The Stealth bomber story you haven't heard; it doesn't work, and it'll probably crash.

• Author: Shugar, Scott

The Stealth Bomber Story You Haven't Heard

It was star date 5027.4 when the Enterprise was suddenly surrounded by Romulan spacecraft that swooped in undetected by any of the Federation starship's sensors. Spock, of course, figured out how that happened: "I believe the Romulans have developed a cloaking device." Later, Spock and Captain Kirk were able to infiltrate the enemy commander's vessel and teleport the gadget back aboard. The plan was for the Enterprise to use it to slip away unnoticed. But the engineering officer, Lieutenant Commander Scott, soon discovered that this was easier said than done. After working feverishly, Scotty reported to Kirk, "I've got the device installed, but bless me if I know whether it's going to work. It's the biggest guess I've ever made. . . . I don't know whether our circuits can handle this alien contraption."

Well, thanks to cheap special effects, the thing worked perfectly and the Enterprise escaped undamaged. But Scotty was right--you wouldn't put much faith in such a revolutionary idea as "cloaking" without doing a lot of testing first.

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between Star Trek and the Pentagon.

In the past few years, the Defense Department's most elaborate attempt at cloaking, the B-2 stealth bomber, has certainly drawn plenty of attention for its price tag and the obscurity of its mission. In 1981, the Air Force estimated that a force of 133 B-2s could be procured for $32.7 billion. By mid-1989, that cost had grown to $70.2 billion. When in mid-1990 the Department of Defense (DOD) decided to acquire only 75 B-2s (10 have been funded thus far) it estimated the cost of that reduced purchase to be $62.8 billion. Last September, the General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that the total cost of buying and operating the 75 aircraft for their likely life span would be around $84 billion. That easily qualifies the B-2 as the second most expensive weapon in American history (first place: the Trident ballistic missile submarine). CIA director William Webster once said that developing the B-2's stealth technology "cost this country over $1 million an hour."

Originally the nuclear-armed B-2 was supposed to fly over its Soviet targets at a fairly high altitude, 20,000 feet or so. But only a few years into the project, the plane's wing was redesigned so that it could also fly the same sort of low-level flight profile that is currently used by our B-52s. The B-52s are down there because they can't evade radar detection at high altitude. But it's not clear why a truly stealthy bomber would have to be down on the deck. And in the mid-eighties, the joint chiefs of staff claimed that a clear advantage of the B-2 over land- or sub-based nuclear missiles was that it could locate and attack "strategic relocatable targets," such as mobile missiles. But now the Air Force admits that the plane can't do that without considerable additional investments in sensor technology. For now, the plane could be used only against stationary military targets like command centers and ICBM silos--if there were any left by the time the bombers got over them, several hours after our missiles had already done their work.

But for all the notice that's been paid to the B-2's cost and purpose, there has been remarkably little energy spent on something even more basic: Will the airplane actually be able to perform as advertised, and has the Pentagon or the contractor tried very hard to find that out? The sad answers to these essential questions are No and No. That's because in producing the B-2, the Pentagon and the contractor have committed every kind of deception--from intellectual dishonesty through cover-up all the way to criminal fraud.

Edsel in uniform

In 1984, an automated anti-aircraft gun made by Ford called DIVAD achieved a perverse distinction--it became one of the few weapons in the history of the U.S. military to get canceled after reaching the production stage. That rarity was accomplished only because of an extraordinarily phony testing program--or rather, because writer Gregg Easterbrook exposed that phoniness in several justly celebrated articles. The DIVAD, reported Easterbrook, "won" a "shootout" by scoring 10 fewer hits--at shorter range--than the competing machine, and managing to hit only helicopters--never airplanes. In one subsequent test, DIVAD's radar locked onto a latrine fan. In another, the gun first aimed at a reviewing stand full of top brass observers and then just blasted away into the ground, nowhere near the hovering target helicopter.

All this slipshod "research" ended up costing the taxpayers nearly $2 billion. If the DIVAD scandal had at least produced some lasting insight in the Pentagon about the importance of honest weapons testing, that $2 billion might have been a good investment. Guess again. The B-2 program proves that the defense world's institutional memory is less than six years. The true scandal of the stealth bomber is that it is the DIVAD testing fiasco writ large--in dollars, at least 10 times as large so far. Never before in the history of weapons has so much money been spent on so little performance.

In 1980, when Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and his undersecretary for R&D, William Perry, revealed the concept of stealth, Perry described it as a "technology that makes an aircraft invisible to radar." Soon enough, the papers were confirming that astonishing breakthrough. The New York Times was referring to "aircraft that, because of configuration and surface materials and paint patterns, would reflect almost no recognizable radar signals." And The Wall Street Journal said stealth allows "fast-moving objects to evade radar detection, giving weapons using it a tremendous ability for surprise attacks." Last summer, this near-invincible characterization was still going strong. General Larry Welch, at the time the senior officer in the Air Force, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the B-2's technology put its radar return in the "insect category."

There are a couple of things you'd want to know about the B-2 before you bought any of that. One, does it stay in the insect category from all angles and no matter what kind of radars are shined on it? Two, even if it does manage that feat, does it do so without sacrificing the aerodynamic performance--such as stability and range--we'd expect and demand from a nonstealthy strategic bomber?

The disaster of the B-2 is that these good questions have gone an awfully long and expensive time without being answered. And that's mostly because the classification of a "black" program creates such a dense wall between those most apt to ask such questions and those in the best position to answer them. More precisely, blackness is like shutters, with the Pentagon holding the only cord. If DOD has a test result it can present as favorable, it will publicize it. Otherwise, results are not released.

On the surface, it might seem as though these questions are not being overlooked. After all, the current budget authorization for the B-2 makes the release of funds for the procurement of additional aircraft contingent on the satisfaction of certain testing and performance "fences," as certified by the Defense Science Board (DSB). During last summer's debate on the defense bill, Senator James Exon expressed his satisfaction with the "fence" arrangement this way: "One of the major principles we have followed on this system is to fly before we buy, eliminating concurrency between the testing of developed systems and their production in quantity." But that concurrency is exactly what the B-2 program has spectacularly failed to eliminate. As Senator Dale Bumpers put it, "One of the big mistakes here is that we did not build a prototype." Although the TV and print ads for the B-2 that...