No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
MICC Reformers: Sprey, Boyd, Spinney, Kay, Christie and the A-10 with Hal Sundt
MICC: Military Industrial Congressional Complex
What happens when military reformers and visionary designers join forces to create an aircraft that's both a formidable war machine and a testament to innovative thinking?
In this episode, we uncover the riveting story behind the development of the A-10 Warthog, an aircraft that's as iconic as it is effective. Listen to Hal Sundt, author of "Warplane," as he shares his journey from an airplane enthusiast to a writer captivated by the principles of human-centered design and military strategy. Through Hal's narrative, we explore the collaboration of key figures like John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, and Tom Christie, whose revolutionary ideas brought the A-10 to life.
We'll traverse the strategic and political landscape of the Pentagon, diving into the intense rivalry between the Army and Air Force over close air support missions. Learn about the inception of the A-X program by Pierre Sprey and Colonel Avery Kay, and the pivotal role of A1 Skyraider pilots in shaping the A-10's foundation. The episode also uncovers fascinating details about the competitive flyoff between the YF-16 and YF-17, and how John Boyd's and Tom Christie's Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) theory influenced modern aviation. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the rigorous and innovative testing processes, from the use of Soviet weapons to improvised wind tunnels, all of which ensured the A-10's operational success and resilience.
Finally, we'll celebrate the storied history and enduring legacy of the A-10, from its Cold War origins to its remarkable performance in the Gulf War and beyond. Hear about the continued relevance and effectiveness of the A-10, despite pressures to retire it in favor of newer models like the F-35. We also pay tribute to the late Pierre Sprey, reflecting on his critical views and practical design philosophy that contrasted sharply with more idealistic approaches.
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Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
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OODAcast...
Okay, we're going to look at human-centered design, prototyping Mavericks inside a large bureaucracy, and we're going to do this through the lens of the Pentagon, developing a fighter aircraft. Our guest today is author Hal Sunt. He's the author of a book called Warplane. It is how the military reformers birthed the A-10 Warthog, the Thunderbolt II. That is an awesome aircraft, an A-10 out of the US Air Force. But what's key about this is the keyword in that is reformers, and John Boyd, pierre Spray, chuck Spinney, tom Christie and others are those reformers and we're going to help build up some context in the John Boyd timeline that we have and that you may have as listeners. So, our guest today, hal, a couple of questions. How did you come into writing a book about the A-10?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, well, thank you for having me on here. This is really cool. I had always loved airplanes as a kid. I have a lot of family in Tucson and so the A-10 was a familiar sight for me. But at a young age I wasn't actually particularly a fan of the A-10. I thought it was slow and ugly, and the F-14 was my favorite. My dad and I can communicate almost entirely through lines of Top Gun, so that's where I was at. But as I got older I started to get really interested in the concept of human-centered design. Now I'm not a scholar of human-centered design, but just the general idea I thought was really cool and interesting, and my first introduction to it was actually the book the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Have you ever read this, by any chance?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, norman Doors. Yeah, I'm very familiar with that.
Hal Sundt:Norman Doors yeah, yeah. So I wrote a short essay for the New York Times Magazine about Norman Doors and trying to understand Norman Doors, if you're listening and aren't familiar. Anytime you go to a door and you try and open it and it doesn't move and you realize, oh, you pushed when you should have pulled or whatever. That's what's called a Norman door, and Don Norman believed that in that instant it's not your fault, it's the door's fault. So, of everything that exists in the world, a door should be really easy to use. When that happens to me, I would usually feel shame or something. And I read Norman's book. I was like, oh, this makes me feel better.
Hal Sundt:And as that design stuff was percolating, I then ended up writing a story about roller coaster design, because I'd been at Disney World and this would have been in the summer of 2019. And I'd been before, but it didn't occur to me until then. You know who builds roller coasters. Do you go to school for that? How does this happen? How do you build something that people want to experience over and over again? Designers who had built them. I thought this would be really cool to go through. There's a great Hagrid's ride at Universal Studios and I was able to ride on that ride side by side with one of the chief designers of it and I got that story accepted and was able to write it and had a lot of fun.
Hal Sundt:And so this interest in design kept building. I mentioned the roller coaster story because, shortly after that came out, a literary agent reached out to me and said hey, have you thought about writing a book? And the truth is I hadn't, but the A-10 had been percolating in the back of my mind. This would have been early 2020. So the conversations around the A-10 versus the F-35 and retiring the A-10 were really ramping up, or they'd already ramped up, and I got curious to understand why are we retiring this thing that seems like it's still doing a really great job? And, more importantly, how does this thing that was built like 50 years ago, how is it still succeeding? How is it still working? How does it continue to do its job really well? And I wanted to understand the mindset behind what it took to build something that endured for so long.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's fantastic. So let's do this. Let's talk about the development of the A-10 in the context of. We'll start with 1995 and then we'll go take us back to the early 50s and we'll move forward on the timeline. We'll talk about that. So 1995, john Boyd actually sketches his Observe Orient Decide Act loop. He sketches it with the help of Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards, whose names may pop up today in this conversation conversation. But before that, in the 1950s, he was flying the F-86. And many fighter pilots and many people say that the OODA loop came from the cockpit of an F-86. That's not true. We know that to be not true.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:There was a lot of other things that came out of the cockpit of the F-86 in John Boyd's mind. One of them is when he goes to the weapons school, the Air Force Top Gun, he creates the aerial attack study authors that becomes known as 42nd Boyd. It's really the standard in air-to-air combat thinking and it's even relevant today, that aerial attack study. And then he goes on to Georgia Tech. He learns a little bit about physics and this thing called entropy, struggles with that a little bit and starts to understand the second law of thermodynamics. Meets up with somebody whose name is very important here and that's Thomas Christie. He and Thomas Christie developed the energy maneuverability theory. It allows combat capabilities in various aircraft from perspectives, the design trade-offs there and how you develop those aircraft and how they should fight.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We tell the story often that in the early 1970s and we'll pick up in the Vietnam War that John Boyd's presenting to a bunch of fighter pilots Navy fighter pilots, air Force fighter pilots about his EM theory and the Navy top gun just stood up and they have a lot of young lieutenants at this workshop where John Boyd tells them you can't fight MiGs with an F-4. And they disagree with him and they say you're forgetting about one important thing and that is the human in the cockpit. And I think that kind of helps the evolution of John Boyd's thinking from a closed system approach to an open system approach. And we see that in the 80s, 90s and where we get his current observer orient to side actually. So I want to pick up in the 1960s, what's going on in the air war in Vietnam, and start introducing these characters and names and people that are critically important in development not only of the A-10, but the Bradley fighting vehicle, the F-16, and even the YF-17. So, hal, can you pick us up in the 1960s and what's going on in Vietnam?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start kind of from an aircraft perspective. Which is one of the most prominent airplanes that we're using in the Vietnam War at this time is the F-105 Thunderchief, the Thud. And that's a really interesting aircraft because it was initially designed for high-speed, low-level nuclear bombing, which of course it wasn't used for. But it was reappropriated to do all sorts of other tactical bombing missions and it was suffering tremendous losses.
Hal Sundt:As an aside, in writing this book I actually came to develop quite an affinity for the THUD Because I think while it was shoehorned into another mission, I think it actually still was in many ways a great airplane, and the folks who flew it, I mean talk about guts. That is a really impressive thing. But I mentioned all that because something that became apparent kind of early on in the Vietnam War was we didn't have an adequate close air support airplane. In fact our best one was maybe the A-1 Sky Raider and otherwise there was a real gap there. So it's taking a really long time. Troops on the ground are calling in for close air support. We don't have anything to get to them and to get to them within a reasonable timeframe, so that's all happening in the battlefield. Over in the Pentagon, there's a young man named Pierre Spray who has been tasked with essentially auditing the military's spending and determining how are they spending their money. Are they spending it in the right way and if not, what should they be developing instead?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, we solved that problem since then. You know that right, it's perfect right now. So nothing's changed in the last 50, 60 years really. So sorry about that, but continue please. 60 years really.
