The name Hopeless Diamond stuck, even after Lockheed’s designers modified the shape to something that ended up looking a bit like a faceted dart. It was not going to win any beauty contests, but it was enough to make Lockheed, along with Northrop, a competitor in what was now called the High Stealth Experiment, a classified program. Both companies built a scaled-down model and tested each on a stationary pole. Northrop’s aircraft took a roughly similar approach to Lockheed’s, using a faceted flat-panel design to deflect radar. Neither company had a clear advantage, but DARPA in April 1976 picked Lockheed as the winner of the competition, a decision that might have been based as much on the Skunk Works’ reputation as it was on the actual design. According to one Northrop official, “Grown men cried that day.” Lockheed would get to build and fly two prototypes of the world’s first stealth aircraft, now code-named Have Blue.
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On December 1, 1977, Heilmeier stood in the Nevada desert for the first flight of Have Blue. DARPA wanted the program under wraps, so neither the Skunk Works plant in Palmdale, California, nor the adjacent Edwards Air Force Base would work given the level of secrecy required. Area 51 was the logical choice.
It was dawn when Have Blue rolled out of the hangar. The pilot followed the instructions: turn right, go about three-eighths of a mile until you get to the main runway, turn right again, and then go seven thousand feet and take off. There were no lights on the runway (to avoid any hint of an aircraft test), and the only illumination came from the landing lights on the wheels of the aircraft—three lights that help guide the pilot down the runway. Heilmeier stood at the end of the runway watching as engineers made last-minute checks to the aircraft, and then watched, fists clenched, as it started to roll. No amount of computer simulation can ever make up for a first flight test, when engineers sweat over all the calculations that might have gone wrong.
For Have Blue, the Hopeless Diamond, the anticipation was even more intense, because there were a lot of things that could go wrong with an aerodynamically unstable, computer-controlled aircraft. “The air gods did not like that vehicle at all,” joked Atkins, the air force engineer.
As the aircraft lifted off from the end of the runway, Heilmeier reached down and gathered a few pink stones from the Nevada desert and put them in his pocket as a trophy. The Have Blue aircraft was flying, and there was a collective sense of relief and jubilation. Not just because it was invisible to radar, but because it did not drop out of the sky.
The first flight for Have Blue coincided with Heilmeier’s last day as DARPA director; he had specifically selected that day to end his tenure at the agency to ensure his legacy was linked to the aircraft’s success. Have Blue was also the final project for Kelly Johnson, the Lockheed designer who had pioneered a generation of secret aircraft. To celebrate, Johnson brought out a bottle of champagne that had been flown in from Europe on the SR-71 Blackbird. Both men signed the bottle, which Heilmeier took back to Washington with him. When his wife asked what it was, he replied, “It’s an empty bottle of champagne.”
“An empty bottle? What do you want to do with it?” she asked.
“Someday I’ll be able to tell you,” he told her.
She would not have to wait long. By the time Park crashed in 1978, reports began emerging in the aviation trade press about the stealth aircraft. The second prototype aircraft crashed in July 1979 (the pilot, Ken Dyson, safely ejected), but at that point the future of stealth was already secured. The air force, based on the success of the DARPA program, had started work on an operational aircraft under the code name Senior Trend, the F-117. Ironically, though the F designation would normally mean it was a fighter, it was really a ground-attack aircraft. The reason for the subterfuge, according to Lockheed’s Brown, was that designating it a fighter would make it easier to recruit pilots; the prestige job in the air force was being a fighter pilot. “No self-respecting fighter pilot is going to fly an attack aircraft or God forbid a bomber,” Brown said.
Stealth remains one of DARPA’s most highly cited accomplishments. After it had proven possible to build an aircraft that could evade radar, stealth was eventually incorporated into a variety of aircraft and weapons, from bombers to helicopters, including the modified Black Hawks that were used to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. One of the few people to express disappointment with the stealth aircraft was Myers, the Pentagon official whose invisible rabbit inspired the original DARPA program. Even four decades later, he felt betrayed that the small, affordable fighter he wanted—with a reduced signature, but not invisible to radar—was never built. “I’m still convinced that Harvey is a good idea,” he said years later. “We should try it sometime.”
By 1980, keeping the existence of a stealth aircraft under wraps was all but impossible. In the midst of a reelection campaign, when President Jimmy Carter was facing questions about the cancellation of the B-1 bomber, Harold Brown, now the defense secretary, decided it was time to confirm what was already an open secret. “I am announcing today a major technological advance of great military significance,” Brown said. “This so-called ‘stealth’ technology enables the United States to build manned and unmanned aircraft that cannot be successfully intercepted with existing air defense systems. We have demonstrated to our satisfaction that the technology works.”
