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bombs.”
Henry stared at his toes and wriggled them experimentally. “Can
you imagine risking a five-hundred-million buck airplane to dump
a load of thousand-pounders on a bridge?”
    “Does stealth ensure survivability?” Jake prompted, too inter-
ested to notice his continuing discomfort from the breeze off the
river.
    “Well, it all boils down to whether or not you think fixed air
bases are survivable in the war the air force is building their planes
to fight, and that is a war in Europe against the Soviets which has
escalated to a nuclear exchange. If I were a Russian I wouldn’t
worry much about these airplanes—neither of which has any off-
concrete capability—I’d just knock out their bases at the beginning
of hostilities and forget about them.”
    “What about a conventional war with the Soviets?”
    “If anyone has figured out a way to keep it from going nuclear, I
haven’t heard about it.”
    “How many Maverick missiles are there? A couple thousand?”
    “Twice that.”
    “That’s still no more than a week or two’s supply. It’d better be
a damn short war.”
    The admiral grunted. “The basic dilemma: without stealth tech-
nology the air force says planes can’t survive over a modern battle-
field; with stealth they must use only sophisticated weapons that
are too expensive to buy in quantity- And they’re not as reliable as
cheap weapons. And if the airplanes truly are a threat, the Soviets
have a tremendous stimulus to escalate the war to a nuclear strike
to eliminate their bases.” He chopped the air with the cutting edge
of his hand. ‘This stuff is grotesquely expensive.”
    “Sounds like we’ve priced ourselves out of the war business.”
    “I fucking wish! But enough philosophy. Stealth technology cer-
tainly deserves a lot of thought. It’s basically just techniques to
lower an aircraft’s electromagnetic signature in the military wave-
lengths: radio—which is radar—and heat—infrared. And they’re
trying to minimize the distance the plane can be detected by ear
and by eye. Minimizring the RCS—the Radar Cross Section—and
the heat signature are the two most important factors and end up
driving the design process. But it’s tough. For example, to half the
radar detection range you must lower the RCS by a factor of six-
teen—the fourth root. To lower the IR signature in any meaningful
manner you must give up afterburners for your engines and bury
the engines inside the airplane to cool the exhaust gases, the sum
total of which is less thrust. Consequently we are led kicking and
screaming into the world of design compromises, which is a handy
catchall for mission compromises, performance and range and
payload compromises, bang-and-buck compromises. That’s where
you come in.”
    Admiral Henry rose from the bench and sauntered along the
walk discussing the various methods and techniques that lowered,
little by little, the radar and heat signatures of an aircraft. He
talked about wing and fuselage shape, special materials, paint, en-
gine and inlet duct design and placement, every aspect of aircraft
construction. Stealth, he said, involved them all. Finally he fell
silent and walked along with his shoulders rounded, his hands
thrust deep into his pockets.
    Jake spoke. “If the best the air force could get out of their stealth
attack plane was A-7 performance, is it a good idea for the navy to
spend billions on one? We can’t go buying airplanes to fight just
one war. and we need a sufficient quantity of planes to equip the
carriers. Five gee-whiz killing machines a year won’t do us any
good at all.”
    The admiral stopped dead and scrutinized Jake. Slowly a grin
lifted the comers of his mouth. “I knew you were the right guy for
this job.”
    He resumed walking, his step firmer, more confident. “The first
question is what kind of fights are we going to get into in the
future. And the answer, I suspect, is more of the same. I think the
likelihood of an all-out war