Will This Bird Fly?

By Jacob V. Lamar

Sleek and sinister, the plane resembles a death machine out of Darth Vader's workshop. Swept back in a single delta-shaped wing, its curved surfaces feature no protruding stabilizers, almost no sharp corners or bends; its dark gray-and-black skin and skeleton consist of layers of graphite epoxies and ceramics honed to extremely fine tolerances. Virtually invisible to radar, it has been called the greatest achievement in military technology since the atom bomb. With the advent of the B-2 Stealth bomber, the U.S. could be on its way to maintaining military dominance well into the next century. Yet the B-2 is an enormously expensive aircraft with a dubious mission. It may pose more of a threat to the U.S. budget than to the Soviet Union.

The plane, which will not make its maiden flight until early next year, was rolled out to a specially composed Stealth Fanfare last week at the Air Force's Plant 42 in Palmdale, Calif. The coming-out party was both a public relations move and a pre-emptive strike against defense-budget cutters in Congress. Conservative estimates place the price tag on a single B-2 at $500 million. That figure could rise to $850 million by 1995. The Air Force wants to build 132 of the bombers for about $70 billion.

The Stealth is just one of an array of new and expensive weapons -- along with the Navy's $3 billion Seawolf submarine and the Army's $60 billion Forward Area Air Defense System -- that the Pentagon plans to purchase despite the urgent need for the incoming Bush Administration to bring down the $145 billion federal budget deficit. Defense specialist William Kaufmann of Harvard estimates that the military programs already in the acquisition pipeline could cost more than $900 billion -- three times the entire amount the Pentagon will spend this fiscal year. "The B-2 embodies the defense conundrum," says Gordon Adams, director of Washington's Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Defense Budget Project. "Controversial mission, extremely high costs -- all at a time of falling budgets."

George Bush promised during the campaign that he would fight to keep the defense budget 2% above the rise of inflation, but he is unlikely to get that much without a tax increase. Even with such an improbable hike, Bush's numbers would fall more than $140 billion short of what the military wants over the next five years. The President-elect has yet to spell out which military programs he will put on hold. Bush's likely pick for Defense Secretary, former Texas Senator John Tower, would only add to the controversy. An unabashed hawk with strong ties to military contractors, Tower came under fire last week from moderates who think the job should go to a disciplined financial manager. Tower wants to bring his own associates into the Pentagon, but Bush's aides are insisting that he accept an efficient administrator as his second-in- command. Bush's negotiators, said a source close to both Bush and Tower, want to be sure "they don't create another Cap Weinberger."

Despite its stratospheric cost, the Stealth bomber has the support not just of military boosters like Weinberger and Tower but also of Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Michael Dukakis. With good reason: if successful, the Stealth bomber could neutralize the strategic dominance that radar has enjoyed for half a century. In a war, the B-2 would fly undetected over Soviet territory and from an altitude of 30,000 ft. drop nuclear bombs on the Soviets' mobile SS-24 and SS-25 missiles. But Air Force Chief of Staff General Larry Welch indicated that the Stealth's primary targets would be Soviet ICBM silos and underground bunkers housing the command posts of top Soviet leaders. The B-2, in other words, could be considered a $500 million weapon aimed directly at Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Stealth bomber's detractors, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists, question whether the plane would really be so difficult to detect. High-flying Soviet radar planes might spot the B-2 from above, and the airborne tankers that would refuel the bomber en route to the Soviet Union would be as visible and vulnerable as an ordinary plane's. The bomber's secondary mission is also questionable: mobile targets such as SS-24s and SS-25s can be located only by intelligence satellites. If the Soviets were to knock out certain U.S. satellites or jam satellite communications with the B-2, the bomber would be left to hunt targets on its own -- an improbably difficult task, considering that the Stealth would be traveling at 600 m.p.h.

The defense establishment argues that the very existence of the B-2 will upend Soviet military strategy. "What counts is not what outside observers think about the airplane, but what the Soviets think about it," says Air Force Secretary Edward Aldridge. "They're going to be just devastated by their conclusions." The B-2, declares former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, "makes obsolescent $200 billion worth of Soviet air defenses."

Still, the same destructive tasks could be performed more cheaply by cruise missiles, which are also being constructed with radar-eluding Stealth technology. Hundreds of relatively low-cost cruise missiles could be fired from the ground, and cause just as much damage as the bombs dropped by the B- 2. Cynics complain that military leaders have selfish reasons for favoring manned aircraft. Says John Pike, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists: "You don't get ahead in the Air Force by pushing buttons to launch missiles."

Moreover, as Pike points out, the U.S. already has a new manned bomber: the B-1. The Pentagon has purchased 100 of the planes for a total of $28 billion. But the Air Force has conceded that the B-1 cannot yet perform its basic task -- low-flying penetration of the Soviet Union -- because its electronic jamming system does not work properly. Last year a B-1 crashed after colliding with wild geese. In the space of ten days last month, two more of the bombers went down during training flights. The latest disaster, which occurred in South Dakota, may have been caused by ice buildup on the plane's wings. Commercial airliners have long been equipped with deicers, but the B-1 unaccountably is not, even though the planes may be called upon to attack the Soviet Union in winter.

Jimmy Carter tried to cancel the B-1 in favor of the Stealth bomber. But the plane was rushed into production as part of Weinberger's helter-skelter defense buildup during the early years of the Reagan Administration. Now the U.S. may end up with two bombers: one that does not do its job, another that the country cannot afford. The Stealth bomber is sure to become the centerpiece of the defense debate that is about to begin.

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles and Bruce van Voorst/Washington