses to what Boyd had done. The first was to bring him up on charges and court-martial him for stealing computer time to prepare his energy maneuverability study. If he hadn’t lied, he hadn’t exactly told the truth either. He had technically misappropriated government funds, filed fraudulent records in charging work to other programs, and engaged in conduct unbecoming an officer. All three are serious court-martial offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. On the other hand, the significance of the work was such that he should be recognized for brilliant insights, hard work (much of it on his own time), and a major contribution to the Air Force in the form of improved design and assessment of aircraft performance. He and Tom Christie had performed a valuable service to the nation. A package was prepared to present him an award for that contribution. Initially, the system pursued both paths simultaneously: to court-martial Boyd, punish him, and force him from the service and to reward him with a medal and commendation attesting to contributions that “reflect great credit on Major Boyd and the United States Air Force.” He may not be the only man in the Air Force to have found himself in the circumstance, but it was an extremely rare situation. The award paperwork went forward. The court-martial proceedings did not.
Boyd, after being persona non grata for a while, was hailed as a hero and presented with the customary awards and citations. Systems Command presented him and Tom Christie with the Air Force Systems Command Scientific Achievement Award for developing the energy maneuverability theory in the fall of 1965. In 1966 Boyd was awarded an Air Force Research and Development Award in aeronautical engineering. Today, some of the work he did on the theory more than 35 years ago remains classified, but not by the Air Force. (It was declassified years ago in an Air Force review.) Some nameless, faceless bureaucrat at the Department of Energy, no doubt acting on well-intentioned but idiotic instructions, classified the energy maneuverability theory and related reports by Boyd because the documents had the word “energy” in the title—just part of the protection and security we get for our tax dollars.
As Boyd prepared for his next assignment (in the Plans and Requirements Office of Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon), an enterprising young first lieutenant did a story for the base newspaper with the catchy and prescient title “Remember the Name.”9 It began, “Major Boyd, who has been referred to as personable and at the same time outspoken, will be concerned with advanced systems, an area he literally lives for, and will probably fight for in the future.” That was a bit of an understatement. One is reminded of Dorothy Parker’s retort after listening to an interminable boor. A friend said to Parker, “Well, she certainly is outspoken,” to which Parker replied, “By whom?” The article continued: “Boyd’s credo is simple: do your homework—present your views—then be prepared to defend them with the facts. To date, his batting average is pretty impressive.” The lieutenant concluded, “There is no disputing Major Boyd has made major scientific contributions to the Air Force. And judging from his enthusiasm and positive ideas, he doesn’t plan to stop contributing for a long time.” He was right on all counts.
As Boyd moved to Washington, his career, the future of the Air Force, and the nation’s military were to change dramatically. The next three decades of post-Vietnam experience would be hard for the American military and the country. The nation still has not recovered fully from the triple blows of civil rights upheaval, the defeat and deception practiced by the government regarding Vietnam, and the erosion of faith in our own political processes and institutions occasioned by Watergate. The trials that Samuel Huntington has called “the S&S Decades” of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the period from 1965 to 1975, were a tough time for America. Even the end of the Cold War and the false euphoria of the Gulf War have not entirely erased their pall.
In the midst of these troubled times, Maj. John Boyd left Eglin Air Force Base and was reassigned to the Pentagon. While in Washington, D.C., he would do great things over the next 23 years, in and out of uniform. He owed nearly all of his insights to the experience of air-to-air combat, reflection and learning about basic science and mathematics, and the opportunity to apply those to his craft as a member of the profession of arms and an officer in the U.S. Air Force. A series of chance encounters combined to create an utterly transforming set of circumstances that permitted all of this to fall into place. He had not washed out of pilot training for failing to perform gliding turns. He had not been punished for practicing air-to-air combat instead of cross-country training at Willy. He had not gone into maintenance, twice. He had been able to change things at Nellis. He had talked AFIT into sending him to Georgia Tech. And he had learned the math, science, and computer programming he needed to know to put it all together.
Just what were the key events in the culmination of these last steps in the chain reaction of circumstances that led to even greater accomplishments in the future? The chance meetings, flashes of insight, and great ideas all came while eating hamburgers and drinking beer at Georgia Tech and the Eglin Officer’s Club bar. It just doesn’t get any better than that.