Have Blue did one more thing that most people never realized: it saved the agency from extinction, according to James Tegnelia, who was the deputy director when the stealth aircraft flew. “You can fail at a $10 million program,” he said. “When you’re putting in $100 million, you can’t afford to fail.” Tegnelia credited the sudden growth of “big” technology programs, like Have Blue, with protecting the agency from critics who wanted to shut it down. After the success of Have Blue, “no one questioned the value of DARPA’s investment,” Tegnelia said. If there is an irony to this success, it was that the stealth aircraft emerged from the broken fragments of William Godel’s Project AGILE, which were dusted off and put back together as the Tactical Technology Office. Godel’s early efforts were coming to fruition just in time for what would become the largest military buildup of the Cold War.
CHAPTER 15
Top Secret Flying Machines
On Christmas Day 1979, Soviet airborne forces landed in Kabul, paving the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In Iran, a onetime base for the U.S. military—and DARPA—students loyal to the Iranian revolution were holding fifty-two American hostages, a nightmarish spectacle played out nightly on television. In April 1980, a daring rescue attempt of those hostages authorized by President Jimmy Carter ended in an embarrassing failure. After a series of mishaps that forced the military to abort the mission, a departing helicopter collided with a parked C-130 aircraft in the desert of Iran, killing eight American servicemen.
The Carter administration’s clumsy attempts to bolster its image of military prowess, such as publicizing development of the stealth aircraft, were ineffective. Approaching an election year, the country was facing a trifecta of inflation, unemployment, and recession. The price of oil peaked in December 1979 at more than $100 a barrel. Abroad, the United States was doing little better, as one by one, from Iran to Nicaragua, countries that had been bulwarks of American support fell to insurgent movements. The Soviet Union’s influence, on the other hand, seemed to be expanding, from Cuba to Afghanistan.
Facing allegations of military weakness and economic decline, a charismatic former actor and governor of California stepped onto the political scene, promising to reinvigorate America through military strength. The United States is “already in an arms race, but only the Soviets are racing,” Ronald Reagan told an audience of veterans, in one of his seminal campaign speeches. “They are outspending us in the military field by 50 percent and more than double, sometimes triple, on their strategic forces.” Reagan promised to reverse that trend, reinvigorate the military, and America. It was a message that resonated with voters; Reagan carried forty-four st
ates in a landslide election.
Shortly after Reagan’s victory, Richard DeLauer, the new administration’s pick for undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, called his friend Bob Cooper, a defense scientist, with big news: the White House was going to double the Pentagon’s budget over the next five years. “Sure, Dick, yeah, I know, I’ve heard that story before,” Cooper replied.
DeLauer insisted it was true. Reagan was adamant that the United States should increase its defense spending to send a strong signal to the Soviet Union. DeLauer wanted Cooper, a former football player known for his forceful personality, to return to the Pentagon and take over two jobs. Cooper would work directly for DeLauer, as an assistant secretary of defense, while also heading DARPA, which, following the success of the stealth aircraft, was regarded as a hotbed of innovation, a sort of corporate lab that could quickly push out military technologies. And with Reagan in the White House, there was going to be a huge demand for new military weapons. Cooper agreed to take the job.
When he arrived at the Pentagon in 1981, he was appointed to sit on the Defense Resources Board, which made funding decisions on major weapons. The powerful board consisted of the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary, the military chiefs, and other senior military and civilian officials. Essentially, his position on the board created a direct bridge from DARPA to the Defense Department’s senior leadership. For the first time since the mid-1960s, when DARPA was exiled from the Pentagon, the agency was thrust back into the epicenter of the country’s military decision making. With Cooper at the helm, DARPA would no longer be a stand-alone research agency, a few metro stops away from the Pentagon. Instead, its director would have a full-fledged voice on the Pentagon body that made decisions about what weapons to develop and buy. And military technology was about to become the focus of national policy under Reagan. According to Cooper, his job was to “give an enema to the pent up technologies” at DARPA.
Shortly after Cooper arrived, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger held a meeting for his staff and other senior Pentagon officials. Weinberger stood up and repeated the claim that Reagan would double the defense budget. At this point, Cooper interjected, “Cap, I’ve heard that song before, and I don’t think the public is going to support doubling the defense budget in the next three years.” Weinberger, however, was adamant. “We are going to spend them into the dirt,” he said. Yet even Weinberger was shocked by what happened next.
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On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan addressed the American people directly, warning of a grave threat of war and nuclear annihilation, balanced with a Hollywood message of hope. “The solution is well within our grasp,” Reagan assured the nation.
That solution, it turned out, was one of the most expensive and technologically foolhardy projects ever undertaken by the Pentagon: a space-based missile shield to protect the United States and its allies from a Soviet nuclear attack. “I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles,” Reagan said, much to the surprise of the Pentagon’s leading missile defense experts, who had been telling the president for the past year that such technology was currently impossible. Reagan’s dream was soon derisively labeled “Star Wars,” a name that would stick with the program for life, and death.
Not since the days of DARPA’s 1950s-era Project Argus, the nuclear-powered astrodome, had the government pursued a scheme to create a missile shield that could protect the entire country. Exotic proposals like Project Argus never got beyond the conceptual stage. Now Reagan was proposing to build an equally ambitious defensive system. Despite a few exploratory efforts, most of the missile defense work over the prior two decades had focused on ground-based inceptors that might take out a few incoming missiles, and even those systems had not gone very far. None of that concerned Reagan, however. “What other President, after all, could persuade the country of something that did not, and could not for the foreseeable future, exist?” Frances FitzGerald wrote in her nuanced account of Reagan’s impossible missile defense dream.
