Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

A Promising Start

Ben Rich describes taking over the Skunk Works from Kelly Johnson in 1975 and immediately pursuing stealth technology after mathematician Denys Overholser brought him a Russian physicist’s paper that enabled precise radar cross-section calculations, producing the ‘Hopeless Diamond’ design with radar visibility as small as an eagle’s eyeball.

• Rich inherited the Skunk Works at the worst possible moment—defense spending was at a post-Vietnam low, Lockheed was nearly bankrupt from the L-1011 Tristar disaster and a bribery scandal, and the workforce had shrunk from 6,000 to 1,500—making new business an urgent survival requirement.
  • Lockheed lost approximately $2 billion on the L-1011 Tristar airliner after partner Rolls-Royce went bankrupt, and in late 1974 Textron almost acquired the entire corporation for $85 million.
  • The bribery scandal, involving payments to Dutch Crown Prince Bernhard, Japanese politicians, and others to buy Lockheed airplanes, caused Kelly Johnson to nearly quit and the top management to resign in disgrace.
• Stealth technology became possible when Denys Overholser discovered that Soviet physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev’s 1966 paper provided formulas to accurately calculate the radar cross section of any two-dimensional flat-panel shape, allowing designers to minimize radar visibility with mathematical precision for the first time.
  • Ufimtsev’s paper, ‘Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,’ published in Moscow and only recently translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division, had been ignored because it was so technically dense.
  • The key insight was that the shape of an airplane—not its size—determines its radar cross section, so that a flat-panel design could make a full-size fighter appear smaller than a hummingbird on radar.
• The ‘Hopeless Diamond’ design—a faceted, diamond-shaped airframe built from flat triangular panels—was computed to be 1,000 times less visible on radar than the best previous Skunk Works design, the D-21 drone, and appeared on radar as no larger than an eagle’s eyeball when scaled to fighter size.
  • The design required onboard fly-by-wire computers making thousands of electrohydraulic adjustments per second to compensate for the aerodynamically unstable flat-plate shape—without these computers, the airplane could not even taxi straight.
  • Kelly Johnson was so skeptical he kicked Rich and crumpled up the proposal, calling it ’theoretical claptrap,’ while senior aerodynamicists called it ‘Rich’s Folly’ and suggested burning Overholser at the stake as a heretic.
• Rich won DARPA’s stealth competition against Northrop in March 1976 at the White Sands radar range, where the Hopeless Diamond model measured the equivalent of a golf ball—and when Rich rolled actual ball bearings across generals’ desks to represent the airplane’s radar signature, it produced an immediate emotional and strategic impact on Pentagon decision-makers.
  • At White Sands, the test pylon supporting the model registered brighter on radar than the model itself, because no one had ever built anything that stealthy before—the Air Force had to pay half a million dollars to build new stealth pylons.
  • “Ben Rich went out and bought ball bearings and flew to the Pentagon and visited with the generals and rolled ball bearings across their desktops and announced, ‘Here’s your airplane!’” —Denys Overholser
• Rich demonstrated stealth’s operational reality in August 1979 when the Have Blue prototype flew directly over a Marine Hawk missile battery that had been given the airplane’s flight plan in advance—the radar screen showed nothing, and the Marines never acquired the target.
  • The Marines, deceived into thinking the airplane carried a radar-jamming black box, never knew two airplanes should have appeared on their scope; they only acquired the T-38 chase plane flying miles behind.
  • The young sergeant who watched the diamond-shaped aircraft pass overhead exclaimed to his captain: ‘You won’t believe this…’—validating stealth’s visual reality against radar invisibility.

Engines by GE, Body by Houdini

Rich overcame intense internal skepticism, crushing security restrictions, a machinists’ strike, and the challenge of building a real flying stealth aircraft from the aerodynamically impossible Hopeless Diamond design, ultimately achieving first flight of Have Blue on December 1, 1977, and losing both prototypes to accidents while proving unprecedented low radar cross sections.

• Building Have Blue required the Skunk Works to cannibalize off-the-shelf components from multiple existing aircraft—F-16 flight controls, F-111 actuators, B-52 navigation systems, F-16 ejection seat—in order to build two experimental stealth prototypes for only $30 million, roughly one-quarter the normal cost of an advanced technology demonstrator.
  • Major Jack Twigg, the Air Force program manager, requisitioned six J-85 engines from the Navy by fast-talking GE’s management and shipping them through false addresses and drop boxes to avoid revealing the Skunk Works as the destination.
  • The airplane was so unstable in all three axes simultaneously—a dubious first—that without the onboard computer system it could not taxi straight, but computer expert Bob Loschke adapted the F-16’s flight control software to compensate.
• The Air Force’s Top Secret Special Access Required classification—rarer even than the Manhattan Project’s—imposed such draconian security measures on Have Blue that it increased costs by 25 percent and nearly paralyzed the operation, validating Kelly Johnson’s warning that extreme classification would eat the project alive.
  • A two-man rule required that no engineer or shop worker could ever be left alone with a blueprint; if one machinist went to the toilet, the co-worker had to lock up the drawing until he returned.
  • A coffee mug designed with a logo showing the nose of Have Blue peeking from a cloud was classified top secret and had to be locked in a safe between coffee breaks.
• When machinists struck four months before the scheduled first flight, Skunk Works managers and engineers worked twelve-hour days seven days a week for two months and completed the airplane three weeks ahead of schedule—demonstrating that the Skunk Works’ culture of craftsman-engineers was its most critical competitive advantage.
  • Shop superintendent Bob Murphy improvised a heat shield for the tail section by cutting up a six-foot steel shop tool cabinet, telling his assistant ‘Steel is steel,’ and sending Rich the bill for a new cabinet.
  • Murphy’s crew ran engine tests by rolling the plane after dark to a nearby blast fence and hanging canvas sheets to shield it from view, pulling it back into the hangar before dawn.
• Have Blue’s first flight on December 1, 1977, was a near disaster—the airplane barely cleared the runway and struggled over foothills—but succeeded, and subsequent testing against the world’s most sophisticated radars confirmed unprecedented low observability, though both prototypes were eventually lost to accidents that injured test pilot Bill Park and ended his flying career.
  • On May 4, 1978, Park crash-landed after a bent landing gear caused one wheel to fail, ejected at 10,000 feet, landed face-down and was dragged by his parachute across desert scrub—a paramedic he had insisted remain on duty cleared his sand-filled airways and saved his life with seconds to spare.
  • Lt. Colonel Ken Dyson flew 65 sorties against radar ranges with the second prototype before losing it to hydraulic failure, and by then the test results were complete: Have Blue had outperformed every radar system on earth.

