What is the Air Force really worried about: national security or job security?

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

Maybe the Pentagon wants the new stealth planes because they are technological marvels that will revolutionize air warfare. Or maybe it's just because without them, the pilots might lose their jobs.

"It is difficult at this remove to view dispassionately the short-sightedness of the prevailing official attitudes towards the new weapon," Peter Young, a British general has written of the decade following the invention of the airplane. "In 1912 the American colonel Isaac Newton Lewis fitted his famous aircooled machine gun to a Wright Biplane. Official reaction was tepid." That

attitude did not last. As tenaciously as military officialdom once opposed the notion that the airplane's time had come, it now resists the possibility that its time is about to pass. The Pentagon is about to commit itself to three new manned aircraft of record-setting expense: the B2 bomber, the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF), and the A12 Advanced Tactical Aircraft. (If Congress lets it; the House defense bill minimized B2 funds and cut the ATF altogether.) Though information about the B2 is slowly becoming available, hardly anything has been published about the ATF and A12, which combined will likely cost more than the stealth bomber program. ATF, intended to be the world's hottest "air superiority" fighter, is being designed by the Air Force. The A12, intended to attack land targets from carrier decks, is being designed by the Navy. Both will be stealth-that is, radar-elud-

ing-aircraft incorporating features similar to those of the B2. Because unusual hierarchies of secrecy cloak stealth programs, it is difficult to estimate whether these aircraft will succeed from a technical standpoint. For some time the military refused to confirm the existence of the B2 or the F117, a limited-edition stealth fighter built principally to determine whether radar-evading jets could be aerodynamically controllable. Today the Pentagon says precious little about ATF; even less about the A12. Both are black programs, meaning many references blacked out of public documents. (The Pentagon now shuns that term, preferring Special Access Required. Slang had mutated to the point that public-record programs were called white;" work areas referred to as "the white world" and "the black world.") Assessing whether the new aircraft can fly from the standpoint of cost effectiveness may be a different matter. The planes will incorporate so many costly features-some focused more on career security for the pilots' guild than on military necessity-that the world's richest country will be able to afford only a comparative handful.

Current plans call for 132 B2s and 750 ATFS. During World War II the U.S. fielded aircraft in quantities like these: 16,494 B24 bombers, 13,586 P51 fighters. The advent of the jet age did not immediately alter this equation: in 1951 the Air Force

acquired 6,300 aircraft, mostly jets, at an average of $1.3 million in current dollars. But by 1984 the service was spending an average of $40 million in current dollars for the mere 322 aircraft acquired that year. At about $530 million, each B2 will cost nearly 400 times as much in real terms as a B24. Each ATF will cost about 150 times as much, adjusted for inflation, as a P5 1.

If the only factor at play here were trading more expensive and glorious aircraft for steadily reducing numbers-Soviet military jet production has declined too, though not as rapidly as ours-the choice might be a toss-up. But while the number of combat aircraft declines, antiaircraft weapons are multiplying like mad. Recent advances in computers, sensors and manufacturing techniques have rendered surface-to-air missiles SAMS) increasingly effective. Improved air-to-air missiles are in the offing, and the miniature SAM exemplified by the U.S.-built Stinger has now been added to the quiver. Wielded by illiterate Afghan guerrillas, this $40,000 weapon overwhelmed Soviet high-performance jets. In the Pentagon's vision of the future a small force of sensationally expensive manned aircraft will do battle against a huge proliferation of such weapons.

Air-superiority fighters and superbombers have become as much symbols of American technical prestige as elements of military proficiency. Alternatives such as unmanned drones and affordable manned designs are spurned for their very worldliness. Yet a measure of subtle awareness in military circles that the end for traditional aircraft may be in sight is that already occupants of the cockpit are called not pilots or people but "humans." Airplanes, their primary role increasingly to serve as racks from which to launch missiles, are called "platforms." Around Air Force labs I heard many references to "the human on the platform."

The most renowned flying humans are those who sit in fighters. Unlike bomber or transport pilots, fighter jocks are glory hounds and individualists. The weapons they use pose little threat to noncombatants. Their quarry are other virtuosos who know the risks and even have a sporting chance to bail out if hit: more like the competition than the enemy. Now there's a lifestyle.

Thus the romance of the fighter jock dies hard. Of equal importance, while the case for $530 million for any bomber is difficult to make, the ATF and A12 projects invoke shades of gray, with many points in favor of such aircraft. Are there enough? The scenario pilots love

It's the year 2000. Fighting breaks out along the

Central Front; rationality or terror prevents the adversaries from resorting to nuclear malice. Some ATF squadrons prepare to lead a raid, the objective being a Warsaw Pact airfield. A group of F15s and F16s, frontline fighters from the 1980s, crosses into Warsaw Pact territory flying "terrain masked," down low where ground radars

cannot see them. these planes have their own radars and electronic jammers cranked to full blast. During the first phase of the strike, ground guns and SAMs pose the main hazard. But new Soviet interceptors operating in the sanctity of Warsaw Pact airspace can use improved radars to spy attackers in the otherwise elusive low position. So even if the F15s and F16s make it past the ground weapons they still face jeopardy.

Concurrently ATFs cross enemy lines at a majestic altitude, high above the range of battlefield weapons. Because ATF has stealth, it is reasonably secure against radar detection at altitudes conventional aircraft would find suicidal. While the B2 is a subsonic aircraft, in order to be capable of intercontinental travel, the shorter-range ATF cruises at around mach 1.5. Unlike contemporary fighters that have impressive top speeds but rarely use them because then fuel consumption goes off the scale, new "dry supersonic" motors enable ATF to sustain mach velocity without activating an afterburner. Thus these fighters transit the lethal envelopes of defenses in less time than current aircraft. The ATFs are operating with radars and jammers off, so as not to betray their presence. Each is receiving a rich stream of information from U.S. sensors in space and at distant locations, while employing

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