THE DANGER IN PLANNING OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE is that we prepare to fight World War II all over again. The victor in any future war will have learned that lesson. If there is a third world war it will be a great deal different.
Is the defense currently being programmed for this country really effective? Does it look far enough ahead? Does it risk more than necessary? Are we getting the most for our money? Is it costing too much? Is a “prohibitively expensive” defense really so? Do we want to go down in history as the richest nation in the history of mankind—but be destroyed?
Or is it possible that the realization that no country can afford the defense necessary against new technology might so affect diplomacy that war really does become unthinkable?
The history of the human race does not offer much encouragement. Civilizations have been devastated before with an “ultimate” weapon.
The invention of the longbow and then the crossbow were as important to warfare in their time as the atom bomb or laser and particle weapons today and tomorrow.
When a man fought astride his horse bareback, with only knee pressure and a pull on the mane for control, any peasant could pull him off, stab him, or knock him out with a stone ax. But when the horseman developed a flight control system—a bridle, then saddle, and stirrups—war became darned dangerous for someone on foot.
The invention of the English longbow that could kill a French knight in armor from a distance of 1,300 feet so shattered the mores of the time that the Pope declared in effect, “Cursed, ye who use the longbow.” It was unthinkable that an unworthy peasant could overcome a noble knight. The longbow had a rapid-fire capability, too. In their first use of the longbow on the European continent, the English decimated the French at the Battle of Cressy in 1346, when their marksmen could launch arrows in waves, each shot requiring only a few seconds.
The Turkish crossbow, though slower, had more power—being cranked back mechanically—and could send an arrow slightly farther.
It wasn’t until 1803—although the rifle dates from the 15th century—that the Kentucky long rifle, invented by a Pennsylvania Dutchman, could deliver a greater impact with higher accuracy than the English longbow. But the real reason the rifle then became important on the battlefield was not that it was so efficient at killing people but because it made so much smoke and noise that it frightened the horses!
The use of mustard gas in World War I was viewed as so terrible a weapon that all nations agreed to outlaw its use. This restraint was observed in World War II. But then, the gas would have been difficult to control in dispersion and not effective enough militarily for the user to face the inevitable international opobrium. Since Korea, however, use of nerve gas has been reported on more than one side. The morality of man on record does not, I fear, hold out much hope for an end to deadly human conflict.
The technological battles of today will determine the outcome of any future world war. It will be won with new weapons—lasers and charged particle weapons for defense, “stealth” technology to make attacking aircraft invisible, and space satellites for navigation and missile firing. Computer capability may be the most important element of all to winning the conflict, being the controlling technology, insuring the accuracy of weapons firing.
We must not sell our technology. We must not sell, for example, our best electronic gear—the silicon chips and galium arsenide chips that give computers a memory of millions of bits of information for guidance of missiles, aircraft, submarines, and satellites.
Computer technology is a field in which this country has led for some time. It will be fundamental to our defense against the intercontinental ballistic missile. With enough power, beams can be directed to destroy incoming targets from space bases or from earth bases. These targets—as many as 12 warheads on each missile—must be detected and destroyed with near-100 percent reliability while they still are above the earth’s air blanket, well over 100 miles up.
They must not be allowed to get low enough so that the blast to destroy them creates fallout. Even a low-level blast could destroy our own missile bases and cities. A direct hit on earth, with the resultant dispersion of polluted dirt and debris, would be devastating.
Our navigation satellites are fundamental to guiding our submarine-launched missiles with the same accuracy as missiles launched from fixed-ground locations. If we cannot protect our satellites, we cannot insure the accuracy of our missile firings.
In the battle for technology, it is not only what we do but what we do not do that will be important. Our defense can be endangered by actions we fail to take. Failure to develop supplies of critical material. Failure to exploit the resources we have. Failure to think innovatively. Inadequate basic research and development. Insufficient attention to training of technicians, engineers, and physicists. Failure to stop technology transfer.
When we were fighting on the same side with the Russians in World War II, there was a considerable open exchange of technology, of course. They had as good or better equipment than ours in some cases. Our tanks were not comparable to theirs in winter. Their aircraft were better winterized than ours and were operating in freezing weather when we could not even start ours. Winter was a familiar friend for them. On the other hand, our tanks were desertized to operate in Africa, whereas the Russian tanks in the desert would grind to a halt in no time at all.
