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only
problem is the B-2s cost $516 million a pop, so unless you’re send-
ing them to Moscow to save the human race, you can’t justify
risking them on anything else. A B-2 isn’t a battlefield weapon.”
    “How are these gizmos going to find their targets?” Conven-
tional bombers used radar to navigate and locate their targets, but
the transmission of a radar beam from a stealth bomber would
reveal its location, thereby negating all the expensive technology
used to hide it.
    Admiral Henry settled onto a park bench with his back to the
Tidal Basin. His eyes roamed the sidewalks, which were deserted
on this early-spring morning- “You’re not going to believe this, but
the air force hasn’t solved that problem yet. They’re waiting for
technology that’s under development.”
    Jake Grafton looked at Henry to see if he was serious. He ap-
peared to be. “How about a satellite rig like the A-6G was going to
have? The Navstar Global Positioning System?”
    “That’s part of the plan, but the trouble with satellites is that
you can’t count on them to last longer than forty-eight hours into a
major East-West confrontation. And there’s only eight satellites
aloft—the system needs twenty-eight. If they ever get all the birds
aloft it should tell you your position to wnhin sixteen meters any-
where on earth, but that’s a big if what with NASA’s shuttle and
budget problems. No, I think the answer is going to be a system
made up of a solid-state, ring-laser gyro inertial nav system, passive
infrared sensors and a stealthy radar, one that powers up only
enough to see what’s necessary, has automatic frequency agility,
that sort of thing. That’s basically the A-6G and B-2 system. We’ll
use it on the A-12. It’s still under development.”
    Henry snorted and wiggled his buttocks to get comfortable.
“Congress isn’t going to fund any significant B-2 buy. The way the
whole budget process screwed up the buy, with inflation and pre-
dictable overruns and underbuys, the last plane in the program is
going to cost over a billion bucks. The manned strategic bomber is
going the way of the giant panda and the California condor. We
want to avoid the mistakes the air force made,”
    “SAC will have more generals than airplanes.”
    “The stealth concept has been around since World War II,”
Henry continued, “more as a curio than anything else. It really
became a driving force in aircraft design after Vietnam when it
became apparent that conventional aircraft were going to have a
very rough time surviving in the dense electronic environment over
a Western European battlefield. Conventional electronic warfare
can only do so much. The spooks say there’ll be too many frequen-
cies and too many sensors. That’s the conventional wisdom, so it’s
probably wrong.” He shrugged- “But any way you cut it, the attri-
tion rate over that battlefield would be high, which favors the Sovi-
ets. They have lots of planes and we can’t match them in quantity.
So we would lose. Ergo, stealth.”
    “But we could match them in quantity,” Jake said. “At least the
air force could build a lot of cheap airplanes optimized for one
mission, like fighter or attack. No room on carriers for that kind of
plane, of course.”
    “The air force doesn’t want that. Their institutional ethic is for
more complex, advanced aircraft with greater and greater capabil-
ity. That’s the whole irony of the stealth fighter. They’ve billed this
technology as a big advance but in reality they got a brand-new
tactical bomber with 1950s performance. But, they argue, it’s
survivable- Now. For the immediate future. Until and only until
the Russians come up with a way to find these planes—or someone
else figures out a way and the Russians steal it. Even so, the only
thing that made first-generation stealth technology feasible was
smart weapons, assuming the crew can find the target. These
planes have little or no capability with air-to-mud dumb