Can’t Anyone Slow the B-2 Juggernaut?
How dumb do they think we are? Did you see that picture of the Air Force guys hosing down a B-2 bomber to prove that it doesn’t melt? Whoopee, for $45 billion we give you a plane costing three times its weight in gold that can withstand the onslaught of a garden hose.
What it cannot withstand is the rain, sleet, ice, lightning and heat encountered during the plane’s anticipated 500 mph flight, elements that will disintegrate its stealth coating.
The photo-op arranged by the Air Force, which flew journalists at taxpayer expense to witness the hosing down of the plane, was a con job to counter the negative publicity generated by a devastating General Accounting Office report documenting that the stealth covering deteriorates under normal flying conditions.
Nor is it fixable. 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.”
The “low-observability” of stealth coating was supposed to make the B-2 invisible to radar and hence superior to the B-1 bomber, of which we already have 95 operational. But if the B-2 takes off from its home field in Kansas, the degradation of its coating by the end of a flight to say the Mideast can leave the plane as visible as the B-1 to radar. Since the retrofitted B-1s carry 50% more of the smart guided bombs that the military prefers, there was no reason to waste money on the B-2, much less to build nine more of them at an additional cost of $27 billion, as Newt Gingrich and company want.
House proponents of the B-2 even had the arrogance to insert a clause, No. 141, a “repeal of limitations,” that exempts Northrop Grumman, the prime manufacturer, from agreed-upon cost and performance requirements. Thus the House would give up the right to demand that among other requirements, the plane be invisible to radar. Bizarre, no? The manufacturer of a plane that has failed miserably to live up to its promised performance would now be rewarded with an even lower standard of congressional oversight. Instead of demanding an accounting of how the money was misspent on the first 21 planes, the House now wants to give Northrop a blank check for nine more.
Northrop, which distributed $877,000 in contributions during the last election cycle, got its money’s worth. Not surprisingly, Jane Harman (D-Torrance), the top recipient of Northrop funds, has been the plane’s chief congressional proponent. But the list of those handsomely rewarded by Northrop includes Republicans as well as Democrats, liberals and conservatives.
Will they get away with this continuing rip-off of the taxpayers? That decision is being made now in a closed conference committee meeting on the overall defense appropriations bill. The Senate has not voted any new B-2 funding, but House leaders are adamant in pushing for more B-2s that the Pentagon does not want.
What a wonderful moment for citizens to get into the act. Ask your representatives what they are doing to resist this egregious waste of your tax dollars. Find out how much they have received from Northrop. Remind them that the B-2 was designed to carry nuclear bombs and fly undetected by Soviet radar in a nuclear war scenario that is especially nutty now that the Cold War is over.
Beyond that, there should be an inquiry into the 17-year history of this secret program to ascertain if anyone deliberately defrauded taxpayers. Were officials honest in reporting the B-2’s problems, including the failure of its guidance system to distinguish between a rain cloud and a mountain, the fact that water seeps into critical components and makes them inoperable upon freezing and the inability to deploy the B-2 without expensive climate-controlled hangars and $165,000 of maintenance for each hour of flying?
The ultimate insult, the fragility of the plane’s much vaunted stealth coating, must have been known to insiders well before its public disclosure three weeks ago.
Congressional committees and special prosecutors are investigating the most far-fetched allegations of corruption, but this monstrous boondoggle never has been subjected to that spotlight. One benefit of the Cold War’s end ought to be lifting the veil of secrecy on the Pentagon’s secret “black budget” that allowed military contractors and their counterparts in government to fleece a patriotic but gullible public.
We may not be able to fully recover the $45 billion wasted on the B-2, but those who profited should be held accountable before we give them any more of our money.
