Stealth Can’t Fill U.S. Gap in Technology
The Air Force last week towed out a prime example of American technology--and also a symbol of why U.S. industry has slipped behind technologically--when it unveiled the B-2 stealth bomber.
The secret plane is like so many U.S. products these days: a Defense Department project, designed for military use, and expensive.
Even before the public show on Tuesday, the projected price tag for research, development and manufacture of 132 of the B-2 planes was $36.6 billion, or an average $277 million per plane. But those are old, 1981 numbers. New estimates put the cost of 132 planes at $68 billion, or $500 million per aircraft.
That $500 million is a lot more than the United States is spending on other technologies. It is double the government investment in Sematech, the last-ditch effort to keep America in the semiconductor equipment business. It is much more than government or industry is spending on high-definition television, the advance that holds a key to future computers and electronics. And it’s more than is being spent on superconductivity, the electrical technology that could transform tomorrow’s industry.
The plain fact is that U.S. industry, having lost the technological leadership it held 20 years ago, now seems resigned to losing the future. And projects like the B-2 are part of the problem, not the solution.
Expensive military projects divert scarce national resources, says Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW Inc. “The stealth bomber, by the time it enters Air Force inventory, will have used far more engineering resources than would have been necessary to develop the most advanced passenger plane for commercial airlines,” writes Ramo in his book “The Business of Science.”
Ramo, 75, a developer of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, is certainly no knee-jerk critic of the Pentagon. But he criticizes the lack of selectivity that allows so many weapons to get R&D; money while commercial technology languishes.
True enough, there are advances in the B-2. The skin of the plane is made of special materials designed to foil radar, and the Air Force and Northrop Corp., the developer, say the plane’s manufacture employed new three-dimensional computer techniques. Which is nice, but at what cost? Surely materials and manufacturing can be advanced more cheaply and efficiently than in a $70-billion, secret project.
Trouble is, no government agency other than Defense is funding much research. Even Sematech, a commercial project, is funded by the Pentagon. And it’s late. Sematech should have been done four years ago when Hewlett-Packard Chairman John Young proposed it as a way to leapfrog electronics technology. But other companies refused to put up a share of the $75 million the project required in 1984.
Slowing to a Crawl
So while America slept on, the semiconductor industry--which U.S. companies invented in the 1940s and ‘50s--slipped further from its grasp. Now U.S. industry is faced with an emergency, so IBM and other major firms plus the federal government are pooling $500 million to play catch-up.
More worrisome, the National Science Foundation reports that U.S. companies are responding to global competition by slowing R&D.; To be sure, U.S. research spending remains hefty--$125 billion in 1988, 47% government, 53% non-government. It has grown from $62.6 billion in 1980. But, says the NSF, the rapid growth of R&D; in the late 1970s, early 1980s has slowed to a crawl since 1986.
Why? It’s a mystery--on which the congressional Office of Technology Assessment is launching an inquiry--but takeovers, leveraged buyouts and other high jinks are suspected of robbing the future.
The problem, says Si Ramo, who has seen U.S. industry invent the transistor and the laser, is that financial market pressure on people running companies today discourages all but government-funded research. “You don’t invest to make new products 10 years from now--unless government is funding the effort and removing the risk,” he says. Which is why so much of U.S. technology these days is like the B-2, specialized and costly, and why the country that invented the phonograph, the telephone and television seems unable to come up with new products for the information age.
