Skunk Works

Perry was convinced that a stealthy deep-penetration bomber would give us air supremacy over the Soviet bloc for at least a decade or longer. He sold Secretary Brown and the Joint Chiefs. They, in turn, sold the president. Anti-stealth technology was a hundred times more difficult to develop than the original stealth technology itself, and would demand extraordinary breakthroughs in the area where the Russians were at their weakest—in supercomputers.

That period at the Skunk Works was the busiest I had ever been. Had I been less preoccupied juggling several big stealth projects simultaneously I might have given more thoughtful consideration to life without Bill Perry at the Pentagon. Because as the presidential campaign heated up and we headed into the fall election, President Carter was clearly in deep political trouble and the chances were growing that Ronald Reagan was about to become the new commander in chief. Perry was a Democrat and was certain to be replaced by the Reagan defense team. Perry enjoyed respect both in the Pentagon and on the Hill for his technical acuity; without him, the Skunk Works lost a true believer in stealth technology, willing to push against the Pentagon bureaucracy to get important work done.

Northrop was our closest rival in stealth technology. Although they had lost to us in the stealth fighter competition, they were damned good. Their stealth guru was a bearded maverick named John Cashen, a shrewd and tough competitor, who once told me over a few friendly beers that if he had a choice between going to bed with the world’s most beautiful woman or beating the Skunk Works out of a contract, he would not hesitate for a second knowing which to choose. “I’d rather screw Ben Rich any time,” John chuckled.

John had heard rumors about our supersecret bomber project and managed to push his way into competition with an unsolicited proposal of his own. “This is going to be a huge project, in the billions of dollars, and we can’t just hand it to you on a platter,” an Air Force general told me. That was probably true, but I knew it was only half the story.

The open secret in our business was that the government practiced a very obvious form of paternalistic socialism to make certain that its principal weapons suppliers stayed solvent and maintained a skilled workforce. Aerospace especially demanded the most trained workers, a labor pool totaling about a quarter million, in the employ of the four or five biggest manufacturers and their host of subcontractors. Each of the major players enjoyed its own special niche, which kept contract awards relatively equitable. The largest was McDonnell Douglas, which specialized in fighters, building hundreds of F-15 interceptors for the Air Force and the Navy’s top fighter, the F-18. Next came General Dynamics, builder of the F-16, a cheap, lightweight fighter sold by the hundreds to our NATO allies, as well as submarines, tanks, and missiles. Lockheed was a solid third, specializing in Polaris missiles, satellites, military cargo aircraft, and spy planes. And finally, Northrop and Rockwell.

At the time that the blue-suiters informed me that Northrop would be competing against us for the stealth bomber, the rumor in the industry had Northrop taking it on the chin with big losses on a project I was familiar with. I couldn’t help but chuckle because they had screwed up royally while trying to peddle the lightweight fighter they had wanted me to come aboard to build.

Kelly was right on two counts: Northrop never did start up a Skunk Works operation and its top management was all over that lightweight fighter, interfering in ways that made a bad situation infinitely worse. They had lost more than $100 million on that single-engine fighter, called the F-20, built at the administration’s suggestion as a so-called nonprovocative fighter, which meant one that was made to be sold to friendly countries but designed to be vulnerable to our own state-of-the-art interceptors. Arming our friends was good business, but being able to shoot them down if they became our enemies was good strategy. To build this kind of airplane required the permission and cooperation of the administration, which could otherwise block such hardware sales.

So Northrop zeroed in on the Taiwanese, who were receptive to upgrading their fighter squadrons with the new Northrop product. But when the mainland Chinese voiced outrage at the impending sale and called it a serious provocation, the administration got nervous and withdrew Northrop’s license to sell the fighter.

Perhaps tacitly acknowledging the administration’s culpability in the fighter fiasco, the Pentagon invited Northrop into the bomber competition. I should have read the tea leaves right then about the final outcome of the competition, but I was naive and perhaps a trifle self-confident that we would win on merit, given our expertise and experience in stealth technology. We had the better team, but Northrop had the greater need.