Memorial, Henry asked the driver to pun over. “Come back for us at nine.”
He led Jake toward the walkway around the Tidal Basin. Across the basin the Washington Monument rose toward the low clouds. Beyond it, Jake knew, but not visible from here, was the White House.
Jake broke the silence first. “Does Admiral Dunedin know we’re having this talk this morning, sir?”
“Yeah. I told him. You work for him. But I wanted to brief you personally. What do you know about stealth?”
“The usual,” Jake said, snuggling into his coat against the chill wind. “What’s in the papers. Not much.”
“The air force contracted for two prototype stealth fighters un- der a blanket of absolute secrecy. Lockheed got the production contract They call the thing the F-117A. It’s a fighter in name only; it’s really an attack plane — performance roughly equivalent to the A-7 without afterburner but carries less than half the A-7 weapons load. Primary weapons are Maverick missiles. It’s a little ridiculous to call a subsonic minibomber a fighter, but if they can keep the performance figures low-key they might get away with it.”
“I thought that thing was supposed to be a warp-three killing machine.”
“Yeah. I suspect the congressmen who agreed to vote for a huge multibillion-buck project with no public debate probably did too. But even supersonic ain’t possible. The thing doesn’t even have afterburners. Might go supersonic in a dive — I don’t know. Any- way, the air force got more bang for their buck with the stealth bomber, the B-2, which Northrop is building. It’s also subsonic, a flying wing, but big and capable with a good fuel load. The only problem is the B-2s cost $516 million a pop, so unless you’re send- ing them to Moscow to save the human race, you can’t justify risking them on anything else. A B-2 isn’t a battlefield weapon.”
“How are these gizmos going to find their targets?” Conven- tional bombers used radar to navigate and locate their targets, but the transmission of a radar beam from a stealth bomber would reveal its location, thereby negating all the expensive technology used to hide it.
Admiral Henry settled onto a park bench with his back to the Tidal Basin. His eyes roamed the sidewalks, which were deserted on this early-spring morning- “You’re not going to believe this, but the air force hasn’t solved that problem yet. They’re waiting for technology that’s under development.”
Jake Grafton looked at Henry to see if he was serious. He ap- peared to be. “How about a satellite rig like the A-6G was going to have? The Navstar Global Positioning System?”
“That’s part of the plan, but the trouble with satellites is that you can’t count on them to last longer than forty-eight hours into a major East-West confrontation. And there’s only eight satellites aloft — the system needs twenty-eight. If they ever get all the birds aloft it should tell you your position to wnhin sixteen meters any- where on earth, but that’s a big if what with NASA’s shuttle and budget problems. No, I think the answer is going to be a system made up of a solid-state, ring-laser gyro inertial nav system, passive infrared sensors and a stealthy radar, one that powers up only enough to see what’s necessary, has automatic frequency agility, that sort of thing. That’s basically the A-6G and B-2 system. We’ll use it on the A-12. It’s still under development.”
Henry snorted and wiggled his buttocks to get comfortable. “Congress isn’t going to fund any significant B-2 buy. The way the whole budget process screwed up the buy, with inflation and pre- dictable overruns and underbuys, the last plane in the program is going to cost over a billion bucks. The manned strategic bomber is going the way of the giant panda and the California condor. We want to avoid the mistakes the air force made,”
“SAC will have more generals than airplanes.”
“The stealth concept has been around since World War II,” Henry continued, “more as a curio than anything else. It really became a driving force in aircraft design after Vietnam when it became apparent that conventional aircraft were going to have a very rough time surviving in the dense electronic environment over a Western European battlefield. Conventional electronic warfare can only do so much. The spooks say there’ll be too many frequen- cies and too many sensors. That’s the conventional wisdom, so it’s probably wrong.” He shrugged- “But any way you cut it, the attri- tion rate over that battlefield would be high, which favors the Sovi- ets. They have lots of planes and we can’t match them in quantity. So we would lose. Ergo, stealth.”
“But we could match them in quantity,” Jake said. “At least the air force could build a lot of cheap airplanes optimized for one mission, like fighter or attack. No room on carriers for that kind of plane, of course.”
