The Fighter Mafia was a group of U.S. Air Force officers and civilian defense analysts who, in the 1970s, advocated the use of John Boyd's Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) theory to develop fighter aircraft. The theory enabled quantitative one-to-one comparison of the performance of aircraft in terms of air combat maneuvering, and identified deficiencies with both designs in service and proposed designs of the time. They influenced the specifications of the F-X, and went on to independently develop specifications for the Light Weight Fighter. The nickname, a professional jest coined by an Air Force member of Italian heritage, was a rejoinder to the "Bomber Mafia", theorists at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s whose ideas led to the primacy of strategic bombing over the fighter within the Air Force. The Fighter Mafia was instrumental in a return to air-combat maneouvrability as the defining quality of fighter planes after the Vietnam war showed that long range missiles were unlikely to be the deciding factor in air combat. This led to a new generation of warplanes such as the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F/A-18.
Contents |
In the 1960s, both the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy were in the process of acquiring large, heavy fighters designed primarily to fight with missiles. Project Forecast, a 1963 Air Force attempt to identify future weapons trends, stated that a counterair force must be able to destroy aircraft in the air at long ranges using advanced weapon systems. The Air Force felt that these needs would be filled for the next twenty years by missile-armed variants of the F-111 and F-4 Phantom II.[1] Their F-X fighter acquisition program, initially merged into the TFX program (which developed the F-111), was written along those lines.
Real-world combat during the Vietnam war demonstrated that the entire "Missileer" concept did not work in practice. Rules of engagement, limitations in communications, poor performance of the missiles and a wide variety of other problems conspired to make air-to-air combat devolve into dogfights in almost every situation. In spite of a huge technical superiority on paper, the US Navy and Air Force F-4s found themselves fighting at close quarters with the "inferior" MiG-21, and losing the fight all too often. The heavy and poorly maneuverable fighters imagined as part of F-X would be even worse off in these situations.
Boyd's work with E-M theory demonstrated that the F-111 would be poorly suited to the role of fighter, and the Air Force F-X proposal was quietly rewritten to reflect his findings, dropping a heavy swing-wing from the design, lowering the gross weight from 60,000+ pounds to slightly below 40,000, and the top speed to Mach 2.3, from 2.5. The result was the F-15 Eagle, an aircraft that was far superior in maneuverability to the F-111 fighter variants. The Air Force had also been studying a lighter day fighter; starting in 1965, the Air Force had pursued a low-priority study of the Advanced Day Fighter (ADF), a 25,000 pound design. After they learned of the MiG-25 in 1967, a minor panic broke out and the ADF was dropped in order to focus work on the F-15. The F-15, originally a lighter aircraft, grew in size and weight as it attempted to match the inflated performance estimates of the MiG-25. While Boyd's contributions to the F-15 were significant, he felt that it was still a compromise.[2]
Boyd, defense analysts Tom Christie and Pierre Sprey, and test pilot Col. Everest Riccioni and aeronautical engineer Harry Hillaker formed the core of the self-dubbed "Fighter Mafia" which worked behind the scenes in the late 1960s to pursue a lightweight fighter as an alternative to the F-15. Riccioni coined the nickname, a joke on his Italian heritage that harkened back to the "Bomber Mafia" (whose acolytes still occupied the upper command positions of the Air Force), and dubbed himself the "godfather". In 1969, under the guise that the Navy was developing a small, high-performance Navy aircraft, Riccioni won $149,000 to fund the "Study to Validate the Integration of Advanced Energy-Maneuverability Theory with Trade-Off Analysis". This money was split between Northrop and General Dynamics to build the embodiment of Boyd's E-M theory - a small, low-drag, low-weight, pure fighter with no bomb racks. Northrop demanded and received $100,000 to design the YF-17; General Dynamics, eager to redeem its debacle with the F-111, received the remainder to develop the YF-16.[2]
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, who entered office with the Nixon administration in 1969, were interested in these studies and threw their support behind the notion. In May 1971, Congress issued a critical report of the F-14 and F-15 and advocated spending $50 million on developing an alternative lightweight fighter. This was followed by the assignment of $12 million in the 1972 fiscal year budget for the LWF. On January 6, 1971, an RFP was issued to industry for a 20,000 pound fighter to complement the F-15.[1] Sprey insisted on a fly-off between two prototypes, as he had earlier on the A-X program, pitting the planes against MiG-17s and MiG-21s secretly maintained in Nevada, as well as an F-4. Furthermore, the evaluating pilots would not be test pilots, and each would fly both airframes.
In retrospect, the group's greatest contribution was in the introduction of E-M as a basis for evaluating and designing aircraft for air combat maneuvering. However, their disdain of "gold-plating", or technological add-ons, would prove wrong, as the same technology would protect aircraft from missiles in an increasingly sensor-saturated battlefield, and would enable the multi-mission capabilities of modern aircraft (though, they often argued that the ground attack mission should be handled by more appropriate aircraft such as the A-10, which has had an outstanding record in that area).[3]