Let’s Hope It Rains on the B-2’s Parade

Is anyone going to jail in the $45-billion B-2 bomber scandal exposed last week by the Government Accounting Office? Are any congressional investigations or special prosecutors in the offing? Will taxpayers be ripped off with nine more of these useless planes at an additional cost of $27 billion, as the House of Representatives wants?

After 16 years of development, a plane that costs three times its weight in gold is not operational because its central and most expensive feature, the stealth covering that is supposed to make it invisible to radar, melts in the rain. It also blisters in the sun and chips in the cold, which means there is hardly any place it can fly without undergoing expensive repairs.

As the GAO reported, “Air Force officials said it is unlikely that the aircraft’s sensitivity to moisture and climate or the need for controlled environments to fix low-observability problems will ever be fully resolved, even with improved materials and repair processes.”

Whoa! The “low observability” was the whole point of this boondoggle, and if the stealthy skin of the plane is so vulnerable to the elements, why has it taken so long to discover that fact? Was the presence of rain, cold and heat in the atmosphere not known to those involved in the massive snow job to sell this expensive junk to the American public?

Even flying over the Rose Parade degraded its stealth covering. Protecting parades is the plane’s most useful function, given that the end of the Cold War has obviated the need for a nuclear-armed bomber that can survive a Soviet first strike. Attempts by its backers to find a purpose for the plane in conventional warfare were dismissed in 1989 by William S. Cohen, then a Republican senator and now secretary of defense, who said it would be like sending “a Rolls-Royce down into a combat zone to pick up groceries.”

Even parked, the plane is a loser. The B-2 needs to be housed in costly and complex climate-controlled hangers to protect it from the elements.

Two years ago the GAO revealed that the B-2’s radar could not distinguish between a rain cloud and a mountain, and now we learn that the consequences of encountering either would be disastrous. As the GAO report states, “Testing indicated that B-2s are also sensitive to extreme climates, water and humidity--exposure to water or moisture that causes water to accumulate in aircraft compartments, ducts and valves can cause systems to malfunction.”

The B-2’s failure to perform its intended mission must have been known to at least some of the industry lobbyists and those in Congress who have been pushing for funding for nine more of these clunkers. The Air Force says clearly that it doesn’t want any more, and the Senate finally has proved reluctant to throw taxpayer dollars into this black hole. But despite Pentagon opposition, the House narrowly voted such funds last month, and Speaker Newt Gingrich insists on keeping that money in the defense appropriation.

Southern California representatives led by Jane Harman (D-Torrance) favor building more of these expensive Cold War relics as a jobs program, since Northrop,the plane’s lead manufacturer, is based in their region. Lockheed Martin, a major contributor to Gingrich, is in the process of acquiring Northrop, which helps explain his fight to save the plane.

While taxpayers should shudder at the costs of attempting to make the existing 21 planes operational, let alone building nine more, that’s money in the bank for Lockheed. In addition, the Air Force has identified at least 73 additional major defects in the plane that will require costly retrofitting well into the next century.

This plane was developed under the secret Air Force “black budget” and was intended to enhance this country’s security. Instead, that cloak of secrecy was used to produce a plane that has never been capable of being deployed for its intended military function.

What did they know and when did they know it? These questions must be answered by executives of Northrop and their counterparts in the Air Force who approved the plane’s top-secret development.

When did they first discover that the much-ballyhooed technological breakthrough, the thermoplastics and composites that cover the plane’s surface, were so vulnerable to the elements as to give the plane an astoundingly low mission-capable rate of 26%, as cited by the GAO?

The public has a right to a full accounting of how its $45 billion was spent, and whether those who profited did so legally.