Hal Sundt:So sorry about that, but continue please. No, no, I'm sure Pierre would be cackling right now. So Pierre is tasked with. It's called a presidential draft memo.
Hal Sundt:And he writes this memo and I'll mention this and then I'll jump back a little bit in time to Pierre's story to kind of catch up to where we're at. But he develops this draft memo and if I were to distill it into kind of two main findings, he said we need a lightweight, very maneuverable aerial fighter effectively what became the F-16. And we need a suitable close air support airplane, what would eventually become the A-10. Become the A-10. As it happened, pierre had developed these ideas and another gentleman in the Pentagon, colonel Avery Kaye, who had been a navigator in World War II he was on the fateful Schweinfurt raid. He was also motivated by this close air support mission and realizing that we needed something like the A-10 in development. And they quickly linked up. And I mentioned Avery Kay just briefly here because, while he's not often mentioned alongside the reformers, pierre would often correct folks and say that Avery Kay was the true father of the A-10 because he was the guy that initially got the wheels turning on developing something like this. And in fact at Avery Kaye's funeral they even had an A-10 flyover, which is really, really cool. So Pierre would often gently correct when someone would introduce him as the father of the A-10. He'd say no, it was Avery Kaye. But anyway, pierre has developed these findings.
Hal Sundt:How did he get to the Pentagon? Well, in the early 40s his family fled France. They actually flew out of from France Then they then they went to Casablanca and they flew from there to the US. They were fleeing, fleeing the Nazi occupation, and they settled in Queens and Kew Gardens. And Pierre quickly demonstrated that he was quite literally a genius. When he was 15, he enrolled at Yale where he double majored in mechanical engineering and French literature and he always loved airplanes and quickly found himself working for the Grumman Corporation. And then he was kind of mid to late 20s, he joined McNamara's whiz kids and that's how he found himself in the position of writing this presidential draft memo where his story oh, go ahead.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, no, keep. There's so much of this. You got McNamara, you got the context. Mcnamara, coming over from Ford, is now Secretary of Defense, correct?
Hal Sundt:He is yep.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah. So a lot of interesting other connections happening here, but we'll stay focused on Pierre Spray and where we're going.
Hal Sundt:Well, and what's interesting about? It's nice to pause on the McNamara bit, actually, because Pierre is a member of the whiz kids who were basically tasked with reimagining the Department of Defense, but he didn't really quite align with all of their ethos or values either. Pierre didn't really fit into any particular box I mean talk about. He was sort of the maverick of mavericks. His allegiance was to what he would say you know, common sense and the truth and what the data shows was to what he would say common sense and the truth and what the data shows. So he became very unpopular in the Pentagon because not only was he working for the group that was effectively auditing the rest of the military, but then even within the group that was auditing he was like I don't actually align with a lot of the stuff that you guys are saying either. So he was really out on an island.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I think there's something really important here that we want to highlight. It's diversity of thought, right, that cognitive diversity that comes into an organization that matters, and we talk a lot about this with protecting your mavericks. You have to protect those people that provide those weak signals, those people that see the world differently, from a different lens, from a different orientation, and the reason behind that is you don't want to have that group think so. This is an important topic for today's business leaders, and that is we're talking about cognitive diversity here, a different orientation based off of your genetics, culture, your previous experience, your education, all these other things. It's not the surface diversity that matters, and I don't want to get political about this, but we talked about this on the show and this is what's happening now, and I think that's what you're highlighting is um.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Here's a maverick of mavericks and I I like that that thinking um, uh, of what's going on there, and then he also makes some pretty interesting connections to um. Was it uh, this, this document that he wrote? Um, this memo he wrote, uh, what? What else is entailed in that? What other concepts is he borrowing from?
Hal Sundt:in there. One of the influences on that I believe this is actually credited to McNamara, who I know is a polarizing figure but certainly had a lot of really interesting ideas as well. It was McNamara who thought, hey, rather than compare weapons systems or systems within different military branches, he said we should compare it all together. Now I've not served I think your perspective on this would be really interesting but he had the thought of well, look, we should compare how much is an airplane that's taking off of an aircraft carrier cost to a tank that we're having in the jungle, and that all of that stuff should exist together rather than in these disparate parts. I'm not sure quite what would have informed that thinking if that was actually to combat groupthink within these smaller branches or what I don't even know, if that actually sounds like a sound methodology.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Looking at it holistically today, you can argue that shooting an SM2 or 3 at a drone costs a lot of money, right? $6 million, $5 million, $2 million to shoot down a $20,000 drone may not be there. So if you're looking at economies of scale, or where are you getting the value for what you deliver? I could see somebody doing this. One thing we do in the military, or we've done in the military, is we would take a course of action, a planning approach, and compare it to the other planning approach, kind of see which one's better. And that's not necessarily a good thing, because you're not comparing it to what really matters, and that's the external environment, right. So you need to kind of understand how we used to do. Again, I don't know if we're doing that like that now in the military, but in the past it was compare things to each other and not to the environment, which is not always a good thing.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, yeah, that's interesting to. I mean that really kind of clarifies or distills it for me. And one thing, just as an aside as I was writing this is I was constantly trying to also imagine or be empathetic to any of the pushback that these folks would be getting, because memo that basically recommends, hey, we needed what would become an F-16 and an A-10 is Pierre himself did not serve, he was a civilian and he would get a lot of pushback like, hey, who are you to be telling us what we should be doing? How do you know anything about this? And there was actually a long track record or history of civilians and non-military personnel having a positive impact on war. I don't know if you've talked at all about the. There's that famous story from World War II with the B-17s, the holes in the bombers and where they're at.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah. So survivorship bias is something that we talk about all the time, and that's when you bring back an aircraft and you look at all the bullet holes in it, but what you're missing are the data points for the bullet holes, or where are the bullet holes on the aircraft that actually crashed, right. So survivorship bias is something that we look at and you and I talked about this before. Human-centered design in the B-17s and the World War II aircraft. You know, coming back from a tough mission where the pilots are struggling to get the aircraft on the ground and part of their landing procedures are to lift the flaps up on landing rollout, and they actually lift the landing gear up. Why is that? The way it's designed, right. So this is.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You know, people don't really know how powerful aviation, what kind of impact aviation has on their lives, from the 40s, 30s, 50s and even today. And that's where we're going with this is the development of an A-10 and the bureaucracy in the Pentagon and those characters that are doing that. So back to Pierre Spray, this memo we got McNamara. What else is going on with Pierre at this time?
Hal Sundt:So he writes this memo, says we need this stuff, we need basically an A-10, f-16. It's really not popular when it comes out. It's not popular because it goes against I'm oversimplifying here but the bomber mafia ethos of the time. And also we have a. The optics are terrible. We have a civilian basically ratting out the Department of Defense's spending in a memo that's going to go directly to the president. It's a bad look all around.
Hal Sundt:So there's a deal that's made between the rest of the Pentagon and the whiz kids basically, uh, that pierre needs to defend this memo and if the and if the air force can, can prove that the findings are false, then they won't go forward with it as part of that process. That's where pierre first meets john boyd, one of the, the, the, the miss they wanted to dispel, curiously was that, uh, us airplanes, uh, fighters would, would, would absolutely wax Migs in combat and and the? U? S believed actually that the threat was more uh, uh even. And so they, they tell John Boyd and this I talk about the story a little bit, but it's also recounted in in beautiful detail, in detail, in Robert Coram's absolutely outstanding biography of John Boyd, called Boyd. But John Boyd and Pierre have a sit down meeting because the Air Force says, hey, we want you to set Pierre Spray straight.