The Silver Bullet

The extraordinary success of Have Blue’s radar testing led the Air Force to contract for the F-117A stealth fighter before its predecessor had even flown—an unprecedented reversal of the ‘fly before you buy’ rule—but the program was beset by runaway inflation, security nightmares, congressional investigations, and a brutally punitive fixed-price contract that nearly bankrupted the Skunk Works before the airplane flew perfectly in June 1981.

• The Carter administration’s cancellation of the B-1A bomber in June 1977 was directly caused by stealth’s breakthrough—National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski briefed President Carter using Rich’s data and a photo of Have Blue, concluding that stealth rendered the conventional bomber obsolete and changed air warfare fundamentally.
  • “Rich told Brzezinski two things to tell the president: stealth ‘changes the way that air wars will be fought from now on’ and ‘cancels out all the tremendous investment the Russians have made in their defensive ground-to-air system.’” —Ben Rich
  • Bill Perry, the Pentagon’s chief for research and engineering, immediately set up an office for counter-stealth research and the CIA redirected satellites to find Soviet stealth programs, concluding the Russians had no priority effort in the technology.
• The Air Force signed a development contract for the F-117A stealth fighter in November 1977—one month before Have Blue’s first test flight—in a ‘fly before you buy’ reversal unique in defense procurement history, reflecting such confidence in Rich and the Skunk Works that normal acquisition rules were abandoned.
  • General Bob Dixon told Rich he wanted ‘five silver bullets for starters’ and ’twenty more down the line’—a silver bullet being a secret weapon kept under wraps for Delta Force covert surgical strikes against the highest-priority, heavily defended targets.
  • “General Larry Welch recalled: ‘Ben Rich and the Skunk Works say that they can deliver the goods, I think we’d be idiots not to go along with them—and that faith was based on long personal experience.’” —General Larry D. Welch
• Rich was forced to sign a punitive $350 million fixed-price contract guaranteeing that the full-size flying F-117A would match the radar cross section of the original 38-foot wooden test model—a potentially company-destroying commitment—after discovering that even three improperly tightened screws extending one-eighth inch above the surface could make the stealth fighter appear on radar ‘as big as a barn door.’
  • When inflationary OPEC oil prices sent costs soaring 16 percent in 1979 with no price-adjustment clauses in the contract, Rich howled to the winds: ‘Who could’ve foreseen this goddam mess?’
  • “Lockheed president Larry Kitchen warned: ‘We need real projects, not pipedreams, Ben. If you’ve got to take risks, at least make sure you keep it cheap.’” —Larry Kitchen
• Congressional investigations triggered by a disgruntled employee and a best-selling commercial model kit incorrectly depicting the secret stealth fighter led to government auditors cutting progress payments by 30 percent, requiring Rich to retrieve cartons of classified documents stored illegally in Kelly Johnson’s garage, and ultimately filling the Skunk Works with 40 auditors monitoring every move.
  • Model maker Testors sold 700,000 kits of its speculative ‘F-19’ stealth fighter, infuriating Congress; the Air Force blocked Rich’s congressional testimony on national security grounds, sending Lockheed president Larry Kitchen to be ‘browbeaten unmercifully’ before a House subcommittee.
  • The chief government auditor told Rich directly: ‘Mr. Rich, let’s get something straight: I don’t give a damn if you turn out scrap. It’s far more important that you turn out the forms we require.’
• The F-117A flew on June 18, 1981—the date Skunk Works program manager Alan Brown had written on a slip of paper and placed on Rich’s desk the morning after his wife Faye died suddenly, promising a firm delivery date—and ultimately generated more than $6 billion in revenue after losing $6 million on the first five production models.
  • Rich’s wife Faye died of a massive heart attack on August 18, 1980, shortly after cancer surgery; Rich plunged into work and received Brown’s date as both a professional commitment and a personal lifeline.
  • After the initial loss the Air Force expanded the order to 59 fighters; by achieving phenomenal production efficiency the Skunk Works made $80 million on the deal and gave $30 million worth of free engineering improvements back to the government.

Swatting at Mosquitoes

The F-117A stealth fighter became operational in 1983 under conditions of extreme secrecy at a remote Nevada base, training ‘Nighthawk’ crews to fly exclusively at night for years before proving its revolutionary precision and lethality on the opening night of Operation Desert Storm, where 37 fighters flying only 1 percent of total coalition sorties accounted for 40 percent of all damaged strategic targets without a single aircraft or crew lost to enemy fire.

• The F-117A’s first production-model acceptance flight nearly ended in catastrophe when a rewired servomechanism reversed the new airplane’s pitch and yaw controls—test pilot Bob Riedenauer flipped over backward only 30 feet off the runway, requiring seven months of hospitalization, and exposing the dangerous consequences of security-driven workforce fragmentation.
  • The wiring error should have been caught in the inspection process—its failure was a direct result of using too many inexperienced workers, a consequence of security restrictions that prevented telling workers what they were building or how many aircraft were involved.
  • Foreign object damage caused by careless workers was costing approximately $250,000 annually in repairs, prompting the design of pocketless coveralls and strict parts-auditing systems on the assembly floor.
• The F-117A ‘Nighthawks’ at Tonopah Air Base—140 miles from Las Vegas—lived as ‘vampire bats,’ sleeping all day and flying five nights a week in total blackout conditions for years, their families unaware of where they went every Monday and returned from every Friday, in order to maintain one of the most successful deceptions in military history.
  • A-7 attack fighters were kept parked on the ramp so Soviet satellites would think it was an A-7 base; earlier, a fake deployment used napalm canisters painted black with flashing red lights and ‘Reactor Cooling Fill Port’ labels to simulate atomic antiradar devices.
  • The wing commander, Colonel Alton Whitley, noted bats crashing into the F-117A’s stealthy tails inside open hangars—the bats’ sonar could not detect the low-radar-cross-section surfaces, providing eerie physical confirmation that stealth worked.
• Two computer specialists developed an automated mission-planning system in only 120 days for $2.5 million that pre-programmed every aspect of an F-117A strike from takeoff to attack and return on a cassette—the computer even turned the fighter at optimal stealth angles during the most dangerous radar-exposure moments—and the Air Force bought it for use across all attack platforms.
  • On training flights the system was targeting particular apartments in Cleveland high-rises or boathouses on remote Wisconsin lakes with simulated perfect strikes, demonstrating a precision in automated warfare previously impossible.
  • The system’s precision allowed hands-off flying through all turning points, altitude changes, and airspeed adjustments, while the pilot retained override capability to guide laser bombs to target using infrared video.
• Operation Desert Storm’s opening night on January 17, 1991, validated every stealth claim: F-117As attacked Baghdad—the most heavily defended city on earth, with 16,000 missiles and 3,000 antiaircraft emplacements—dropping bombs down airshafts and through building windows with the whole world watching on CNN, while Iraqi defenses fired blindly and never scored a hit.
  • “Colonel Barry Horne described the experience: ‘The skies over Baghdad looked like three dozen Fourth of July celebrations rolled into one. Only it was a curtain of steel that represented blind firing. We were like mosquitoes buzzing around their ears and they furiously swatted at us blindly.’” —Colonel Barry Horne
  • In three bombing raids totaling about twenty minutes, combined with Tomahawk missile attacks, Iraq’s communications, command centers, air defense, and infrastructure were destroyed on the first night alone—knocking out the equivalent of the White House, Capitol, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and key bridges if Baghdad had been Washington.
• The pilots’ personal accounts from Desert Storm reveal that stealth’s invisibility allowed tactics impossible in conventional air warfare—delaying attacks by five minutes to let anti-aircraft guns cool, hitting the same bunker twice with a first bomb drilling through eight feet of reinforced concrete and a second following down the drilled hole, and achieving such precision that crews boasted they could target specific rooms in a building.
  • Major Miles Pound described taking out a Republican Guard barracks at a prison camp, freeing Kuwaiti prisoners, and timing the destruction of Baghdad’s telecommunications center to the second while watching Peter Arnett’s CNN broadcast go dark on cue.
  • The F-117A knocked out 39 of the 43 bridges spanning the Tigris-Euphrates River, while destroying Saddam’s nuclear research facility at three in the morning using only eight airplanes where a daytime raid by 72 conventional aircraft had failed to score a single hit.

