Skunk Works

This wasn’t exactly a ship of classic design, but my hunch was that we could really fill an important niche in the Navy’s defensive needs. NATO war games played out by computer had triggered alarm among the Navy brass about the vulnerability of our carrier task forces to enemy air attack. The premise of the game was that the Soviet Union had attacked Western Europe and that the U.S. Navy had quickly reacted by steaming a backup carrier task force into the North Atlantic.

Unfortunately, Soviet long-range fighter-bombers using new look-down, shoot-down radar-guided missiles caused worrisome losses to our carriers and escorts in the computerized warfare exercise. To counter this threat, the Navy was crashing production of a billion-dollar missile frigate that would fire the new Aegis ground-to-air missiles designed to destroy incoming cruise missiles. I thought, Why go after the arrows? Go after the shooter. To the chagrin of the billion-buck Aegis frigate backers, our SWATH boat would cost only $200 million. We could arm it with sixty-four Patriot-type missiles and send it out three hundred miles ahead of the carrier task force as an invisible, amphibious SAM missile site. We’d shoot down the Soviet attack aircraft before they got in missile range of the fleet. And because they couldn’t see the stealth ship electronically, they’d literally never know what hit them. We did an analysis and determined that the entire U.S. Navy carrier fleet could be protected by only eighteen of our stealth defenders armed with SAMs. Since our ship would knock out most of the incoming air armada trying to attack our carriers, we would make the Aegis more effective by dramatically decreasing the number of incoming missiles it would be called upon to try to destroy at one time.

And we had compelling test data to prove our contentions. To accurately measure the low radar cross section of a model ship under realistic ocean conditions, Ugo Coty went to one of the most remote areas of the western desert. There, within hailing distance of Death Valley, he built himself a miniature ocean. The place was about two days from Edwards Air Force Base by mule pack or by jeep crawling through deeply rutted roads. It was an ancient lake bed sitting at the foot of an 8,500-foot mountain, on top of which Ugo planned to mount a radar system that would duplicate the Soviet radar satellite’s. Ugo’s ocean was a hundred-foot-by-eighty-foot plastic swimming pool eight inches deep. The model sat atop a thirty-foot table that rocked and rolled to approximate a realistic ocean. The Soviet’s X-band radar was hauled up the steep side of the mountain in a secondhand refrigerated meat truck that kept both the electronics and the operators from frying in the broiling sun. To get up the steep dirt incline, the truck had to be pushed by a bulldozer. The biggest problem we encountered was with the region’s wild horses and mules, whose ancestors were the pack animals used by borax miners who dug in those mountains during the last century. The smell of water drew the wild herds to our make-believe ocean and interfered with our testing until one of our guys solved the problem by adding buckets of salt to our bogus ocean. Soviet spy satellites overflew once a day because the Navy used that desert range for missile testing, and the Russians must have wondered what in hell we were up to out there, stocking a pool near Death Valley for thirsty mules and horses.

In the early fall of 1978, I took our test results to Bill Perry at the Pentagon. I reviewed with him all our tests and the low radar returns we had managed to achieve so far. He was enthusiastic and ordered the Navy to provide research and development funding for the creation of our prototype stealth ship. The ship would be called Sea Shadow. But I returned to Burbank with some anxieties about the mixed blessings of launching another stealth project while we were still struggling to build the first stealth airplane, were currently updating our fleet of U-2s, and producing SR-71 Blackbirds. I was thriving while our shipbuilding people in Northern California were laying off workers. That situation was not lost on the Ocean Division executives, who heard rumors about our secret stealth ship project and complained to the Lockheed top management that they needed this project one hell of a lot more than did the Skunk Works. I found myself suddenly under pressure to let go of the ship and send it northward.