by Ben R Rich
That first night we saw French-built F-1s and Soviet MiG-29s flying around on our sensor displays. But they gave no sign of ever seeing us.
There were five communications sectors in the country, so we didn’t have to destroy all their missiles or airplanes, but knock out their brains and claw out their eyes. So we hit their missile and communications centers, their operational commands, and their air defense center. In only three bombing raids that lasted a total of about twenty minutes, combined with attacks from Tomahawk missiles, we absolutely knocked Iraq out of the war. From that first night, they were incapable of launching retaliatory air strikes or sustaining any real defenses against our airpower. All they had left were mobile Scud missiles—a primitive revenge weapon—and vulnerable ground troops who had to fight in the open without air cover or hope. To put it in domestic terms, if Baghdad had been Washington, that first night we knocked out their White House, their Capitol building, their Pentagon, their CIA and FBI, took out their telephone and telegraph facilities, damaged Andrews, Langley, and Bolling air bases, and punched big holes in all their key Potomac River bridges. And that was just the first night. We went back night after night over the next month.
We flew in twos, but you don’t see your partner, so the guys that first night saw the skies over Baghdad and just figured we’d lost airplanes and pilots. Then, once safely back across the border, we joined up and saw that everyone was okay and we were amazed, overjoyed, and deeply moved. No one had suffered as much as a hit or even a near miss. That stealth shit had really worked.
Major Miles Pound
It took only about two or three missions before most of us didn’t even bother to glance out at the flak bursting all around us. We took advantage of their blind firing. We’d delay an attack five minutes knowing they’d have to stop firing to cool down their guns—then we’d come in and hit them. We drew all the demanding high-precision bombing of the most heavily defended, highest-priority targets. The powers that be decided to use B-52s to pour down bombs on the big North Taji military industrial complex. But it was protected by surface-to-air missiles that could knock down our bombing armada. So we went in the night before and took out all fifteen missile sites using ten stealth airplanes. They never saw us coming. That mission won us a standing ovation from General Schwarzkopf and the other brass monitoring us back in the coalition war room.
Given our precision bombs we could locate the one communications node in a city block and take it out without inflicting collateral damage. We used to brag, “Just tell us whether you want to hit the men’s room or the ladies’ room and we’ll oblige.” Because of stealth we could arrive at target unseen and focus entirely on making a precision hit. Our GBU-27 laser-guided bomb could penetrate the most hardened bunker. We hit Saddam’s Simarra chemical bunkers with these bombs. They were eight feet of reinforced concrete, and we used the first bomb to pierce through the dense construction, then a second bomb followed down the same drilled hole made by the first and exploded with tremendous impact. About halfway through the war we began running low on bomb supplies and reverted to using a lighter bomb. Those GBU-10s bounced right off the roof of some hardened hangars at a forward Iraqi airbase called H-2. Intelligence reported the Iraqis were gleeful, felt they had finally defeated us at something, so they crammed these hangars with as many of their remaining jet fighters as they could. We waited for a couple of days, then went in with our heavier GBU-27s and blew that damned air base off the map.
Three other missions I remember with a lot of relish: we did some high-precision bombing and took out a Republican Guard barracks at a prison camp housing Kuwaiti prisoners, allowing them to escape. On another night, we took out Peter Arnett of CNN! I was at the base watching him broadcast—that guy was not wildly popular with many of us because we felt Saddam was just using him for propaganda—and we knew that in exactly six seconds our guys were going to hit the telecommunications center in downtown Baghdad and knock Arnett off the air. So we began counting out: “Five… Four… Three… Two… One.” The screen went blank. Right on cue, too. We cheered like nuts at a football game.
But the raid against Saddam’s nuclear research facility, which also had capability for chemical and biological weapons production, probably proved stealth at its best. The Air Force went after that place in daylight, using an armada of seventy-two airplanes, including fourteen attack F-16s, and the rest escorts, jammers, and tankers needed to support such an operation with conventional aircraft. Those pilots saw more SAMs and triple As coming up at them than they cared ever to remember. The Iraqis covered the target with smoke generators so that our guys had no choice but to drop bombs into the smoke and scoot for their lives. They scored no hits.