There also was some inadvertent exchange. We found that when one of our aircraft would have to make a forced landing in Russian territory it would be very difficult to get it back. We tried hard to avoid that. They did copy from two B-29s forced down and retained there.
The United States has been slow to tighten security on access by Russia, especially to some seemingly simple but strategically important basic technology.
Concrete hardness testers, for example, would not seem at first thought to be strategically important. They are used in this country to determine strength in a bridge or roadway—or a missile installation. The tester tells us what kind of weapon it would take to knock out an installation. Several were sold to Russia before supply was cut off.
Gear-shaping equipment that has made our submarines more quiet for years than the Russians’ has been sold to them. So has ball-bearing grinding equipment that could improve their missile-firing accuracy by a factor of eight or ten.
Our own Air Force some years ago received an award for size of a load carried in a single airplane—40,000 pounds of switching gear flown to Russia in a C-5 cargo plane. And how would that gear be used? It was capable of switching tremendous amounts of power in nanoseconds, a necessity in magnetohydrodynamics—generating high-powered rays electrically or from nuclear sources. The Russians needed the American equipment to generate the very short time pulse that is the basis of what we believe to be one of their new weapon systems.
It was no secret that they were undertaking four to five times more work than this country in the field of lasers and charged particles—commonly called “death rays”—the next major weapons. Should the Russians develop the capability first to make our missiles impotent, there won’t be a war, just a surrender. They may be ahead of us in charged particles. I think we may be ahead in lasers. I’m quite sure we are ahead in infrared use. But I do not think we should make it any easier for them by transferring technology in any of these areas.
There was interest by the Russians during the early ’70s in buying Lockheed’s L-1011 transport. It was the latest in advanced passenger airliners. The Russians wanted to buy three planes only. This would have provided them with three complete sets of drawings and all manuals, including details on the world’s only advanced automatic blind landing system. That would have been very useful for all-weather bombers. It would have been a very inexpensive way to acquire the technology without a long research and development program. And the Rolls-Royce engine on the airplane is much better than anything the Russians have. I was one who protested that sale, and I must not have been alone. Somewhere along the line the deal was dropped. The English are reported to be considering sale of the engine still.
Future military aircraft will be very expensive. An entire new fleet—fighters, bombers, ground-attack airplanes, cargo carriers—designed with the latest “stealth” radar avoidance techniques—would cost more than this country could afford realistically.
We will have fewer types of advanced new models and fewer of them in number. Because of the high cost, it becomes critical to deploy them only on key missions. Vulnerability of the new systems can be lessened and effectiveness increased by mixing them in service with the large number of old and obsolete models—manned on support missions, or unmanned as bombers, missile carriers, or drone decoys.
In new design, we must not look backward and try to put maneuverability in the airplane over all else, but rather put it in the missile. We may not need to endanger a man in the vehicle at all on the most hazardous missions.
It will be a very selective process, deciding how to fight a future war. Superior performance will be required of the new systems. And toward that end, work needs to be done in several basic fields. It should not be forgotten that the major aeronautical advances of World War II were not ours but German—the swept wing, the delta wing, and the jet engine, for example.
Work needs to be done to give our fighter aircraft more range in supersonic flight than they now have flying subsonically, and without afterburner and its extravagant use of fuel. The range of the F-15 in supersonic flight at sea level is about 57 miles. The F-14 doesn’t fly much farther. The extra range will come with improvement to the type of engine built by Bristol and used now in the Concorde transport. This engine shifts cycles, using a slight amount of afterburner to boost speed to supersonic, then cuts off the afterburner to cruise at Mach 2 with very economical fuel consumption.
Another area requiring more research in the transonic range—speeds from Mach .9 to Mach 1.1. In this speed range today, aerodynamic drag goes up by a factor of 300 to 1,000 percent, with tremendous compressibility effects. We still rely on primitive forms of dealing with this phenomenon. We have learned how to deflect it, but not yet to conquer it.
There are ways of minimizing it. In the F-104, we did it with a razor-thin wing. It can be accomplished also with highly swept-back wings. In the YF-12A, the brute power of the engines just pushes the plane through the transonic range. But these are not efficient methods of solving the basic problem.
Fundamental research is needed. The logical agency for this is NASA with its excellent research facilities, representing the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, and which it would be a waste for private industry to duplicate even if funds were available.
It is a waste of our resources, too, when research is repeated. Yet this occurs. Two specific examples: development contracts for aircraft radomes able to withstand 500°F temperatures; a contract for development of titanium landing gear. The Blackbirds have been operating with titanium gear for 22 years! Their radomes give fine performance at 650°F!