How We Skunks Got Our Name

Rich traces his own origins as a thermodynamicist from Manila and his first encounter with the Skunk Works in 1954, explaining how Kelly Johnson created the operation during World War II under a circus tent next to a stinking plastics factory, codified 14 operational rules while ‘half in the bag,’ and built America’s first jet fighter 37 days ahead of schedule—establishing a culture of small teams, shop-floor integration, and radical autonomy that would define the operation for 50 years.

• The name ‘Skunk Works’ originated when engineer Irv Culver answered the phone during World War II with ‘Skonk Works’—a reference to Al Capp’s ‘L’il Abner’ comic strip’s outdoor still next to a plastics factory, mimicking the actual stench from the noxious plant next to Kelly Johnson’s circus tent—and Kelly both fired Culver on the spot and never made the firing stick.
  • Kelly set up his original jet fighter operation under a rented circus tent in an area already taken for round-the-clock fighter and bomber production, choosing proximity to the stench to keep the curious away.
  • Using 23 engineers and about 30 shop mechanics borrowed from the main plant, Kelly built the P-80 Shooting Star prototype in only 143 days—37 days ahead of schedule—establishing the template for all future Skunk Works projects.
• Rich joined the Skunk Works in December 1954 as a thermodynamicist on a short-term loan, intending to stay a few weeks but remaining 36 years, drawn by the camaraderie, intellectual intensity, and the profound weight of building a spy plane Kelly Johnson described as ‘beautiful picture postcards for Ike’ that might decide whether America survived.
  • “On his first day, Kelly told Rich: ‘Whatever you learn, see, and hear for as long as you work inside this building stays forever inside this building. You’ll tell no one—not your wife, your mother, your brother, your girlfriend, your priest, or your CPA.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • Rich and colleagues worked in deliberately cramped conditions—desks touching, heavy smoking creating London fog conditions—winning a ‘Broad Butt of the Year’ contest and hanging pinup pictures that were flipped to duck decoys on visitors’ arrival.
• Kelly Johnson’s 14 operating rules—written one night while ‘half in the bag’—codified the Skunk Works philosophy: the program manager must have complete authority, teams must be kept small, engineers must work within a stone’s throw of the shop floor, paperwork must be minimal but important work thoroughly recorded, and there must be absolute trust between contractor and military customer with daily liaison.
  • Rule 3 was the most radical: ‘The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.’
  • Rule 14 addressed the central compensation paradox: ‘Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay not based on the number of personnel supervised’—inverting the standard corporate hierarchy.
• Kelly Johnson’s genius was demonstrable, near-supernatural mastery of every engineering discipline simultaneously—he could calculate in his head, to within 2 percent accuracy, figures that took Rich two hours with a calculator—combined with a volcanic temper that drove exceptional performance but also made powerful enemies who would eventually exclude the Skunk Works from fighter competitions.
  • When a designer named Bob Allen had someone answer the phone with a curt ‘yeah, he’s here’ and hang up on Kelly, Johnson was livid—but ‘deep down he appreciated the feisty independence of his best people.’
  • Kelly once told Rich to refigure an inlet design he’d called 18 percent too big, saying it was 20 percent too big; Rich spent two hours calculating and came up with exactly 18 percent—Kelly had estimated it instantly in his head.

Picture Postcards for Ike

The CIA secretly contracted Kelly Johnson to build the U-2 spy plane for $1 million per aircraft using laundered checks mailed to his home address, hidden under the cover of ‘C&J Engineering,’ in order to overfly the Soviet Union and discover whether Russia was preparing a Pearl Harbor-style nuclear first strike—a mission so urgent that half of all Americans believed they would die in a thermonuclear war before old age.

• The U-2 program was financed through an entirely unprecedented arrangement: the CIA paid Kelly Johnson through personal checks totaling over a million dollars sent to his home in Encino, laundered through a phony company called ‘C&J Engineering,’ with pilots officially carried on Lockheed’s books as employees doing a weather research study—the most elaborate government-contractor fiction in American history.
  • A local postmaster who grew suspicious of the crates arriving at the Skunk Works’ mail drop sent an inspector to follow the delivery van; security nabbed him outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he ‘pleaded writer’s cramp.’
  • Test pilot Tony LeVier found the secret base location by flying over the Nevada desert dropping 16-pound cast-iron shotput balls to test the hardness of dry lake beds, then describing the site to ‘Mr. B’—Richard Bissell, the CIA’s project director—as ‘just dandy.’
• The U-2 was designed to extremes of lightness that terrified its own builders: wings weighed only four pounds per square foot (one-third normal), the fuselage was so thin that a toolbox banged against it left a four-inch dent, and the landing gear weighed only 200 pounds and used a bicycle configuration never before flown on a powered aircraft—prompting universal fear that the airplane was too fragile to survive.
  • To save weight, the early models dispensed with ejection seats entirely—the CIA decided the 30 added pounds were not worth the altitude limitation imposed on the airplane.
  • The razor-thin tail was attached to the fuselage by just three five-eighth-inch bolts, and the twin-wheel bicycle landing gear required pilots to wrestle with a porpoising tendency on landing that ’never quite evaporated, no matter how many landings a pilot successfully completed.’
• The Cold War threat environment of 1955 was so severe—with more than half of Americans believing they would die in thermonuclear war before old age—that the U-2 program represented not just an intelligence priority but a potential civilizational survival mechanism, as Eisenhower desperately needed to know whether Soviet preparations meant a surprise Pearl Harbor-style nuclear attack was imminent.
  • The Joint Chiefs had warned Eisenhower that at the 1954 May Day parade the Soviets displayed apparent 100 new ‘Bison’ bombers capable of reaching New York with nuclear weapons—only later revealed to be approximately 20 aircraft flown in circles to deceive Western observers.
  • The CIA estimated that 90 percent of all hard data on Soviet military development would ultimately come directly from U-2 cameras—confirming Richard Helms’s assessment that the program was ’the greatest intelligence breakthrough of the twentieth century.’
• Tony LeVier’s first U-2 test flight on August 4, 1955, nearly ended in catastrophe when Kelly insisted on nose-wheel-first landings against all conventional advice, the airplane porpoised violently, and after three attempts LeVier ignored Kelly and brought it in nose-high—landing perfectly just as a desert thunderstorm flooded the lake bed.
  • LeVier’s first taxi test went airborne accidentally at 70 knots—he ‘almost crapped,’ jammed power to avoid a stall, hit the ground hard, blew both tires, and set the brakes on fire, while Kelly arrived by jeep ‘boiling mad.’
  • Kelly challenged LeVier to an arm-wrestling match at the celebratory party that night, ‘banged my arm down so hard he almost busted my wrist,’ and then the next morning had no memory of the contest.

