[ajmurmann]

The Boyd biography by Robert Coram tells the story of the battle between the Fighter Mafia and the Bomber Generals. It also talks about, what I'd at best call regulatory capture. There was an outrageous series of events around procurement of the Bradley fighting vehicle. An excerpt from the craziness that ensued:

"The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army’s ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing use real Soviet weapons. The Army agreed. But the first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no explosion would result. “What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.” Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion and logic with Army officials, but to no avail. When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them"

Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about. I believe this was the basis for the movie The Pentagon Wars which I haven't seen.

[mastax]

I had some hope that this biographer wouldn't take Burton's claims at face value, but alas.

The Bradley was designed to survive 14.5mm HMG fire. This is in line with IFV doctrine. The three most important layers of the survivability onion come before "don't get penetrated" and Bradley has proven to be very good at those.

The army did not plan to perform live fire testing with an RPG designed to destroy tanks weighing twice as much as the Bradley because it would be a waste of a vehicle. The outcome was already known, the vehicle would be catastrophically destroyed. When Burton asked, they agreed to do it anyway. The army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) wanted to modify the test so that they might actually learn something they didn't already know. Burton interpreted (Ed: or portrayed) this as a conspiracy against him to hide a fact that was a matter of public record before the first vehicle was built.

In that test, the fuel tanks were filled with water so that vehicle damage assessment could be performed after the test. It's much easier to look at the spalling pattern of a projectile, or see what internal systems got damaged, when you're not trying to look at a burned out husk.

I could go on but I'm on my phone.

I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests and just wanted to blow up as many Bradleys as possible in order to create a hoopla to get the program cancelled.

Source: The Bradley and how it got that way, Howarth.

[gmkiv]

> I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests.

It's possible. It's also possible that he had a good sense of how test results are presented by program managers to Congress, and was trying to accurately convey the situation. Congress typically doesn't have time to delve into the details of the test, they get top-line results like "the Bradley did not catch fire when shot by an RPG" even though the footnotes would talk about the water in the tanks.

More generally, there is a tendency even today to make test results look good through judicious selection of test conditions. Program managers will refuse to do tests where "we already know the answer" - but only when we think the system won't work. We do plenty of tests when we have high confidence the system will work. So you get headlines like "86 of 105 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful" [1], without the context that we never attempted the shots that we think we would miss, even if those scenarios are tactically important.

I'll grant that there are several motivations for testing like this, but let's not pretend that they are all purely technical.

[1] https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2018/11-2019-M...

[jandrewrogers]

In the case of hit-to-kill intercepts, terminal guidance was proven and reliable 30-40 years ago (at least), it is a mature capability. That is no need to test that it can hit the target per se if the rocket can precisely respond to the guidance commands.

What changed is that they later attached that terminal guidance to new high-performance rocket motors that pushed the materials science requirements to a point where it was difficult to get the rocket to respond precisely to guidance commands and the terminal guidance package itself suffered ablative damage due to extreme acceleration. As such, all of the tests for the last 20+ years have been tests to determine if the missile components materially degrade or fail in-flight, regardless of what they are aimed at. The nature of the target and test environment are almost irrelevant to this question -- hitting the target is pretty strong evidence that the materials didn't fail.

[giantrobot]

> I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests and just wanted to blow up as many Bradleys as possible in order to create a hoopla to get the program cancelled.

Burton and the rest of the "Reformers" all had pet projects they were pushing. IIRC Burton's was an armored airplane that acted as an unguided rocket truck. Burton didn't want radar, EO, or FLIR systems. Just iron sights and shitloads of unguided rockets.

All the "Reformers" were hucksters advertising themselves as fighting "the man" and systemic corruption. The Pentagon has many problems with its procurement processes but none of the crap Burton actually addressed those problems.

[SonicScrub]

The story about the Bradley procurement as written by John Boyd, and made popular by the Pentagon Wars is misleading at best, and entirely wrong in many regards.

The movie's most famous scene ( the Bradley design montage) is entire fictional. The Bradley was designed intentionally from the ground up as an Infantry Fighting Vehicle NOT, as the movie states, an APC whose design was fiddled by meddling generals. While this may seem pendantic, this completely invalidates the critiques leveled against the vehicle by the movie characters during the design montage. The design characteristics that would be silly for a vehicle operating in an APC role are perfectly reasonable given the role of an IFV. Also worth noting that the program also came in under budget, contrary to movie's portrayal of ridiculous cost overruns. The program was expensive. Much more expensive than a program for a slightly more modern APC should be. But completely reasonable for what was then a completely new class of vehicle.

