program managers in the Department of Defense. The mission of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center had changed as well. With budget cutbacks and greater downsizing in all strategic bombardment units, some place had to be designated to keep all these inactive aircraft until they might be needed again. Although most were sent to the “boneyard, ” the Air Force Aerospace Maintenance and Restoration Center at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona, to be stored for spare parts or for scrap, a few were secretly sent to Dreamland, in the desert of central Nevada, for research and special missions. The place was the Strategic Air Reserve Group, commanded by General Elliott. SARG took the work of the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center one step furtherlt created an operational unit out of exotic research experiments. Whereas the Old Dog became an operational mission completely by accident, now other “Old Dogs” were being created and held in reserve until needed. The new Old Dogs collected over the years now included six B-52 bombers; two B-1 bombers-both original A-models; six F-111G fighter-bombers, which were formerly SAC FB-1 11A strategic bombers; and the newest arrival, McLanahan’s B-2 Black Knight bomber. “The other task you’ve got is ASIS, ” Ormack continued. “Air Force is finally considering putting a pilot-trained navigatorbombardier on board the B-2 instead of the current navigatortrained ‘mission commander’ layout. The cockpit is designed for two pilots; you have to redesign it for a weapons system officer and defensive systems operator, but retain the dual pilot control capability. You’ve got a few months, no more than four, to get ASIS ready for full-scale production and retrofit, including engineering blueprints and work plan.” He smiled mischievously and added, “The B-2 pilot ‘union’ is not too happy about this, as you might expect. They think ASIS is a bunch of crap, that the B-2 is automated enough to not need a navigator, and the B-2 should keep its two pilots. I think our experience with the Old Dog proved otherwise.” McLanahan laughed. “That’s an understatement. Now, what’s ASIS stand for?”
“Depends on who you ask, ” Ormack said dryly. “Officially Attack Systems Integration Station. The flight test pilots and B-2 cadre call it something else-in honor of all navigators, of course. “What’s that?” ‘Additional shit inside.” McLanahan laughed again. “Figures.” Slamming navigators was common fare in this fighter pilot’s Mecca in southern Nevada. Still awestruck, he walked toward the huge batwinged bomber sitting inside the brilliantly lit hangar. The Black Knight was designed specifically to attack multiple, heavily defended, and mobile targets around the world with high probability of damage and high probability of survival. To fly nearly five thousand miles unrefueled, the B-2 had to be huge-it had the same wingspan as a B-52 and almost the same fuel capacity, able to carry more than its own weight in jet fuel. In the past, building a bomber of that size meant it was a sitting duck for enemy defenses-a quarter-to-half-million pounds of steel flying around made a very easy target for enemy acquisition and weapons-guidance radars. The B-52, first designed in the 1 940s when it was designed to fly at extremely high altitudes, eventually had to rely on flying at treetop level, electronic jammers and decoys, and plain old circumnavigation of enemy threats to evade attack. The B-58 Hustler bomber relied on flat-out supersonic speed. The FB111 and B- 1 strategic bombers utilized speed, a cleaner “stealthier” design, advanced electronic countermeasures, and terrain-following radar to help themselves penetrate stiff defenses. But, with rapid advances in fighter technology, surface-to-air missiles, and early warning and tracking radars, even the sleek, deadly B-1 would soon be vulnerable to attack. The black monster before Patrick McLanahan was the latest answer. The B-2 was still a quarter-million-pound bomber, but most of its larger structural surfaces were made of nonmetallic composites that reduced or reflected enemy radar energy; reflected energy is dispersed in specific narrow beam paths, or lobes, which greatly decreases the strength of the reflected energy. It had no vertical flight-control surfaces that could act as a radar reflector-viewed on edge, it appeared to be nothing more than a dark sliver, like a slender tadpole. Each wing was made of two huge pieces of composite material, joined like a plastic model-that meant there were no structural ribs to break, no rivets attaching the skin to a skeleton, producing an aircraft that was as strong at the wingtips as it was at the fuselage. Its four turbofan engines were buried within V-shaped wings, which eliminated telltale heat emissions, and engine components were cooled with jet fuel itself to further reduce heat emissions. Its state-of-the-art navigation systems, attack radars, and sensors were so advanced that the B-2 could strike targets several miles before the bomber could be detected by enemy acquisition radars. The cost of the Black Knight bomber program was staggering-a half billion dollars per plane and nearly eighty billion dollars for an entire fleet, including research, development, and basing. A planned total purchase of one hundred and thirty-two B-2s in five years quickly went away, replaced with an extended procurement deal that would bring only seventy-five