The Fighter Mafia was a group of United States Air Force officers and civilian defense contributors formed in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated for fighter design criteria in opposition to those of the design boards of the time. Their assertions included:
The Fighter Mafia was a group of United States Air Force officers and civilian defense contributors formed in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated for fighter design criteria in opposition to those of the design boards of the time. Their assertions included:
- Contemporary Air Force generals established poor criteria for combat effectiveness that ignored historical combat data.
- Design focus on high technology and planes that could go "higher, faster, and farther" increased costs and decreased effectiveness. The group's view was that cheaper designs would have been more effective.
- The bureaucracy of the Air Force was corrupt, allegedly dishonestly testing weapons before buying them and deploying them in the field.
- The focus of the USAF should have been on close air support and the use of combined arms to support maneuver warfare rather than interdiction bombing.
- Multi-role and multi-mission capability plane designs were fundamentally compromised compared to specialized designs.
- Beyond visual range combat was a fantasy.