John Richard Boyd (January 23, 1927 – March 9, 1997) was a United States Air Force fighter pilot and Pentagon consultant during the second half of the 20th century.

[3] Boyd was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Force following completion of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program at the University of Iowa.

[4] In the two months until the Korean War armistice on July 27, Boyd flew 22 missions in F-86 Sabres, in which he did not fire his guns or score a kill.

According to his biographer, Robert Coram, Boyd was also known at different points of his career as "The Mad Major" for the intensity of his passions, as "Genghis John" for his confrontational style of interpersonal discussion, and as the "Ghetto Colonel" for his spartan lifestyle.

The Air Force's FX project (subsequently the F-15) was then floundering, but Boyd's deployment orders to Vietnam were canceled, and he was brought to the Pentagon to redo the tradeoff studies according to E-M theory.

[11] With Colonel Everest Riccioni and Pierre Sprey, Boyd formed a small advocacy group within Headquarters USAF that dubbed itself the "Fighter Mafia.

"[12] Riccioni was an Air Force fighter pilot assigned to a staff position in Research and Development, and Sprey was a civilian statistician working in systems analysis.

Both the Department of Defense and the Air Force went ahead with the program and stipulated a "design to cost" basis no more than $3 million per copy over 300 aircraft.

The program soon went against the Fighter Mafia's vision since it was not the stripped-down air-to-air specialist that they had envisioned but a heavier multi-role fighter-bomber with advanced avionics, an active radar, and radar-guided missiles.

[20] In a letter to the editor of Inside the Pentagon, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps General Charles C. Krulak is quoted as saying, "The Iraqi army collapsed morally and intellectually under the onslaught of American and Coalition forces.

[22] The key concept he developed in the early 1970s as a result of this observation was the decision making cycle or OODA loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event.

[24][25] Boyd also served to revolutionize air-to-air combat in that he was the author of the Aerial Attack Study, which became the official tactics manual for fighter aircraft.

"Ray" Leopold, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, Jim Burton, and Tom Christie, were described by writer Coram as Boyd's "acolytes".