Boyd is a biography of John Boyd, an Air Force colonel and a brilliant engineer. At the time of his death in 1997, he was 70 years old and largely unknown. Boyd's life story reads like a mixture of Top Gun and Failure is Not an option.

Anyone not wanting to read swear words should avoid the book and this review. Boyd's coarse language and combative personality earned him as many enemies as friends.

I loved the book, and I want to communicate its essence as best I can. This review is mainly paraphrases and direct quotes from one of the book's story arcs. Consider it the equivalent of a film trailer. Reading this review shouldn't detract from the value of the book. Boyd is 485 pages of great reading and is far deeper and more engaging that what's highlighted here:

• Boyd wrote Aerial Attack Study--the definitive air combat manual, which has remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s.
• Using stolen computer time, he developed Energy-Maneuverability Theory - a scientific process for measuring aircraft combat performance.
• While working at the pentagon, he was instrumental in the design of the F-15 and F-16.
• He devised new theories of ground warfare. A number of Boyd's ideas are central to what is now termed "Fourth-Generation Warfare."

Coram begins Boyd with some history about John Boyd's youth, but the majority of the book focuses on Boyd's military career. Boyd served briefly in the Army Air Corps following WWII, and returned home to attend school on the GI bill. He joined the Air Force just as the Korean War was beginning. New Air Force pilots bound for Korea were trained at Nellis Advanced Flying School (the navy modeled their "Top Gun" program on Nellis).

After flying in Korea, Boyd returned as an instructor. While teaching at Nellis, he was undefeated in simulated combat. His standing offer was to pay $40 to any pilot who he could not defeat in 40 seconds. Nobody ever collected.

Nellis was a lone holdout against the Air Force's growing vision of missile-and-bomb air power. After Korea, the USAF was becoming more and more focused on strategic bombing, and less concerned with air combat.

Fighter pilots who talked of dogfights were relics of bygone days. The first air-to-air missiles were in the pipeline and there were whisperings that these missiles could be fired from ten miles away...The next generation of fighters, it was argued, would not have guns. The day of airborne gunslingers was over.

After four years of instructing, Boyd was promoted to major and sent back to college for an engineering degree. The thermodynamics and physics he learned gave him a better understanding of how aircraft flew, and more importantly, how they performed in combat. After his graduation, Boyd was posted to Elgin AFB, where he expected to develop his ideas. But his reputation for loudmouthedness resulted in being moved from job to job--each less important than the last. He was unable to build any official support for his idea of developing mathematics to govern air combat. Boyd had developed some early equations, but the math was complex and calculations were painfully slow.

The biggest computer on the base was an IBM 704. To use it, one had to come to the computer shop as a supplicant. The proper way to obtain computer time, the Air Force way, the only way, was first to have a project that met all the criteria for computer usage. Then whoever was in charge of the project delegated someone to take the data to the computer office. There a program was written and that information placed on punch cards, which were fed into the computer. The printouts were returned to the supplicant.

Boyd wrote letter after letter asking permission to test his data. The civilian in charge refused each request. Boyd again went to see the civilian. "This thing I'm working on will benefit the Air Force," he said. "It will enable fighter pilots to devise new tactics. It will enable America to dominate air combat." The civilian reminded Boyd that he was only a major, a man being bounced from job to job, someone whose job description had nothing to do with computers. Computer time was too valuable to waste on some harebrained idea.

Boyd's luck changed when he met the first of a number of lifelong accomplices--a mathematician named Thomas Christie. Christie developed bombing charts for the Air Force, and was skilled with computers. He was also skilled in handling the bureaucracy at Elgin, and almost half the computer work in the base was done for him. Boyd described his theory to Christie and the two began to develop the formulae together. By borrowing computer time from other projects, Christie and Boyd produced complex tables relating aircraft altitude, airspeed, temperature, angle of bank and G-load. When the mathematics began to gel, Boyd named their body of work "Energy-Maneuverability Theory."

Boyd quickly realized that he could quantify the performance of soviet aircraft jets relative to their US counterparts. These results would provide the motivation for the Air Force to treat his work seriously.

Boyd and Christie wrangled permission to use flight data from US planes from the Wright-Patterson AFB flight dynamics lab (this was different than data from plane manufacturers, who tended to give optimistic estimates). A short time later, managed to get access to classified intelligence data on soviet aircraft. They began to create a briefing showing jet-by-jet comparisons of E-M performance.

From the beginning, Boyd intended E-M theory to be used by airplane designers. He ran some preliminary calculations on the new F-111 (a swing-wing aircraft which was hyped as a do-everything airplane The F-111 was hyped as a plane that could serve as air-to-ground support, air-to-air combat and nuclear attack). The E-M results were abysmal. In late 1962, Boyd happened to be in the same bar with Henry Hillaker--the General Dynamics project engineer for the F-111. He was introduced to Hillaker by another officer.

