Fighter Mafia The Fighter Mafia was a controversial group of U . S . Air Force officers and civilian defense analysts who , in the 1970s , advocated the use of John Boyd and Thomas P . Christie ' s Energy - Maneuverability ( E - M ) theory as the sole driver in designing fighter aircraft . The mathematical model developed enabled quantitative ( number - driven ) one - to - one comparison of the performance of aircraft in terms of air combat maneuvering , independent of real world flight testing . The model was used to identify deficiencies with both designs in service and proposed designs of the time . The Fighter Mafia would influence the specifications of the F - X , and went on to independently develop specifications for the Light Weight Fighter . The group was instrumental in a return to air - combat maneuverability as one of the defining qualities of fighter planes after the Vietnam war showed that long - range missile systems of the time were insufficient as the sole deciding factor in air combat . The next generation of warplanes combined both maneuverability ( which the group advocated ) as well as the high - tech electronics and missiles ( that they opposed ) . Aircraft in this generation included the F - 15 , F - 16 and F / A - 18 . Name . The nickname , a professional jest coined by an Air Force member of Italian heritage , was a rejoinder to the " Bomber Mafia " , theorists at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s whose ideas led to the primacy of strategic bombing over the fighter within the Air Force . History . In the 1960s , both the U . S . Air Force and U . S . Navy were in the process of acquiring large , heavy fighters designed primarily to fight with missiles . Project Forecast , a 1963 Air Force attempt to identify future weapons trends , stated that a counterair force must be able to destroy aircraft in the air at long ranges using advanced weapon systems . The Air Force felt that these needs would be filled for the next twenty years by missile - armed variants of the F - 111 and F - 4 Phantom II . Their F - X fighter acquisition program , initially merged into the TFX program ( which developed the F - 111 ) , was written along those lines . Real - world combat during the Vietnam war demonstrated that the entire " Missileer " concept was not ready for real combat conditions . Restrictive rules of engagement , limitations in communications and IFF , poor reliability of the early generation missiles and a wide variety of other problems conspired to make air - to - air combat devolve into dogfight s far more often than US air combat tacticians envisioned . In spite of a huge technical superiority on paper and some very successful BVR missile aces , the US Navy and Air Force F - 4s found themselves fighting at close quarters with the " inferior " MiG - 21 , and losing the fight more often than US ' s clear - cut technical advantage should afford . The heavy and poorly maneuverable fighters imagined as part of F - X would be even worse off in these situations . Boyd ' s work with E - M modeling demonstrated that the F - 111 would be poorly suited to the role of fighter , and the Air Force F - X proposal was quietly rewritten to reflect his findings , dropping a heavy swing - wing from the design , lowering the gross weight from 60 , 000 + pounds to slightly below 40 , 000 , and increasing the top speed to Mach 2 . 3 , from 2 . 5 . The result was the F - 15 Eagle , an aircraft that was far superior in maneuverability to the F - 111 fighter variants . The Air Force had also been studying a lighter day fighter ; starting in 1965 , the Air Force had pursued a low - priority study of the Advanced Day Fighter ( ADF ) , a 25 , 000 pound design . After they learned of the MiG - 25 in 1967 , a minor panic broke out and the ADF was dropped in order to focus work on the F - 15 . The F - 15 , originally a lighter aircraft , grew in size and weight as it attempted to match the inflated performance estimates of the MiG - 25 . While Boyd ' s contributions to the F - 15 were significant , he felt that it was still a compromise . Boyd , defense analysts Tom Christie and Pierre Sprey , and test pilot Col . Everest Riccioni and aeronautical engineer Harry Hillaker formed the core of the self - dubbed " Fighter Mafia " which worked behind the scenes in the late 1960s to pursue a lightweight fighter as an alternative to the F - 15 . The group strongly believed that an ideal fighter should not include any of the sophisticated radar and missile systems or rudimentary ground - attack capability that found their way into the F - 15 . Riccioni coined the nickname , a joke on his Italian heritage that harkened back to the " Bomber Mafia " ( whose acolytes still occupied the upper command positions of the Air Force ) , and dubbed himself the " godfather " . In 1969 , under the guise that the Navy was developing a small , high - performance Navy aircraft , Riccioni won $ 149 , 000 to fund the " Study to Validate the Integration of Advanced Energy - Maneuverability Theory with Trade - Off Analysis " . This money was split between Northrop and General Dynamics to build the embodiment of Boyd ' s E - M theory - a small , low - drag , low - weight , pure fighter with no bomb racks . Northrop demanded and received $ 100 , 000 to design the YF - 17 ; General Dynamics , eager to redeem its debacle with the F - 111 , received the remainder to develop the YF - 16 . Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard , who entered office with the Nixon administration in 1969 , were interested in these studies and threw their support behind the notion . In May 1971 , Congress issued a critical report of the F - 14 and F - 15 and advocated spending $ 50 million on developing an alternative lightweight fighter . This was followed by the assignment of $ 12 million in the 1972 fiscal year budget for the LWF . On January 6 , 1971 , an RFP was issued to industry for a 20 , 000 pound fighter to complement the F - 15 . Sprey insisted on a fly - off between two prototypes , as he had earlier on the A - X program , pitting the planes against MiG - 17 s and MiG - 21 s secretly maintained in Nevada , as well as an F - 4 . Furthermore , the evaluating pilots would not be test pilots , and each would fly both airframes . In the resulting fighter competition , the USAF would select the YF - 16 over the YF - 17 , and the F - 16 would become a highly - versatile , highly - advanced multi - role fighter bomber . Legacy . The Fighter Mafia attracted considerable controversy and the actual extent of their contribution to shaping US fighter design is a matter of debate . Since the members of the group was in effect preaching a new US air combat doctrine , the expertise and qualifications of the group were the subject of scrutiny and criticism by defense experts and both USAF and USN officers . While Col . Boyd was a Korean War air combat veteran , Col . Riccioni was criticized for his lack of air combat experience , having seen no combat before his assignment to the Pentagon and afterwards opting for a desk position in Korea when offered a chance to fly combat missions in Vietnam . Similarly , Sprey had no military expertise and scarce professional experience with fighter aircraft prior to his participation in the Fighter Mafia . While Sprey education included aeronautical engineering and he wanted to be a plane designer , he later abandoned that path to focus on probabilities , statistics and operational research . In addition , Sprey was noted to have exaggerated his participation in both the testing of the A - 10 , the design of the F - 16 and in NASA ' s operation of its F - 15 test aircraft . In retrospect , the group ' s greatest contribution was the promotion of E - M as a basis for evaluating and designing aircraft for air combat maneuvering . At a time when the US military was seemingly obsessed with technological solutions , the Fighter Mafia acted as the opposite extreme from which a more balanced approach to fighter design would emerge . However , this can be seen as ultimately a defeat of the Fighter Mafia and its ideals . While this balanced approach would result in the highly successful F - 15 , F - 15E , F - 16 , F / A - 18 and F / A - 18E / F , it did so at the betrayal of the Fighter Mafia ' s campaign for the US military to adopt a single - role , low - tech fighter in large numbers . The group ' s uncompromising disdain of and campaign against advanced weapons , radars , ECM , and multi - role designs , what they characterized as " gold - plating " , would prove erroneous . For example , the Fighter Mafia argued that the ground attack mission should be handled by more appropriate , dedicated aircraft such as the A - 10 , which has had an outstanding record in that area and that the addition of more electronics to F - 16 caused its weight to rise to the point where it lost its edge in dogfighting , the mission for which it had been designed . The vision of the group would have seen the US build thousands of dedicated short - ranged , low - tech , fighter - only aircraft to counter Soviet air power on a numerical superiority basis , a plan that was never endorsed by the USAF or the USN . Instead , the success of US military aircraft has shown that the same technology would protect aircraft from missiles in an increasingly sensor - saturated battlefield , and would enable the multi - mission capabilities of modern aircraft . And while the US aircraft has engaged in few air - to - air encounters since Vietnam , the trend continues to show that missiles and in particular increasingly mature long - range missiles are the primary weapon on choice in modern combat , a trend that started as far back as the Vietnam War but continues to be downplayed by the Fighter Mafia . Although Sprey often portrays himself as a " principle designer " of the F - 16 , the actual plane that entered service included the long - range missiles , sensors and multi - role capability that he continues to criticize today . Interestingly , the Fighter Mafia can be considered presently active , as Sprey has become an often - cited critic of the F - 35 , including using comparisons of the accident rates of the early F - 16 design that most strongly felt his design influence to argue that the F - 35 ought to be equally unsafe .