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1123The abandonment of the RAH-66 Comanche combat helicopter was announced on 23 February with an abundance of precautions – the secret had been well kept, precluding resistance to abandoning the system. It is a major event in the history of weapon system development. It is, perhaps, a still more important event with regard to what has constituted, for over a quarter century, the foundation of the DoD armaments development philosophy.
Presenting the causes of the abandonment of the program on 25 February, Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker declared: “Comanche was a wonderful idea up until about 1989. […] We started seeing that kind of threat disappear, and then it continued to disappear over the last decade.” Commenting on the Schoomaker statement, Defense News wrote on 1 March: “Army officials say the move reflects the more elusive enemies and weapons that have emerged since Comanche was conceived in 1983 to find and fight Soviet tank formations. Stealth, once the RAH-66’s biggest selling point, is now deemed unnecessary and expensive.”
These few words convey some idea of the importance of the decision; they gauge the effects that the decision will have, most of them probably involuntary, for obviously General Schoomaker probably does not imagine the repercussions of the decision that he and the Secretary of the Army have taken. What we want to do here is not to analyze the end of the RAH-66 as the end of a conventional military program – one of great importance, of course, but in itself, not necessarily revolutionary. We believe, however, that the decision is revolutionary, but consider that in order to understand that fact, it is necessary to take into account factors other than the strictly military factor, i.e. the strategic, industrial, technological and budgetary factors. It is necessary to present a very broad analysis that, in addition to the factors just mentioned, also takes into account aspects involving politics and the culture of the Pentagon.
The decision by the US Army – whatever its technical, operational and bureaucratic justification (which in our view is very great) – can only be judged for its true value by criteria that have nothing to with technical, operational and bureaucratic arguments. What we are dealing with is nothing less than sacrilege, in that the decision has been justified primarily by the determination made publicly and unequivocally that stealth technology (or LOT, for Low Observability Technology) is a thing of the past.
It is on this point that the reactions to the abandonment of the Comanche have been the strongest. The most characteristic aspect of this decision by the US Army is the fact that the reactions have less to do with the abandonment of the program than with what the program abandonment calls into question in order to justify the decision. General Schoomaker’s argument in effect goes back to the experience acquired in recent conflicts – those still ongoing in fact, in Afghanistan and in Iraq – since those conflicts clearly demonstrate that the employment of a new combat helicopter incorporating stealth technology must be totally reevaluated. Various official sources are cited as criticizing this aspect of the decision. One official is quoted as saying: “Today’s threats are not using so much radar, so low observability is not an important thing. But in the future? I take issue with that. … This is going to be a very real threat. Comanche’s stealth and other capabilities would confer battlefield advantages in just about any area where we conceive of having ground forces – even against terrorists.”
This attitude is typical and, as can be seen, has little to do with reasoned logic. It is purely and simply an affirmation, one that blithely chooses not to respond to the explanation put forward by the US Army. It comes down to a matter of faith: even if Afghanistan and Iraq show that stealth technology has practically no operational role (near or total absence of enemy air defense capability), it is still necessary to believe in it because it might find a role under some future scenario. The verb ‘believe’ is the operative word.
Before further considering the interpretation that must be placed on the abandonment of the RAH-66 program and the implicit questioning of stealth technology, let us review the development of the technology. As we shall see further on, we are dealing with much more than a single technology; we are dealing with a collection of technologies. But much more still, we are dealing with a state of mind, a vision of the world, a Weltanshauung. That is why the abandonment of the RAH-66 is so important.
The concept of Low Observable Technology (LOT) was born as a direct lesson of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. In the first four or five days of that war, the Israelis, taken by surprise, had incurred substantial fighter aircraft losses, because of the enemy effective radar-guided air defense, based on surface to-air (SAM) missiles launched from quadruple 23 mm ZSU 23 batteries. The quest for LOT therefore focused on radical reduction of the radar signature to the point of its near disappearance. Different means and technologies exist for achieving this result (whence the fact that LOT is more a ‘bouquet’ of technologies than a single technology, from the more simple (aerodynamic forms) to the more complex (radar wave absorbent paint, countermeasures, etc.). We already had an example of the effect of LOT, obtained by happenstance: the Lockheed SR 71 Blackbird spy plane, dating from 1964, had forms so inimical to the reflection of the radar waves that an SR-71 landing was generally perceptible visually before it appeared on surveillance radar screens.
From the beginning, around 1975, stealth technology was a ‘black’ program – i.e. one of the top secret programs handled by the Pentagon under an overall annual budget ranging between $20 billion and $30 billion, without any detail of the repartition of the budget. Only 1% of US Congressmen and Senators (the chairmen of the Intelligence Committee and of the Armed Services Committee) are briefed on the detail of ‘black’ programs.
