Bill Whittle has a long ode to John Boyd.

A lot of this theory applies to NASA as well. Unfortunately, space isn't important enough to compel the government to do it well.

Rand, I have to take issue with you. Space is very important to many but not important enough to the government to compel them to do it well.

We in the Commercial world have no choice - we either do it well or we die, sometimes literally, hopefully only commercially.

I read Boyd's book that Whittle based his article on. I recommend it highly. The guy was all that Whittle described. The entire OODA loop paradigm is applicable to so many competitive situations in life.

I read Boyd's book that Whittle based his article on. I recommend it highly. The guy was all that Whittle described. The entire OODA loop paradigm is applicable to so many competitive situations in life.

I disagree with you, Andy. I watched "October Sky" over the holidays (put aside thoughts and opinion of Homer Hickham, if you have any). Here's the one thing I noticed... the "rocketboys" made test flight after test flight with many failures along the way. They learned more about rocketry with each failure than most aerospace engineering students will learn in college, while never once taking such risks. Was there risk to life and limb? Certainly, but the major risks were addressed. At the same time, there was a clear understanding that their was far more significant harm in remaining risk adverse than there was in taking some risk.

Moving along to NASA today... the whole point of ESAS and Ares was to move along faster. As it is, NASA itself is trying to push that timetable to the right in order to take comfort in a known quantity of the shuttle and station. Why? Because there is no threat to ones career by sticking with the Shuttle or Station. They represent stability. At the same time, there is a major threat to actually fielding Constellation and watching it fail. This threat of failure is why the past 3 replacements for the shuttle never really made if off the drawing board. It is likely why Constellation will also fail.

It's not to say that Constellation is a great design either, but failing to Decide and Act is causing us to stay stuck in Observe and Orient while waiting for the perfect decision.

As a group, fighter pilots aren't known for their humility. Boyd was the fighter pilot's fighter pilot, but as the article described, he was so much more. It takes great strenght of will to turn around an entire bureaucracy but Boyd and his supporters managed to do it. To get an idea of what he was up against, I suggest the book "Thud Ridge" about flying F-105s in combat during Vietnam.

Boy is Thud Ridge a depressing book.

Jack Broughton has complaint aplenty about the maneuverability or lack thereof of the F-105. But as to the complaint (from Mr. Whittle) about not having a gun, the F-105 did too have a 20 mm Gatling gun and Broughton speaks of his very affectionately.

Of all the things that brought down our planes and put our pilots and aviators in prison camp or worse, enemy fighters were low on the list. Yes, there were significant casualties to the MiG's, Broughton's compatriot Leo K Thorsness who was recently recounting his experiences on the History Channel comes to mind and it is all in that book, but Thorsness' loss of his plane was to a MiG that snuck up on him owing to the distraction of someone elses stuck emergency radio, so the dog fighting ability or lack thereof of the F-105 wasn't even a factor.

As to the F-105 not designed as a dogfighter, it was more the Vietnam era version of the B-17 delivering the tonnage of bombs on target rather than the P-51. Didn't the single seat F-105 carry more bombs than a B-17?

As to defending against enemy fighter planes, I remember asking some Air Force officers way back in 1982 who were accompanying some Air Force whiz kid who came to the U to talk about their F-16 technology demonstrator. Smart alec that I was, I asked about the WW-II "combat box formation" and I got a thoughtful answers (from the "handlers", not the young Air Force Captain Whiz Kid).

I was told that the "Brits" (this is the first time I remember someone speaking of "Brits") warned "You Yanks are always worried about 'Jerry in the Air' -- the real threat is from 'Jerry on the Ground'." For however the fighter threat was talked up, there was mention that the Germans would sometimes only send up a single plane to shadow the bomber formations, if only to get an altitude to radio back for fusing of the flak battery shells.

So it was over Vietnam. The NVAF kept their fighters on a short leash, and the USAF generally had radar coverage from the Red Crown radar ship and other places warning them to generally avoid the NVAF as the mission was to bomb ground targets. The SAM threat was big, but the SAM could be evaded if you had warning of a launch, but then you were exposed to the guns.

So how did it matter that you had a 1:1 exchange with the MiG when the MiG rarely came up to fight and when it did, you avoided him because your mission was to bomb targets. Unlike Korea where the heavy bombing missions went to the B-29 that was quite vulnerable to the MiG, the fighter bomber generally was able to outrun and disengage from the MiG, especially at tree top level, as the F-105 was under-winged from a combat maneuverability standpoint because its original mission was a high-speed low-level nuclear bomb delivery.

And when Randall Cuningham and Willy Driscoll became Navy aces, besting the NVAF's reputed best through superior training and tactics, they got shot down on their egress by . . . a SAM, and were rescued from the sea out from under enemy fire.

As to Colonel Broughton recounting the sad, senseless casualties from amoung his compatriots, the politically-managed rules of engagement and start-stop aspect to the bombing, a President who famously didn't want an outhouse bombed without orders from the White House, the letting SAM bases just sit their while under construction so as to not kill and hence provoke the Russians, while wasting crews on dangerous missions to attack them when they came on the air, all of that had much more to do with the losses and perhaps waste of young men than the lack of dogfighting capability in the F-105.

The example of the F-105 was that the plane was designed to be a single-seat single-engine nuclear bomber, not a fighter. It was very fast for its time but wasn't maneuverable worth a damn. Broughton also wrote about critical vulnerabilities in the flight control system that the bureaucracy wouldn't fix that caused the loss of quite a few of the planes. Of the 833 F-105s produced, 382 were lost. Yes, they flew some highly dangerous missions - especially the Wild Weasels - but they also had many weaknesses that lead to a lot of men being shot down.

The F-4 Phantom II wasn't much better in terms of maneuverability and the F-111 was even worse. Those were the leading fighters produced when the Air Force was ruled by Bomber Generals. Boyd had his work cut out from him when it came to turning around that mentality at the Pentagon.

You'll certainly get no argument from me about the criminal incompetence of the Johnson Administration (especially McNamara) when it came to fighting that war.