Hal Sundt:Well, john Boyd was not really someone who could be told what to do or to think, and, as it turns out, neither was Pierre Spray, and within a few minutes they quickly hit it off. And they're talking about dogfighting tactics and military strategy. Throughout history, pierre was Chuck Spinney called him the ultimate empiricist. He believed in the past, informing the present, of course, but that that's how we should make those decisions, and so all of his thinking was really informed by rigorous research of the past, was, uh, boyd's to a large degree, although boyd also ended up being more philosophical. But they, they, they really hit it off there, and it would be a few years before they would collaborate as like what we know as the reformers. But they comprised the, the group that preceded the former, the reformers known as the fighter mafia.
Hal Sundt:And, um, pierre would, would be the editor for a lot of uh for, for Boyd's calculations. Um well, uh, christie would do a lot, tom Christie would do a lot of calculations, but but Pierre was another kind of uh, important editor and, um I believe that it's Robert Corm who first said this that Boyd referred to Pierre as the Pierre Spray buzzsaw. So when he was editing something, he'd give it to Pierre and say, hey, does this pass the test?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So who's in the Pentagon? Okay, so we have Tom Christie coming out of the late 60s going into the 70s. Now EM Theory is something Vietnam's going on. We have Pierre Spray, who's in the Pentagon, tom Christie, who's down in Eglin, pensacola, eglin area. John Boyd just did a tour in I think it was in Thailand, and he's heading back to the Pentagon. So who's the anchor point right now coming into this story? Is it Christie? Is it Spray? Who's bringing everybody into the Pentagon at this time?
Hal Sundt:Well, yeah, so it ends up actually being so. My anchor point for a lot of this was Pierre, who was really spearheading this effort with the A-10. But in terms of bringing everyone to the Pentagon, it ends up being Tom Christie, who's I think I described him once. He's kind of like Danny Ocean in the Ocean 11 movies.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:There you go. Okay, yeah, so we have a Danny Ocean character. Oh, this is cool, I like that analogy. So, danny, okay, ocean 11 going on here. Ocean's 11 going on here.
Hal Sundt:And Tom Christie, who I was able to spend a fair bit of time with as well. Just a wonderful, wonderful guy and absolutely brilliant. His skill maybe you already know this, but I mean his skill was facilitating this unpopular work that these other guys were doing, while he was still managed to be rather likable. He was charismatic and, I hesitate to say, diplomatic, but he was able to move things forward while these other guys were maybe being less popular, and Tom facilitated that among doing all kinds of other brilliant things as well.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right. So let's see Back on the timeline. We're looking at the Pentagon. We don't have the YF-16. We don't have the YF-17 yet and the A9, a10, or AX program is still kind of being put together too right.
Hal Sundt:Yeah. So what happens is we're in the late 60s here and Pierre, it has teamed up with Avery Kay. So Pierre presents this memo and defends it and his findings are proven to be valid. As that's happening, this gentleman, colonel Avery Kay, finds him and says I keep using these movie be named AX project and he discovers Pierre's work. He says I need your help. That team is basically comprised of Pierre, avery Kaye and a few folks who had flown A1 Sky Raiders, which quickly proved to be among the most valuable assets on the team, because the Sky Raider, which was designed by Ed Heinemann, was this. I mean talk about sort of an A-10 before the A-10 is this rugged, seeming relic of a previous war that's still being extremely effective. So the human-centered design component was already baked into the work that these guys were doing to conceive of what should be the A-10 or the A-X the A-X which became the A-10, because they had flown these kinds of missions.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I think there's a point that we missed here and that is in World War II it was the Army Air Corps, and then we get what emerges out as the Air Force and one of the things in the US Navy. We have the Marine Corps, we have TAC Air and our Marine TAC Air that is connected to those guys on the ground. So I think what's happening here is the Army, the ground forces, sense that they're going to lose some say some persuasion in how these things work, and what we talk about all the time is you have to engage with the external environment. The control is outside and bottom up. That's something we get from the Toyota production system. That's what John Boyd talks about later on that you have to engage with those people that are your customers. Essentially, right, and I think that's a critical thing. That's happening here is some of the ground force commanders are starting to sense that, hey, we're losing control of this and they start to develop their own platforms. Is that right?
Hal Sundt:Yes. So what's happening is, concurrently with the need for something like the AX, the Army is putting together a proposal for an attack helicopter and their design, which ended up not quite working out. It was the Cheyenne, but the successor to the Cheyenne, the Apache, ended up being quite effective. But the joke or not even a joke, because there's a fair bit of truth in it too is that the A-10 was initially designed to kill one thing, and we think about it as being a tank, but in fact it was designed to kill a US helicopter, because if the, if the A-10 wasn't put into production, the Air Force would lose that mission, the funding, and it would snowball from there. I mention as an aside here as well that I think that that story does have a lot of truth in it. But I want to be deliberate here that as I was working on this and trying to understand the story, I really wanted to be generous towards the Air Force perspective too.
Hal Sundt:I think a lot of times that these two branches will be pitted against each other, particularly in the context of the A-10's origins, and I think that I obviously wasn't alive then. But it must have been really frustrating for the Air Force in the early to mid-60s to suddenly be audited so aggressively by the whiz kids and others. In a span of 10, 15 years we went from flying B-29s to developing something like the XB-70 Valkyrie. I mean whether all of those platforms had a direct, feasible mission application. It's like to go from one to the other. That's a tremendous amount of development and innovation and it must have been frustrating not only to be audited but then to be like okay, now we need to devote funding to something that flies as fast as like a regional jet from Cleveland to Chicago.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's not very sexy, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Hal Sundt:But anyway. So this small group of Skyraider drivers Avery Kay, Pierre, spray and a few others are now developing what's known as the, or what's called a concept formulation packet. So it's the list of must-haves that any design will need to contain or entail In that process, and this relates to the human-centered design component and connecting with the or being in touch with the customer. Is Pierre required everyone on that team to read the biography of Hans Rudl Stuka, pilot? Have you read that, by any chance?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, I'm familiar with it. So we're talking about the German Stuka airplane, is that right, the bomber?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, it's a really interesting read insofar as getting inside the mindset of a prolific tank buster.
Hal Sundt:Root-roodle is generally considered the most prolific tank-busting airman that ever existed, that ever lived, and Pierre wanted everybody on his team to read that autobiography because it would give insight into not only what a close air support and tank-killing airplane would need to have namely the importance of a cannon, a gun, but what the mindset of that type of pilot would need to facilitate that mission and what the airframe would need in order to allow that pilot to be their best at what they're doing. So I thought that was really interesting. A lot of times Pierre would be folks would challenge him on like, hey, where do you get all your information? Cause he would use data and all this stuff. But he would also say I think some of the best resources are the firsthand accounts of folks who have served. Uh, whether it's just talking with them or it's reading, you know the autobiographies, things like that and I think sometimes that can be discredited as like oh well, that's a subjective experience and Pierre's like no, no, it's absolutely critical.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So narrative-based approaches, qualitative, quantitative data from that is much better than handing out surveys to people that have a hypothesis and I'm going to tell us hey, what did you do back then in a survey? The stories matter because it has context. We get context from a context and this is what you discovered. There is what we try to help out with our clients, and that is a narrative based approach is you can you can get qualitative and quantitative data from that that will inform you on what's going on in your system. So I absolutely agree with you 100%.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, and I that was, it was. This is where this, this, this field of human centered design and its tangents. It was so fun for me to learn about this because I just hadn't considered that stuff as being super valuable resources at the time. And it's. And for Pierre and others to argue, hey, this is the most important thing, or one of the most important things we can consult, was eye-opening for me, even if it seems obvious in retrospect. So they begin developing this concept formulation packet and then that's when it goes out to competing manufacturers, the main conclusion which it won't surprise anyone who has seen the A-10 or is familiar with the A-10, is that the gun needs to be at the center of the airplane. Pierre, I think he said I'm misremembering the exact quote here, but if we didn't have the gun at the center of the airplane, he's like there's no way I could have backed.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah. So at the time I think we had what? 20 millimeter guns? And just more context, during the Vietnam conflict we were actually removing the guns from aircraft. So the F-4 did not come with a gun, it actually came with a center pod that had a gun on it a little bit later on. So the idea was, hey, technology is going to save us, right, we're never going to fight with a gun again, we're going to use missiles. And those proved to be insufficient and that thinking proved to be insufficient. So this idea of building an airplane or an aircraft around a gun that has a specific mission, which is tank busting, if you will, and I don't believe the 20 millimeter I think there were 20 millimeter at the time I don't think they were sufficient to do the damage that with the A-10 has. So can you talk about the what was it? The GAU-8, the development of that, the GAU-8?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, so, just as in a going off that as well, boyd was a huge proponent of guns and aerial combat as well, and I think that's another touchpoint where Pierre and Boyd really connected.
