Genesis of the successful F-16 fighter/attack aircraft lies in reaction to severe deficiencies in US fighter design revealed by the Vietnam War.

Following the success of the small, highly maneuverable F-86 day fighter in the Korean War, US fighter design changed to emphasize maximum speed, altitude, and radar capability at the expense of maneuverability, pilot vision, and other attributes needed for close combat.

This trend reached its extremity in the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, which was the principal fighter for both the US Air Force and Navy during the latter part of the Vietnam War.

The F-4 was originally designed as an interceptor for defense of the fleet against air attack - a mission neither it nor any other jet has ever executed, because no US fleet has come under air attack since the beginning of the jet age.

Be that as it may, the F-4 interceptor was designed to meet the fleet defense mission by using rapid climb to high altitude, high supersonic speed, and radar-guided missiles to shoot down threat aircraft at long distance.

Used as a fighter rather than as an interceptor in Vietnam, the F-4 was severely miscast. Against very inferior North Vietnamese pilots flying small, highly maneuverable MiG-21s, the air-to-air kill ratio sometimes dropped as low as 2 to 1, where it had been 13 to 1 in Korea. As the Vietnam War drew to a close, it was generally agreed that the F-4 had prohibitive deficiencies including:

LARGENESS. F-4 pilots to frequently found themselves fighting at separation distances at which they could not see the smaller MiG-21s, but the MiG-21 pilots could see them.
POOR PILOT VISION. In order to minimize high-speed drag, the F-4, and all combat aircraft before the F-14, does not have a bubble canopy. It is designed for a pilot to look straight ahead. Vision down and to the sides is poor; vision to the rear is nonexistent.
MANEUVERABILITY. While the F-4 can pull 7G in turns, which was acceptable for that time, it can only do so by rapidly bleeding off energy (losing speed and/or altitude).
TRANSIENT PERFORMANCE. Ability of the F-4 to change its maneuver (that is, to roll rapidly while pulling high Gs) was poor.
COST. The large F-4 was an expensive aircraft to procure and maintain. This meant that, compared to the MiG-21, fewer aircraft could be bought with a given budget.
NO GUN. The F-4 was designed without a gun, and was thus not capable of very close combat.
COMBAT PERSISTENCE. While the ferry range of the F-4 was acceptable, its ability to engage in sustained hard maneuvering without running out of fuel was a significant problem.
These various sacrifices were rationalized by the belief that visual dogfighting was obsolete, and that in the supersonic age, air combat would be fought beyond visual range (BVR) using radar-guided missiles. This concept failed in Vietnam for two reasons: First, radar could detect and track aircraft but not identify them. Operating beyond visual range created an unacceptable risk of shooting down one's own aircraft. Pilots were therefore required to close to visually identify the target before shooting; this eliminated the theoretical range advantage of radar-guided missiles. Second, the performance of the Sparrow radar-guided missile in Vietnam was poor, generally yielding less than 10% kill per shot.

Dissatisfaction with these deficiencies led to the US Air Force F-15 and US Navy F-14 designs. On this page we discuss only the Air Force programs.

The original F-15 had excellent pilot vision, including being able to see 360 degrees in the horizontal plane. It had strong high-speed maneuverability and a 20mm cannon. In addition to rectifying some of the F-4's deficiencies, it could fly higher and faster than the F-4, and had dramatically better climb and acceleration.

It also had a powerful radar with advanced look-down shoot-down capability, and relied on the Sparrow missile as its principal weapon.

Nevertheless, an informal but influential group called the "Fighter Mafia" objected to the F-15 as moving in the wrong direction. (The most prominent Fighter Mafia spokesmen were systems analyst Pierre Sprey, test pilot Charles E. Meyers, and legendary fighter pilot John Boyd.)

The F-15, the Fighter Mafia objected, was even larger and more expensive than the F-4. Much of that money went into creating high maximum speed (Mach 2.5) and altitude (65,000 feet) and to serving as a launcher, under BVR conditions which couldn't be used in real combat,. for the Sparrow missile which didn't work While recognizing that the F-15 had phenomenal supersonic climb and maneuverability (it could sustain 6Gs at Mach 1.6), at such speeds it could not fight because its turn radius was so large that it could not keep the enemy in sight.

What the Air Force needed, the Mafia argued, was a successor to the WWII P-51 Mustang and the Korean War F-86 Saber: an all-new small fighter that would be cheap enough to buy in large numbers. (The F-104 was not considered a predecessor aircraft because, while it had excellent climb and acceleration, its wings were too small, leaving it deficient in range and maneuverability.) The new fighter would have revolutionary maneuverability, transient performance, acceleration, and climb at the subsonic and transonic speeds at which air combat is actually fought. It would have a gun and its primary armament would be the infra-red guided Sidewinder missile that had proven highly effective in Vietnam.

While Sidewinder's range was limited to about three miles, the Mafia argued that air combat beyond that range was fantasy in any case. Some members of the Mafia even suggested that the ideal small fighter would have no radar at all, although this was a minority view.

In any case, the Air Force establishment wanted no part of a new small fighter, with or without radar. It was regarded as a threat to the F-15, which was USAF's highest priority program. But the Fighter Mafia gained considerable resonance in Congress and within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In 1971 Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard began a Lightweight Fighter (LWF) program to explore the concept.

The LWF was to be about 20,000 pounds, or half the weight of the F-15, and was to stress low cost, small size, and very high performance at speed below Mach 1.6 and altitude below 40,000 feet. Two competing designs would be chosen for prototyping.

Industry recognized, correctly, that regardless of USAF hostility, LWF variants had great potential for profitable foreign military sales, including replacing the F-104. Single-engine designs were put forward by Boeing, General Dynamics, LTV, Northrop, and Rockwell. Northrop also proposed on a twin-engine design, in effect using Air Force money to develop a replacement for its F-5 export fighter.

The Boeing and General Dynamics designs were the clear leaders from the beginning, with the Northrop twin-engine design clearly the weakest of the six.

But midway through this stage of the competition, some potential foreign buyers expressed concern over buying a new single-engine fighter. The previous single-engine supersonic export fighter, the F-104, had a troublesome safety record that some buyers were disinclined to repeat.

USAF, therefore, decided that one of the two down-selectees had to have two engines. Since the last-place Northrop design was the only twin-engine contender, it became a down-selection winner by default.

When the General Dynamics design was chosen the other selectee on merit, Boeing was no doubt a bit miffed that its loss was caused by USAF changing the rules in mid-competition. But it did not protest the decision.

Of the two surviving designs, now designated the General Dynamics YF-16 and the Northrop YF-17., the YF-17 was a relatively conventional design, to some extent an outgrowth of the F-5, while the YF-16 was an all-new design incorporating highly innovative technologies that in many respects reached beyond those of the more expensive F-15.

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