Primarily, though, the SR-71s were supposed to be part of SAC’s main “deterrent” mission — fighting nuclear wars. The SR-71s’ job would be to fly over the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war, after the bombs and missiles had fallen, and “assess battle damage.” What they did do was simple intelligence gathering, flying over trouble spots, and, after the A-12s were phased out in 1968, they did it for the CIA as well as the Air Force.
But to keep up the original premise, SR pilots had to go through the monthly ritual of refresher courses in post-nuclear-battle damage assessment, learning to distinguish what cities were in need of additional blows and on which targets another nuke would simply, in the infamous phrase of the overkill era, “bounce the rubble.” The exercise struck the pilots as not only pointless but grim and surreal.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was looking at different kinds of planes. McNamara—“Mack the Knife,” the contractors called him — was pushing the THX for both the Air Force and the Navy.
Both the Air Force and the Navy hated it — if only because it forced them to share. McNamara not only killed the Blackbird but put in motion the process that would destroy the tooling to produce it. The Skunk Works buffs all know the dark day: On May 5, 1970, Kelly Johnson was ordered to sell the dies and jigs for the fastest, highest-flying airplane in history as scrap for just a few cents a pound.
But the symbolic end had come on June 26, 1968, when a group of high-level CIA officials, pilots, and pilots’ families assembled on the caliche at Groom Lake. Each of the living agency pilots, and the families of those who had died, were presented the agency’s highest award, the Intelligence Star. At last wives got a glimpse of the strange place to which their husbands had been disappearing. But there would be no public acknowledgment of the existence of the CIA Blackbird for another two decades.
12. Low Observables
The Blackbird had succeeded because of the great speed and altitude at which it flew. But before the plane ever took off, the Skunk Works people knew it could never safely fly over the Soviet Union. Constantly improving Soviet radars, such as the one the Pentagon called Tall King, could spot it even if the human eye could not.
The Blackbird looked as if it had been shaped for speed, but the knifelike extensions of its fuselage, called chines, which made it look like a sword with wings, had been designed to elude radar. Future airplanes would take their shapes less from the wind tunnel than from radar test chambers and be sculpted not by shock waves but by electromagnetic ones.
In the 1860s and ’70s, in quiet labs at King’s College London and Cambridge, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell theorized that light, electricity, magnetism, and what would later be called radio- and microwaves were all related. In his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, he told how they shared the properties of reflection and refraction, diffraction and polarization. Here lay the origins of radar.
One day in 1932, with fascism taking hold across Europe, former prime minister Stanley Baldwin stood up in the House of Commons to deliver a warning that there was no longer any question of protecting the man in the street from bombing. During World War I, zeppelins had bombed London, and the British understood that no fleet could provide full defense in the future. The next war would turn on the fact that Britain “was no longer an island.” “The bomber will always get through” was Baldwin’s famous phrase, to be repeated down the decades in the debate over airpower.
“The only defense is in offense,” he went on, “which means that you will have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy.” It was an endorsement of the teachings of the airpower enthusiasts and a foretaste of the doctrines of massive retaliation and assured deterrence.
Not everyone could accept that there was no defense against the bomber, however. Just as Ronald Reagan, a half century later, would look to the dream of Star Wars to break the logjam of mutual destruction, the British air ministry desperately sought new ways to shoot down bombers. They even looked at such exotic ideas as radio-wave weapons — ray guns. How much radio energy would it take to make a man’s blood boil? scientists were asked. How much to blow an airplane out of the sky?
The results were not promising, but something else interesting came out of the discussion: the idea that you could locate, if not destroy, an airplane by beaming radio waves at it and capturing and measuring the reflection. Clerk Maxwell had postulated in 1873, and the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had later shown, that microwaves would behave like light waves. The early radar scientists worked out just how this was so. They had invented a new way of seeing things in the sky. Instead of ray guns, they got radar.
It took an odd character, met with some disdain in the London gentlemen’s clubs where the planning went on, to turn the idea into reality.
Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, a pudgy and loquacious man in the Ministry of Defense, pushed the idea of radio detection and ranging. (The British provided the idea but the Americans would provide the acronym.) He tracked a Dutch airliner crossing the Channel in 1937, and by the time of the Battle of Britain he had laid out a network of stations that fed into the underground war room. By the narrowest of margins, and aided by Hitler’s and Goering’s failure to strike first at airbases rather than at civilians, radar seemed to have won the air war for the British in 1940. “Britain,” Watson-Watt declared, triumphantly but prematurely, “is an island once more.”
Such security was not long lasting. And America, too, would soon enough no longer be a continent protected from attack by even greater extents of water. With the coming of the atomic bomb, the consequences of bombers crossing the ocean became even more frightening.
Electronics, however, was advancing more rapidly than jet engines or airframes. By the 1960s, the big bomber was an endangered species. By the 1970s, radar had such a lead over even aircraft equipped with their own jamming and spoofing electronics that it seemed unlikely that “the bomber will always get through.” This became specifically clear to the U.S. Air Force in the 1973 Mideast war, when some thirty of the topline fighters it had sold to Israel were shot down by improved radar and SAMs. The Pentagon had been right to kill LeMay’s B-70—new SAMs would have made it obsolete — but smaller, faster planes were vulnerable as well.
In 1975 the Pentagon began convening special conclaves of scientists, engineers, and contractors to consider a response. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was put in charge. Founded in the wake of Sputnik, DARPA served as the Pentagon’s version of Bell Labs, a free-thinking outfit dedicated to exploring the frontiers of technology liberated from bureaucracy and interservice rivalries.
It planned the first ICBMs and designed sensors for Robert McNamara’s line, the high-tech barrier planned for Vietnam’s Demilitarized Zone. It developed the autonomous land vehicle, a huge walking tank, like something out of the Imperial army in The Empire Strikes Back. DARPA created improved integrated circuits, sensors, and actuators, the sinews and joints of modern weaponry. But most important, DARPA’s funds had built up the computer industry in the 1960s and would give us the computer mouse and the Internet — initially called ARPANET.
To come up with a means of eluding the new, powerful radars, DARPA created a project called Harvey, after Jimmy Stewart’s invisible bunny pal, to look into making an airplane invisible to radar, or at least harder to see. It signed up four leading airplane builders and gave them four million dollars apiece to solve the problem. Lockheed was at first not among the four. The irony was that the Skunk Works achievements in reducing radar cross section on the Blackbirds, including the stealthy D-21 drone, had been so secret that no one in the Pentagon knew of them; thus when the discussion turned to stealth, no one thought of Lockheed. To get the company included in DARPA’s stealth studies, along with Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Northrop, Rich had to do some fast talking to DARPA’s George Heilmeier.