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F-X [1965]

At the end of World War II, the ideas and doctrines of the American government and military were preoccupied with an over-emphasis on nuclear warfare. For the USAF’s Tactical Air Command (TAC), this meant playing second-fiddle to the "Bomber Mafia" of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Fighter design priorities emphasized the nuclear delivery and interceptor missions.

With the enlarged American commitment in Vietnam the fighter community began to realize just how far off target the fixation on interception and nuclear weapons delivery had put them. The large, heavy, unmaneuverable and purely missile-armed fighters were forced to engage older but more agile Migs. Fears that foreign non-combatant aircraft might be downed generated the policy requiring an aircraft had to be identified visually before it could be fired upon. This ROE negated many of the intended advantages of the missile-armed fighters of the period with their emphasis on Beyond Visual Range (BVR) capability. The resulting engagements frequently devolved into lower, slower endgame battles American fighters without guns could not fight well.

Work on what would become post-Vietnam fighters began at roughly the same time the Fighter Mafia drafted their report. The Air Force Systems Command, overlooking the events in Southeast Asia, began their "Preliminary F-X Concept Formulation Package" in 1965 and presented it a year later. The design stuck with the ideas and doctrines that dominated the fighter field since the 1950s and called for a vehicle which was clearly just another evolution of the Century Series fighters. The F-X was to weigh in at approximately 60,000 pounds, have a top speed of approximately Mach 2.7 and a low Thrust-to-Weight (TW) ratio of .75.

In 1965, as the errors of the USAF were just beginning to be appreciated, a small group of individuals, later to be known as the "Fighter Mafia," oversaw the creation of a report that called for new fighter designs that harked back to pre-nuclear fighter characteristics -- agile with good pilot visibility and armament for close engagements as well as BVR combat.

In late 1966 Major John Boyd, one of the Fighter Mafia, worked for the USAF's Tactical Division of the Air Staff Directorate of Requirements. Boyd was an engineer and ACM tactician who rediscovered energy maneuvering and many other air combat techniques that were nearly as old as air combat itself but which had been discarded by the "atomic" USAF. Unsurprisingly, Boyd rejected the F-X proposal.

In 1967 a second Request for Proposal (RFP) was made for a very different F-X, one that incorporated the design characteristics the Fighter Mafia advocated. The changes underway in USAF thinking at this point are best demonstrated by the fact that where the original F-X RFP was for a "Tactical Support Aircraft," the 1967 version was for a "Fighter." The McDonnell Douglas design eventually won the competition in December of 1969 after a series of revised cost proposals from the three finalist contractors earlier in that year. The resulting F-15 design was everything the Fighter Mafia advocated, with a TW at combat load of 1.4:1, good cockpit visibility, and other ACM features, including a gun.

Even as the F-15 was taking shape in 1968, the more radical members of the Fighter Mafia did not feel that the design went far enough away from the interceptor mentality. They argued that the USAF should instead build a highly-agile single-engine fighter, the F-XX, that was dedicated purely to air superiority. The Air Staff was not convinced and the F-X/F-15 program was not further modified, though the F-XX was reborn in a modified form in 1971 and ultimately evolved into the highly-successful F-16.