Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  Have Blue flew against the most sophisticated radars on earth, I think, and broke every record for low radar cross section. At one point we had flown right next to a big Boeing E-3 AWACS, with all its powerful electronics beaming full blast in all directions. Those guys liked to brag that they could actually find a needle in a haystack. Well, maybe needles were easier to find than airplanes.

  3

  THE SILVER BULLET

  MY STYLE OF LEADERSHIP at the Skunk Works was markedly different from Kelly Johnson’s, and it was wryly described by John Parangosky, the CIA’s program manager for several Skunk Works projects, who knew us extremely well: “Kelly ruled by his bad temper. Ben Rich rules with those damned bad jokes.” I was ebullient, energetic, a perennial schmoozer and cheerleader with an endless supply of one-liners and farmer’s daughter jokes supplied fresh daily by my brother, a television producer on a situation comedy. Being so “user-friendly” was in sharp contrast to Kelly, who seldom made small talk and expected crisp, informed responses from his senior people to his sharp, pointed questions. When younger employees happened to see Kelly heading their way, they often dove for cover. I believed in the nonthreatening but benignly authoritarian approach to maintain high morale and team spirit. I spent half my time complimenting my troops and the other half bawling them out. Of course, by 1978, I was bouncing on pink clouds, enjoying the hosannas reserved either for angels or the head of a research and development outfit that produced a technology everyone wanted. Producing a new technology was the R & D equivalent of scaling Mount Everest. Northrop, our closest rival in developing stealth, was very good, but we were significantly better, and I was now taking meetings with admirals and four-star generals from all branches, each eager to buy into the new technology for their tanks and shells and missiles.

  Rolling small ball bearings across the desks of four-star generals had paid off handsomely. “Here’s the observability of your airplane on radar,” I declared to their astonishment. By contrast, most fighters in the current inventory had the radar signature of a Greyhound bus, so the Air Force could not wait to shrink to marble size and signed a contract with us to start engineering a stealth fighter in November 1977, one month ahead of Have Blue’s first flight test.

  I was thunderstruck. We were rewarded with a development contract for a new fighter before our Have Blue demonstrator actually proved it could fly. No one in the defense business would be able to recall an occasion when the blue-suiters pulled an end run around their own inviolate rule: “Fly it before you buy it.”

  Military aircraft were so expensive and complex and represented such a sizable investment of taxpayers’ money that no manufacturer expected to win a contract without first jumping through an endless series of procurement hoops, culminating in the flight-testing phase, that under normal circumstances stretched nearly ten or more years. From start to finish, a new airplane could take as long as twelve years before taking its place in the inventory and become operational on a flight line long after it was already obsolete. But that was how the bureaucracy did business. Within the Air Force itself, the decision to proceed on a particular project usually followed months, sometimes years, of internal analysis, debate, and infighting, which ensured that every new airplane was designated for a very specific operational purpose.

  In our case the airplane was untested and its strategic purpose unclear. But William Perry, the Pentagon’s chief for research and engineering, who had come into office with the new Carter administration in January 1977, took one look at the historic low observability results we achieved and immediately set up an office for counter-stealth research to investigate whether or not the Soviets had ongoing stealth projects; the CIA began an intensive search to find out what the Russians were doing in stealth technology by redirecting satellites to overfly their radar ranges. The agency concluded that their only real interest in stealth was some preliminary experiments with long-range missiles. Otherwise, stealth was not a priority for them. Why spend money on a costly stealth delivery system when the U.S. had so few defensive missile systems and none nearly as sophisticated as their own?

  The Soviets’ apparent indifference to stealth spurred Bill Perry into action. In the spring of 1977, he called in General Alton Slay, head of the Air Force Systems Command. “Al,” he said, “this stealth breakthrough is forcing me into a snap decision. We can’t sit around and play the usual development games here. Let’s start small with a few fighters and learn lessons applicable to building a stealth bomber.”

  The Air Force, like a shopper, bought by the pound: the lighter the cheaper. The rule of thumb was that the airplane’s structure cost roughly a thousand dollars a pound, while its avionics were prime cut—four thousand dollars a pound at 1970s prices. Had Perry immediately pushed for a stealth bomber, General Slay would probably have done all in his considerable power to kill it. Not because he opposed stealth, but he was then up to his eyeballs trying to make Rockwell’s troubled B-1A bomber live up to its advance billing as the successor to the B-52 long-range bomber. The B-1 was his number one priority. He very quickly got word sent to me via a subordinate: “Tell Ben Rich not to lobby around about a stealth bomber.” He was one tough hombre.

  In early June, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s NSC chief, whom I had never before met, decided to fly out to see Have Blue for himself. Brzezinski flew in an unmarked private jet to the remote base where I awaited him inside a tightly guarded, closed hangar. We spent several hours together. I let him kick Have Blue’s tires and peer into the cockpit. Inside a secure conference room next to the hanger, I briefed Brzezinski on the stealth program and he began to question me: “How much stealth is enough stealth?” “Could stealth be applied to a conventional airplane without having to start from scratch?” “How long would it take the Russians to duplicate our stealth diamond shape if a model fell into their hands?” “How long before the Russians are likely to produce counter-stealth weapons and technology?”

