Led to Sticker Shock : Why Did AF End Stealth on Stealth?

As the sun rises over the Mojave Desert, unmarked trucks from clandestine warehouses begin to make the day’s deliveries of secret aircraft parts to Northrop’s B-2 bomber plant in Palmdale.

The trucks pass through several barbed wire security fences and a perimeter that is guarded by attack dogs and cameras. When employees arrive for work, they must punch in a secret code to pass through special locked turnstiles. Many small subcontractors still haven’t been told what aircraft they are producing parts for.

Yet, across the country in Washington, the morning begins with glitzy television advertisements extolling the same B-2 bomber, part of a high-stakes lobbying campaign to keep the controversial program alive. Photos that once would have been considered highly classified are handed out in press kits. Practically every day, Northrop and the Pentagon release information that once was classified top secret.

Split Personality

When it comes to secrecy, it seems, the B-2 program has developed a decidely split personality.

To some critics, the reason has less to do with security than it does with the political demands of selling a $70-billion project to a skeptical Congress amid debate over astronomical costs and the bomber’s strategic value.

But the evolution of the plane’s public profile--from a barely whispered “black” project to its nationally televised first flight last month--mirrors an internal Pentagon debate in which the Air Force sought unsuccessfully to declassify the B-2 budget five years ago.

Whether the plane’s cost ever needed to be so shrouded in secrecy is now being questioned, and some argue that the secrecy actually undercut the program by sending taxpayers into “sticker shock” when the actual cost was disclosed.

‘Push for More Openness’

“There is going to be a great deal of pressure put on the Pentagon in future programs like the B-2,” said Don Fuqua, president of the Aerospace Industries Assn., a trade group. “I think there is going to be a big push for more openness. I can’t see that it hurts anything.”

The public debut of the B-2, also know as the Stealth bomber, began last April, when the Pentagon released an artist’s drawing of the aircraft, confirming speculation that it was a flying wing that lacked a conventional fuselage. But the rendering contained key deletions, apparently for security reasons.

By November, the actual aircraft was towed out of its hangar, but the news media was allowed to see only the front of the airplane, ostensibly to protect technology. At the rollout, adhesive tape marked areas where reporters were supposed to stand.

By May, the Air Force had disclosed the bomber’s weight, payload and crew size but said that it would not invite the public to see the first flight. However, it changed that position by June, when it opened the event to all news organizations. Now, pictures of the bomber from almost every conceivable angle have been widely distributed.

The most recent disclosure indicated how much each state will benefit from production of the B-2. California will reap $25.1 billion of the $70-billion cost of the program.

Over the last eight months, the Air Force has also rapidly declassified the B-2’s current budget and expected expenditures over the next five years--figures that often are not disclosed about weapons that are far less secret.

The rush to open up the books on the bomber has prompted critics in Congress to argue that the Air Force moved to declassify details only because the project has become threatened politically--and it raised once again the contentious issue of whether the program needed to be so secret for so long in the first place.

$70-Billion Price Tag

By keeping the B-2 cost secret for so long, critics maintain, the Air Force managed to commit $22 billion to the program before telling taxpayers that the total bill for the fleet of 132 bombers would be a staggering $70 billion.

“This was the worst kind of public policy,” said Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio). “To keep something secret all this time and drive the cost up to $22 billion will never be tolerated again.”

The Air Force rejects such criticism out of hand. “The charge that someone was hiding anything from the Congress is ludicrous. There were dozens and dozens of people in the Congress who were fully aware of all the details,” Gen. Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, said in a recent interview.

Welch dismisses also the widely held notion that recent disclosures about the B-2 have been politically motivated. “The timing on the declassification of that information had to do with the necessity of bringing the airplane out, taxiing it and flying it--not with political support issues,” he said. “And, by the way, we announced that plan well before the political opposition surfaced.”

Amid all the current debate, what is not generally known is that the amount of secrecy needed for the B-2 has been a source of sharp disagreement for many years even within the Pentagon. Former Air Force officials have said in a series of recent interviews that they had sought to declassify the B-2 budget in 1984, fully five years before it was finally disclosed this summer.

Former Air Force Secretary Verne Orr said he had recommended declassification and was supported by senior military leaders but was blocked in 1984 and again in 1985 by former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

“We didn’t feel that the enemy would find out that much by declassifying the budget,” Orr recalled. “It had become so big that it distorted the budget. Financially, it was becoming burdensome to hide that much money. And my feeling was that we were not being fair with the Congress.”

By 1984, cumulative spending on the B-2 was just a fraction of the $22 billion committed today. The exact sum spent by 1984 is still classified, according to Air Force officials, one of the continuing quirks of declassification.

Hard-Line Views

When asked why he had vetoed Orr’s recommendation, Weinberger held fast to the hard-line views that he championed at the Pentagon.

“My own feeling was that they were not proposals that were designed to either help with the project or do anything but satisfy the Soviets’ desire to know,” Weinberger said. “We had a lot of talk about the public’s right to know, but the Soviets’ desire to know is the thing that I was trying to avoid.”

But former Gen. Lawrence Skantze, who headed Air Force procurement and research, said, “The funding in and of itself did not disclose any technology.” In fact, Skantze said, the Air Force knew that, once the bomber began to fly, many of its most important secrets would become public.

“I used to joke that, if somebody wanted to keep it secret after it began to fly, we would have to develop a flying tarpaulin,” Skantze said.

Ironically, Air Force officials felt that the sweeping classification favored by Weinberger could one day haunt the B-2 program.