We came in at three in the morning using only eight airplanes and needing only two tankers to get us there and back, and took out three of the four nuclear reactors and heavily damaged the fourth. Once that first bomb hit all hell broke loose. I dropped my bombs, but I couldn’t get my bomb-bay door closed. That was as bad as it could get because a right angle is like a spotlight to ground radar and a bomb-bay door is a perfect right angle. And out of the corner of my eye I saw a missile firing up at me. I had one hand on the eject lever and the other trying to manually close that stalled bomb bay. As the missile closed on me, the door finally did, too, and I watched that missile curve harmlessly by me as it lost me in its homing. About an hour later I began breathing again.
The night of that first raid against Baghdad coincided with a farewell banquet Lockheed staged to mark my retirement as head of the Skunk Works. It was a very emotional and patriotic evening, interspersed with the latest bulletins and live coverage from CNN. Early the next morning my son Michael called me and read me a story from the New York Times reporting that the first F-117A to drop a bomb on Baghdad carried a small American flag in its cockpit that later would be presented to me. The story said that the pilots of the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing had dedicated that first air strike to me in honor of my retirement. Even more gratifying was that stealth lived up to all our expectations and claims. In spite of undertaking the most dangerous missions of that war, not one F-117A was hit by enemy fire. I know that Colonel Whitley had privately estimated losses of 5 to 10 percent in the first month of the air campaign. No one expected to escape without any losses at all. The stealth fighters composed only 2 percent of the total allied air assets in action and they flew 1,271 missions—only 1 percent of the total coalition air sorties—but accounted for 40 percent of all damaged targets attacked and compiled a 75 percent direct-hit rate. The direct-hit rate was almost as boggling as the no-casualty rate since laser-guided bombs are strictly line of sight, depending on good visibility, and the air war was conducted during some of the worst weather in the region in memory.
The airplane was used at first as a silver bullet against high-value targets. They dropped the first bombs and opened the door for everyone else by destroying the Iraqi communications network. Those attacks were shown to the American public on CNN, and the political impact was as great as the military. It showed we could go downtown at will and with the precision of threading the eye of a needle take out the enemy military command centers with terrific accuracy. Those bull’s-eye shots kept the public’s morale high and its backing secure. No shoot-downs; no prisoners; no hostages.
Gradually, stealth missions were broadened to include air bases and bridges. Bridges are the most difficult target to destroy unless hit in a precise spot with the right payload. To bring down some bridges in Vietnam, for example, took thousands of sorties. The F-117A knocked out thirty-nine of the forty-three bridges spanning the Tigris-Euphrates River—simply astounding.
Stealth opened a new frontier in air war, proving that night attacks were more effective and less dangerous than daylight raids, where aircraft can be seen by the eye as well as by electronics. But Operation Desert Storm also raised red-flag warnings about future air combat: one month seemed to be the logistical limit to air combat sorties. We didn’t des
ign our airplanes to fly five hours a day, every day, for a month or more. Pilot fatigue and a shortage of spare parts became a growing concern. We almost ran out of bombs, too. But the overriding fact of Desert Storm was that the only way the enemy knew the F-117A was in the sky above was when everything around him began blowing up.
5
HOW WE SKUNKS GOT OUR NAME
I FIRST SHOWED UP at Kelly Johnson’s front door, in December 1954, as a twenty-nine-year-old thermodynamicist earning eighty-seven bucks a week. I had never before set foot inside the so-called Skunk Works, in Building 82, a barnlike airplane assembly facility next to the Burbank Airport’s main runway, where Kelly and his minions held forth in a warren of cramped offices, oblivious to the outside world. Everything about that operation was secret, even what building they were in. All I knew for sure was that Johnson had called over to the main plant, where I had been working for the past four years, and asked to borrow a thermodynamicist, preferably a smart one, to help him solve some unspecified problems. It was like a band leader calling over to the union hall to hire a xylophone player for a one-nighter.
