Pierre Sprey

Sprey died on August 5, 2021 of an apparent heart attack.

Pierre Sprey recorded music through his own label Mapleshade Records and sold high-end audiophile equipment. His recording with the Addicts Rehabilitation Center (ARC) Choir singing "Walk With Me" appears in Kanye West's 2004 hit "Jesus Walks." Sprey said he earned enough royalties from the West song "to support 30 of my money-losing jazz albums."

Pierre Sprey left the Pentagon in 1971. He and Colonel John Boyd worked with others in the Pentagon and Congress toward military reform, helping gain passage of military reform legislation in the early 1980s.

During the 1960s, Pierre Sprey belonged to a group of defense “analysts” who called themselves the 'Fighter Mafia'. At the time he joined them, he had been a weapons system analyst working for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. The 'Fighter Mafia' group of defense analysts worked behind the scenes in the late 1960s to advocate a lightweight fighter as an alternative to the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle.

Sprey was born in Nice, France in 1937, and raised in New York. Sprey was admitted to Yale university at the age of fifteen and graduated after four year with a double major in French literature and Mechanical Engineering. He later continued his education at Cornell University where he studied mathematical statistics and operations research. He subsequently worked at Grumman Aircraft as a consulting statistician on space and commercial transportation projects. From 1966 to 1970 he was a special assistant at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.