Wanted Technology Protected

“Our objective was to declassify the B-2 as rapidly as we could and protect only those segments of the B-2 that needed to be protected,” Welch said. “By that I mean the Stealth technology. Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with the Air Force on that drive for declassification.”

One motivation to declassify, Welch said, was the heat the Air Force took on its handling of problems with Rockwell International Corp.’s B-1 bomber. Critics accused the service of hiding significant technical problems on the program until production was nearing an end.

Welch said that the Air Force did not hide problems on the B-1, but the criticism left some officials determined to avoid such allegations on the Stealth. “We were in a way reacting to that accusation.”

But some critics say that, even when the Air Force and Northrop held classified briefings, disclosures were inadequate.

“I attended classified briefings by the Air Force and by Northrop which frankly left a lot to be desired,” Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) said. “They were not straightforward, they were not candid and, in many ways, they were very confusing.”

Synar, a longtime critic of the B-2, faulted Northrop for being over budget and behind schedule, saying that the firm “miserably failed to manage this program.”

‘Bit of a Phony Deal’

Northrop spokesman Les Daly, responding to congressional critics who expressed “sticker shock” at the price tag of $530 million for each B-2, said: “A lot of what is a big surprise was known a long time ago. The sticker shock is a little bit of a phony deal.”

While the Pentagon officials could not agree among themselves on the level of secrecy necessary, others outside the Pentagon today doubt that such all-encompassing secrecy was required from the start, when Northrop was awarded the bomber contract in 1981.

“If there was a valid classification on national security grounds, why would they be putting it on all of the televisions now?” Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) asked. “I think it is terribly embarrassing, the way (Northrop) is handing out coffee cups, posters and (lapel) pins.”

As part of its lobbying activities, Northrop has been distributing coffee mugs with a picture of the B-2 that appears when the mug is filled with coffee. The B-2 bomber is supposed to be rendered “invisible,” or nearly so, to enemy radar by the use of exotic materials and complex contours.

Plant Security Tight

Even though senior Air Force officials have loosened restrictions on B-2 information, workers inside Northrop’s plants say that they can hardly notice the difference. “What they are preaching to us is that what we are seeing on television doesn’t affect us,” one B-2 worker at Palmdale said. “They put a tremendous security operation together at the beginning of the program, and right now it is rolling along on its own momentum. It is like it was always there and always will be there.”

B-2 secrecy has led to some strange measures. At Northrop’s Pico Rivera plant, for example, some employees were forced to work at desks shielded behind black curtains. Motion detectors are widely used to monitor activity within the plant.

Bruce J. Hinds, the Northrop test pilot who first flew the B-2 only last month, couldn’t tell his wife that he had been selected for the honor. His wife guessed his role by reading newspaper stories.

The security system itself has a staggering cost. Former Undersecretary of Defense Robert B. Costello estimated that protecting the secrecy of the B-2 has added 5% to the program’s cost.

$1 Billion for Secrecy

So far, that amounts to more than $1 billion. Over the life of the program, the extra cost could jump to $3.5 billion if security is not drastically reduced.

However, Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, said that the highly classified parts of the program, the so-called compartmentalized areas, are being rapidly reduced in scope. “The cost of the security requirements are significant,” he said.

Despite all of the declassification, a significant amount of information remains top secret. The advanced Northrop manufacturing technology that permitted such a large aircraft to be produced with plastic composites is closely held. In addition, the exact composition of the materials is classified and is expected to remain so for a long time, Welch said.

“None of the technology has been revealed,” he remarked. “A lot of the capabilities have been revealed, of course. With a strategic system, it’s very much to your advantage to not have the opponent underestimate the capability of the system. That’s what deterrence is all about.”

Northrop spokesman Daly, discussing the issue of the secrecy, observed, “It is my product, but I don’t set the rules. It is the Pentagon that knows and has to make the judgment of what has to be a military secret.”

The worker at Northrop’s Palmdale plant put a different view on the same point, saying, “We grumble about it, but we have lived for so long under it all you can say is: ‘It’s dumb but what are you going to do about it.’ As long as the Air Force is paying for it, we just do it.”

Tight security has imposed a stiff price on Northrop in some quarters: Wall Street investors with millions of dollars at stake have been uncertain as to what was happening on the program; the stringent security has made work more stressful for many employees; and industrial efficiency has sometimes been sacrificed.

When Northrop employees were hired, they could not go directly to work until they obtained security clearances. Sometimes, they were assigned make-work jobs in an area of the Pico Rivera plant known irreverently as the “drunk tank.”

Securities analysts have called Northrop a “casino play” because of uncertainties in the B-2 program. Northrop stunned investors in 1986 and again in 1987 with write-offs of $214 million on the B-2 program.

And compartmentalization of work created some inefficiencies. For example, one former supervisor recalled that some of his employees worked on tasks that he was not cleared to know about himself.

“I could not ask what they were doing,” he said in an interview last year. “I wasn’t even supposed to know where they were working. For all I knew, they were going to the movies every day.”

The security measures still include the use of a highly secure telephone network, in which Northrop executives must use costly scrambler telephones to discuss business with subcontractors and the government.

All Manuals Top Secret

“All the manuals are top secret,” another Northrop employee said last week. “Ninety-five percent of them are ordinary aeronautics. They just classify everything. When you talk about repair manuals, operating manuals, logistics manuals, training manuals, test manuals, you are talking about a stack that is high as a two-story building.”

Many government and industry experts say that far too much information is classified in general, but efforts to cut classification have not been successful.

“Our experts estimate we could save $30 billion in security if we could streamline the system,” said Fuqua of the aerospace trade group. “There are 639 duplications of regulations between the military services, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Regulation. Nobody talks to each other.”