Skunk Works

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.”