Speaking of which, watch "The Pentagon Wars" sometime. Has Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammer in it. It's all about the M-2 Bradley. "What it needs is a turret on it!" Col. Burton sacrificed his career to make the Bradley less of a danger to the troops it was designed to protect.
If he'd been right, the F-16 wouldn't have all those hardpoints or a radar (he believed air combat would be managed by ground controllers). You can say the F-16 evolved, but it sure as hell didn't evolve as he thought it should.
The AF and Navy/USMC need a plane for dropping bombs. They keep hacking fighters to do that. But they're more right than Boyd was.
The F16 is around 27,000 lbs (air-to-air loaded)[1], the F15 (which was developed around the same time)is 48,000 pounds[2]
The F16 did develop a pretty decent ground attack capability but it does have a pretty good air-to-air record too: eg, the Israelis used it against the Syrians in the early 80s, the Turks and Greeks used them against each other in non-shooting dogfights[3])
The AF and Navy/USMC need a plane for dropping bombs. They keep hacking fighters to do that. But they're more right than Boyd was.
Meh.. I'm not sure this is a simple right/wrong thing. There have been very limited wars where airforces have been reasonably closely matched since the F16 entered service. In the mid 70s (after Vietnam & the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East) no one predicted that at all. It was only the Yom Kippur war that made planners see what a threat SAMs were on the battlefield (they had been fairly ineffective against fighters during Vietnam)
When one side has air supremacy, then yes - they will use that as much as possible. It's been that way since WW1
[1] http://www.f-16.net/f-16_versions_article9.html
[2] http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blF_15_Eagle.ht...
[3] http://www.f-16.net/news_article1809.html (there are other incidents too)
I hadn't heard he was opposed to a radar in the F-16 -- depending on ground control doesn't make sense for an offensive unit. He probably didn't anticipate how lightweight modern electronics have become.