bombers on-line over ten years. Even that reduced production rate had been compromised-by April of 1992 there were only twelve fully operational B-2 in the inventory, including the initial three airframes used for testing and evaluation and nine more that had been purchased in 1991. The 1992 and 1993 budgets had carried only “life-support” funding for the B-2-just enough money to keep the program alive while retaining the ability to quickly gear up production if the need arose. Because there would only be seventy-five B-2s active by the turn of the century, the B-52-slated for replacement by the Black Knight-would still be in the active strategic nuclear penetrator arsenal well into the twenty-first century. But the B-2, despite charges of being a “billion-dollar boon SK operational, was now a reality and had proven itself ready to go to war in extensive flight testing. The first Black Knight bomber squadronthe 393rd Bomb Squadron “Tigers”the same unit that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War Il-had been activated at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri a few months earlier, and when that happened, it had rendered billions of dollars’ worth of the enemy’s military airdefense hardware instantly obsolete. “Got time for a walkaround, sir?” McLanahan asked. “You bet, ” the young Air Force General replied. Ormack let Patrick drink in the sight of the magnificent black bomber before him as Patrick stepped toward it for a walkaround “getacquainted” inspection. The B-2 had no fuselage as on more conventional airplanes; it was as if someone had sawed off the wings of a B-52, stuck them together, and put wheels on it. For someone like McLanahan, who was accustomed to seeing the huge, drooping wings of the mighty B-52, it was amazing to notice that the B-2s, which were just as long and easily twice as wide, did not droop one inch-the composite structures were pound-forpound stronger than steel. The skin was perfectly smooth, with none of the stress wrinkles of the B-52, and it had no antennae attached to the hull that might act as a radar reflector. The plane’s “flying wing” design had no vertical flight control surfaces that would create a radar reflector; instead, it achieved stability by a series of split flaps / ailerons on the wing’s trailing edges, called “flaperons, ” which would deflect in pairs or singularly in response to a triple-redundant laser optic flight computer’s commands. The unique flaperon flight-control system, plus a thrust ejector system that directed engine exhaust across the flaperons to increase responsiveness, gave the huge bomber the roll response of a small fighter. To prevent any radar image “blooming” when the flaperons were deflected in flight-even the small flaperon deflection caused by aS-degree turn would increase the radar image size several times-the trailing edge of the B-2’s wings were staggered in a zigzag pattern, which prevented any reflected energy from returning directly back to the enemy’s radar receiver. Patrick ducked under the pointed nose on his way back to the double side-by-side bomb bays, the natural part of such an aircraft that would attract any SAC bombardier. The lower part of the nose section on either side of the nose gear had large rectangular windows protected by thick pads. “Are these the laser and IR windows?” Patrick asked Ormack. “You got it, Patrick, ” Ormack replied. “Miniature laser spotters / target designators and infrared detectors, slaved to the navigation system. The emitter windows and the cockpit windows are coated with an ultrathin material that allows radar energy to pass through the windows but not reflect back outwards, much like a one-way mirror. This reduces the radar reflectivity caused by energy bouncing off the crew members or equipment inside the plane itself. If allowed to reflect back, the radar return from the pilots’ helmets alone can effectively double the B-2’s radar signature.”
“Where’s the navigation radar? Is there one on the B-2?”
“You bet. The Black Knight has an AN/APQ-181 multimode radar mounted along the wing leading edges, with ground-mapping, terrain-following, targeting, surveillance, and rendezvous modes-we can even add air-to-air capability to the system. “Air-to-air on a B-2 bomber?” McLanahan whistled. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Not after what we did on the B-52 Old Dog, ” Ormack replied. “After our work in Dreamland putting antiair missiles on a B-52, I don’t think there’ll ever be another combat aircraft that can’t do a dozen different jobs, and that includes heavy bombers carrying air-to-air weapons. It makes sense-if you can take sixteen to twenty weapons of any kind into battle with you, you have the advantage. Besides, the B-2 is no slouch of a hot jet any way you look at it-the B-2 bomber has one-one hundredth the radar cross-section of an F-15 Eagle Fighter, one-twentieth the RCS of an F-23 Wildcat fighter-which means it could engage targets before the other guy even knows the B-2 is out there-and at high altitude it has the same roll rate and can pull as many Gs as an F-4 Phantom.” The underside of the B-2 was like a huge dark thunder cloud-it seemed to stretch out forever, sucking up every particle of light. Patrick was surprised by what he found-two cavernous weapon bays. “It’s a hell a lot bigger than I thought, General, ” he said. “Each bomb bay carries one Common Strategic Rotary Launcher filled with eight SRAM short-