The supposed meddling with the live fire testing was John Boyd failing to understand what the purpose of a live fire test was for. The Bradley cannot take an RPG round. It was not designed to. John Boyd's insistence that the Pentagon was covering up a flaw in the Bradley's design by not shooting a Bradley with an RPG is just wrong. The Pentagon didn't want to do this test because they already knew what would happen and would learn nothing from doing so. A similar thing occured with the supposed "scandal" of replacing the fuel with water for the small arms fire testing. The objective of the test was not to hit the Bradley until it broke under realistic combat situations, but instead to learn about specific locations where the amour is vulnerable. If the Bradley catches fire and is destroyed, you lose the information you tried to gain. By placing water in the fuel tanks, you can identify where the bullets penetrated, while also ensuring the bullet pass through a fluid (important for a realistic sense of the bullet dynamics after penetration. John Boyd did not understand the objective of the tests, and cried conspiracy.

[dralley]

This narrative is nonsense. To point out one example

>> To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel.

No, the reason is so that you can see what got hit by shrapnel and where afterwards, and not have a burned out wreck of metal. The goal of testing is to make improvements to the design, not produce very expensive fireworks displays.

Likewise it was obvious that no amount (or composition) of armor was going to make it survive direct hits from a tank or ATGM, so heavily compromising the design in a futile attempt to do so would be wasteful, as would blowing up several dozen of them with such tests as Boyd and co. wanted to do.

We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good.

[wolverine876]

> We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good.

We have no experience with it fighting a peer or near-peer enemy, is that correct? That doesn't make it bad, but not good either. We have little data.

[nradov]

We have data. Several Bradleys were hit during the Iraq wars by weapons similar to what near-peer adversaries use. Some shots penetrated, others did not. Overall, it held up about as well as can reasonably be expected. It's simply not physically possible to build an IFV that can stand up to modern guided weapons, and so the Army accepts that risk in order to accomplish their mission.

[icegreentea2]

I've read that book - it was my introduction to Boyd. I read it as a teenager, and it really spoke to me. I believe that Boyd is incredibly important and has made very very valuable contributions.

I think it is slightly suspect that basically everyone either becomes a whole-hearted follower of Boyd, or is some bullshitter out to protect their backsides and finding how to backstab Boyd and their followers. I also think it's suspect that the book never really engages with the "what-if" scenarios had the reformers gotten everything they wanted.

What would have happened if the F-16 shipped with an airframe too small to practically retrofit a BVR capable radar?

What would have happened if the Bradley tests went exactly the way Burton wanted? What were the alternatives? Would any alternatives provide meaningfully better outcomes than the Bradley in the same tests that Burton wanted? Would they provide meaningfully better outcomes in actual battlefield use?

Maneuver warfare and mission command can generate tremendous outcomes (but they do not guarantee them... see Battle of France vs Barbarossa) . But what if there were meaningful reasons to want to hedge against going all in? What if synchronization of forces and actions cause a temporary reduction in velocity, to generate a surge in velocity at a later timepoint - what if this approach could also be beneficial to collapsing the opponent's decision loop? What if synchronization of forces is helpful with logistics?

I am not saying that procurement or the military is perfect. I am certain there are shit shows everywhere. I think Boyd and the reformers did a valuable job in trying to keep the services publicly accountable. I think it's important (in fact vital) for a democracy to be able to explain to their citizens why they are spending money on specific programs, and why these tradeoffs are being made, and ultimately what missions/requirements these programs are for - and ultimately what is the purpose of the military.

I just think also think that the reformers were not right about all of their technical thrusts, and certainly don't think we should take their recollections of events at face value.

[afterburner]

"Maneuver warfare and mission command can generate tremendous outcomes (but they do not guarantee them... see Battle of France vs Barbarossa)"

This is a nitpick, but really maneuver warfare is proven effective by both of those battles. And in the same way. The biggest difference is just that the Soviets had much, much more land to retreat through to prevent collapsing after one month, and also had way more men. But that doesn't really change the conclusion about maneuver warfare.

[Steltek]

My recollection is that Burton didn't understand the purpose of the tests nor the system he was raging against. If the Bradley was totally annihilated in the test, there'd be nothing to analyze and nothing would be learned (other than a Bradley is obviously not a tank, which is also why it was not called a tank). His objections were misplaced and so failed to have much influence outside of an entertaining film starring Cary Elwes.

[onepointsixC]

>Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about.

He seems clever on the surface level until you consider that not only did the existing M113 which the Bradley was to replace was worse by every single criteria that Boyd had selected, but so were the BMP-2's which the US Army was facing. If there wasn't a contemporary vehicle which could meet the specifications Boyd had set, and the Bradley was a improvement over the existing vehicles, one would think that it's pretty clear the requirements Boyd had set were wildly incorrect.

The Bradley's capability was later combat proven in the Gulf War as an incredibly effective vehicle.

[lostlogin]

Oh that’s grim - and seems so foolish. People will die.

Assuming that is a direct quote, the editor has missed ‘insure’. It should be ’ensure’.

Edit: others have posted possible reasons for the test method which give important context.

[geenew]

There's an HBO movie about development of the Bradley called 'Pentagon Wars'. It's a rare bureaucratic comedy movie.

[SonicScrub]

While entertaining for sure, the details of the movie are almost entirely fictional.