Hal Sundt:So they decide that they need to build this thing around a gun, and they determine that 30 millimeter is the round size that's needed to effectively kill tanks, and this gun uh ends up being 20 feet long, uh, weighing um like 4,000 pounds, uh, developed by, um, uh, general Electric and um, and uh, uh it's.
Hal Sundt:It's far more devastating than they could have imagined Once they had settled on the A-10 as being the design, so it was Northrop's A-9 versus Fairchild's A-10, fairchild Republic's A-10, the gun wasn't available during the prototyping for that, and I know we can go back and talk about that a little bit more, so they were using another model, um, but once they got the the the Gow 8 all set and designed and developed and they were they were killing tanks in the desert. They, they worried that it wasn't going to do the job well, because A-10s would sweep in and hit the tanks, and then they wouldn't see anything, and they were like oh geez, what have we done here? We've invested all this money in this thing. What they realized, though, was that the properties of of uh, du, depleted uranium uh, it did most of its damage after impact and after almost like a few minutes and they would see smoke billow out of the tanks.
Hal Sundt:And then that's when they realized okay, this, this is the perfect tool for this job.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So they had to build. They had to build this aircraft around a new gun. I mean that's in order to achieve the outcome that they're looking for, right.
Hal Sundt:Right, and while it was a new gun in the sense that the Gow 8 did not exist beforehand, the system of using a Gatling gun had been around 100 plus years at that point I can't remember the exact year that Gatling came into service, and that was another example of Pierre and these guys saying, hey, let's take things off the shelf and that's what we'll require to be used here and so and the Gatling for a? For a whole host of reasons. One of it, uh, it's valuable properties was it was really quite accurate because it could fire so quickly that it would limit the dispersal of rounds Right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right. So now, now we're, uh, we're about to build an aircraft. Uh, we have introduced this story. We have um Thomas Christie, John Boyd, Pierce, Bray, Avery, Kay. How does where does Chuck Spinney come into all this?
Hal Sundt:Oh, I'm so. I'm so glad you asked that because, as you're naming the names, I was like I need to mention Chuck Spinney. So Chuck was not super close to all these guys yet at this point in time, but the work he was doing was extremely important to all of the things they would be doing, but especially to the A-10, even though it was indirect. He was working on helping to assess the vulnerability of the F-105 because the huge problem with the F-105 was that it kept catching fire from small, like small arms would puncture its belly and the thing would catch fire. And they were trying to figure out why. And they realized the F-105 had been designed to carry a nuclear bomb but once it wasn't going to do that, they reappropriated its belly fuselage to carry fuel Um. And that was a problem also because the hydraulic lines it had two hydraulic lines but they were right next to each other and they were wrapped around the. The fuel bladder was wrapped around the engine. I mean it was just kind of a disaster waiting to happen.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah.
Hal Sundt:And and and Chuck, building on the work of others who had preceded him, uh began to assess okay, how can we make this thing more more durable in a combat environment? And that's when they started to employ the use of self-sealing fuel tanks and things like that, and that work ends up being a huge influence on so much of what happens with the A-10 in terms of dispersing where fuel is stored, having the engines, you know further away higher up and further away.
Hal Sundt:I can't. I'm trying to remember now, I think, the decision to actually have them higher up, that that should be credited to the folks at fairchild republic, because they were given the parameters and then I think they figured out oh, here's maybe the best place to have them. It had the added benefit of the the on the A-10 kind of if we think back to the B-17, they kind of functioned as like a shield for the engines, because if you're shooting from the ground it was harder to get to the engines Right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right, so Chuck's. Now in the story we have Tom Christie. He also came up with something, and this is when I was reading your book. It was J-MEMS Joint Munition Effectiveness Manual. So my background is an air-to-ground weapons training officer in the F-14 community and going into the Aerospace Operations Center. We had to use J-MEMS quite a bit to understand how these weapons would, the effects they would have on the ground and, plus, you don't want to frag yourself, you don't want to fly into a bomb fragment fragmentation when you're dropping something. Tom Christie, he, he created that. Is that right? He co-created that? Or the, the J-MEMS.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, I, he developed. I believe it was the first one here. Okay, Funny thing I if I'm misspeaking at all, I apologize. It's funny, I got so in the weeds with the A-10. And then when you submit it to a publisher, it's like oh, like, more than a year passes and you're like yeah.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we totally get that. No, no, no, so we're not responsible for anything we say here, right, no, this is good a cop out there, but I believe it was the the first one, and and that's what pierre ended up consulting when he was putting together this presidential draft memo, um, and he he described it I wonder if it was still the same when you were using it like this incomprehensibly dense totem of of data, I mean, um, so he was sifting through all of that, which is, I mean, just a feat of endurance in and of itself.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah. So again, more connections in here. And when I look into the book or read the book I'm like, wow, I had no idea. The Christie-Pierre Spray connection with the John Boyd connection before they even met, right, they were already looking at each other's work. Connection before they even met, right, they were already looking at each other's work. Okay, so here we are. More context here.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we're in the early seventies and here we have the development of the F-14, the US Navy, the F-15, the F-111, the Aardvark that was actually designed for the Air Force and Navy, which is a tandem seat fighter swing wing aircraft. John Boyd mentioned that hey, if you paint it yellow and put seats in it, you can build a bus with it. That's probably the best thing you can do with it, and I think he talked about that. Then we have this thing happening in the early 70s between the YF-16 and YF-17. And we also have the A-10 story going on. All of these folks are involved in all these at some level. I think there's one quote in your book and I can't remember exactly, but I think it was from Pierre Sprey or somebody saying that, talking about the F-18 and the F-14 and what the Navy got wrong with the F-18. And it's basically, he basically says you need to get rid of both, but first you need to get rid of the F-18. So there's that piece in there and we kind of make fun of the plastic jet that's still out there flying today now with the F-18F. So okay, more context. We're about to have a flyoff between the YF-16, yf-17.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:On paper, em theory says the YF-17, which is now today's F-18, should outperform the F-16. That kind of triggers something for John Boyd when he finds out the F-16 has this capability called which is now known as a fast transient. Fast transience is where we get the concept of pivot from. So think about organizations wanting to pivot. It's the ability to go from one regime of flight to another rapidly. And again we're moving away from all this power in the engines and all this thrust to energy maneuverability. How do you create agility in aircraft? And that's where the A-10 is going as well. So the A-10 gets developed here. We start adding weapons to it and things like that. But walk us through the early 70s development or mid-70s development of the A-10. And even where you had some other names pop in here. Burton pops up, james Burton pops up, but that's a different story a little bit later on, and you got Mike Wiley popping up here as well. Uh, but what else is going on with the A-10 development?
