[1][2] Mafia member Harry Hillaker designed the purely air superiority day fighter prototype YF-16, which won the LWF contest but then turned into the multi-role F-16 Fighting Falcon.
The group's nickname, a professional jest coined by Everest Riccioni,[3] an Air Force member of Italian heritage, was a rejoinder to the "Bomber Mafia".
[4] Boyd's work with energy–maneuverability theory (E-M) modeling, enabling quantitative comparison of the performance of aircraft in terms of air combat maneuvering in the context of dogfighting, demonstrated that the F-111 would be poorly suited to the role of fighter.
The Air Force F-X proposal was quietly rewritten to reflect his findings, dropping a heavy swing-wing from the design, lowering the gross weight from 60,000+ pounds to slightly below 40,000, and decreasing the top speed from Mach 2.7 to 2.3–2.5.
This money was split between Northrop and General Dynamics to build the embodiment of Boyd's E-M theory – a small, low-drag, low-weight, pure air-to-air fighter with no bomb racks.
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and his deputy David Packard had entered office with the Nixon administration in 1969 and were tasked with whipping the military purchasing system into shape.
Packard was interested in the idea of prototyping weapons before sending them into production, given issues stemming from McNamara's "Total Package Procurement Concept" where analysis and quantification was done on paper.
As the Mafia's civilian associate member Pierre Sprey argued that sneaking up on an unaware opponent was the most important criterion of a good fighter, the LWF's small size would also make it less visible to the eye.
However, it lost in the USAF Enhanced Tactical Fighter competition to a new F-15 model, the 15-hardpoint F-15E Strike Eagle, in part due to the latter's lower cost and twin engines.
[13] Critics argue that the F-15 and F-16 succeeded because they moved away from the Fighter Mafia's ideas, seeing significant export success because they were multi-role aircraft with active radar homing missiles.