Northrop’s B-2 Bomber Is Still Dodging Demons

For more than a hundred miles around Knob Noster in western Missouri on Friday, students left their classrooms and boarded buses for one of the region’s hottest events of the year: the arrival of the first B-2 stealth bomber at Whiteman Air Force Base.

In a showy ceremony at the base, Northrop delivered the first of 20 operational B-2 nuclear bombers to the Air Force--roughly 12 years after it began secret development of the plane in Pico Rivera.

Yet, behind the scenes, the B-2 continues to generate controversy, as it has during much of its history.

The gray bat-wing aircraft was piloted into Missouri by Gen. Mike Loh, a strong proponent of the B-2 who has stirred up some harsh feelings in Congress in recent weeks with his talk of buying more B-2s.

Loh has raised the possibility of building two B-2s a year as a way of preserving U.S. industrial capacity for bombers, in much the same way the Navy is ordering additional nuclear submarines purely to preserve that industrial base.

Since Northrop began the $44.4-billion program, the B-2 has undergone a major wing redesign, the Air Force has significantly cut back orders, and the Cold War has ended. Yet whatever technical, financial and political demons have plagued the program, recent production and testing is going smoothly, Northrop and Air Force officials say.

Northrop will deliver the last of the 20 B-2 bombers in early 1998, although it will begin laying off 5,000 workers over the next 24 months. The Century City-based company now has 11,800 employees in Pico Rivera and Palmdale and at Edwards Air Force Base and nearly 16,000 additional workers at its B-2 subcontractors.

In an interview Friday, Northrop Chairman Kent Kresa said: “This is the last bomber production capability in America. The clock is definitely ticking. With direction from the Air Force, we already have been mothballing tooling for the B-2.”

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Kresa would not say how much Northrop would charge for additional B-2s, but it would be less than the average $2.2 billion each has cost so far. Loh has suggested privately a price of $500 million apiece.

But Loh’s advocacy has evoked a bitter reaction among some lawmakers, many of whom never wanted any B-2s.

Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Oakland), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a recent letter to outgoing Defense Secretary Les Aspin that he found Loh’s advocacy “incomprehensible.” It shows a “disregard for the current law” that limits B-2 production to only 20 aircraft, Dellums said.

In particularly harsh language, Dellums also warned Aspin, “You should be aware that any attempt to request additional B-2s will be met with strong opposition that could endanger your entire defense budget.”

Because it can carry 16 bombs that each weigh as much as a subcompact car and can fly 6,000 miles without refueling, the B-2 provides a formidable capability to project American power around the world, according to Christopher Bowie, a senior staff member at Rand Corp.

“It would be nice to have more of them, but politically I don’t think that is feasible in this era,” Bowie said. “The aircraft acquired a very bad reputation on the Hill. It is a lot of money, but I firmly believe it is a good airplane.”

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Strategic bombers have always been controversial weapons because they are both costly and lethal. Bowie believes that future bombers may be derivatives of commercial aircraft, firing cruise missiles from outside enemy fire.

But the idea of depending on commercial-type aircraft, such as a Boeing 747 rather than a B-2, leaves many cold.

“If you had to fly a mission into enemy territory, which plane would you rather be in?” asked Northrop spokesman Tony Cantafio. “You can take the 747 and I’ll go in the B-2.”

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Although Congress never recovered from the sticker shock of the B-2’s cost, the airplane’s political visibility has subsided considerably. After early testing revealed that the B-2 wasn’t as stealthy as expected, the Air Force fixed the problem and blunted the political backlash.

After touring the B-2 plant earlier this year, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the subcommittee on defense appropriations, wrote to Aspin saying that ending the program would be a major mistake.

“My tour of the Palmdale B-2 final assembly facility left me extremely impressed with the scope of the B-2 industrial infrastructure,” Inouye wrote. “The B-2 industrial team is a national security asset which must be preserved.”