There also is not enough use of what we already have accomplished. Sometimes the attraction for something new is irresistible over adapting proven equipment for a lot less money. We should not be repeating costly development work. Lockheed’s Lancer and universal trainer proposals, discussed earlier, come to mind. Rather than improve the proven for readily-available, low-cost vehicles, the military opted for new aircraft with comparable capability to be developed over a considerably longer period of time and at much greater cost.
We must study our areas of potential vulnerability. Are we relying for defense on a team of dinosaurs? If it is necessary to penetrate an enemy country, what will be the best way to do it?
Many mappings from U-2 overflights and space satellites provide us with information on the location of Russian radar and missile stations, sites of factories, and other strategic targets, for example.
A number of years ago the Skunk Works made studies of penetration into the Soviet heartland. We computed probable aircraft losses for different approaches—bombers coming in at sea level to others operating at 80,000 feet. The study did not incorporate aircraft with low radar cross-section design.
We evaluated the proposed B-1 subsonically at low level and a hypothetical bomber cruising at Mach 3 at 80,000 feet.
Our conclusion was that a subsonic plane at low altitude would be subject to attack by all versions of Russian fighters, from the older MiG-15 to the later faster types. Efforts to incorporate the latest radar avoidance techniques in already existing design were not very productive. The loss rate was put at 35 percent of the fleet. And cost per unit for the bomber was more than $200 million per plane, not counting costs for crew training and support.
The high-altitude supersonic bomber was much more expensive than the low-altitude aircraft, but had a survivability rate about three times greater.
My own conclusion from these early studies was: why a manned bomber at all? If we can get the accuracy we expect from intercontinental missiles, I see little reason for sending a man on the attack mission.
A familiar argument is that the bomber can be recalled. Well, the missile can be blown up en route with a radio signal. There is little reason for putting a man over Russia except perhaps for reconnaissance in some cases. And then you hope he will survive the 45 minutes’ overflight through high-altitude clouds of nuclear contamination.
One U-2 monitoring atmospheric quality a few years ago, when both Russia and the United States were testing hydrogen bombs, found the same cloud of nuclear debris circling the earth six times—propelled by the jetstream along an airplane polar route over the United States.
The vulnerability of the U.S. Navy, or any navy, in a nuclear war—or any kind of war—is a concern. With satellite tracking stations making a pass overhead every 90 minutes, it is very easy to follow a fleet moving at a speed of 20 knots. At one time, Russian satellites actually were providing us with much of the information on our fleet location. Our own reconnaissance was better than theirs over land.
It is perfectly feasible to launch a land-based ICBM or IRBM carrying a dozen warheads at a fleet under way. I know of no way at present to stop an incoming missile speeding on a 90 degree course straight down on you.
The Russian Backfire could launch its missiles, carried under the fuselage, from about 240 to 250 miles away and guide them to knock out our capital ships. The ability to stop that Backfire is important.
The vulnerability of the U.S. Navy is vitally important. Military missions aside, a high-priority purpose is to protect the tankers hauling oil around the continent of Africa and transocean from the Middle East. Keeping these shipping lanes open is important for more than one reason. There is in this country a shortage of strategic materials—e.g., vanadium, chromium, platinum. Many of these metals come from Africa and the developing nations.
Russia has very good submarines—bigger, faster, deeper diving than ours—and many more of them than we have. Their newest is almost as large as a cruiser. Their subs can do 50 mph—much faster than ours. Their latest have titanium hulls which make them more difficult to detect. Titanium is non-magnetic and escapes some of the means we have of detecting submerged submarines. The Russians can build these large-size titanium hulls that give their subs the deep diving capability because they have the huge presses to do it. We do not.
If Russia with all her submarines decides to put us out of the shipping business, it will be a big problem for us.
Of course, we may find other ways to match their submarine performance. Do not write off our Trident and earlier Polaris submarine-launched missiles.
Anti-submarine warfare is a constantly changing battle. Lockheed’s carrier-based S-3A ASW aircraft for the U.S. Navy, after only five or six years’ service, already had changed over to new electronic gear for locating submarines.
Several years ago it was discovered that every submarine makes its own distinguishing operating sounds. No submarine is totally quiet, though that is the goal. These sounds now have been classified into a sort of directory, so that with sonar and other detection equipment our ASW planes, ships, and land-based stations can follow and identify the trail of an individual sub, know whether it is large or small, diesel-powered, electric, or nuclear.