  Brzezinski scribbled my replies on a small pad. Then he asked me about the possibilities for developing a stealthy cruise missile that could be air-launched from a bomber and overfly unseen two thousand miles or more inside the Soviet Union to deliver a nuclear punch. I told him our preliminary design people were already at work on developing such a missile, which would be basically the same diamond shape as Have Blue. But without a cockpit in the configuration, the stealthiness was almost an order of magnitude better than even Have Blue—making our cruise missile design the stealthiest weapon system yet devised.

  I showed him a copy of a threat analysis study prepared for us by the Hughes radar people, who were the best in the business, predicting near invulnerability for a stealthy cruise missile attacking the most highly defended Soviet target versus only a probable 40 percent survivability rate for the B-1A bomber. He asked for a copy of the study, a photo of the Have Blue airplane, and design drawings of the cruise missile to show to President Carter.

  As he was leaving, Brzezinski asked me a bottom-line question: “If I were to accurately describe the significance of this stealth breakthrough to the president, what should I tell him?”

  “Two things,” I replied. “It changes the way that air wars will be fought from now on. And it cancels out all the tremendous investment the Russians have made in their defensive ground-to-air system. We can overfly them any time, at will.”

  “There is nothing in the Soviet system that can spot it in time to prevent a hit?”

  “That is correct,” I replied with confidence.

  Three weeks later, on June 30, 1977, the Carter administration cancelled the B-1A bomber program. I had no doubt there was a direct cause-effect relationship between our stealth breakthrough and scrubbing the new conventional bomber. When I heard the news, I knew there would be at least one powerful Air Force general hopping mad and looking for someone to blame. I buzzed my secretary and told her, “If General Slay calls, tell him I’m out of the country.”

  It would be several mon
ths before I received any definitive word from the government on how they would proceed on stealth. During this long silence, I would later learn, a behind-the-scenes debate raged among the top echelons of the Air Force and the Defense Department on the best uses of stealth to provide us with the maximum strategic advantage against the Soviet Union. Within the Air Force the debate was between the Strategic Air Command, furious at losing its B-1 bomber, and the Tactical Air Command, eager to add a stealth fighter to its inventory. The referees in the middle were Secretary of the Air Force Hans Mark, an atomic physicist and former director of NASA’s Ames laboratory, who was skeptical about stealth and a strong advocate of promoting missiles over manned bombers, and General David Jones, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who kept his powder dry and his opinions to himself until he was asked to make a decision. In the end it was General Jones who displayed the wisdom of Solomon: he gave SAC the green light to proceed with developing our cruise missile, and he approved the stealth fighter.

  General Bob Dixon, head of the Tactical Air Command, flew out to see me in Burbank. “Ben,” he said, “we want you to build us five silver bullets for starters. We’ll take twenty more down the line.”

  In the jargon of the trade, a silver bullet was a deadly secret weapon kept under tight wraps until it was ready to be used to take out an enemy in a Delta Force covert surgical strike. The Israeli air force hit against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb facility in Baghdad was the perfect example of a Delta Force–style surgical strike operation. The silver bullet would be used to quick-hit the highest-priority, heavily defended targets in the dead of night.

  Actually, it was an ideal Skunk Works project: tightly secret, building small numbers of hand-made airplanes rather quickly and efficiently. But I knew we also faced a steep learning curve leaping from building the small Have Blue demonstrator, with its off-the-shelf avionics, to a truly sophisticated larger fighter with novel and complex avionics and weapons systems.

  Not long after General Dixon’s visit, the chief of staff himself detoured from some business he had in San Diego, to drop by before going back to Washington. Among the services, the Navy was the most active in running “deep black” programs, especially in Navy SEAL penetrations of Soviet harbor and naval installations. But as General Jones reminded me over sandwiches in my office, “Your stealth fighter is the first black program the Air Force has ever run. Security is paramount. I doubt there are ten people in Washington aware of this project. Maintaining secrecy must be your number one priority, even ahead of keeping to the schedules and so forth. A leak in the papers would be disastrous. Be prepared to sacrifice efficiency or anything else to maintain the tight lid. Do that, Ben, and you’ll keep out of trouble. The payoff for this airplane will be total surprise on the enemy the first time it is used.” The president wanted Jones to personally brief Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Defense Secretary Harold Brown on Have Blue and the other stealth projects. I had a briefing book prepared, which he took with him back to Washington. Before he left, the general told me that Admiral Bobby Inman, head of the supersecret National Security Agency, which operated all U.S. satellite and communications monitoring activities, was being brought into our stealth project to take direct charge of communications security between the Skunk Works, the test site, and the Pentagon. We would be receiving special cryptographic gear and scrambler fax and telephone systems.

  I made a mental note that General Jones was not the one to complain to when Air Force security began driving me up a wall.