“The air force doesn’t want that. Their institutional ethic is for more complex, advanced aircraft with greater and greater capabil- ity. That’s the whole irony of the stealth fighter. They’ve billed this technology as a big advance but in reality they got a brand-new tactical bomber with 1950s performance. But, they argue, it’s survivable- Now. For the immediate future. Until and only until the Russians come up with a way to find these planes — or someone else figures out a way and the Russians steal it. Even so, the only thing that made first-generation stealth technology feasible was smart weapons, assuming the crew can find the target. These planes have little or no capability with air-to-mud dumb bombs.” Henry stared at his toes and wriggled them experimentally. “Can you imagine risking a five-hundred-million buck airplane to dump a load of thousand-pounders on a bridge?”
“Does stealth ensure survivability?” Jake prompted, too inter- ested to notice his continuing discomfort from the breeze off the river.
“Well, it all boils down to whether or not you think fixed air bases are survivable in the war the air force is building their planes to fight, and that is a war in Europe against the Soviets which has escalated to a nuclear exchange. If I were a Russian I wouldn’t worry much about these airplanes — neither of which has any off- concrete capability — I’d just knock out their bases at the beginning of hostilities and forget about them.”
“What about a conventional war with the Soviets?”
“If anyone has figured out a way to keep it from going nuclear, I haven’t heard about it.”
“How many Maverick missiles are there? A couple thousand?”
“Twice that.”
“That’s still no more than a week or two’s supply. It’d better be a damn short war.”
The admiral grunted. “The basic dilemma: without stealth tech- nology the air force says planes can’t survive over a modern battle- field; with stealth they must use only sophisticated weapons that are too expensive to buy in quantity- And they’re not as reliable as cheap weapons. And if the airplanes truly are a threat, the Soviets have a tremendous stimulus to escalate the war to a nuclear strike to eliminate their bases.” He chopped the air with the cutting edge of his hand. ‘This stuff is grotesquely expensive.”
“Sounds like we’ve priced ourselves out of the war business.”
“I fucking wish! But enough philosophy. Stealth technology cer- tainly deserves a lot of thought. It’s basically just techniques to lower an aircraft’s electromagnetic signature in the military wave- lengths: radio — which is radar — and heat — infrared. And they’re trying to minimize the distance the plane can be detected by ear and by eye. Minimizring the RCS — the Radar Cross Section — and the heat signature are the two most important factors and end up driving the design process. But it’s tough. For example, to half the radar detection range you must lower the RCS by a factor of six- teen — the fourth root. To lower the IR signature in any meaningful manner you must give up afterburners for your engines and bury the engines inside the airplane to cool the exhaust gases, the sum total of which is less thrust. Consequently we are led kicking and screaming into the world of design compromises, which is a handy catchall for mission compromises, performance and range and payload compromises, bang-and- buck compromises. That’s where you come in.”
Admiral Henry rose from the bench and sauntered along the walk discussing the various methods and techniques that lowered, little by little, the radar and heat signatures of an aircraft. He talked about wing and fuselage shape, special materials, paint, en- gine and inlet duct design and placement, every aspect of aircraft construction. Stealth, he said, involved them all. Finally he fell silent and walked along with his shoulders rounded, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
Jake spoke. “If the best the air force could get out of their stealth attack plane was A-7 performance, is it a good idea for the navy to spend billions on one? We can’t go buying airplanes to fight just one war. and we need a sufficient quantity of planes to equip the carriers. Five gee-whiz killing machines a year won’t do us any good at all.”
The admiral stopped dead and scrutinized Jake. Slowly a grin lifted the comers of his mouth. “I knew you were the right guy for this job.”
He resumed walking, his step firmer, more confident. “The first question is what kind of fights are we going to get into in the future. And the answer, I suspect, is more of the same. I think the likelihood of an all-out war with the Soviets in Western Europe is pretty small — no way to prevent it from going nuclear and the Russians don’t want that any more than we do. But we must pre- pare to fight it, prepare to some degree, or we can’t deter it. I’d say it’s a lot more likely we’ll end up with more limited wars, like Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or the Persian
