The Stealth bomber story you haven't heard; it doesn't work, and it'll probably crash

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1991 by Scott Shugar

B-2 officials will tell you ad nauseum about all the tests they've run using scale models, computerization, and simulation, but when it comes to actually putting a real B-2 in the air, the litany isn't quite so impressive. Even though the first production B-2 was available for flight testing throughout fiscal 1990, that year passed without the fences being cleared. In the two years since the first B-2 rolled out of its hangar, it has flown 87 hours. During that time, the two flyable B-2s now available have together flown only a total of about 100 hours. That's just 3 percent of the test flight hours the plane is supposed to undergo before it can be deemed mission-capable. And the aircraft is only just now beginning to fly against radar--but not against operational radars of the sort our forces or the Soviets employ, merely against special test-range equipment. Flying against real-world detection and targeting equipment won't come for many more months. The GAO says that "if these current schedules are met, it will be at least three years before critical performance requirements have been fully tested. That is the point in testing where problems are typically discovered."

And check out the DSB before you figure it's going to let the chips fall where they may. "Go back and look at how many times the DSB signed off on the avionics on the B-1," suggests one Pentagon skeptic, referring to an electronic countermeasures system that nearly everyone now admits is a total failure. On the DSB sit such disinterested figures as executives of Martin Marietta, Rockwell, Hughes Aircraft, TRW, ITT, Lockheed, United Technologies, and Ford--the creator of DIVAD. There's Donald Hicks, former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and don't forget William Perry, who decided a decade ago that stealth makes airplanes "invisible," and who trumpeted his support for the B-2 in a print ad widely distributed by the plane's principal contractors during last year's budget debate.

Test anxiety

There are some respectable reasons to proceed slowly with testing. Safety is the one that immediately comes to mind. But there are less admirable reasons that have had more to do with the testing delay in the case of the B-2. First, there's the perverse idea that slowing things down while money continues to be spent (the budget fences restrict most spending for procurement of new planes, but they don't obstruct expenditures on testing and parts) helps the plane's survival by enhancing what is known around town as the "sunk cost" argument. If you have already spent $X billion, the reasoning goes, you might as well spend $X Y billion. After all, you can't get the $X billion back by not spending more. In an official letter to Air Force Times, Air Force Brig. General William B. Davitte made the point quite baldly in defense of the B-2: "With almost one half of the total program cost already committed, it would make absolutely no sense to walk away from this revolutionary program now." Haven't these people ever heard of the distinction between good and bad money, as in throwing the former after the latter?