Can you roast Pierre Sprey and William Lind?
Pierre Sprey (aka “That old grouchy asshole”) is a fucking hack who isn’t half as smart or important as he thinks he is. I’d call him washed up but that would imply he knew anything of value to begin with. He was a defense analyst in the 1960s-70s and was part of the “Fighter Mafia” that argued for major changes in fighter design - specifically, they argued for maneuverability and against those crazy new-fangled “radars” and “long range missiles.” They’re often credited for influencing the design of the F-15 and F-16, which is half-true - those fighters are highly maneuverable and had designs that took into account John Boyd’s E-M theory, but they also have some damn good radars and AIM-7s/AIM-120s. Sprey likes to shit all over what the F-15 became despite it having a literally perfect air-to-air combat record of over 100 aerial kills and 0 losses because he can’t ever admit to being wrong.
Sprey also refers to himself as “the father of the A-10″ despite the fact that 1)all he did was lay out some basic requirements and 2) nearly everything that makes the A-10 good was against his advice. He argued vehemently for a gun-only plane because apparently dropping bombs and launching missiles would expose the plane to AA fire but strafing runs wouldn’t because of reasons.
You’ll often see Sprey cited in F-35-critical articles because he never got off his bullshit of “radar is useless all you need is maneuverability and some Fox-2s” and most reporters aren’t educated enough to know how full of it he is. He’s responsible for every single one of those stupid “it’s a turkey, can’t fly, can’t turn, etc” comments you see in every F-35 discussion online so thank him next time you’re wading through that crap.
Keep in mind through all this that he has literally no relevant experience whatsoever - he has an engineering degree but has never done any actual engineering work. He’s an academic who never mentally left the Ivory Tower and thinks everything works exactly as it should in whatever hypothetical friction-less vacuum model he’s developed in his head.
William Lind is a conservative political writer who has such insightful views as “police should carry RPGs as standard issue.” He’s most known for being one of the first to describe the concept of Fourth-generation Warfare, which is basically just “insurgency but wrapped up in enough meaningless jargon to make it sounds like I’m talking about something totally new and not in anyway a repackaging of every asymmetrical warfare concept in history.” Seriously, all he did was layout the basic concepts of every single state-vs-non-state-actor conflict that’s ever occurred and packaged it as some radical new prediction of what war will be like in the 21st century.
I don’t have nearly as many strong opinions on him as I do on Sprey because for the most part he’s just your standard-issue right-wing nut job. There’s nothing I can say about him that isn’t said daily about anyone else who’s gone a bit too far to that end of the political spectrum.
