Patterns of Conflict
| The works of |
| Works of John Boyd |
|---|
OODA WIKI Edition
Quantico Transcription
Okay, with that in mind, now what I want to do is, let’s go into our first bullet point of departure, air-to-air. Any pilots in here or anything, any fighter pilots? You’re going be familiar with some of the stuff I’m talking about. The other people you’ll understand the [unintelligible]. Air-to-air. Now as I’d already indicated in the beginning these ideas actually came out as a result of our investigations and studies pertaining to the YF-16, YF-17. And what we found out after going through things, well, in fact that was the beginning of the supercomputer program, to decide air-to-air combat on the computer, who had the better airplane. And of course, then, we’re going to pick airplane A as opposed to B, C, or D, because it’s a better airplane that we run it through the computer.
Of course, the idea being that those simulations, in a sense, you would like to think they sort of represent what actually takes place in the air. If they don’t represent, they’re not too useful. So that’s always the question. So we had what you’d call a “fly before buy” program. So I made the people at that time, I said okay, if you think your goddamn computer, so everybody came with their computer program with their own simulations, so we used them all. I said we’ll run them all, I don’t give a crap. Because I don’t know what’s the best one. Everyone says theirs is the best, so we’ll run it all up. Christ, it’s only the electric bill anyway. And so I said fine, if you’re going to do that, now I want you to— here’s the catch, you tell me which one’s the better airplane before we run the flight data. We’re going to find out what the predictability of the program is, if it’s so damn good.
And so they did that, and then we run the flight data. In some areas they were right, in other areas they were wrong. And other than that, they couldn’t understand why they were wrong, they knew they were wrong, so we’re going to try to educate you why [unintelligible]. What wasn’t in those programs, what people hadn’t thought of before, which leads to many of the ideas [unintelligible] in my presentation.
So what did we find out? Turned out to be something very simple, and so I used to call it a generalization.
Lightfoot Transcription
Point of depart. As I've already indicated I was very deeply involved the evolution design of the F-15 lightweight fighter. As I've also already indicating we had some problems there and the key thing is even when we have all this theory eventually it ends up in the real world testing. We explain those, it took some time just going to give you some insight one of the you think is a very trivial statement but at the time it was not.