Before Hillaker could say a word, Boyd made a head-on attack. The first words out of his mouth were, "My name is John Boyd and I'm a fighter pilot and I understand you work on the F-111 and what I want to know is why you guys built a goddamn eighty-five-thousand-pound airplane and called it a fighter."

"It's a fighter-bomber," Hillaker said, somewhat taken aback.

Boyd poked Hillaker in the chest three or four times, took a puff off his cigar, and said, "Yeah, well last time I looked, an 'F' in front of an airplane meant it was a fighter. That thing is a piece of shit. It's too big to be a fighter and that goddamn little wing it's got, it must take two states to turn around. I'll tell you something else. The pilot can't see behind him and he can't see out the right window. He has to depend on his copilot to tell him what's out there.

Hillaker gritted his teeth. The project manager for the F-111 did not have to listen to this from a loudmouthed fighter pilot. Before he could reply, Boyd was off again.

"It's too goddamn big, too goddamn expensive, too goddamn underpowered. It's just not worth a good goddamn." He moved closer to Hillaker. His voice rose. "How much extra weight does that swing wing add to the airplane? Twenty percent?"

Boyd didn't wait for an answer. He poked Hillaker in the chest again. "The entire weight of the wing goes through that pivot pin and you hide it all in that big glove. You'll be getting stress cracks in that fucker before it's got five hundred hours on it. And the amount of drag you've created is aerodynamic bullshit. That pivot adds weight and degrades performance, plus you can't sweep the wing back fast enough in combat to make a difference. The low-speed performance is lousy, the high-speed performance is worse, and the goddamn thing won't maneuver."

Hillaker stared at Boyd. Fighter pilots usually talk in generalities when they criticize an airplane; they say it is a "pig"...but they don't know enough to hone in on design specifics. Thus, Hillaker was more than a little shocked to hear the loudmouthed fighter pilot ask about the things that were only beginning to be whispered about in the back rooms of General Dynamics.

Hillaker pulled out a chair. "Sit down, John."

After a few minutes of highly technical engineering discussion, Boyd and Hillaker had cleaned off the table and began writing on cocktail napkins and passing them back and forth, covering them with engineering data, formulae, drag polars, and lift coefficients. They exchanged ideas about fighter aircraft, about what each considered the ultimate fighter aircraft, a nimble little fighter such as the world had never seen, about the fighter that, if they had no restraints, they would build.

Boyd finalized his brief comparing the E-M performance of US fighters to soviet ones. He began to brief pilots passing through Elgin. He went to Nellis and briefed. He briefed Chuck Yeager. Word began to spread. He began to brief defense contractors.

Boyd and Christie conducted a series of "effectiveness tests" -- flight tests to further validate their work. Every mission proved almost exactly what the E-M charts predicted. At this point, acceptance of Boyd's theory could not be held back, despite the negative views toward it by officers who were embarrassed by its conclusions.

"You are trying to say we do not know what we are doing," said an angry colonel. "You are telling us we are buying the wrong airplanes when we have the best minds in the Air Force on this."

Across the room a general was going through a book that listed Elgin research projects. "I am missing something here," the general said. "Where in the hell is this energy-maneuverability project? Did you list it under another name?"

"It's not in there," Boyd said.

"I just heard you talk about the resources to make this thing go. There is no way you can get those resources in the computer without having a project."

"I can steal computer time in this command and you would never know it," Boyd said.

"Are you telling me you stole the computer time?"

"I am being honest with you."

The general locked eyes with Boyd and barked, "Everybody out but Boyd."

"If you are wrong," the general told Boyd, "we are going to court-martial you."

But the E-M data could not be refuted. Boyd went on to brief Walter Sweeney, the head of Tactical Air Command. The briefing was accepted, though Boyd was ordered to leave out his final slide which showed the glaring shortcomings of the F-111.

Boyd and Christie were in the coffee shop at Elgin, talking and laughing with the easy confidence of two men sure of their future, when in walked the civilian in charge of the computer shop. Boyd's laughter ended and his face became hard and angry. He stuck his cigar in his mouth, stood up, and stalked toward the civilian. Christie sensed the danger, but it was too late to stop Boyd.

Boyd took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Guess you heard I briefed Sweeney."

"Yes I did," said the civilian.

"And Schriver, and the secretary of the Air Force, and the president's Scientific Advisory Board, and Dr. Johnny Foster?" Boyd's voice rose with each addition to the list. The civilian nodded. Now people in the coffee shop were looking up and listening.

Boyd tapped the civilian in the chest. Hard. "You didn't think my work was important enough for your goddamn computer and now I got four-stars calling me for briefings." Tap. "Everybody in the Air Force has heard of Energy-Maneuverability." (Tap. Tap.) "You." (Tap.) "Don't." (Tap.) "Know." (Tap.) "Shit."