Overflying Russia

Between 1956 and 1960, CIA U-2 pilots flew fewer than 30 missions over the Soviet Union that provided 90 percent of all hard intelligence on Soviet military development, eliminating the ‘bomber gap’ fear, tracking missile development, and photographing nuclear facilities—until Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, by an SA-2 missile battery that had been forewarned of the route, collapsing the Paris summit and exposing the entire program.

• The first Soviet overflights beginning July 4, 1956 revealed that U.S. intelligence had catastrophically underestimated Soviet radar capabilities—the Soviets tracked the U-2 almost from takeoff on every mission, scrambling fighters that could not reach it but making clear the airplane’s days were numbered from the first flight.
  • “Kelly told his team: ‘We gave them lend-lease early-warning radar during World War II and presumed that, like us, they wouldn’t do anything to improve it. Obviously they have.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • Pilot Marty Knutson, flying the third mission on July 8, 1956, looked through his drift sight and saw 15 Soviet MiGs following him from 15,000 feet below—unable to reach him but tracking him throughout the flight over Leningrad and Engels Airfield where 30 Bison bombers were photographed.
• Pilot James Cherbonneaux inadvertently discovered and photographed an unknown Soviet nuclear test site in central Russia with a bomb in a tower—and was nearly vaporized when the bomb detonated two hours after he flew over it, proving only afterward that his observation was correct when CIA debriefing officers who had initially dismissed his report received urgent confirmation by coded cable.
  • Cherbonneaux’s most memorable mission ended with his airplane crossing the Soviet border with only 100 gallons of fuel remaining, landing at a tiny World War II airstrip in Iran secured by CIA agents with grenades, where he tapped out a Morse code message on one hand while holding a beer in the other.
  • The parachuted film recovery from extreme-range missions was so complex that Cherbonneaux once landed with less than 20 gallons of fuel after an 8-hour-plus mission covering nuclear test sites, missile facilities, and military-industrial complexes across central Russia.
• Operation Rainbow—the crash effort to lower the U-2’s radar signature—produced only marginal results: piano wire dipoles cost 7,000 feet of altitude, Salisbury screens worked only at some frequencies, and a specially painted ‘dirty bird’ killed test pilot Bob Sieker when its heat-absorbing ferrite paint caused engine overheating, ultimately leading Kelly to declare the program a dead end.
  • Kelly had the CIA produce a phony U-2 flight manual showing a maximum altitude of only 50,000 feet, then artificially aged it with grease, coffee stains, and cigarette burns—to be fed to the Soviets as disinformation.
  • Sieker’s pressure suit faceplate, secured by a defective 50-cent clasp, blew off above 70,000 feet causing hypoxia and loss of consciousness within 10 seconds—’the damned thing cost fifty cents and it killed him.’
• Francis Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, 1960, over Sverdlovsk because the CIA chose the ‘Grand Slam’ mission route that General Nathan Twining had specifically warned repeated Marty Knutson’s exact approach path of only weeks earlier—allowing the Soviets to wait in ambush with 14 SA-2 missiles, destroying any hope of deniability and collapsing the Paris summit.
  • The CIA and White House were stunned that Powers survived, since they had assured Eisenhower that ’not much would be left of a U-2 or a pilot if shot down by a missile’—his survival meant Eisenhower had to admit the spy program publicly and endure international humiliation.
  • Kelly analyzed the wreckage photos and concluded the SA-2 missile’s electronic counter-measure box we had installed on Powers’s tail—code-named Granger—may have actually acted as a homing beacon by transmitting on the same frequency the Russian missile used, a theory confirmed when Taiwanese U-2s later flying without their black boxes survived while three of four with the device were shot down.
• Richard Helms and Richard Bissell both assessed the U-2 overflights as the greatest intelligence operation of the cold war, providing four years of data that covered over a million square miles of Soviet territory, eliminated the phantom bomber gap, tracked ICBM development, located nuclear facilities, and—most critically—proved the Soviets could not prepare a surprise nuclear attack without U.S. cameras revealing it.
  • Bissell told the president the U-2 would provide ’the greatest intelligence coup in history’—and delivered: photos from just the first missions allowed analysts to make ‘much firmer estimates of Soviet bomber strength by types,’ definitively disproving the feared bomber gap.
  • The program accumulated 1,200,000 feet of film—a strip almost 250 miles long—covering Soviet atomic energy, weapons testing, nuclear stockpile locations, air defense systems, submarine pens, and order of battle.

Blowing Up Burbank

Rich was assigned to explore liquid hydrogen as fuel for a successor spy plane to the U-2, traveling the country incognito as ‘Ben Dover’ to consult hydrogen experts who uniformly told him the idea was insane, then building a secret liquefaction plant near the Burbank airport that produced 200 gallons daily before a fire nearly destroyed it, ultimately proving that the proposed CL-400 Suntan aircraft could not achieve the necessary range—leading Kelly Johnson to personally call the Air Force secretary and return $90 million.