It is the USAF which, understandably, took charge of stealth technology development. Between 1975 and 1980, several prototype programs were developed around two central programs:
• An attack fighter program, which culminated in the Lockheed F 117A, of which 59 were produced.
• A bomber program, the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB), which led to the Northrop B-2, of which 21 were produced.
Stealth technology became a matter of public knowledge around the same time as it was acquiring an aureole of mystery and of glamour, since it was popularized under the comic-strip name of ‘the invisible aircraft’. During the 1980 electoral campaign, the Carter Administration orchestrated leaks from the ATB project to respond to attacks alleging weakness on national security, in particular with the abandonment of the B-1A: the ATB/B-2 project effectively compensated for abandonment of the B-1A.
At the same time, a veritable bureaucratic cabal was forming in the Pentagon, first in support of, then to impose, stealth technology as the answer to the nation’s military requirements and aspirations. This ‘stealth mafia’ was led by Bill Perry, Head of Pentagon R&D in the Carter Administration. John Lehman, who served as Secretary of the Navy in the early 80s, related (see Context No. 51, May 2002, ANALYSIS) how, in order to manage to launch the program for the modernization of the A-6 Intruder (the A-6F version), he was obliged to agree to launch a stealth program for the Navy (the ATA, abandoned in 1991). Himself a former A-6 pilot, Lehman harbored an uncompromising skepticism on the subject of stealth technology, including operationally, but he had to commit the Navy to the ATA in order to gain acceptance of his A-6F program. (After Lehman’s departure, the A-6F was dropped, before the elimination of the ATA.)
Before anyone knew what had hit them, suddenly, everything had to be stealth: fighter aircraft, missiles, surface ships, submarines, helicopters, unmanned aerial craft (today’s UAVs and UCAVs) – even certain new tanks on the drawing boards.
The development of stealth technology, along with its insidious penetration into all weapon system fields, was so alluring, so irresistible, that hardly any attention was paid to a major negative factor: the cost. In January 1991, the issue of the cost of stealth technology – with its uncontrollable, indefinable element and with its ‘the-sky’s-the-limit’ excesses – was raised in an article in Armed Forces Journal International, containing this revealing exchange:
“Lockheed’s Ben Rich (whose Skunk Works built the F-117A) tells AFJI that stealth adds only about 10% to an airplane’s cost, and should be viewed as a trade-off like any other feature. [John J. Welch, Jr., the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition], has a slightly different answer. ‘How much does stealth cost? We have tried to figure that out. The answer I want to give you is, ‘Not much – 10% to over 20%’, but I’m becoming convinced that the answer is wrong. There’s a helluva big R&D bill. If you don’t buy a lot of airplanes, the R&D cost as a percentage of production costs gets into very large numbers, well into double digits. The cost is infinite if you only buy a couple of airplanes.’”
The costs of stealth technology generally form part of the same world as the ‘black’ programs – as impossible to unravel as stealth itself. Still, it was possible to shed light on one program and provide some measure of the extraordinary scope of the cost issue: the ATB or the B-2.
• At the start (1981), the ATB program called for 132 airplanes at a unit cost of $180 million.
• Little by little, the program got bogged down, with new costs pushing up the overall cost and leading to a reduction in orders.
• The official final ‘bill’ came to $44.5 billion for 21 aircraft.
How much does it cost? Maybe it’s a matter of ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.’
Extremely well-placed and highly reliable sources, with their own means of calculating the costs, hold the view that colossal costs were concealed through ‘black’ program legerdemain. These sources tell us: “We have calculated the cost ourselves from the operations carried out, from the technologies employed, from the characteristics of the aircraft and from our own parameters. All of these enable us to affirm that the cost of stealth technology is astronomical. For us, the unit cost of the B-2 is between $4 billion and $6 billion.” Did someone say ‘out of this world’?
The reality of the stealth technology debacle – an initiative proclaimed as a success by the Pentagon – is ultimately this: in 1987, the USAF announced that between 40% and 60% of its aerial fleet would be ‘stealth’ in 2000. Today, there are 77 stealth aircraft (56 F-117As and 21 B-2s) out of an overall complement 2,500 combat aircraft. The US Navy (including the Marine Corps) does not have a single stealth aircraft!
To justify the importance that we attribute to the elimination of the RAH-66 program and to better understand what stealth technology truly is, it is necessary to bear in mind the colossal mass of expenditures charged to stealth technology and the extraordinarily slim impact those expenditures have had on the operational posture and readiness of the US armed forces.