My expertise was solving heat problems and designing inlet and exhaust ducts on airplane engines. In those years, Lockheed was booming, cranking out a new airplane every two years. I felt I was in on the ground floor of a golden age in aviation—the era of the jet airplane—and couldn’t believe my good luck. As young and green as I was, I had already earned my very own patent for designing a Nichrome wire to wrap around and electrically heat the urine-elimination tube used on Navy patrol planes. Crewmen complained that on freezing winter days their penises were sticking painfully to the metal funnel. My design solved their problem and I’m sure made me their unknown hero. Both my design and patent were classified “Secret.”
My input was far less dramatic working on America’s first supersonic jet fighter, the F-104 Starfighter, nicknamed by the press “the missile with the man in it” in tribute to its blazing Mach 2 speed. I helped design the inlet ducts on that, as well as on our first military jet transport, the C-130, and on the F-90. The latter was a stainless-steel jet fighter, capable of pulling twelve-g loads during incredible dives and turns, but was woefully underpowered since the engine originally designed for it was canceled by the Air Force for budgetary reasons. So the F-90 wound up serving the country by being shipped to Ground Zero at the Nevada atomic test site at a mock military base specially constructed to determine how various structures and military equipment would withstand an A-bomb explosion. The short answer was everything was either vaporized or blown to pieces except for the F-90. Its windshield was vaporized, its paint sand-blasted, but otherwise our steel airplane survived in one piece. That sucker was built.
The projects at Lockheed were all big-ticket items, and workrooms as big as convention halls were crammed with endless rows of white-shirted draftsmen, working elbow to elbow, at drafting tables. We engineers sat elbow to elbow, too, but in smaller rooms and a slightly less regimented atmosphere. We were the analytical experts, the elite of the plant, who decreed sizes and shapes and told the draftsmen what to draw. All of us were well aware that we worked for Chief Engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the living legend who had designed Lockheed’s Electra and Lockheed’s Constellation, the two most famous commercial airliners in the world. All of us had seen him rushing around in his untucked shirt, a paunchy, middle-aged guy with a comical duck’s waddle, slicked-down white hair, and a belligerent jaw. He had a thick, round nose and reminded me a lot of W. C. Fields, but without the humor. Definitely without that. Johnson was all business and had the reputation of an ogre who ate young, tender engineers for between-meal snacks. We peons viewed him with the knee-knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament. The guy would just as soon fire you as have to chew on you for some goof-up. Right or not, that was the lowdown on Kelly Johnson. One day, in my second year on the job, I looked up from my desk and found myself staring right into the face of the chief engineer. I turned pale, then crimson. Kelly was holding a drawing of an inlet I had designed. He was neither angry nor unkind while handing it back to me. “It will be way too draggy, Rich, the way you designed this. It’s about twenty percent too big. Refigure it.” Then he was gone. I spent the rest of the day refiguring and discovered that the inlet was eighteen percent too big. Kelly had figured it out in his head—by intuition or maybe just experience? Either way, I was damned impressed.
In those days Kelly wore his chief engineer’s hat until around two in the afternoon, then drove off to the Skunk Works, which was about half a mile down the road tucked away inside the Lockheed complex, and spent the final two hours of his workday doing his secret design and development work. There were always plenty of rumors about what Kelly was up to—designing atomic-powered bombers or rocket-driven supersonic fighters. Supposedly, he had a dozen engineers working for him, and we in the main plant pitied those guys who were under that brutal thumb.
Still, the truth was I welcomed the chance to get out of the main plant for a while. Lockheed was very regimented and bureaucratic, and by my fourth year on the payroll I felt stymied and creatively frustrated. I had a wife and a new baby son to support, and my father-in-law, who admired my moxie, was pushing me to take over his bakery-delicatessen, which earned the family a very comfortable living. I had actually given notice to Lockheed, but at the last moment changed my mind: I loved building airplanes a lot more than baking bagels or curing corned beef.
So I was eager to experience Kelly’s Skunk Works, even if I was only on loan to him for a few weeks. It never occurred to me that I had any chance at all to stay there permanently. I was well trained in my engineering specialty and actually had taught thermodynamics at UCLA before joining Lockheed. I was also a naturalized American citizen and intensely patriotic, and welcomed the chance to work on secret projects designed to defeat the Russians. I had plenty of self-assurance and figured that as long as I did a good job, Kelly Johnson would behave himself.