ASW aircraft really originated with the Hudson bomber during World War II when an RAF plane became the first in history to capture a sub. Lockheed since then has built more ASW aircraft than all other companies combined.
ASW has been a developing science from those first beginnings, when the target had to surface with snorkels to recharge batteries to today’s nuclear-powered models that can remain submerged for days. Historically, the submarine has been ahead of the game step by step, temporarily to be overtaken by search-and-destroy techniques but then racing ahead again.
For years, I have said—jokingly because it is totally impractical—that in any next war I wanted to be in a nickel-plated, nuclear-powered, deep-diving submarine with plenty of food and reading material, because it would be the safest place in the world. Nickel plate would make the sub very smooth and very quiet. That would be prohibitively expensive, of course, but there are other platings we are studying seriously now for silencing purposes.
“Operations analysis,” or “operations research,” as an approach to design decisions really took off from those early ASW efforts in World War II and immediately afterward. Lockheed determined to stay in the anti-submarine business, and to do so we knew we had to keep ourselves educated. After the war, we sought a Navy research contract, even on a “no-cost” basis. I set up a group under Robert A. Bailey to study all phases of submarine and anti-submarine development—sonar, weight analysis, noise, etc.
We were given privileged information and, in return, reported to the Navy every few months on results of our studies. The heart of operations analysis, and the only method to make it worthwhile and accurate, is to keep it a purely research effort. Never use it as a sales tool. In the long run that is counterproductive, because it leads to tainted conclusions.
There are other ways our enemies could interrupt our vital supplies—such as subverting the governments in the developing countries that supply much of our strategic imports and installing governments sympathetic if not subservient to their own.
Development of sources of basic materials where possible in this country and others in this hemisphere is especially indicated because of these threats to our supply.
The titanium “sponge” from which the sheet and bar were formed for the SR-71s came principally from Australia and Japan which have it in good supply. But the basic materials for the later Blackbirds came also from Russia, which had developed its titanium-producing facilities and decided to undercut the others in price. We discontinued those purchases, however, after an initial one because we did not want to help Russia develop this industry.
The titanium ore found naturally in this country is not the rutile from which the basic sponge has been made to date. It is a different form of titanium oxide—ilmenite. It has been cheaper to buy from foreign sources in the past rather than develop the local product. While it will require more power to process our native ore, it should pay overall to insure availability of the metal. We know how to do it, but the expense of the necessary investment has delayed development so long because importing the product was cheaper.
This comes back to one of my favorite crusades—developing a titanium capability in this country and getting the cost of the metal down to where it is reasonable compared to other materials. This means mining and processing the ore, building rolling mills and sheet metal plants, and, especially, building a big enough press to forge the large submarine plates that give the Russian subs their deep diving capability, and other large production pieces, such as aircraft landing gear.
The initial cost would be tremendous for such a press alone, but the value in availability of the material, time saved in production, quality of the finished product, as well as importance to national defense must be considered to overbalance the dollars involved.
One of the most important things we can do in the battle for technology is to train young engineers, scientists, and technicians who can follow the tremendously complicated and complex new programs. We are short of technicians, especially. And for dealing with the technology of the future, we cannot quickly reassign engineers from conventional aircraft design. Engineers still will be required to design and build our defense systems. But the discipline now that will determine what these are is physics.
The Russians are graduating five times as many engineers each year as the United States. There is no unemployment of them. Here, unfortunately, there is little or no stability in our programs. It’s train, hire, and fire.
The defense of this country and the Free World requires an operations analysis approach—looking at the entire area from scratch, objectively. What would a war be like? Nuclear? Non-nuclear? What weapons will we really need? Expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers which might last two or three days? Should we put the carrier underseas—as a submarine? Do we need manned aircraft when a missile can be fired and controlled accurately from the ground? Should we use our old obsolete aircraft as decoys while the new highly-sophisticated and very expensive technologically-advanced models head for target? In the operations analysis approach, no idea is too outlandish to consider—and then evaluate for effectiveness, cost, complexity, flexibility, reliability, manageability, and all the other characteristics that come into play.
In the Skunk Works we have a dozen or so people working at all times in this manner, keeping ourselves educated on what “they” are doing and “we” can do. How good are their surface-to-air missiles? Their radar? Their next airplanes? Their research and development in other fields? How do we penetrate the country in case of war?
This approach as a national policy is basic to defending ourselves.