  By my third anniversary since taking over from Kelly Johnson in 1975, the Skunk Works had added one thousand new workers and by 1981 would employ seventy-five hundred. Our drafting rooms and workshops were operating on overtime; our assembly hangars hummed around the clock, on three shifts. In addition to stealth, we were updating squadrons of older Blackbird spy planes, now twenty-five years old, with new wiring and avionics. We were also building six brand-new TR-1 spy planes a year, for a total of thirty-five, the deal I had closed with General Jones the first year of my regime. I was happily putting in twelve- to fourteen-hour workdays and so was nearly everyone else. Still, as a businessman I believed in the adage of “strike while you’re still hammering”—and I pitched the Pentagon for seed money to develop stealthy helicopter rotor blades and anything else we could think up. Some wags in my employ presented me with a bowling ball stamped TOP SECRET. The attached card explained it was the equivalent of the radar cross section of the Pentagon, once we diamond-shaped it. The instructions said to roll it across the desk of the secretary of defense.

  I should have been in high clover instead of up to my lower lip in deep doo-doo, but General Al Slay did get the last word and a measure of revenge for the loss of his beloved B-1: he forced on us a contract that was almost punitive. Because the Air Force had gone the unusual route of contracting for an airplane before the technology was proven in flight test, I was being socked with a contract worth $350 million to deliver the first five stealth fighters under draconian terms that could absolutely ruin us. Ultimately I had to guarantee that the stealth fighters would meet the identical radar cross section numbers achieved by our thirty-eight-foot wooden model at the White Sands radar range in 1975. I had also to guarantee performance, range, structural capability, bombing accuracy, and maneuverability.

  The contract was like a health care insurance policy without catastrophic coverage: you were fine as long as you were fine. If something terrible happened, you would go down the tubes dead broke. If it proved impossible for us to duplicate the incredible invisibility of a wooden model with a full-size flying machine, we would be penalized and expected to foot the entire bill to get it right. I was feeling particularly skittish on that score because a few weeks before the contract negotiations began, I received an urgent call from Keith Beswick, head of our flight test operation out at the secret base.

  “Ben,” he exclaimed, “we’ve lost our stealth.” He explained that Ken Dyson had flown that morning in Have Blue against the radar range and was lit like a goddam Christmas tree. “They saw him coming from fifty miles.”

  Actually, Keith and I both figured out what the problem was. Those stealth airplanes demanded absolutely smooth surfaces to remain invisible. That meant intensive preflight preparations in which special radar-absorbent materials were filled in around all the access panels and doors. This material came in sheets like linoleum and had to be perfectly cut to fit. About an hour after the first phone call, Keith phoned again. Problem solved. The heads of three screws were not quite tight and extended above the surface by less than an eighth of an inch. On radar they appeared as big as a barn door!

  So the lesson was clear: building stealth would require a level of care and perfection unprecedented in aerospace. The pressure would really be on us to get it right the first time or literally pay a terrible price for our mistakes. Deep down, I felt confident that the Skunk Works would rise to the challenge. We always had in the past. Still, I had to swallow hard taking my case to our corporate leaders, who were still struggling to put our company back on its feet. They reacted with about as much apprehension as Kelly Johnson had when I told him about the contract: “Oh, boy. You could wind up losing your ass.”

  I argued that management had expected me to hustle and get new business, which also meant taking risks. Our new CEO, Roy Anderson, and president Larry Kitchen were clearly worried about our ability to duplicate the low radar cross section we had achieved on a small wooden model. “That is just asking for big league trouble promising to equal that,” Kitchen remarked. I couldn’t deny that he was right. I said, “We’ve already shown that we know what we are doing when it comes to stealth. We’ve been as good as our predictions up to now. And there’s no reason to think we’ll drop the ball. We’ll build up a quick learning curve delivering these first five airplanes, and if we do hit a snag, we’ll make it up off the back end. The fifteen to come will provide our profit margin.”

  One or two executives wanted m
e to refuse the deal and wait for the end of the Have Blue tests in the next year or so, when the Air Force would not be so intent on covering their own butts because they were buying untested merchandise. I rejected that idea. “Right now, we’ve got a contract and also the inside track on the next step, which is where the big payoff awaits: building them their stealth bomber. That’s why this risk is worth taking. They’ll want at least one hundred bombers, and we’ll be looking at tens of billions in business. So what’s this risk compared to what we can gain later on? Peanuts.”

  It was not a very happy meeting, and the conclusion reached was reluctant and not unanimous. The corporate bean counters insisted we install a fail-safe monitoring and review procedure that would sound the alarm the moment we fell behind or hit any snags. “Above all, no nasty surprises, Ben,” Larry Kitchen warned me. Frankly, he sounded more prayerful than hopeful.

  From that moment on, a hard knot formed in my gut around my biggest worry: guaranteeing bombing accuracy. Who knew what huge, ugly, time-consuming problems lay in store for us solving that one? Unlike the low-flying B-1 bomber that attacked from the deck, we would come in relatively high—twenty thousand feet or more—giving us a tighter circle to aim at. Also, because we would be invisible, our pilots would not have to duck and weave to avoid missiles or flak. We would have a clear shot to drop a pair of two-thousand-pounders. Hopefully, laser-guided smart bombs sighted by the pilot in the cockpit would prove unerring. Otherwise, I was in the tank until we found out how to make those damned bombs wise up.