Hal Sundt:So, so, um, what I started to talk a little bit about just briefly and that sort of now in time this, this is, this is the spot to talk about it is when they're testing the gun and the ammunition to the most important folks that were, I would call them, kind of reformer adjacent Colonel Bob Dilger and Lon Ratley, and they were in Nevada doing all the testing on the gun and the ammunition for the A-10. And that's when they learned that the effects of depleted uranium rounds, it's kind of a delayed effect. It's kind of a delayed effect. So these pilots would go in and they would test the gun and they would fire it and then there would be a delayed reaction. Once they realized that the delayed reaction was to be expected, they realized that with Hans Rudl, who had flown the Stuka, that his tank killing count was probably dramatically higher than what it was originally listed as, because he had someone else had to observe it.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, um, you had to be. I think you had to see smoke billing out of a tank, um, and uh, uh, in point of fact, that may have been a delayed process. Okay, uh, uh, oh. The other thing, just to jump back in time here, but related to testing of the gun, but as they're testing the A-10 versus the A-9, the big thing that Pierre and the reformers advocated for was competitive prototyping.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right.
Hal Sundt:So when they're deciding on which airframe to use, pierre said we want the competitors to bring in a few different models and we don't just want to see them fly off and do little tricks, in that we want to shoot them with weapons to see how they're going to take damage and we're not going to just shoot them with any weapons. His exact words were like we're going to buy Russian weapons on the black market and we're going to shoot them with those Because we want to know for certain how is this thing going to impact the tool that we're developing.
Hal Sundt:So they didn't want to leave things up to hypotheticals or approximates.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:They wanted to be yeah, so this is important. So in the world of business right now we do a lot of prototyping. In fact, the whole concept of Scrum, which came from fighter aviation and the flying F-4, the OODA loop and Toyota production system. We've had Jeff Sutherland on the show and plus I've worked with Jeff and others. But this is absolutely critical here, and that is, you want your customers to be able to give you feedback on where you are with a product, and this is prototyping now. I don't think we saw a lot of that early on in aircraft development. We do see it now, but it costs a lot of money to produce an aircraft. So walk me through the mindset of Fairchild and the competitors. Is this something they wanted to do? I mean, was this in their best interest to go ahead and start building these aircraft knowing that they may not get the contract?
Hal Sundt:So that's a really interesting question and I think that it'd be interesting what manufacturers have to say about this. Now. There was initially pushback because the expense of building a few prototypes obviously was considerable and it carried with it the risk that the prototype, if it's not picked up, what are you left with? So it wasn't popular on a number of fronts. It just so happened that the Secretary of Defense at the time, schlesinger, jim Schlesinger, actually really believed in or no wait, was it Packard, dave Packard?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so it was Dave Packard as a Deputy Secretary of Defense, so he's coming from Hewlett Packard, right?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, yeah. So it's Packard who, in particular, was a fan of prototyping. Pierre said Packard believed in kind of prototyping in general, but it really helped that he served as an ally to the folks as the ATEM was coming into development and he's the one who pushed the manufacturers to do the competitive prototyping rather than leave it up to. Here's a hypothetical model of how something will possibly work.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So what's interesting about the testing of the A9, A10 is the bring over the actual weapons that will be used against us potentially. So we're going to go ahead and find a way to get those from the Soviet Union or a proxy, and then we got to find a way to fly this thing without flying this thing right. So that story is pretty cool too. Can you walk the audience through? How do you fly an aircraft without actually flying it and how do you shoot things at it?
Hal Sundt:Oh yeah. So the short answer is that you can't get it up in the air, right, because how are you going to fly it without a pilot? So what they did instead is they had to have it delivered to them. One of the prototypes had to be delivered to them in parts, and they were going to shoot those parts with these weapons.
Hal Sundt:But, crucially, pierre pointed out, shooting something on the ground with more or less static air doesn't approximate the same thing as being shot out when you're flying 400 miles an hour or more. And so then there was this whole dilemma of okay, well, how do we build Wind tunnels? Existed, but shooting live rounds within a wind tunnel is not exactly the safest thing that you can do. Um, so then there's this whole dilemma of like okay, well, do we, how do we build a wind tunnel? That, uh, that that makes that possible, the expense is going to be enormous.
Hal Sundt:And pierre was like no, no, no, no, you guys are overthinking this. We don't need a wind tunnel, we just need wind. And he's like I know that in the boneyards you've got props from, uh, you know prop engines from B-17s and B-29s that that can go X number of hundred miles an hour. Um and I know they can go that fast because that's how fast the airplanes flew um, all we need to do, basically, is to strap one of these engines onto, like a concrete block, and have the, the, the, the air blowing over, for example, a wing, a section of wing, and then we can fire it with the rounds and the the.
Hal Sundt:what ended up being developed was something called a vertical wind tunnel, which is a little more sophisticated than just having something on a concrete block, but it was to me. I love that story about the A-10 because that's like what the A-10 is about. It's like, hey, we don't need all this stuff, we just need wind. Yeah, we don't need the whole arm around it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Keep it simple, right. Keep it simple right. And so the commercial off the shelf approach, the prototyping. A lot of things that people are still talking about today in the Pentagon was actually happening in the 70s. For whatever reason we have these bureaucracy's, there's a phrase that comes up here I'm not sure if this is the right time to bring it up, but the military industrial congressional complex. Who used that phrase?
Hal Sundt:That's so, chuck Spinney. If you ever mention the military industrial complex, which is that sounds so familiar, right, he would always insist on no, you need to include congressional in there, because that's this added.
Hal Sundt:It's not even just a variable, it's such a. It's a I mean it's a primary variable of how that whole complex functions and works and navigating the bureaucracy not just of the Pentagon but then of all of Congress. I mean that just gets infinitely complex. Infinitely complex. I believe I think it was Chuck who told me this that originally when President Eisenhower used the term, he had congressional in the phrase but removed it at the last minute, I think, out of fear.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's pretty amazing given the context of what's going on in the world today. The idea is that systems drive behaviors and you have ego and you have mission focus. What we're talking about with Pierre Sprey, john Boyd, chuck Spinney, tom Christie is their mission focus. They're focused on the desired outcome rather than their own egos. In fact, today I'm wearing a shirt that says to be or to do right, which is John Boyd's view of you could be something or you could do something. At this point, they're doing something, whereas the congressional side, the industrial complex, is being something. How do I get promoted in the system? How do I ensure my constituents have work that build this component for an aircraft that we don't need right? That's the type of thinking that's happening here and we're breaking this up into. I'll just call it mission-focused and ego-focused. The system drives behaviors right into. I'll just call it mission focused and ego focused. The system drives behaviors right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:If we want to develop an aircraft, it's not as simple as just focusing on desired outcome, the intent of the aircraft, the whole system is part of it, and there's an episode of the Simpsons where, designing a vehicle I think Homer and some other folks designed a vehicle you get this horrible system that does absolutely nothing. And there's another I can't remember the name of the law off the top of my head, but the design of your system, how you organize, actually is revealed in the products you design, right? So your communication structure and all that. So this is happening today quite a bit. We've seen it with the LCS and the US Navy. We have these desired outcomes that are trumped or overcome by the system itself, which we're going to call the military industrial congressional complex, which is fantastic. Any more thoughts on that, hal?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, I think it was. So another member of the reformers was a man named Ray Leopold who ended up developing the Iridium satellite constellation and is really brilliant in his own right, and I think it was Ray who told me that, if I'm remembering this correctly, when you develop something and it gets stuck into that group think of all these bureaucracies inevitably what you end up with is a camel of some sort, like that's the offhand word.
Hal Sundt:It's like oh, is it a horse or what is it, you know? And it just has all these extra pieces added on top of it, Just as another shout out here for navigating the bureaucracy. This is where Tom Chrissy played such an important role, because he, in ways I don't even fully appreciate, I think that there's a real skill in having someone to provide top cover to still put up with the bureaucratic stuff so that these other folks can make things happen within it. I don't know who the leaders are in the world now that do that, but that is such a valuable and unique skill Because you can't.
