Skunk Works

God, I hated to do it, but company politics and basic management considerations prompted me to go along and give up the ship project. I had a full plate without it, while my shipbuilding colleagues were scrambling to find business. I surrendered to the inevitable and turned over the project to the Ocean Division, but only after I convinced our CEO, Roy Anderson, to allow Ugo Coty and his team, who had done all the work on the ship in the test phase, to stay on as overseers of the actual construction. “We need Ugo to keep those damned shipbuilders from going off on a tangent,” I told Roy Anderson. “This is one project where the method of shipbuilding is much less important than the stealth technology,” I told Roy. “They’ll want to sacrifice the stealth if it gets in the way of the ship’s performance, but Ugo will force them to stay focused. All Dr. Perry wants to prove out is the stealth. That’s key to this test. If the ship merely floats that’s good enough.” As it happened, my fears about the conflicting agendas between professional shipbuilders and experts on stealth technology, like Dr. Perry, were realized almost from the first day that the Ocean Division took over the project.

Ugo Coty did his best, but he ran into heavy weather. His original six-man operation quickly was shunted aside by eighty-five bureaucrats and paper-pushers running the program for the division. Then the Navy marched in, adding its supervision and bureaucracy into the mix with a fifty-man team of overseers, who stood around or sat around creating reams of unread paperwork. No ship ever went to sea—not even a top-secret prototype—without intensive naval supervision to ensure that all ironclad naval rules and regulations were strictly enforced before the keel was ever laid.

“Where is the paint locker?” a Navy commander demanded of Ugo, rattling the blueprint plans. Since the days of John Paul Jones, every naval ship afloat has a damned paint locker on board. Sea Shadow would definitely not be the only exception since the Revolutionary War, and before she started her sea trials, a paint locker was located just below the bridge. Maintaining secrecy was another big headache. How do you build a 160-foot ship, whose strange, exotic appearance and shape are the keys to its secrecy, and keep that shape and appearance from the eyes of a small army of shipyard workers building it? The only logical answer was to build the ship in pieces, doling out six or eight sections per shipyard, then assembling the pieces as a gigantic jigsaw puzzle inside a huge submergible barge located in Redwood City, California.

Sea Shadow was made of very strong welded steel, displaced 560 tons, and was 70 feet wide. During early sea trials in 1981, we suffered unexpectedly large wakes that were easy to spot on radar and from the air, which completely baffled us until we discovered that the motor propellers had been installed backward! Our ship had a four-man crew—commander, helmsman, navigator, and engineer. By contrast, a frigate doing a similar job had more than three hundred crewmen.

Viewed from head-on the ship looked like Darth Vader’s helmet. Some Navy brass who saw her clenched their teeth in disgust at the sight of the most futuristic ship ever to ply the seas. A future commander resented having only a four-man crew to boss around on a ship that was so secret that the Navy could not even admit it existed. Our stealth ship might be able to blast out of the sky a sizable Soviet attack force, but in terms of an officer’s future status and promotion prospects, it was about as glamorous as commanding a tugboat. At the highest levels, the Navy brass was equally unenthusiastic about the small number of stealth ships they would need to defend carrier task forces. Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige. The carrier task force people didn’t like the stealth ship because it reminded everyone how vulnerable their hulking ships really were.

But by the fall of 1982, when Britain and Argentina began hostilities around the Falkland Islands, the Sea Shadow won renewed attention at the Pentagon. The British reported success using primitive ferrite-coated nets hung over the masts and radar antennas of their warships to lower their radar cross section against air attack. Even the QE 2, which was drafted as a troop transport, used these antiradar nets. The Brits claimed to have lowered their radar cross section by an order of magnitude. But their results weren’t one quarter as impressive as ours. A typical warship was a very high reflector of radar—a radar profile equal to about fifty barns. Our frigate would show up a hell of a lot smaller than a dinghy.