Publisher's Weekly Review
John Boyd (1927-1997) was a brilliant and blazingly eccentric person. He was a crackerjack jet fighter pilot, a visionary scholar and an innovative military strategist. Among other things, Boyd wrote the first manual on jet aerial combat, was primarily responsible for designing the F-15 and the F-16 jet fighters, was a leading voice in the post-Vietnam War military reform movement and shaped the smashingly successful U.S. military strategy in the Persian Gulf War. His writings and theories on military strategy remain influential today, particularly his concept of the "OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) Loop," which all the military services-and many business strategists-use to this day. Boyd also was a brash, combative, iconoclastic man, not above insulting his superiors at the Pentagon (both military and civilian); he made enemies (and fiercely loyal acolytes) everywhere he went. His strange, mercurial personality did not mesh with a military career, making his 24 years in the Air Force (1951-1975) difficult professionally and causing serious emotional problems for Boyd's wife and children. Coram's worthy biography is deeply researched and detailed, down to describing the fine technical points of some of Boyd's theories. A Boyd advocate (he "contributed as much to fighter aviation as any man in the history of the Air Force," Coram notes), Coram does not shy away from Boyd's often self-defeating abrasiveness and the neglect and mistreatment of his long-suffering wife and children, and keeps the story of a unique life moving smoothly and engagingly.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Profanity-laden, action-filled biography of legendary Air Force pilot, instructor, and aircraft design theorist John Richard "Forty-Second" Boyd. Veteran journalist, novelist, and nonfiction author Coram (Caribbean Time Bomb, 1993, etc.) portrays Boyd as a visionary whose no-quarter-taken pursuit of weapons improvement so infuriated the bureaucrats that he was denied a generalship despite being recognized as a near genius. After two years as an Air Force mechanic, Boyd made his mark as a pilot in Korea and became a legend teaching others to fly, using his unique acrobatics to get on the tail and "hose" a mock enemy fighter in less than 40 seconds, a feat that taxed both pilot and aircraft. The highly inquisitive Boyd persuaded the Air Force to finance his engineering studies at Georgia Tech, where he learned thermodynamics and formulated his revolutionary theory on design factors that would quicken a fighter pilot's ability to get the better of an enemy. Real information (potential and kinetic energy from engine thrust, aircraft lift and drag, g-forces endurable, etc.) replaced conventional reliance on the often-inflated aircraft speed and range claims of bureaucrats who believed that the more complex a weapon, the more gizmos it carried, and the greater its cost, the better. Higher costs meant added layers of command and accelerated promotions for the spear-carriers, who cared far less about actual performance vis-`-vis that of prospective enemies' weapons. But Boyd's graphs of the swept-wing F-111 fighter and the acclaimed B-1 bomber showed that neither could withstand an onslaught from an ordinary MIG fighter. Soon his theories swept the government, the defense industry, and Congress; the crafts he designated "lemons" never saw combat. Nonetheless, Boyd died in poverty as a retired colonel, best remembered by a handful of supporters he called "Acolytes." Required reading for frustrated innovators, aviation buffs, and Horatio Algers intent on improving the world against the best efforts of ever-prevailing deal-busters and naysayers.
Booklist Review
The late Colonel John Boyd, United States Air Force, began his career as a supremely proficient fighter pilot in the Korean War, after which he went on to develop the concept of energy maneuvering that has been the basis for fighter tactics and designs for 30 years. He proceeded militantly to advocate simpler fighter designs and attracted a group of like-minded civilian and uniformed reformers, known as the Acolytes, who were mostly as unorthodox as he. After his retirement, he developed strategic concepts based on the velocity of attack, which, while they may not be as original as Coram claims, reminded the armed forces of velocity of attack at a time when they direly needed reminding. On the personal front, Boyd, the product of a dysfunctional family, generated another, which doesn't make pretty reading. The sheer mass of information Coram pumps out requires some military knowledge, if only not to be taken in by all of Coram's claims about Boyd, and such knowledgeable readers will most appreciate this study of an American military reformer. Roland Green.