Hal Sundt:Just it'd be great to say, oh, I wish there was no bureaucracy and it's like, well, that's not possible. But how you navigate it can be is a really is the key. And I think it was Ray Leopold who also told me this, because I asked him. I was like, how did you guys not just like, how are you not just angry all the time? And he said that John Boyd and Pierre in particular seemed to really have fun figuring out these problems. And yes, they thought that a lot of the bureaucracy was really inane, but then they would quickly turn into or their mindset would shift and be like, okay, so how can we, how can we scheme around this and navigate this?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, and that's key here is it's it's kind of we talk about this in a complex adaptive system it's the informal networks that get things done right. So you can you can have all your organizational charts and hierarchy, hierarchical charts, but that's not how your system is actually run. Here we have these folks that are mainly don't know each other but find each other in the Pentagon that work on this, together with their backgrounds in EM theory, j-mems, looking at the money, just all kinds of special characters coming in here. But that's how things, unfortunately, get done, is you work around the system you're given and you're right about the span of control piece. You got to protect your Mavericks and that's, I think, who's doing that protection at this time. I think it's Tom Christie, if I understand the hierarchy right at the time. So John Boyd is working in the Pentagon now. I think he's retired at this point, coming back in as a consultant. I think he took a dollar paycheck to be back in there because he doesn't want to double dip.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, I remember hearing that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, he doesn't want to double dip. But here we are, the development of the A10, going into the 80s. Things are tracking along and you bring up. I can't remember if you bring up, is it James Burton in the book at all? And you bring up.
Hal Sundt:I can't remember if you bring up. Is it James Burton in the book at all? Yeah, so I didn't get a chance to speak with Mr Burton, but his book the Pentagon Wars was absolutely crucial to my research.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So when I was coming in the Navy it was like early late 90s, early 90s, mid 90s actually. I remember seeing the HBO special Pentagon Wars and just laughing like wow, is this really what I'm getting into? And it's a, it's an air force Colonel looking at the Bradley fighting vehicle and I'm like what the heck? I don't understand this Right. What's what's an air force Colonel have to do? Well, later on you find out that, uh, um, in fact, I think the shirt that I'm wearing I have one right now is connected to that of John Boyd taking Burton under his wing in the Pentagon and kind of guiding him through how to navigate the bureaucracy and get a better fighting vehicle. But always, you know, that's another tangential thing we can look at in the podcast or in the no Way Out podcast is the Bradley fighting vehicle and that connection to John Boyd. Okay, let's go through, you know, go through the successes of the A-10, what we saw with it from the 80s on to today and what the future holds.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, so the competitive prototyping stuff. Actually the A-10's impact, I mean, is incredible, but part of its impact is actually on how its development influenced other weapons development over the last 30-some years. And when they're doing all the prototyping a name I mentioned earlier is this gentleman, a name I mentioned earlier is this gentleman, colonel Bob Dilger and he further pushed along the prototyping when they were testing the gun. They were like we're not going to just use surrogate tanks, we're going to initially bring in Russian tanks, which another gentleman who I spoke with said we got them. I'm not going to tell you exactly how, but we got them and that rigorous prototyping and testing would carry on. And in many ways is what is kind of one of the lasting impacts of the A-10 and the folks behind it, even though they were sort of pushed out of the Pentagon in the late 80s there. Even though they were sort of pushed out of the Pentagon in the late 80s there.
Hal Sundt:What's funny about the A-10 story is it's built, it kind of rolls off the production line in the late 70s and then it's in limbo for a while. It's used in a few small engagements, but but not on the scale that we thought and in fact, the impetus for for building it and the whole reason Pierre wrote this presidential draft memo was because the we were at the height of the Cold War and the threat was that believed to be that Russia was going to invade the West or the Soviet Union was going to invade the West through a stretch of land called the Fulda Gap with tanks. And that was a problem because it was cloudy and overcast and things were concealed and we didn't have anything that could fly low enough. And, as happens in the late 80s, we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and suddenly this Cold War threat is not quite what we thought it would be. And now this massive tank assault that the A-10 was effectively built for is not happening. So there are calls to retire the A-10 rather quickly.
Hal Sundt:As an aside, pierre, almost from the moment that the A-10 rolls off the production line, he and other members of the reformers, and another gentleman, chuck Myers, and some others are already advocating for building a successor to the A-10. They're like already this thing can be better. And what, boyd and Pierre and the Reformers? One of their ethos was people first Yep, you mentioned that story from earlier. And they were never beholden to one piece of technology and in later years, when you know folks would back Pierre into a corner and say, well, isn't the the eight, 10 out of date and shouldn't it be better? And he'd be like, yeah, I think it can be better, which?
Hal Sundt:is kind of the greatest trump card I mean it does, which is a testament to also how well it's designed, that, even as Pierre thought it could be so much better, it still ends up being, I think, perhaps the finest military aircraft ever built.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's number two.
Hal Sundt:Yeah. So I say all of that is, in spite of all this opposition, the A-10 ends up doing this incredible work. Where we first see it really make an impact is in the Gulf War, and I remember when I was talking with Pierre he said he kept emphasizing this. He's like one of the things you got to emphasize is that once this thing's being used in the Gulf War, it flies almost no close air support because there wasn't really much of a ground assault right, and instead the A-10 ends up doing basically every other possible mission it could do.
Hal Sundt:There's a great sketch where someone says the A-10 should be redesignated the RFOA-10B or something like that. Obviously it's prolific at hunting and killing tanks, flies a lot of bombing missions and does extremely well. It's credited with a couple of air-to-air kills because they shot down some helicopters. I think after the or not I think I know after the war. It's cited along with the B-52 as enemy soldiers cited that as the airplane that they were most afraid of. And there was initially reluctance to deploy the A-10 in the Gulf War. There was some. There was an experiment to modify some.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I want to, I want to, I want to add something here, because this is so. There was an aircraft that the Iraqis were terrified of because of their previous involvement with the Iranians. Do you know what that was?
Hal Sundt:What would?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:the what would you avoid? What aircraft do you think the Iraqis wanted to avoid the most during the Gulf War? I'll give you a hint. It's behind me it's the F-14. Why is that? Because the Iranians had it and the Iranians just absolutely destroyed the Iraqi Air Force with it. I'll just throw that in there, because I'm a Tomcat guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, people were like the F-15 got a lot of kills. Well, yeah, of course they shot down a lot of aircraft because that's who the Iraqis wanted to fight. They didn't want to fight the F-14s. All right, that's another story, all right.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, yeah, that's great. So early on they didn't even want to deploy there was a lot of resistance to deploy the A-10. They're like, look, this thing's out of date, we don't want to use it, et cetera. Um, uh, and they had modified some F-16s to uh be A-16s and to do some attack missions. And there's a story where, uh, a squadron of A-16s was tasked with taking out a particular target and the bomb dispersal rate was so bad that when they looked at it there's this great, probably he's considered like the greatest A-10 hog driver ever. His name is Muck Brown. He looked at the bomb dispersal rate and he said those boys couldn't hit their dinner plate with a spoon. Yeah, yeah, um, uh, I don't want that. Nothing against the f-16, it's that's just no.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, it's great aircraft, yeah yeah, yeah, um, uh.