• It is impossible to estimate the total amount allocated to stealth technology since 1974-75. Certain figures appear – almost out of the blue – and provide an indication of the vastness of the phenomenon. For example, it was disclosed that in 1993, R&D expenditures for stealth technology consumed 13% of the total Pentagon R&D budget for the year, or $12.1 billion, with a Pentagon spokesman saying: “That level of spending has been consistent for some time.” This means that an annual R&D expenditure in excess of $10 billion is an acceptable yardstick and thus brings total expenditures since 1975 to between $250 billion and $300 billion. And that’s just for starters and does not take into account either production costs or operation and maintenance costs. It would not be surprising if a serious audit came up with $500 billion over the period in question.
• To show for that, 56 F-117As and 21 B-2s, whose operational activity never reached daily employment cruising speed. The use of stealth aircraft is – by the support infrastructure put in place – highly visible! A French Air Force source reports that “it is very easy to detect a B-2 mission. When the USAF decides to deploy the aircraft, we know it right away, because of the unusual level of activity, including very specific logistic support measures, carried out in very confined spaces.”
• In reality, from the outset of development of stealth technology, a divergence evolved between the program and the reality. We referred earlier to the prospect of announced in 1987 of stealth aircraft comprising 40%-60% of the USAF fleet in 2000. The complete integration of stealth technology into USAF programming was a massive, phenomenal feat from the outset. In September 1980, Armed Forces Journal International, which then constituted, under Benjamin Schemmer, an authoritative source on military information and analysis in Washington, wrote: “A senior defense official told AFJ that by the end of this decade, he expects to see roughly one tenth of the US military air arm comprised of the new stealth airplanes. That would mean that about 300 to 400 of the planes might be operational [by 1990].” We know the reality – 59 F-117A aircraft in 1984-85 (later reduced to 56) and 21 B-2s in 1990-96.
The quarter of a century that has passed since 1975 has shown the psychological – one might almost say the ‘spiritual’ – dominating presence of stealth technology – and its almost total absence from the operational arena. Stealth technology has never been integrated into the everyday force structures. It has always remained the exception and has never been involved in routine air operations. Operations involving stealth aircraft have always constituted exceptional operations conducted under very special conditions, and therefore integrated only at a very superficial level into overall planning.
The operational aims proclaimed in 1980 were grandiose and purportedly were to involve full integration into the USAF’s aerial offense capability of the 300-400 stealth aircraft expected to be available in 1990. The September 1980 article quoted above also laid this out, citing the same ‘senior defense official’: “He said that ‘We already have this investment in conventional aircraft, and we don’t need to scrap it. The trick is to use the new planes as ‘Force multipliers’ – to perform their own functions and increase the effectiveness of the planes we already have.”
“It is obvious, for example, that ‘stealth’ aircraft could be used to suppress enemy air defenses without even being detected … […] A senior defense official was emphatic in saying that the stealth breakthrough renders present air defense systems almost useless. The Soviets, he said, will now be faced with a choice of trying to function without air defense, or of spending tens of billions of dollars to invent and field new ones.”
Operations until the 90s and to this day have shown that the vision was totally false. Stealth aircraft surely play a role in the attack of air defenses, but in a very specific way and generally, preceded by ECM aircraft with jamming capability. In any event, stealth fighter aircraft are very far from being capable of providing the main thrust of the offensive against air defense targets. It is rather precision guided weapons that are playing the major role in that regard.
One fact is certain: for over 25 years, stealth technology has been presented as the key to American air power. Experience has little impact on the psychological reflexes of the military bureaucracy of the Pentagon. Today, stealth technology is – as it was in 1980 – the object of silent admiration and of unbounded operational esteem.
Considered over the course of its development, which now extends over a quarter of a century, stealth technology finally seems to be much more than a technological phenomenon or a simple step forward in technical progress. At the outset (in 1975-80), the general conditions were very special. Enthusiasm for stealth technology, evidenced by the installation of a powerful bureaucracy that cut a wide swath, was developing at the same time as the microcomputer revolution was being assimilated by the Pentagon, at the end of the 70s. The American armed forces were beginning to recover from the shock of Vietnam, perceived by them as terribly demoralizing and as threatening their very existence (internal troubles had plagued the American forces during the war, with many cases of outright mutiny, incidents of fragging [assaults upon unpopular superiors with fragmentation grenades] and extensive drug use). There was an unsalutary psychological climate that had nothing to do with technological and operational matters.