As fearsome as Kelly was supposed to be, I knew he would be a pushover compared to my own stern father, Isidore Rich, a British citizen who had been, until the outbreak of World War II, the superintendent of a hardwood lumber mill in Manila, the Philippines, where I was born and raised. The Riches were among the first Jewish families to settle in Manila, and after one of my paternal grandfather’s business trips to Egypt, he brought back a snapshot of the beautiful young daughter of one of his Jewish customers to show to my bachelor father. My father was enchanted, and a flirtatious correspondence bloomed into a full-fledged romance; marriage followed a few years later. My mother, Annie, was a French citizen, born and raised in Alexandria, a brilliant linguist who spoke thirteen languages fluently, a free spirit who pampered me, as her second youngest among four sons and one daughter. Mother was the opposite of our authoritarian father, who ruled over us like a Biblical prophet and used a strap to enforce his commandments. We lived in a big house with lots of servants on my father’s very modest, middle-class salary, enjoying a way of life that was patently colonial and exploitive of the locals, but wonderfully secure and languid as the tropical air itself. My parents dressed formally to dine at their club and play bridge. We raised twenty-three police dogs in our huge backyard that resembled a tropical rain forest. And in later years, I amused Kelly with the story of how I built my first airplane at the tender age of fourteen. An older cousin bought a Piper Cub from a local flying club and to his dismay discovered that it came in a dozen crates and that he had to assemble it himself. My brothers and I built it for him in our big backyard, and after weeks of hard labor, we discovered that the finished product was too big to fit through our front gate. We had to take off the wings—but still no go. Then the tail, and finally the landing gear. In the end, we recrated the damned thing and my cousin got his money back. A few years later, that same cousin barely survived the infamous Bataan Death March.
By then, my family and I were safe in Los Angeles, having fled the island onl
y a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As tough as it was starting life anew, none of us were complaining: my father’s sister, who had weighed a hefty one hundred and fifty pounds before the war, emerged from a Japanese prison camp as a gaunt, eighty-pound skeleton.
During the war years, my father and I worked in a Los Angeles machine shop to keep the family going. I was able to start college only after the war ended and I was already twenty-one. So I gave up my dream of becoming a doctor, like my father’s brother, who was a world authority on tropical medicine, and decided to become an engineer instead. I graduated from Berkeley in mechanical engineering in 1949, in the top twenty in a class of three thousand, and decided to go on for my master’s at UCLA, specializing in both aerothermodynamics and dating sorority girls. By then I had met my future wife, a beautiful young fashion model named Faye Mayer, who had an incomprehensible weakness for skinny engineers who smoked pipes. We got married just in time for me to start job hunting in the middle of the painful postwar recession and discover that a UCLA hotshot with a master’s degree was just another candidate for unemployment. But one of my professors tipped me off to an engineer job opening at Lockheed’s Burbank plant. I was hired and worked under Bernie Messinger, Lockheed’s heat transfer specialist, when Kelly had phoned Bernie asking him to borrow a competent thermodynamicist for an undisclosed Skunk Works project. Bernie tapped me.
Since its inception back in 1943, when the first German jet fighters appeared in the air war over Europe, the Skunk Works had been entirely Kelly’s domain. The War Department had turned to Lockheed’s then thirty-three-year-old chief engineer to build a jet fighter prototype because he had designed and built the twin-engine P-38 Lightning, the most maneuverable propeller-driven fighter of the war. Kelly was given only 180 days to build that jet prototype, designed to fly at 600 mph, at least 200 mph faster than the P-38, at the very edge of the speed of sound. Kelly set to work by borrowing twenty-three of the best available design engineers and about thirty shop mechanics at the main plant. They operated under strict wartime secrecy, so that when he discovered that all available floor space in the Lockheed complex was taken for round-the-clock fighter and bomber production, that suited Johnson just fine. He rented a big circus tent and set up shop next to a noxious plastics factory, whose stench kept the curious at bay.
