Skunk Works

So we decided to design a stealthy sub; the cigar-shaped hull was shielded by an outer wall of flat, angular surfaces that would bounce sonar signals away and also muffle the engine sounds and the internal noises of crewmen inside the vessel. We ran numerous acoustical tests in special sound-measuring facilities and obtained dramatic improvements. If nothing else we had rendered null and void the favorite cliché of a lot of World War II naval action movies about a submariner sneezing or dropping a monkey wrench at the critical moment when the enemy destroyer’s sonar search pings ever closer. The flat outer wall effectively eliminated any noises. Armed with high hopes, I took our design and test results to the Pentagon office of a Navy captain in charge of submarine R & D. By the time I left his office, I was grimly reciting Kelly’s Skunk Works Rule Number Fifteen. Fourteen of his basic rules for operating a Skunk Works had been written out, but the fifteenth was known only by word of mouth, verbal wisdom passed on from one generation of employees to the next: “Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don’t know what in hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.” I’d been a fool to ignore Kelly’s wise words of warning.

That submarine captain epitomized the hidebound Navy at its worst. He frowned at my drawing and backhanded my concept. “We don’t build submarines that look like that.” He admitted that our test results were “interesting” but added, “Your design would probably cost us two or three knots in speed.” I countered, “But why care about losing three knots, when you are invisible to your enemy?”

He ignored me. “This looks more like the Monitor or the Merrimac from the Civil War,” he said. “We’d never build a modern submarine that looked like that.”

I returned to Burbank with a renewed healthy disdain for the anchors aweigh crowd, but one of our engineers, just back from a Pearl Harbor business trip, mentioned to me that he had seen a catamaran-type ship that the Navy had built experimentally on the q.t. out of unauthorized funds. This was a prototype SWATH (Small Water Area Twin Hull) ship that was proving to be amazingly stable in heavy seas and was considerably faster than a conventional ship. It seemed to me that a catamaran SWATH ship held real promise as a model for a stealthy ship. And on my next trip to Washington for a meeting on our stealth airplane design with Defense Undersecretary Bill Perry, who was the Carter administration’s czar of stealth, I mentioned the idea of a model stealth ship. I told Dr. Perry that the catamaran would provide a perfect test of the effects of stealth shaping and coatings for surface vessels. We also wanted to test the effects of seawater on radar-absorbing iron ferrite coatings. Dr. Perry agreed and ordered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to authorize a study contract with us.

I put our best special projects engineer, Ugo Coty, in charge. DARPA had come up with $100,000, and I kicked in an additional $150,000 to begin developing a workable model catamaran. One of the biggest threats against our surface vessels was the Soviet RORS satellite, using powerful X-band radar. Shape was the key to defeating Soviet radar. Coatings accounted for only 10 percent effectiveness in deflecting radar. The rest was quietness of a vessel’s engines and minimizing its wake.

Ugo picked four other engineers for his team and set to work developing a SWATH ship model that sat on the water like a catamaran with a pair of underwater pontoon-type hulls that propelled the ship with twin screws. The underwater pontoons provided most of its buoyancy and good stability in rolling seas and also produced very little wake. A ship’s wake is as easy to spot from the sky as a fighter’s contrail.

Our ship was the most unconventional seagoing vessel ever to come off a drawing board. There was a definite family resemblance to our stealth fighter. Only the floating version had no wings. It was a series of severe flat planes at 45-degree angles that sat above the water on struts connected to a pair of submerged pontoons. The ship would be powered by the diesel-electric propulsion that drives electric generators. Cables carried the current to a pair of powerful electric motors in each submerged pontoon that spun counter-rotating propellers. Careful shaping of the pontoons and the propellers cut down sharply on noise and wake.