Skunk Works

Most troublesome, the Russians were exporting their advanced nonnuclear defensive systems to clients and customers around the world, making our airplanes and crews increasingly vulnerable. The Syrians now had nonnuclear SAM-5s. And during our Pentagon briefing we were subjected to a chilling analysis of the 1973 Yom Kippur War involving Israel, Syria, and Egypt. What we heard was extremely upsetting. Although the Israelis flew our latest and most advanced jet attack aircraft and their combat pilots were equal to our own, they suffered tremendous losses against an estimated arsenal of 30,000 Soviet-supplied missiles to the Arab forces. The Israelis lost 109 airplanes in 18 days, mostly to radar-guided ground-to-air missiles and antiaircraft batteries, manned by undertrained and often undisciplined Egyptian and Syrian personnel. What really rattled our Air Force planners was that the evasive maneuvering by Israeli pilots to avoid missiles—the same tactics used by our own pilots—proved to be a disaster. All the turning and twisting calculated to slow down an incoming missile made the Israeli aircraft vulnerable to conventional ground fire. If the Israeli loss ratio were extrapolated into a war between the U.S. and the highly trained Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, a war fought using similar airplanes, pilot training, and ground defenses, our air force could expect to be decimated in only seventeen days.

I was not too surprised. The Skunk Works had firsthand experience with the latest Soviet equipment because the CIA had scored spectacular covert successes in acquiring their hardware by one means or another. We could not only test their latest fighters or new radars or missile systems, but actually fly against them. Skunk Works technicians pulled these systems apart, then put them back together, and made tools and spare parts to keep the Russian equipment serviced during testing, so we had a sound notion of what we were up against.

Still, the Air Force had no real interest in using the stealth option to neutralize Soviet defenses. The reason was that while we had learned over the years how to make an airplane less observable to enemy radar, the conventional Pentagon view was that the effectiveness of enemy radar had leaped far ahead of our ability to thwart it. The smart money in aerospace was betting scarce development funds on building airplanes that could avoid the Soviet radar net by coming in just over the treetops, like the new B-1 bomber ordered from Rockwell by the Strategic Air Command, whose purpose was to sneak past ground defenses and deliver a nuclear weapon deep inside the Soviet motherland.

That Pentagon briefing was particularly sobering because it was one of those rare times when our side admitted to a potentially serious gap that tipped the balances against us. I had our advanced planning people noodling all kinds of fantasies—pilotless, remote-controlled drone tactical bombers and hypersonic aircraft that would blister past Soviet radar defenses at better than five times the speed of sound once we solved awesomely difficult technologies. I wish I could claim to have had a sudden two a.m. revelation that made me bolt upright in bed and shout “Eureka!” But most of my dreams involved being chased through a maze of blind alleys by a horde of hostile accountants wielding axes and pitchforks.

The truth is that an exceptional thirty-six-year-old Skunk Works mathematician and radar specialist named Denys Overholser decided to drop by my office one April afternoon and presented me with the Rosetta Stone breakthrough for stealth technology.

The gift he handed to me over a cup of decaf instant coffee would make an attack airplane so difficult to detect that it would be invulnerable against the most advanced radar systems yet invented, and survivable even against the most heavily defended targets in the world.

Denys had discovered this nugget deep inside a long, dense technical paper on radar written by one of Russia’s leading experts and published in Moscow nine years earlier. That paper was a sleeper in more ways than one: called “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” it had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language. The author was Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. As Denys admitted, the paper was so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd’s nerd would have waded through it all—underlining yet! The nuggets Denys unearthed were found near the end of its forty pages. As he explained it, Ufimtsev had revisited a century-old set of formulas derived by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and later refined by the German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johannes Sommerfeld. These calculations predicted the manner in which a given geometric configuration would reflect electromagnetic radiation. Ufimtsev had taken this early work a step further.