So while it may have nominally been McDonnell Douglas' culture that ruined Boeing, it was also very much an inside job. Boeing's leadership had already been fatally infected years prior and invited McDonnell Douglas in with the intention and purpose of adopting their culture.[2] The demise of Boeing culture was a fait accompli before the merger.
This notion that Boeing was a victim is revisionist. To the extent it was a victim, it was a victim of the wider business and finance culture. There's no need to spin conspiracy theories about how it happened; it happened in the normal course of things, unfortunately. While Condit was clearly the immediate driver, the choice of Condit as CEO years earlier wasn't accidental.
[1] "The exit by Givan, 62, who has held the post of Boeing finance chief and senior vice president since 1990, stems in part from disagreements with other executives over the conservative accounting methods used by Givan, say people close to the matter. For example, some officials believe he was too stringent in assessing how Boeing would accumulate charges for problems incurred in the course of its commercial-airplane order boom." https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980715&slug...
[2] "'When people say I [Condit] changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.'" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
https://nader.org/1997/01/02/boeing-mcdonnell-douglas-merger...
His opinion is of little to no value here.
Should the Ministery of Agriculture know nothing of agriculture?
The F-4 was an impressive engineering achievement only in the sense that it was far overpowered to make up for it being under-winged. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the F-4 and "Happy Phantom" is my daughter's Stack Exchange handle. It is an amazing airplane. But it was as much dumb luck as it was engineering. And none of that is relevant to the role of the F-15 in the United States Air Force, and other air forces around the world.
The F-15 is not the F-35, which is meant to take the light-fighter and air superiority and ground attack and even recon roles. I do not think that a single plane can effectively take on all those roles. Even if the F-4 did!
I see the F-4 Phantom II as much more impressive for a number of reasons, including the facts that it was the first airplane with the capability to perform a self-directed intercept, as well as being extremely versatile (serving with the Navy, Air Force, and Marines), and served much longer than most of its contemporaries.
What a ridiculous metric. All aircraft have non-combat losses; that's the nature of flying a high performance aircraft.
There were almost 1k F-15s built (excluding the Strike Eagle models) for the USAF. Not exactly "small numbers." And the F-15 didn't necessitate the LWFC, that was a budget decision to help protect other aircraft manufacturers.
The F-15 is arguably the second most important fighter the USAF has ever had (the P-51 or P-47 can fight over first). And Boyd has been wrong about many aircraft designs. His fan club hates the way the F-16 turned out, but it too has been incredibly successful by any metric applied.
F-15 have been lost in combat but not air-to-air combat.
I'm a big fan of Boyd, but ... the fact that it's a successful weapons platform -maybe the most successful US fighter of all time, seems good enough for me. Sure the Eagle cost a lot; many successful US aircraft were gold plated -the P-38 Lightning, the SR-71, the F-14. The F-15 is not beloved of Boyd acolytes for its gold plated nature, but it certainly fulfilled the energy and maneuverability criteria.
The F-4 was a successful plane in terms of M-D sales, but I'm not sure it was a good plane. It appeared to be, "hook a bunch of decent turbojets up to a shitty 50s airframe (aka the F3H) and stick a big radar in the nose and a guy in the back seat to guide missiles with the radar." Its success seemed due to lack of better US made alternatives more than anything else; though both Vaught and North American had offerings which could have beat it had they been funded (who knows what skulduggery was involved in killing off those programs). American 2nd and 3rd gen fighters were mostly shit, and F-4's were routinely shot down by 1st gen jet fighters and primitive SAMs in Vietnam. Seemed like the Saab and Dassault 3rd gen offerings were nicer in most ways, and IMO the XF-108 or even a souped up F-106 would have beat the pants off it.
So it's curious that someone who takes Boyd's fighter prescriptions seriously is a Phantom enthusiast, but perhaps there's a reason for that. The part about the Phantom being a more impressive engineering achievement strikes me as somewhat crazy, to be honest, and I don't know what to say about it.
Can you go into who Boyd was, what was so important about the "specifications", and how the F-15 would have been better by following them (or is worse because didn't)?
First Flight in 1970, produced until 1988; McDonnell and Douglas merged in 1967.
> The frenzy of defense industry mergers can be traced to 1993, when then-Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry invited executives to dinner. At an event now referred to as "the last supper," Perry urged them to combine into a few, larger companies because Pentagon budget cuts would endanger at least half the combat jet firms, missile makers, satellite builders and other contractors represented at the dinner that night.
> Perry's warnings helped set off one of the fastest transformations of any modern U.S. industry, as about a dozen leading American military contractors folded into only four. And soon it's likely only three will remain, with Lockheed Martin Corp.'s announcement yesterday that it plans to buy Northrop Grumman Corp. for $11.6 billion.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/07/04/h...
In context I don't see anything untoward here. 1993 was also the fourth round of closures under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure BRAC was the systematic demilitarization of the U.S. after the Cold War, and apparently Perry was giving the industry fair warning that the process was finally and irreversibly going to bear down on their long-term sales prospects. I think it's fair to say that the Defense Department had a legitimate interest in the orderly realignment of the defense industry. It doesn't seem like he told them anything that wasn't already publicly known; rather more letting them know that there weren't going to be any 11th hour miracles.
If there's an issue here it's acting on the belief that defense contractors can only survive with enormous economies of scale given the long-term capital expenditures. But everybody believed that; and most still do. Most people still think Elon Musk and SpaceX are aberrations, and maybe they are. And nobody could have guessed 9/11 and subsequent wars, which inflated defense expenditures to well beyond Reagan's highs. (For that matter, nobody could have predicted the huge amount of assets and incredible liquidity of the modern investment world that make SpaceX possible.) If spending had remained at Clinton-era levels the reduced number of competitors may have worked out perfectly well, notwithstanding the demise of Boeing culture.
Letting the US defense industry die off and lose capacity would but the US years behind in any total war.
For sure total war is unthinkable now in our globalized world. Yet the past thought so too, right before 2 world wars.
Boeing subsumed McDonnell Douglas, not a McDonald's franchise, and did so under pressure from members of the Clinton administration.