John 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. The group strongly believed that an ideal fighter should not include any of the sophisticated radar and missile systems or rudimentary ground-attack capability that found their way into the F-15.
In retrospect, the group's greatest contribution was the promotion of E-M as a basis for evaluating and designing aircraft for air combat maneuvering. At a time when the US military was seemingly obsessed with technological solutions, the Fighter Mafia acted as the opposite extreme from which a more balanced approach to fighter design would emerge.
However, this can be seen as ultimately a defeat of the Fighter Mafia and its ideals. While this balanced approach would result in the highly successful F-15, F-15E, F-16, F/A-18 and F/A-18E/F, it did so at the betrayal of the Fighter Mafia's campaign for the US military to adopt a single-role, low-tech fighter in large numbers.
The group's uncompromising disdain of and campaign against advanced weapons, radars, ECM, and multi-role designs, what they characterized as "gold-plating", would prove erroneous. For example, the Fighter Mafia argued that the ground attack mission should be handled by more appropriate, dedicated aircraft such as the A-10, which has had an outstanding record in that area and that the addition of more electronics to F-16 caused its weight to rise to the point where it lost its edge in dogfighting, the mission for which it had been designed. The vision of the group would have seen the US build thousands of dedicated short-ranged, low-tech, fighter-only aircraft to counter Soviet air power on a numerical superiority basis, a plan that was never endorsed by the USAF or the USN.
Instead, the success of US military aircraft has shown that the same technology would protect aircraft from missiles in an increasingly sensor-saturated battlefield, and would enable the multi-mission capabilities of modern aircraft. And while the US aircraft has engaged in few air-to-air encounters since Vietnam, the trend continues to show that missiles and in particular increasingly mature long-range missiles are the primary weapon of choice in modern combat, a trend that started as far back as the Vietnam War but continues to be downplayed by the Fighter Mafia.
Although Sprey often portrays himself as a "principal designer" of the F-16, the actual plane that entered service included the long-range missiles, sensors and multi-role capability that he continues to criticize today.
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