[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.