• Kelly ordered Rich to explore liquid hydrogen propulsion as the U-2’s successor despite universal expert skepticism—Dr. Russell Scott of the Bureau of Standards told him ‘one tank car could blow up an entire shopping mall,’ while Nobel Laureate William Giauque warned from his basement bunker of holes punched in chemistry building walls—because the technology promised an airplane flying at 100,000 feet at Mach 2.5 that any Soviet defense would mistake for a comet.
  • Rich traveled as ‘Ben Dover’—his Skunk Works alias, named after a British music hall star of his father’s era—pretending to be a self-employed thermodynamicist studying hydrogen for an investment group, to avoid revealing he worked at the Skunk Works.
  • The proposed CL-400 ‘Suntan’ aircraft would have been larger than a B-52, with a 108-foot tail-to-nose length equaling Yankee Stadium’s right field foul pole distance, carrying 162,850 pounds of liquid hydrogen as the world’s largest thermos bottle.
• Rich built a secret liquid hydrogen liquefaction plant near the Burbank airport—identified by Dr. Scott as able to ‘blow up Burbank’—that produced 200 gallons daily, becoming the largest hydrogen production facility in the country, while conducting controlled explosions and fires to study the fuel’s behavior and developing safety procedures that would later benefit NASA’s rocket programs.
  • When Rich and Dave Robertson mixed liquid oxygen with liquid hydrogen to create a controlled explosion, ’the shock wave thudded against a huge hangar under construction about five hundred yards away and nearly knocked four workers off the scaffolding, while Davey and I huddled out of sight behind the cement wall, giggling like schoolboys.’
  • A wooden-framed oven Rich used for heat testing caught fire only feet from 700 gallons of liquid hydrogen; rather than call the fire department he ordered workers to bleed the hydrogen tank dry, filling the hangar with a five-foot fog, then let in uncleared firemen who put out the fire in two minutes while seeing nothing classified.
• The Suntan project was cancelled when Rich concluded they were 1,000 miles short of guaranteed range—the airplane could only reach from Los Angeles to Omaha on one tank—and Kelly Johnson personally telephoned the Secretary of the Air Force to recommend cancellation and return $90 million of $96 million in funding, an act of integrity virtually unprecedented in defense contracting.
  • “Kelly told Secretary James Douglas Jr.: ‘I’m afraid I’m building you a dog. My recommendation is that we cancel Suntan and send you back your money as soon as possible. We don’t have the range to justify this project.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • The ironic postscript: the Soviet scientist Pyotr Kapitsa, whom the CIA believed had been released from a Siberian gulag to build a hydrogen-powered interceptor threatening the U-2, had actually been working on a hydrogen-fueled rocket engine—which launched Sputnik 1.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Kelly Johnson proposed building an airplane that could cruise at Mach 3 at 90,000 feet—a concept so audacious it shocked even the CIA—leading to the A-12/SR-71 Blackbird program that required inventing entirely new materials, manufacturing processes, fuels, and lubricants from scratch, purchasing titanium from the Soviet Union through dummy companies, and solving thousands of problems that had no precedents in aerospace engineering.

• The Blackbird program forced the Skunk Works to abandon every convention of aircraft manufacturing: aluminum was useless above 300°F while the nose reached 800°F, so the team had to invent a titanium airframe, new exotic alloys for control cables and hydraulic lines, special gold-plated plumbing, a fuel that wouldn’t vaporize at 350°F or freeze at -90°F, and lubricating oil more expensive than fine scotch that required a blowtorch to liquify.
  • The CIA secretly sourced most of the Blackbird’s titanium from the Soviet Union through third parties and dummy companies—the Russians never realized they were contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.
  • Kelly offered $100 for any idea saving 10 pounds of weight and $500 for an effective high-temperature fuel-tank sealant; nobody collected either reward, and the airplane sat on the tarmac leaking fuel from every pore until supersonic heat sealed the joints in flight.
• Ben Rich’s propulsion system—movable inlet cones that Rich and Dave Campbell invented as an air throttle—produced 70 percent of the Blackbird’s total thrust at Mach 3, far exceeding the engines’ own contribution, and achieving 84 percent propulsion efficiency through 250,000 separate wind tunnel measuring points tested over years of overnight sessions at NASA Ames Research Center.
  • At Mach 3, each of the two inlets swallowed 100,000 cubic feet of air per second—the equivalent of two million people inhaling in unison—compressing outside air from -65°F to 800°F before the engine heated it to 2,300°F and afterburners pushed it to 3,400°F.
  • Developing the air-inlet control system was, Rich wrote, ’the most exhausting, difficult, and nerve-racking work of my professional life,’ taking more than a year’s design phase and consuming 70 percent of program development time on this single component.
• The final A-12 design—code-named Oxcart by the CIA—emerged from a day-and-a-half brainstorming session where Rich improvised by removing an office door, laying it across desks, and having all engineering disciplines simultaneously design the ‘optimum final design’ at 80 percent perfection rather than waiting forever for 100 percent.
  • The breakthrough configuration used a ‘chine’—a lateral downward sloped surface that gave the fuselage a cobralike appearance—which reduced the radar cross section by an incredible 90 percent compared to the earlier bullet-shaped fuselage.
  • Bissell awarded the contract on August 28, 1959, with the condition that operations be conducted ‘identical to that of the U-2,’ telling Kelly: ‘Unless it was done this way he wanted nothing to do with the project either.’
• Titanium proved catastrophically difficult to manufacture at scale—95 percent of initial deliveries were rejected for brittleness, cadmium tools caused bolt heads to drop off, chlorine ink from Pentel pens etched through the metal, and summer chlorination of Burbank’s water supply caused spot welds to fail—requiring the Skunk Works to essentially invent titanium manufacturing from scratch.
  • Thirteen million separate parts were manufactured on this program, with each part traceable back to its original mill pour so that any failed part could trigger immediate replacement of others from the same batch.
  • “Kelly Johnson complained: ‘This goddam titanium is causing premature aging. I’m not talking about on parts. I’m talking about on me.’” —Kelly Johnson

Getting Off the Ground

The Blackbird’s first flight on April 25, 1962 inaugurated an era of continuous operational challenges—violent ‘unstarts’ that slammed pilots around the cockpit, sonic booms destroying property nationwide, sales battles with McNamara’s Pentagon, and a look-down shoot-down missile system that proved the F-111 obsolete—while Kelly Johnson made a fateful promise to General LeMay not to lobby against the B-70 bomber, and ultimately the enormous planned Blackbird production runs were blocked by McNamara’s refusal to believe the Soviet Backfire bomber threat was real.