Much of the enthusiasm for ambitious missile defense schemes originated in one way or another with DARPA, which had pursued the Seesaw particle beam in the 1960s and also sponsored a highly classified laser study called Eighth Card, so named as a trump card that could win a seven-card stud. The Eighth Card study, held in 1968, was sparked by excitement over an air force gas-dynamic laser; the study was intended to merely look at battlefield applications of future technology, but it captured the imagination of the hydrogen bomb inventor Edward Teller. By the time Reagan announced his missile defense plan in 1983, Teller was touting a far more ambitious project based on the Livermore lab’s theoretical work: an X-ray laser powered by a thermonuclear explosion. The improbable scheme would have involved launching into space multiple X-ray laser weapons, which would be used to shoot down ICBMs mid-flight.
Over at the Pentagon, DARPA’s director, Cooper, and other senior officials—including Secretary of Defense Weinberger—sat slack-jawed as they tried to digest the president’s address. The president had just made one of the most significant military technology decisions of the past few decades without consulting the key people in the Pentagon responsible for that technology. “Everybody including DeLauer and myself were completely blindsided by it,” Cooper recalled.
Weinberger had opposed rushing forward with a missile defense system. “Although we appreciate your optimism that technicians will find the way and quickly, we are unwilling to commit this nation to a course which calls for growing into a capability which does not currently exist,” he had written to the retired general Daniel Graham, the founder of the pro-missile-shield group High Frontier, just months prior to Reagan’s announcement. Now Weinberger was expected to build just such a capability, so he turned to DARPA’s director. “I spent the following ten days after that—at least several hours a day—with Cap Weinberger, telling him what the President meant,” Cooper said.
The irony was that the president’s scientific adviser had been heading a study, funded in part by DARPA, about the feasibility of missile defense. The study, which was pessimistic about the chances of developing anything effective anytime in the foreseeable future, was nearing completion just as Reagan made his announcement. “When the President made his announcement, the study disappeared in a flash of smoke, and suddenly there was wild enthusiasm in the Office of the Science Advisor to the President about a ballistic missile defense,” Cooper said, “and things moved forward very rapidly after that.”
Cooper opposed Star Wars, and he was even more opposed to the idea of turning DARPA into a Star Wars agency. Over the next few months, Pentagon officials, including Cooper, debated the best way to put together the president’s vision and what DARPA’s role in that vision would be. Robert Kahn, a DARPA computer scientist, recalled a meeting with Cooper and other officials where DeLauer, a devoted public servant, started tearing up in frustration over the missile defense plans. “He was not a happy camper about this at all,” Kahn said. “There was not much he could do about it.”
With DARPA’s fate in flux, Cooper decided to hold an off-site meeting for office directors in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, about eighty miles from the Pentagon. He would put the missile defense debate to a vote, allowing the agency’s top officials to decide whether or not DARPA should work on a seemingly impossible scheme. The officials who worked on science were against it, worried it would eat up their budget, while those involved in more advanced weapons technology were in favor of it, seeing an opportunity for even more funding. Officials in DARPA’s Directed Energy Office, which was home to the high-energy lasers being swept up into the president’s program, were ambivalent, because their programs were likely to benefit regardless of whether they stayed in DARPA or left.
In the end, Cooper decided to hand off DARPA’s missile defense programs. The Pentagon
set up the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization in March 1984, sweeping up most of the Pentagon’s missile defense research, including DARPA’s laser programs. It was a smart decision; the laser programs, which were ballooning in costs, “were eating DARPA alive,” Cooper said later. He told the exiled missile defense scientists they could come back to DARPA if they wanted, and “some of them did,” he recalled, “after the craziness…got rolling.”
Yet the loss of missile defense was not a bad thing for DARPA, which still benefited from the surge in defense spending. The Pentagon’s budget more than doubled, and Cooper over the next four years presided over one of the largest expansions in DARPA’s history, which fueled the agency’s image as a technology factory. Soon, it was sponsoring dozens of aircraft and weapons projects, many of them highly classified. Not since DARPA was founded in 1958 did the agency have such a clear mission: create weapons that could outmatch the Soviet Union. Gone were concerns about insurgencies, advising foreign allies, or studying human behavior. DARPA would be building a weapons arsenal of the future.
Even if inadvertently, Reagan’s enthusiasm for technology and defense spending had revived DARPA. The Tactical Technology Office, the division created from the remnants of AGILE and Vietnam, was the largest beneficiary of that increase, becoming the agency’s new center of gravity. “We were spending money like it was going out of style,” Cooper later said. “I mean it was fantastic.” Ironically, the technology that would have the greatest impact on war was a DARPA project so small that many directors could not even remember its name. Its roots, like those of so many DARPA projects, stretched back to Vietnam.
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The Imagineers of War Page 30