Hal Sundt:So anyway, then the a-10 is, is is used and uh, it's. It's incredible, and part of its success is its survivability. I can't remember there were a few casualties, tragically. However, relative to the number of missions that ATENs flew, the survivability rate was nearly 100%. I can't remember the exact percentage, but relative to how many sorties flown, it proved to be incredibly survivable.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right. So you look back at some of those images where these aircraft are coming back with half the wing missing, engines ripped up, parts of the fuselage shredded, landing gear removed, you name it. This aircraft came back and I think sometimes they were able to repair them within a few months or a short amount of time. You compare that to an F-35. Today, if you shoot at an F-35, you put a bullet in that there's a good chance that aircraft's not going to fly for a couple of years, right? So I mean that survivability is one thing with the A-10. You just don't get that with. So when people talk about comparing things, what exactly are you comparing? You know, are you cost to? You know the cost of releasing a weapon on a target or how fast it takes to repair something if you get it back right? So a lot to be said about the A-10 survivability.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:During the Gulf War and, of course, when Iraqi Freedom and OEF kickoff. You know the A-10 is everywhere. It's doing a lot of FACA missions. It's doing a lot of SAR missions. In fact, when I was at the Air and Space Operations Center as a Navy guy there, I got to work alongside a lot of A-10 drivers that just came back from Iraq and Afghanistan. So here we are, working in Europe and here are these guys talking about going on these long SAR missions, search and rescue missions, alone and unafraid, in their A-10.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And we're like I'm like, oh my gosh, you would fly all the way out there by yourself. They're like, oh yeah, and why is that? Because that aircraft was so capable, had the legs, had the weapon platform to sustain a longer presence than anything else. Plus, they were hugging the ground when they're doing that too. So hats off to that community. It just unbelievably, by the way, I think they're the closest community to what the F-14 community was A lot of fun, a lot of mission-focused people. So if there's one community in the Air Force that I really, really enjoyed being around, it was the A-10 drivers. Everybody else, nah, not so much. And I know they listen to this.
Hal Sundt:Yeah, have fun flying your commercial airliners, buddy. I mean, there's so many things there. One of them is the, so the folks feeling so secure in that airframe. You know that's the DNA that was infused by Pierre and Avery Kay and others when they're like. We need you to read these firsthand accounts of what does it take to fly these missions in the 40s, and it still impacts them to this day. The other thing is the Navy's impact on the A-10 is kind of huge because Pierre's favorite designer the one he held in the highest regard, was Ed Heinem built the a1 and the a4.
Hal Sundt:You know two just stellar navy, navy planes that were navy, navy, uh, aircraft that were. The a4 was so uh, at least for its time, so human-centered, designed that, um, when folks were first flying it and they got up in the sky, the cockpit was so easy to use relatively that there are reports of pilots being like I got nervous because I didn't know what to do. They're like Ricky Bobby in Trail Day, good Night. It's like what do I do with my hands? Like everything's working, you know, and it's so easy to use the A-10, I'm oversimplifying here here, but the a-10 being able to have these rugged landings, uh, um, in part is infused by the fact that you know, uh, uh, um, navy jets are just built more ruggedly because you're, because you're slamming onto the, to the deck. There it's. It's a different, different uh mission and all that, obviously, but I think that that that dna is infused in the a10 as well that's a great connection.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Uh, I want to talk about um. You got to spend some time with chuck spinney and pierre spray, and, and I want to talk about chuck spinney first. Um, but what's he like? What's it like being around him?
Hal Sundt:Chuck is. He is such a remarkable guy and I was yeah, I got to spend, you know. He invited me into his home we had, we had lunch together, he is and we talked a bunch on the phone because when I was first reporting this um, I had to do a lot of interviews over the phone and I would just both with Chuck and Pierre. I would just kind of turn on the recorder and I'll just listen for hours and hours and Chuck, like Pierre, was able to recount with stunning clarity and detail every kind of moment in his time in the Pentagon, which helped me write the story, because it helped me connect all these different pieces together, and I don't know what the word is for this, but Chuck, like Pierre, is able to convey this nuanced intellect in a very clear and distilled manner.
Hal Sundt:Where he doesn't need to, I don't know, use overly flowery language, but he says something and then you're like wow, there's actually a lot of layers to that. He was just so warm and inviting, and all of these guys, Tom Christie as well. I was sort of taken aback by how they didn't have an ego that's what I would say it was is that there was no ego? And Chuck and all these guys have every right to have a huge ego and yet they don't.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Chuck Spinney is still with us today, but that's not true with Pierre. I understand that Pierre passed away not long after you engaged with him. Is that correct?
Hal Sundt:Yeah, so we. So we spent about a year and a half together. We were doing it. First a bunch of we'd have these long, long, long conversations on the phone and then we got to spend a fair bit of time together in person as well. And the last time I saw Pierre it was over a long weekend in Maryland. We went to the Maryland Air National Guard. They were the folks at the 104th Fighter Squadron, were a tremendous resource for me and they connected with Pierre because Pierre was really close by. So we spent really a full weekend together. And that was the last time we interviewed or did a whole bunch of interviews.
Hal Sundt:And it was this weird feeling for me, because it was after that last conversation that I felt at the end of that weekend I was like, okay, I think I've got enough here to start to really write this story. Not that I'd learned everything that Pierre could teach me, but I felt that I had enough that I could start to wrap my head around his story. Not that I'd learned everything that Pierre could teach me, but I uh felt that I had enough that I could start to wrap my head around his story. And I had that feeling. And then, within I think it was. Two days later, um, I received an email, I believe it was from Tom Christie, with the news that he had um suddenly passed away. And uh, it was. It was uh. It was so odd and weird for me because I wasn't able to write for a couple months and I didn't know why, and I was like I realized it was because I was grieving the loss of Pierre. He, I had become, I, we, I wouldn't say we were friends, but I had become, I think, quite close with him and I think, had he, had, we spent even more time together, we might've actually even become friends. I mentioned this because I remember there's one time this is maybe a month or two before he had passed.
Hal Sundt:I had heard that this was certainly the case with John Boyd, and then I think it became the case with Pierre as well.
Hal Sundt:Is that if he liked you, if he trusted you, sometimes he would just call you, started chatting, and I was like, oh, I'll talk with Pierre for a little bit, cause I had to walk like 30 blocks or something and I had made it the whole way and he and I were still talking and I had to literally be like, oh, okay, pierre, I'm going on a date.
Hal Sundt:I got, like I got to call you back, you know, and, and I at the time I didn't fully appreciate it, but I actually hold that little, that memory, fondly, cause I was like, oh, I think that you know, we were really, um, had developed a connection by that point, and, um, I was, I was so honored to be, uh, invited to his memorial service, uh, which was held a few months later, and, um, many of the surviving members of the reformers were there, uh, so many hog drivers that Pierre had impacted were there.
Hal Sundt:And Pierre was given a flyover, an A-10 flyover, which happened at the last minute because, since he had not technically served, he wasn't entitled to one. So the only way it could happen is he had to be named a dignitary of the Pentagon, which he wasn't super popular in the Pentagon. So it was like, okay, is he had to be named a dignitary of the pentagon, uh, which he wasn't super popular in the pentagon. So it was like, okay, is this going to happen? But, um, there was a small cohort of of of hog drivers that you know made it all come together right at the last minute it's amazing you got the time with him.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So you know we. The last time I saw anything with pierre spray, he was talking about the F-35 and just giving his thoughts on that. Did he talk to you about that at all?
Hal Sundt:He did quite a bit. Pierre was really not a fan of the F-35, which is, I think, no surprise to folks who were familiar with him or the work of the reformers. In his opinion, it was a platform that was designed more idealistically rather than practically. It kind of went against his ethos of, rather than being designed with a specific mission in mind, it was built with this idea of here's all these great things that could potentially one day do a sort of jack-of-all-trades thing.
Hal Sundt:Pierre believed that you designed an airplane to excel at one thing and then, if it was purpose-built, it sort of organically would probably end up being good at other things as well. His reference point for that was Ed Heinemann's A-4. The A-4 was designed for high speed, low level nuclear bombing, a lot like the F-105, which Pierre, as an aside, called a quote dumb shit, horse shit mission. Those were like two of his favorite adjectives dumb shit and horse shit. But he said Ed Heinemann was such a great designer that, okay, it was designed for this mission.
