"Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" by Robert Coram was the first biography I really enjoyed. John Boyd's dedication to his ideals is inspiring. The retrospective that comes from seeing an inspiring life, with all its trade-offs and inevitable end, was life changing.

"The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom - you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero." (John Boyd)

edit: for more about this interesting man, read "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War" by Robert Coram.

For those interested in the unusual development of the A-10, see the book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War".

Surprises me too as I had read Boyd and immediately knew that dpritchett was making a salient point.

I'd love to understand why the downvotes.

Maybe the fighter mafia will finally get their way after all. For anyone interested in some behind the scenes of how fighters get developed I recommend the book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War."

For an extensive treatment of this, I recommend the book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War".

Some good suggestions (and a couple I'll have to read...) I'd add the following:

8. "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks (still, IMO, one of the best management books ever, esp. for software and product development.)

9. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
by Robert Coram (OODA is the true core of agile thinking, and it works pretty much everywhere.)

For software and computers specifically, add:

10. Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson (Impossible to categorize - it's a hypertext book for crying out loud - but browsing it can change your thinking.)

11. The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. (Good for new products in general.)

And for general management and leadership inspiration, two great autobiographies:

12. Mover of Men and Mountains, by R.G. Le Tourneau.

13. Rickenbacker, by Eddie Rickenbacker.

Fiction: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is beautifully written and I've recommended it to many people. I've gotten lost in Carlos' worlds over and over again, and the cemetery of forgotten books is mesmerizing.

Humor: Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson. I've recommended this to many friends who needed a good laugh. I don't remember another book that made me laugh so hard that I dropped the book.

Non-fiction: this one's a tough one because many good books are mentioned already, but two that I really enjoyed and have recommended in the last year are: Boyd by Robert Coram and How the Other Half Banks by Mehrsa Baradaran. Boyd tells the story about a brilliant but petulant air force pilot who rewrote the guidelines of US military aviation. How the Other Half Banks is an eye opening account of how broken our banking system is and the history of how we got to where we are.

Business: again, a lot of good books are mentioned already, but two I've enjoyed are Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Both are fascinating books that'll leave you thinking about how to improve your own game.

--Edit--

Bonus: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi is a tremendous piece. It's a short read but a must read!

If the book is "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" by Robert Coram, then I've also read it.

It's very easy to over state what Boyd did. As in, what he did in reality was so fantastic and unbelievable that it's very easy to attribute additional not fully truthful aspects to him.

Unfortunately, can't really talk about the YF-16's combat potential as a dog fighter all that much. But what I can say is that if you apply Boyd's earlier work (E-M theory and E-M charts) to the the YF-16, then its very likely that you -can- compare the various airplanes. While it's certainly true that the YF-16 could perform the buttonhook turn to significant advantage in a wide variety of situations (the buttonhook turn is used when being pursued. By initiating a ridiculous tight turn, you could dump enough velocity to cause the opponent to overshoot, and then MOST importantly, the YF-16 had the thrust-weight ratio required to rapidly regain the energy it had just lost and allow it to reengage), it's quite likely that either the MiG-29 or Su-27 could have beat it in other regimes. For example, look at how the F-4 (a terrible dog fighter) was able to find advantageous engagements against generally aerodynamically superior MiGs during Vietnam (aided by Boyd's E-M work).

It should also be pointed out that amongst the things that the Air Force forced onto the F-16 was a much better radar. Nearly all the major changes made to the production aircraft degraded its talents as a dogfighter (as you point out) while vastly increasing its flexibility and its ability to engage at long-range - decisions which in retrospect were massively beneficial. The biggest thing to ding the USAF with is that they did not sufficiently increase wing area to compensate for the mass increase. In other words, Boyd's vision of where air combat was heading wasn't really spot on.

Also, credit should go to where it belongs. Boyd did not design the YF-16 by himself. The rest of the "Fighter Mafia" deserve just as much credit, as well as the designers at General Dynamics.

For anyone interested in the dynamics of the Air Force that explain the abysmal performance of the F-35, and why the F-16 can beat it in a dogfight despite being commissioned 40 years ago, look up John Boyd or read "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War." The Air Force is structured to enable and shelter operational failures such as the F-35

Coram's Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War provides an utterly fascinating glimpse into this type of competitive thinking. Boyd's theories are regularly cited by today's Lean Startup personalities. Here's an excerpt from his magnum opus:

"To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. In this sense, the discussion also literally shows why we cannot avoid this kind of activity if we intend to survive on our own terms."

I never managed to finish the one Kilcullen book I bought.

The official USMC reading list is at [1].

Some recommendations:

- "Warfighting (MCDP 1)". This is the official USMC document on how to run a war. It's more philosophical than tactical. It's about how to achieve a goal.

- "The Defense of Duffer's Drift". This little book on small-unit tactics and how not to screw them up is over a century old. It's little-known outside the military, and quite funny.

- "Boyd, The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War". Boyd was a very strange guy. Top fighter pilot. Responsible for pushing through the F-16 and the A-10. (Yes, a fighter jock pushed the A-10 Warthog, which is a slow, heavily armored ground-attack aircraft.) Invented the OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop, a way of thinking about decision making under uncertainty. It has some similarities to "agile" development, but is more suitable for combat and crisis. USAF hated him. USMC liked him.

- "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" - understanding counterinsurgency. This is a depressing read, but necessary.

[1] http://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Articl...

I highly recommend _Boyd: The Fighter Pilot that Changed the Art of War_ (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780316796880). He was lead instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School.

The previous commentator is right that there was a loss of air combat skill but the advent of jets and missiles lead to a diminished emphasis on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and over-emphasis on technology. Boyd was one of the "fighter pilot mafia" that pushed a return to basic combat flight skills and the improved kill ratios proved him and others right.

The book details the battles waged inside the Pentagon over ACM, the F-15, the F-16, the OODA Loop, the reformulation of the Marines into the tip of the spear they are today, and maneuver warfare in general. Boyd was in the thick of it all.

Interestingly, Gen. Schwarzkopf doesn't come out looking that great.

EDIT: added lots more about the book.

For anyone interested in learning more, the book 'Boyd' provides a lot of useful background information on

- why the F-35 is a total disaster
- the Pentagon's intrinsic inability to make reasonable decisions

In a nutshell, this guy Boyd pioneered modern fighter jet design (and important general strategic theorems as well), but spent his career fighting crony-bureaucrats to get any of it adopted by the U.S. military

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/0316...

The best overall study of Boyd and Boydism is Robert Coram's book Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War: http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-The-Fighter-Pilot-Changed/dp/0316...

The best general-audiences intro to Boyd-as-philosophy is probably Chet Richards' book Certain to Win: http://www.amazon.com/Certain-Win-Strategy-Applied-Business/...

Wikipedia has some brief descriptions of Boyd's work and thinking in his page on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_%28military_strategis...

Fast Company magazine did a decent article on Boyd-for-business back in 2002: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/59/pilot.html

Many of Boyd's original writings have been preserved and made available for download here: http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/ (Warning, though, these were not written for a general audience and can be quite dense.)

If you haven't read it yet, Robert Coram's book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" is good. He pissed off a lot of people, but he was right. Which is criminal behavior in the Pentagon.

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.

The book "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" goes into how the F-16 happened. Sprey worked with Boyd on it and is one of the evangelists of the management/development philosophy that Boyd pushed. In a nutshell, normal development pushed for stacking on as many features as you could to please everyone involved. Boyd pushed for making the plane fit a specific performance envelope for the role and making everything else secondary.

I guess this makes Boyd and Sprey co-designers in that they shaped the requirements and specifications.

http://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed-ebook/d...