Stealth technology gave rise to hopes which – behind the jargon and the ‘rational’ certainties – were based on an imaginary representation of the world. The image of ‘the invisible airplane’, so strongly repudiated by the bureaucracy as constituting a romantic construction (a comic-book image, if you will), in reality struck a highly responsive chord in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was living and still is living (more than ever in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam and since then) under the inspiration of the philosophy articulated in 1944 by General ‘Hap’ Arnold, father of the US Air Force. Although this approach applies to the Air Force, it also applies to overall American defense and security doctrine – what the American historian Russell Weigley called, in 1973 (the year is significant), “The American Way of War”: “American air superiority in the war resulted in large measure from the mobilization and from the constant application of our scientific resources. […] The unacceptable character of human losses is a fundamental principle of American democracy. We shall continue to wage mechanical warfare more than human warfare.”
It is obviously in the broad doctrinal context that stealth technology must be viewed in order to better understand and grasp the preeminent role that it has assumed in the Pentagon. This comment completes the image (the comic-book aspect), without in the least contradicting it. It is on the basis of another image, also a comic-book image, that Reagan would conceive the other major military-industrial and technology mystique project, intended to complete stealth technology to ensure both the security of the United States and the power of Americanism. It is obviously in the comic book and in Hollywood imagery that Ronald Reagan came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or Star Wars. (See the revelations by Frances FitzGerald in ‘Way Out There in the Blue’, on the genesis of the Star Wars idea in Reagan’s mind before he became president.)
Stealth technology is not only a military, strategic and technological phenomenon. Most tellingly, it is a psychological symbol. The importance and the effectiveness of stealth technology are measured neither in terms of its operational effectiveness, nor in terms of its budgetary cost effectiveness. Stealth technology had the tremendous virtue of creating a bureaucratic and technological reference point that the Pentagon could identify with and that could be identified with American values. The issue of its operational effectiveness is therefore somehow wide of the mark.
To understand the stealth technology phenomenon, it is important not to cling to conventional doctrine – military, strategic and even technological. The phenomenon is of a totally different order. It is necessary to bear in mind the imagery that was reported as one of the basic causes of the passion for stealth technology: its automatic reference for the Americanist and bureaucratic mindset, to the idea of ‘the invisible airplane’, to the idea of automated warfare, to the idea of the impunity of the human being in warfare (General Arnold’s observations mentioned earlier clearly explain the de facto ‘zero casualties’ doctrine).
This symbolic aspect was present at the outset of the development of stealth technology. It has continually broadened and assumed an ever more important role since then; because the operational deployment was no longer a determining factor with the end of the Soviet Union; because the virtual dimension developed unbridled; because the importance of the bureaucracy supporting stealth technology also grew beyond anything one could have imagined and because the bureaucracy exercises its power more in realm of virtual reality than in the realm of reality.
Stealth technology therefore left the sphere of military and strategic evaluation – reality – to occupy a key place in the new world, the new universe, that has been created in recent years. It now forms part of – an almost paradigmatic illustration of – the world of virtual reality. It is only in this way that one can explain the fact that stealth technology plays an extremely marginal role in the American military arsenal, that it plays a negligible operational role, that its practicality and its effectiveness are largely disputed – to the point of being denied in the real world, while colossal amounts are being expended on the technology amid constant protestations denying its operational significance and validity.
Stealth technology is primarily intended to exert influence, to constantly promote and maintain the image of something highly complex – the image of American power, of American ingenuity, finally, the image of America as the exception among nations (The Chosen Nation), with stealth technology appearing as the champion (Sir Galahad) of America, through the reputedly invisible nature of the technology. That technology, like some Messianic character, is awaiting its hour to intervene in the rest of the world, with its own version of The Truth (the Gospel according to Saint Stealth), without ever having to account for the physical and technical conditions existing in the rest of the world.
Stealth technology must therefore be perceived for what it is – a fundamental tool for escape from the real world, a negation of the real world. It is, therefore, more a ‘technology of communication’ than a ‘technology’ in the generally-accepted meaning and connotation of that term. Stealth technology ‘tells us something’, rather than carrying out missions; it ‘tells’ us far more than all the comic books and all the B movies (having since become A movies in postmodern Hollywood, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the vanguard). We should take a moment to consider this connection, since it rounds out the two phenomena and it proves not to be mere happenstance and to define postmodern America as well: stealth technology has become a technology of communication in the same way as Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California – the two phenomena are not that dissimilar – and the message is that only image matters, that all the rest is only smoke.
All of which signifies that the decision by the US Army to drop the RAH 66 and to declare that stealth technology ‘is now deemed unnecessary and expensive’ is a development fraught with meaning – one very close to sacrilege.
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