OODA Loops and An American HeroInteresting
article on one of the greatest military minds of all time:
To find out how to design a good jet fighter Boyd went to Georgia Tech and got an engineering degree. It was while studying thermodynamics there that he realized that the key to fighter operations was energy, trading off potential and kinetic energy. Assisted by Tom Christie and $1 million of purloined computer time, he developed Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory. It allowed him to draw performance curves for every airplane that flew and predict which fighter plane would win in a matchup. In the late 1960s he headed up an ad hoc guerrilla group in the Pentagon, the “Fighter Mafia,” that designed the best fighter aircraft in the world, the F-16.