• The ‘unstart’ problem—when air entering one engine was suddenly blocked causing the engine’s efficiency to plunge from 80 to 20 percent in milliseconds—slammed pilots violently against their cockpits up to 20 times in 10 minutes at Mach 3, and Rich’s ultimate solution was not to fix unstarts but to engineer a ‘sympathetic unstart’ that made both engines simultaneously drop and relight, eliminating the pilot’s awareness of the event.
  • Test pilot Bill Park appeared at Rich’s desk and dropped his plastic flight helmet in his lap, pointing to a deep dent near the crown: ‘It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could.’
  • Rich agreed to fly the airplane himself to experience unstarts firsthand but made it only to the high-compression altitude chamber before a claustrophobic panic attack—‘screaming, get me out of here!’—and returned permanently to ground duty.
• The Blackbird’s look-down, shoot-down weapons system—firing air-to-air missiles from 75,000 feet at drones flying at 1,200 feet, 80 miles away—achieved 12 hits out of 13 attempts and should have made the F-111 obsolete, but McNamara’s team refused to accept that the Soviet Backfire bomber threat was real and blocked the interceptor program in favor of a tactical fighter for Vietnam.
  • The Blackbird’s missile hit a remote-controlled B-47 flying over the Gulf of Mexico at 1,200 feet from 80 miles away while the Blackbird traveled at Mach 3.2—the most successful new weapons system test in history, achieving a kill rate impossible for any conventional interceptor.
  • Kelly flew to Washington and stormed in on Air Force Secretary Harold Brown, calling the F-111 ‘a national scandal’ and arguing that its vulnerability to look-down/shoot-down radar made it ‘obsolete before it even flew’—Brown held his ground and the Blackbird interceptor program died.
• CIA director Richard Bissell’s Bay of Pigs failure in April 1961 ended his government career and cost the Skunk Works its most powerful champion, leaving Kelly Johnson vulnerable to McNamara’s cost-cutting instincts and unable to leverage the CIA relationship that had given the Blackbird program its initial protection from blue-suit bureaucracy.
  • Bissell had imprudently told President Kennedy that Kelly could convert the CIA spy plane into a long-range bomber, leading Kelly to rush to Washington to show the Air Force his bomber proposal before they heard about it—‘It was not right,’ Kelly noted in his journal.
  • Despite losing his champion, Kelly invited Bissell to watch the Blackbird’s first flight in April 1962: ‘Both men were clearly moved watching our test pilot Lou Schalk gun those two tremendous engines and rip into the early-morning cloudless sky… all the pain and stress involved in building that damned machine melted away in the most powerful engine roar ever heard.’

Remembering Habu

The SR-71 Blackbird flew 3,500 operational sorties over 25 years—over North Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, and Soviet borders—absorbing more than 100 SA-2 missiles without losing a single aircraft or crew to enemy fire, while setting transcontinental speed records and providing presidents with decisive intelligence during the Cuban missile crisis, Yom Kippur War, Korean Pueblo incident, and Libyan bombing raid, before being prematurely retired by Air Force Chief General Larry Welch in 1990.

• The SR-71 crews at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa—whose airplane the islanders called ‘Habu’ after a deadly black pit viper—flew missions so demanding that five hours of flying consumed three aerial refueling rendezvous, photographed 100,000 square miles per hour with resolution sharp enough to see down open ship hatches in Haiphong harbor, and delivered intelligence to presidents within hours of takeoff.
  • Colonel Norbert Budzinske described the mission profile: ‘We came at Baghdad in two waves… hit a tanker fifteen minutes after takeoff, head on down between Taiwan and the Philippines, to Cam Ranh Bay, then turn north over North Vietnam. We’d overfly the north in eight to twelve minutes, take in both Haiphong and Hanoi.’
  • Soviet trawlers appeared at Kadena the minute the SR-71 squadron arrived, feeding takeoff times to North Vietnamese air defenses; the Americans responded by timing missions for optimal sun angles for photography rather than attempting surprise.
• Blackbird provided decisive intelligence at three critical Cold War moments: locating the captured USS Pueblo in Wonson harbor within 24 hours of its seizure by North Korea, providing real-time Israeli targeting intelligence during the Yom Kippur War when the Soviets repositioned Cosmos satellites for their Arab clients, and revealing that Soviet forces were not massing for a Czechoslovakia-style intervention in Poland during Reagan’s 1982 Solidarity crisis.
  • President Johnson personally chose bombing targets in North Vietnam only after reviewing Blackbird photos ’two or three times every week,’ needing reassurance that civilian casualties would be minimized and no Russian or Chinese ships accidentally hit in Haiphong.
  • Following the Yom Kippur War, Blackbird flew nonstop from upstate New York to the Middle East and back—12,000 miles in less than half a day—and its photo take was on the Israeli general staff’s desk the following day.
• The SR-71 was retired in 1990 by Air Force Chief General Larry Welch, who wanted the funding for the B-2 bomber, despite Senator John Glenn and 40 congressional allies fighting to save it and Admiral Bobby Inman warning that ‘satellites will never fully compensate for the loss of the Blackbird’—a decision Rich believed was proven catastrophically wrong when Iraq invaded Kuwait and he offered to have three Blackbirds operational in 90 days, only to be vetoed by Cheney.
  • Welch’s claim that he could operate fifteen to twenty F-15 fighter-bombers for the cost of one SR-71 was ‘bogus’—actual SR-71 costs were about $260 million annually, not the $400 million SAC generals cited, and no F-15 could overfly denied territory at Mach 3.
  • On the airplane’s final flight on March 6, 1990, pilot Ed Yeilding flew from Los Angeles to Washington in 64 minutes, setting a transcontinental record—‘I felt both tremendous elation and tremendous sadness’—while the crowd below included men who cried.

The China Syndrome

The Skunk Works’ Tagboard program (1962-1971) designed and built 50 drones that could be launched from Blackbirds or B-52s to overfly Communist China’s nuclear test facilities at Mach 3+ and 100,000 feet, but after spectacular test flights the three operational missions against Lop Nor all failed through guidance malfunction, parachute failure, or Navy recovery botching—and the program was cancelled, its legacy a composite engine panel found by a Siberian shepherd and gifted to the CIA by a KGB agent decades later.

• The Tagboard drone program was conceived to solve a specific strategic problem: reaching Lop Nor, China’s nuclear test site 2,000 miles inland, without risking pilot lives after four Taiwanese U-2s had been shot down attempting the mission, by using a Mach 3+ pilotless vehicle launched from a Blackbird mothership at 80,000 feet.
  • The drone had the lowest radar cross section of anything the Skunk Works had designed, was built from titanium, flew faster than three times the speed of sound, and used a star-tracker inertial guidance system that could be continuously updated via computer from the mothership until the moment of launch.
  • Kelly’s greatest worry was a safe launch—‘I don’t want to lose a pilot and an airplane. This will be the most dangerous maneuver in any airplane that I’ve ever worked on’—because the drone sat atop the fuselage and had to survive launching through the Blackbird’s Mach 3 shock wave.
• On July 30, 1966, the third Blackbird-launched drone test ended in catastrophe when the drone crashed back into the mothership’s fuselage, causing both pilots to eject over the Pacific—launch operator Ray Torick rashly opened his pressure suit visor while floating in the ocean, water flooded in through the neck ring, and he sank before rescue arrived.
  • Kelly was so distraught by Torick’s death that he impulsively decided to cancel the entire program and give back the development funding—only the offer of B-52 bombers as subsonic motherships instead of Blackbirds, eliminating the shock-wave launch danger, convinced him to continue.
  • “Deputy Defense Secretary Cyrus Vance authorized the B-52-based continuation, telling Kelly: ‘We need this project to work because our government will never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation to develop—all our overflights over denied territory will either be with satellites or drones.’” —Cyrus Vance
• All three operational missions against Lop Nor failed despite technical success: the first drone flew off course into Soviet Siberia, the second performed perfectly but its parachute failed to open on film recovery, and the third was lost at sea when the Navy botched the recovery in heavy seas—leading the CIA to cancel Tagboard in 1972, only for a KGB agent to gift the CIA a piece of the first drone’s engine mount found by a Siberian shepherd fifteen years later.
  • Kelly attributed the operational failures to Air Force personnel at Beale Air Base reassembling the drones repeatedly for no operational reason, introducing subtle damage: ‘They screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions.’
  • The composite engine mount panel given by the KGB agent ’looked as if it had been made just yesterday’—the Russians ‘mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology,’ paying inadvertent tribute to 1960s Skunk Works materials science.

