Skunk Works

Other Voices

General Larry D. Welch

(Air Force Chief of Staff from 1986 to 1990)

In 1976, I was a brigadier general in charge of planning at the Tactical Air Command at Langley, Virginia, when my boss, General Bob Dixon, called me one afternoon and told me to drop whatever I was doing to attend an extremely classified briefing. He said, “The only people I’ve cleared for this briefing are you and one other general officer.” I went over to headquarters and discovered that Ben Rich of Lockheed’s Skunk Works was making a presentation about producing an operational stealth aircraft. Bill Perry, who ran R & D at the Pentagon, had sent him over to us because Dr. Perry was very interested in the stealth concept and wanted our input. Ben spoke only about twenty minutes. After he left, we went into General Dixon’s office and he asked, “Well, what do you two think?” I said, “Well, sir, from a purely technical standpoint I don’t have a clue about whether this concept is really achievable. Frankly, I’m not even sure the goddam thing will fly. But if Ben Rich and the Skunk Works say that they can deliver the goods, I think we’d be idiots not to go along with them.” General Dixon wholeheartedly agreed with me. And so we started the stealth program on the basis of Ben’s twenty-minute presentation and a hell of a lot of faith in Ben Rich & Company. And that faith was based on long personal experience.

Way back when I was a young colonel working in the fighter division—this would be the early seventies—I was tasked to come up with a realistic cost estimate for a revolutionary tactical fighter with movable wings called the FX, which later became the F-15. Inside the Air Force there was a lot of controversy about costs that ranged from $3.5 million to $8.5 million. Before we could ask Congress for money, we had to reach some sort of consensus, so I persuaded my boss to let me go out to the Skunk Works in Burbank and get their analysis because they were the best in the business. So I flew out and sat down with Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich. After drinking exactly one ounce of whisky from one of Kelly’s titanium shot glasses, we got down to business. Ben and Kelly worked out the figures on a piece of paper—Okay, here’s what the avionics will cost, and the airframe, and so on. The overall cost they predicted per airplane would be $7 million. And so we went to Congress and told them that the FX would cost between $5 million and $7 million. The day we delivered that airplane the cost came out to $6.8 million per airplane in 1971 dollars.

So I had supreme confidence that Ben and his people would deliver superbly on stealth. There were only five of us at headquarters cleared for the stealth program, and I became the head logistician, the chief operations officer, and the civil engineer for the Air Force side. The management approach we evolved was unique and marvelous. Once a month, I’d meet with Dr. Perry at the Pentagon and inform him about decisions we required from him as Under Secretary of Defense. Sometimes he agreed, sometimes not, but we never had delays or time wasted with goddam useless meetings. Because we were so highly classified, the bureaucracy was cut out and that made a tremendous difference. Frankly, that was a damned gutsy way to operate inside the Pentagon, but the reason we could afford to be so gutsy was our abiding faith in the Skunk Works.