Hal Sundt:That was maybe not so great, but it ended up being useful in all these other capacities. So he had very strong opinions against the F-35. However, I was able to talk to some F-35 drivers and folks who had flown both the A-10 and the F-35, because I really wanted to have as well-rounded of a picture as possible, and it seems like those airframes are often pitted against each other. I don't know if unfairly is the word, but it's almost like the F-35, it's just a different tool. The problem is that it's being applied, it's being shoehorned to do something that it's not really designed to do.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right, right right.
Hal Sundt:And I think that's what bugged Pierre.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, I've heard both sides of the arguments, or many arguments, on the F-35 and the F-22. My thing is again focus on the mission. Try not to do everything. There's a downside to being a Swiss Army knife in this world. But at the same time, you know cost is important. And, going back to the military-industrial-congressional complex, what drives these things ultimately is the way the system is set up right. So if we want to build an aircraft, we want to build it in 48 states. It needs to be built in 48 states. That's more important than the actual mission. By the way, I don't know how many states the F-35 is built in at the moment, but I'm sure there's more than-.
Hal Sundt:It is all over the place, though.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah, but there's a reason for that, right, and this is an egocentric view of the world which is, as a representative from whatever, I need to make sure my county gets a piece of that. And it's not about the desired outcome of protecting somebody on the front lines, right, it's not mission focused, and that's what I say ego focused. And this comes back to human centered design and the prototyping, and then the Mavericks and the things we talked about earlier. In fact, one of the things I mentioned to you the other day is, you know, when I, when I read your book, uh, you know, we have the reading lists in the, in the Navy and the air force, um, in the Marine Corps, and, and there are books that need to be on that list, and I'd argue that your book needs to be there, not because of the the importance of the development that they attend, but but who's behind that, what they did, the significance of it, those Mavericks that are all behind it and, being a little selfish here, the connection to John Boyd and that timeline that was actually happening in the late 60s all the way to his death in the mid-90s there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:This is an important aspect of it. He's not just somebody who sat down one day and drew a sketch that everybody goes first you observe, then you orient, then you decide, then you act. There's a lot more to that right, and the connection again to human-centered design. Mission-focused, outward-focused customers have control. They need to read this because the way we're procuring weapons systems today is inconsistent with what we should be doing, and that's you know. Again, I'm not going to get political on that, but the view is when you, when, you, when, when you put the word innovation in an organization, does that make you an innovative organization or an innovation and name only organization?
Hal Sundt:And.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'll argue today that today's defense innovation unit is a brokerage, not an innovation unit. I know that because we got to map it out and see what it actually looks like. And there is a difference and something else. When you start building weapon systems and you're not focused on the outside, on the people first and I'll argue this today too you're not focused on the outside, on the people first, and I'll argue this today too. And I had a great conversation with some folks from Fort Eustis who are working on human performance, using aura rings and watches and devices to understand human performance. That's the level of performance we need. How do you focus on developing human performance? Because, as AI comes on, the worst thing we can do is reduce that human capability by substituting technology for human know-how. And I'll leave it at this.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Anytime I see something come out of the Pentagon that says we need hypersonics or we need this. That's like you saying I need an F-35, rather than saying what is it? You actually need this thing to do. Focus on that, and that's where we get innovation. And I think that's where what your book is really about is when you focus on those people on the ground, in this case, the soldiers. You know the army, soldiers, the folks that are troops on the ground. You focus on their needs, you can start to develop things, and that's where the A-10 is, the strength of the A-10 is really and how it was developed there. So I just want to thank you for being on the show filling that huge gap that we have in that space between the late 60s and mid-90s on John Boyd's timeline. But I do want to turn it over to you and kind of have you share out what you're doing next and how people can get in touch with you.
Hal Sundt:Yeah well, thank you so much for for having me on. This has been a blast. I, I, uh, I, I always wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid and I found out pretty early on that I'm red, green, colorblind, and so that went out the window and I think also my eyesight in general would have made it not possible. But, uh, the chance to get to talk to uh fighter pilots and be around them, to me it's, it's, it's kind of another way to fulfill that dream. So this is every time I get a chance to talk to anyone who's who's flying it, it's, it's or has flown it's. It's really cool. So thank you for that. Um the uh.
Hal Sundt:Right now I'm uh, uh, trying to develop a book, oddly enough, about insurance. Trying to develop a book, oddly enough, about insurance. It's this thing that I think it affects all of our lives. And yet whenever I ask anyone, okay, how does that actually work? Nobody has a really clean, clear cut answer for me and I'm like, oh, that's so weird that here's this thing that we all have to pay for in some capacity and we kind of don't know why. I just opened my mail and I'm like, oh, and I write the check and I and I go on. Um, in particular, I think I'm working on narrowing the focus, but I'm interested in the relationship between insurance and adventure and discovery, because I think in a lot of ways insurance has this, this negative rep, and I think in some ways that's probably earned. But there are some ways where insurance, I think, does really great things. It it enables you to I don't know try and go to space or circumnavigate the globe or whatever, and I think that there's a cool connection relationship there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I have to agree with you that most people don't know understand insurance. I'll give you an example you have insurance on your house, you have it on your car, but I guarantee you the majority of folks don't know how to insure their own money in the bank, insure it in the market, and things like that. How do you create that hedging capability? How do you hedge against the downside? Why do you want to hedge against the downside? Because, like you said, that allows you to be more innovative. How are you going to be more successful in the future? And that is if you protect the downside.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And, by the way, fighter aviation, one of the things we learned, one of the key tenets we learned, is always there's a saying we have everybody's trying to kill you right, and it doesn't mean everybody's really trying to kill you, but if you ever watched kids walk across the street in a crosswalk looking at their phone and you see a driver, somebody's texting and driving, who's trying to kill whom there, right? So if you think like this and this is Mike, I hate the word mindset, but this is what we think about in aviation is, how do you hedge, how do you protect the downside? And when you protect the downside, you get unlimited upside, so I'd have to agree with you on that. Yeah, cool. And then how can we, how can our listeners, get in touch with you?
Hal Sundt:oh yeah, so I've just got a website. It's my name, hal suntcom, and there's a like a contact me page and you can shoot me an email and I'm I'm happy to talk with you. Writing is often a kind of a lonely thing, so it's it's really cool to get to talk with anyone and this is so fun. I was fun when you wrote to me that you'd read the book and wanted to have me on. I was like, hey, this is great, this is the fun part.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Oh, this is a blast. Like I said, I mentioned to you the other day that I came across a book when I was looking for some stuff on statistics and entropy and sacred geometry. So I wasn't even looking for this and I saw an A-10 on there. I'm like, oh look, somebody wrote a book about an A-10. Cute. And then I read the top how the Military Reformers and I'm like, ooh, I know that Flipped it open real fast. I'm like done buying it. Read it on the beach that afternoon. No-transcript, but for business leaders as well, Because what's in this book is really how do you fight bureaucracies and how you develop something that your customers actually need. So, Hal, I wanted to thank you for writing the book and really appreciate your time today.
Hal Sundt:Oh, thank you, and I got to just say the fact that you read it on the beach and read it in two days. I mean, if we talk about sort of purpose-built design, I hoped to write something that someone could pick up and read in like two days. My initial thinking was I wanted to write something that, like my dad, would get at a bookstore in the airport and read on like a cross country trip. And this is that basically describes it so any any time those books have popped up.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We've had one on LSD and Nazis and the CIA that I found in an airport in the next week, and Norman Oleron talking about the LSD, nazis and the CIA. So that's what I like is hey, when something's out there, let's go find those people that are. I imagine you didn't even know how well this connects to John Boyd's Observer Orientated Side Act loop. Right, you just said early on that you're familiar with destruction and creations and, excuse me, destruction and creation and patterns of conflict. But and the whole point of this is, you don't need to know everything, it's just you. You have a a piece of the of the whole picture and that that's important.
Hal Sundt:Well, awesome, well, thank you again.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right, thanks again.