The Ship That Never Was

A chance observation that the Skunk Works’ stealth coatings confused a Polaroid camera’s sonar autofocus led Rich to design the Sea Shadow—a catamaran stealth ship that could protect entire carrier task forces from Soviet air attack while showing up on radar no bigger than a dinghy—but the Navy’s hidebound culture, preference for large crews and prestigious commands, and unwillingness to build anything that ’looks like the Monitor or Merrimac’ killed the program despite spectacular test results.

• Rich discovered the principle of acoustic stealth when the Skunk Works’ photographer complained about fuzzy Polaroid pictures of the stealth model—the camera’s sonar autofocus was being defeated by the model’s stealth coatings and faceted shape—leading directly to designing a stealthy submarine hull that reduced sonar return by three orders of magnitude (1,000 times better) in crude initial tests.
  • When Rich took the submarine concept to the Navy, the captain dismissed it: ‘We don’t build submarines that look like that,’ and was more concerned about losing two or three knots of speed than about being invisible to the enemy.
  • Rich’s Kelly Johnson Rule 15—‘Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don’t know what in hell they want’—was passed verbally through generations of Skunk Works employees and proved accurate in every Navy encounter Rich described.
• Sea Shadow—a 160-foot SWATH catamaran ship sitting on submerged pontoons with severe flat 45-degree planes, armed with 64 Patriot-type missiles, and crewed by only four men—achieved test results so spectacular that Navy sub-hunter aircraft made 57 passes at it and detected the ship only twice at 1.5 miles range, too close for the aircraft to survive retaliation.
  • Rich’s analysis showed that only 18 Sea Shadow stealth ships could protect the entire U.S. Navy carrier fleet from Soviet air attack, at $200 million each versus $1 billion for a conventional Aegis missile frigate—but the small crew size made the ship useless for an admiral’s career advancement.
  • Sea Shadow was built secretly in pieces at multiple shipyards and assembled as a jigsaw puzzle inside a submergible barge in Redwood City, California, then tested at night off Santa Cruz Island while the Coast Guard leaked word of drug enforcement operations to keep civilian boat traffic away.
• Despite proving that stealth applied to naval vessels with the same order-of-magnitude effectiveness as to aircraft, the Sea Shadow program was killed by the Navy’s cultural resistance to revolutionary designs, the inability of senior officers to build a career commanding a four-man vessel, and the surface fleet’s institutional preference for large crews and prestigious commands over strategic effectiveness.
  • The sea trials initially produced embarrassingly large wakes visible on radar until investigators discovered that the propellers had been installed backward—and even after this was corrected, admirals complained the design was ’too radical’ and that secrecy was incompatible with the reality of hundreds of shipyard workers building it.
  • Rich had designed a stealthy aircraft carrier that would show up on radar no bigger than a life raft, but after proving Kelly’s Rule 15 correct twice, he declined to pursue it: ‘Why ignore it twice?’

The Long Goodbye

Rich traces his rise from a junior thermodynamicist to Kelly Johnson’s chosen successor—declining a Northrop offer in 1972 when Kelly matched it and named him VP for advanced projects—while watching Kelly’s health and relevance decline, becoming increasingly isolated by security clearances he no longer held, until the SR-71’s final flyby in 1990 drew tears from a man who barely recognized his own creation, and Kelly died the day before Rich’s own retirement.

• When Northrop offered Rich a Skunk Works leadership role with a $10,000 raise in 1972, Kelly Johnson countered with an identical raise, named Rich VP for Advanced Projects, explicitly told him he was the chosen successor over the more senior Rus Daniell, and began taking him to Pentagon meetings—training his replacement while teaching him that most corporate Skunk Works imitations fail because management can’t surrender control.
  • “Kelly told Rich about Northrop: ‘Most managements don’t trust the idea of an independent operation, where they hardly know what in hell is going on and are kept in the dark because of security… Those guys are all empire builders, because that’s how they’ve been trained and conditioned. Control is the name of the game.’” —Kelly Johnson
  • Kelly’s prediction proved accurate: Northrop never started a proper Skunk Works, its management interfered constantly with the F-20 lightweight fighter, and they lost more than $100 million when the administration blocked their Taiwan sale.
• Kelly Johnson’s personal relationships with Rich deepened through shared grief—Kelly’s first wife Althea died in 1970, his second wife MaryEllen died at 38 from diabetes complications in 1981, shortly after Rich’s wife Faye died suddenly—and Kelly’s social warmth toward Rich and his successive wives contrasted sharply with his professional brutality toward others.
  • On his deathbed, Althea told Kelly he needed to remarry quickly and suggested his secretary MaryEllen Meade—‘a vivacious redhead, twenty-five years younger than both of the Johnsons’—and Kelly consulted Rich about what people would think, something ‘very much out of character’ for a man who normally ignored public opinion.
  • MaryEllen, hearing of Faye’s sudden death, said to Rich: ‘Oh, Ben, Faye was so much stronger and healthier than I. What hope can there be for me?’—and died a few weeks later, devastated.
• Kelly Johnson’s final years in St. Joseph’s Hospital—dying over four years from senility and arterial disease, shrinking from 200 to 130 pounds—ended with him unrecognized by most colleagues and unable to recognize Rich, yet when the SR-71’s final flyby shook the Skunk Works with two sonic booms, tears rolled down Kelly’s face in the darkened limousine—and he died the day before Rich’s own retirement.
  • Kelly’s senility produced a heartbreaking moment when he told Rich: ‘Ben, I’ve got a great idea for a new spy plane. Get Allen Dulles on the line’—and when Rich told him Dulles had died years before, Kelly shouted: ‘The hell you say. You lying bastard. I never did trust you.’
  • “Rich wrote: ‘In the mere act of trying to please him and live up to his expectations, I became twice the man I otherwise would have been. Like all the rest of us at the Skunk Works, I ran my heart out just to keep up with him. Kelly, I thank you. All of us do.’” —Ben Rich

The Two-Billion-Dollar Bomber

Rich’s stealth bomber proposal—a logical successor to the F-117A that he believed the Skunk Works was destined to build—was ultimately awarded to Northrop in October 1981 ‘on the basis of technical merit’ in a decision Rich considered profoundly unjust, resulting in the B-2’s cost escalating from $480 million to $2.2 billion per aircraft as production numbers were slashed, making it the most expensive airplane in history and a cautionary tale about what happens when the government abandons Skunk Works principles.

