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

A related bad reason for footdragging is the fear that realistic and expedient tests would quickly produce bad news. The likelihood of adverse test results has been the B-2 nightmare for some time. Within weeks after stealth was proclaimed in 1980, Edward Teller, the inventor of the H-bomb, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "It is a good general rule to make all possible progress in military technology and to worry about countermeasures later. I firmly believe that the present case is an exception. At least one proposal for a countermeasure exists. This method appears obvious and does not even require any extraordinary technological effort in order to allow the Soviets to detect, locate, and destroy stealth bombers." Teller added that the rules of classification prevented him from describing this effective counter-measure. But they wouldn't prevent those in the stealth program from putting Teller's idea to the test. How is it then that a full decade later, we are still many months away from testing the B-2 against operational radars?

"They have adamantly refused to test it," says Tom Amlie, a Pentagon analyst with many years of experience in radar. There are some pretty fancy counterstealth tests the Pentagon could do but hasn't, such as flying the B-2 against "bi-static" radar, which tries to defeat the low radar signal a stealth plane sends back to the radar transmitter by placing the receiver at a second location, where it is likely to sample a larger return from the plane. Another potential counterstealth technique called "ultra wideband" USB) not only isn't being tested against the B-2, but last month the DOD inspector general began looking into charges that B-2 advocates in the Pentagon have actively discouraged UWB research altogether.

More important, there are also some straight-off-the-shelf technologies that DOD hasn't tried on the B-2. "I recommended that they use the Customs aircraft, which has an excellent radar on it," Amlie says. "I flew with them, and we were detecting low, slow, single-engine airplanes at 200 miles. The B-2 people don't want any part of it. And you could do it this week at no cost, because you have an FAA radar right next to Edwards Air Force Base"--where the B-2s are. "I don't believe it's stealthy, but I simply want to see an honest test. I'd like to see somebody besides the Air Force test it. I'd like to see [Senate Armed Services Committee chairman] Sam Nunn's aide standing by the radar when they do it."

I put these straightforward suggestions to Jack Krings, who was the director of DOD's office of operational test and evaluation during some of the crucial years of B-2 development. His answers give you some disturbing indications of what they mean by testing in the Pentagon. "Those radars are not calibrated," Krings replied. "You don't know what they're doing. If you're going to do something that's going to be a critical event, you'd sure like to know what all the players are really doing, so that when you get this amount of data and try to figure out who did what to whom you really know what in fact they were doing." Got that?