Boyd by Robert Coram Page A

finger, poke them in the chest, and demand, “Do you get what I am telling you?”
    He talked so much and so often and so loudly about tactics that on November 25 he was made a flight commander and tactics
     instructor for the squadron. (The Air Force later changed the “tactics instructor” title to “weapons officer.”) At this point,
     what Boyd was teaching was a refinement and an extension of existing tactics. He was simply agreat stick with no reluctance to push the outside limits of the performance envelope.
    Pilots were intrigued both by Boyd’s aircraft handling skills and by his ideas. They asked him to write his tactics down and
     prepare diagrams of various tactical maneuvers. He eagerly accepted the task and began making notes, putting briefings together,
     and studying tactics of previous wars. He stayed up during the long cold Korean nights writing lesson plans. Soon he was holding
     classes.
    Even Boyd’s fellow F-86 pilots, all of whom were avid and passionate about flying jets, were struck by his enthusiasm and
     energy. More than one said they had never seen a man before or since who was so single-minded about aviation. He did not see
     the F-86 as an engine and fuselage and an inanimate collection of esoteric parts; he saw it as a sleek and beautiful and lethal
     weapon of war, almost a living thing, each aircraft having its own personality, each to be ridden into the heavens in the
     name of the United States of America.
    When Boyd talked of aerial tactics, he grimaced and waved his arms, paced the room, wiggled his shoulders, and snapped his
     head back and forth. His voice was loud and nonstop. Nervous energy steamed from him. If a person asked him a question, and
     if Boyd thought the person truly sought knowledge, Boyd would tell him everything he wanted to know about aerial tactics.
     But he expected those who disagreed to come around to his viewpoint—and quickly. If someone belittled his ideas, they were
     instantly and forever dismissed from his life. They ceased to exist. He never spoke to them again.
    Boyd’s ideas about tactics were germinating and sprouting at a time when all the world was agog at America’s extraordinary
     superiority and domination of the skies over MiG Alley. At the end of the war, the MiG was on the losing end of a kill ratio
     that had been as high as fourteen to one and finally settled at ten to one. The official count for the war was 792 MiGs shot
     down and 78 F-86s shot down. (Such numbers remain suspect in some quarters. True wins and losses are almost never revealed,
     even after a war is over. But the ten to one kill ratio remains the number published in histories of Korea.) The extraordinarily
     lopsided kill ratio, while it made Air Force generals puff out their chests and boast, caused great confusion among serious
     thinkers in the Air Force. The MiG should have done muchbetter against the F-86. In many ways it was a far superior aircraft. It could make harder turns than the F-86, could out-accelerate
     it, and had better high-altitude performance. The MiG was one hell of an airplane. So what happened?
    The confusion was put to rest with a rationale that since has become conventional wisdom. Even today, a half-century later,
     when people talk of how the F-86s defeated the MiGs, they give as the reason, “Our pilots were better trained than the MiG
     pilots.” And that is true. But it is also true that this logic became an intellectual wastebasket to hide the fact that no
     one could come up with a better reason.
    But Boyd studied the detailed records of each air-to-air engagement and knew there had to be another reason. It took him another
     decade to figure out what it was. And when he did, it changed aviation forever.
    Boyd’s brief tour in Korea is put in perspective by what then was called an Officer Efficiency Report—an “OER” or, as it sometimes
     was shortened, “ER.” In the Air Force of the 1950s, an officer’s promotions—and