• Rich’s stealth bomber pitch was perfectly timed: he presented it in 1978 to Gene Fubini and Bill Perry just as both were ‘really depressed’ over the B-1’s 60 percent predicted loss rate over Soviet targets, and an independent study showed a stealth bomber would achieve greater than 80 percent survivability over the most heavily defended targets—making stealth the obvious B-1 replacement.
  • SAC colonels worked with Rich for two months to draft bomber requirements calling for a range of 3,600 nautical miles and 10,000-pound payload—deliberately configured to supplant the F-111—and General Richard Ellis quickly approved the program and provided development funding.
  • Rich lost his strongest Pentagon ally when Carter’s loss to Reagan meant Perry’s replacement: ‘Perry was a Democrat and was certain to be replaced by the Reagan defense team’—and with Perry gone, the project moved to General Al Slay at Wright Field, who immediately changed the requirements to a much larger airplane.
• Both Lockheed/Rockwell and Northrop independently arrived at a flying-wing design for the stealth bomber—basic physics led both teams to the same boomerang shape—but Northrop’s larger airplane had marginally better fuel efficiency because its larger control surfaces eliminated the need for the tail fin that slightly penalized Lockheed’s more compact design.
  • Rich discovered the designs were similar when Defense Science Board head Gene Fubini visited the Skunk Works, saw a model of Lockheed’s bomber, and gasped: ‘How in hell did you get a model of the Northrop stealth bomber?’—revealing inadvertently that both companies had independently converged on the flying-wing configuration.
  • A classified message from Wright Field questioning Northrop’s aerodynamic efficiency claims was accidentally routed to Rich, showing Northrop claimed 10 percent better wing efficiency than Lockheed—figures Rich openly questioned.
• Northrop won the B-2 contract in October 1981 despite Lockheed’s better stealth performance across all radar frequencies, because the government’s unspoken industrial policy of keeping major defense suppliers solvent meant Northrop—devastated by F-20 losses—needed the work more than Lockheed did, a calculation Secretary of the Air Force Verne Orr made explicit by telling Roy Anderson ’not only was Northrop better than you, they were much better than you.’
  • Originally budgeted at $480 million per airplane for 132 aircraft, B-2 costs spiraled as Congress cut quantities: to $800 million for 75, then to $2.2 billion each for only 20—the fewer built, the higher the unit cost, consuming development overhead across fewer airframes.
  • The Northrop B-2 assembly building at Palmdale hosted more than 2,000 Air Force auditors, engineers, and supervisors—compared to the combined 240 Lockheed and Air Force personnel on the stealth fighter program—generating one million sheets of paper daily that no one had time to read.

Drawing the Right Conclusions

Rich argues that the Skunk Works model—small teams, radical autonomy, minimal bureaucracy, strong leadership, and prototype-first development—must be urgently adopted across defense and industry at a time when development costs have increased 100-fold since the 1950s, new aircraft introductions have dropped from 49 in that decade to three in the 1990s, and the post-cold war era demands more creative solutions at drastically lower costs.

• The fundamental problem destroying defense procurement is that a system designed to produce massive wartime quantities has been applied to tiny peacetime purchases—the B-2 bomber’s unit cost of $2.2 billion is the direct mathematical result of dividing enormous fixed development costs by only 20 aircraft instead of the 132 originally planned, making procurement reform a matter of national security.
  • Development costs for fighters have increased by a factor of 100 since the 1950s and unit procurement costs have risen 11 percent every year since 1963—so while 49 new airplanes were introduced in the 1950s, only 3 have appeared so far in the 1990s.
  • Rich offered a concrete alternative: the F-117A’s avionics could be redesigned so missiles perform all the maneuvering while the airplane flies straight and level, eliminating the expensive fly-by-wire systems that account for the majority of avionics costs in fighters like the F-22.
• Excessive bureaucracy is at critical mass in defense procurement—with 27,000 DOD auditors compared to 1,200 DEA drug enforcement agents, 33 million pieces of paper per month handled by one Air Force procurement office, and 92,000 boxes of F-16 data stored in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse no one ever reads—while the Skunk Works reduced equivalent paperwork by 99 percent and built better products faster.
  • A Skunk Works purchase order for a vendor development system took 3 pages; a comparable transaction at a major manufacturer produced a 185-page purchase order leading to a 1,200-page proposal plus three volumes on technical factors, costs, and management.
  • Rich cited the paint specification for USS Constitution as the exemplar of bureaucratic inflation: the 1776 original specification to build the ship was 3 pages; the current specification for painting it runs 200 pages.
• Ford’s Team Mustang operation proved that Skunk Works principles work across industries: a secret, small, autonomous team with minimal management interference redesigned the Mustang in three years for $700 million—25 percent less time and 30 percent less money than any comparable Ford program—demonstrating that the concept can succeed wherever management is willing to surrender oversight for results.
  • General Motors followed Ford by starting its own secret development group; the French company Dassault-Breguet has arguably the best Skunk Works operation in Europe; and the concept is spreading, though only about 55 such operations exist worldwide.
  • Rich concluded that the Skunk Works’ core requirements are timeless: ’extremely difficult but specific objectives and the freedom to take risks—and fail—define the heart of a Skunk Works operation,’ requiring generalists over narrow specialists and accepting modest financial risk in exchange for the potential of transformative results.
• Rich predicted that the future of warfare lies in unmanned systems—preprogrammed drones, remote-controlled tanks, computer-guided submarines—because political imperatives now make casualty avoidance essential, and the technology demonstrated in the F-117A’s automated mission cassette system already makes robotic combat aircraft feasible.
  • Rich also identified 26 percent friendly-fire casualties in Desert Storm as solvable through IFF technology—the Army’s planned $100 million radio-frequency identification system for troops was one approach, alongside infrared paints visible only through special lenses.
  • Rich warned of nuclear proliferation as requiring the most sophisticated surveillance technology: ‘A bomb in the hands of the North Koreans, the Pakistanis, or the Iranians makes the world infinitely dangerous and demands the closest surveillance, which only the most advanced technology can provide.’