Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 2, 1990                   TAG: 9003023341
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STEALTH

The General Accounting Office, investigative agency for Congress, reported recently that the B-2 has serious manufacturing and technical problems that not only could drive the price higher, but also imperil its performance.

It's a familiar story. The cheap-by-comparison B-1 ($280 million) also cost more than it was projected to, and its performance has been compromised by technical failures. "It might be the best plane ever made, except it can't do its mission," Frank L. Conahan, chief of the GAO's national security division, said of the B-1.

One reason the B-1 can't perform as designed is that its avionics system - intended to foil attacks on the plane by jamming enemy defenses - didn't work as expected. The Air Force now admits it never will. The B-2 also has avionics trouble; the effort to iron those out has tripled the system's cost, to $5.7 billion, in the past three years.

Moreover, if either plane's system worked, that would be trouble too: These electronic devices emit signals that can serve as beacons for enemy radar. The Stealth's key selling point, remember, is that its unique silhouette renders it almost invisible to radar. You figure out why it also needs avionics.

The B-2's production and testing schedules have slipped badly, and further slowdowns may result from manufacturing and other problems. "Under the current acquisition plan," Conahan told the House Armed Services Committee the other day, "31 aircraft will be on order and over $48 billion will be appropriated before anyone knows whether the B-2 will do its job."

The GAO report was hopped on by Rep. Norman D. Dicks, D-Wash., whose state is home to Boeing, one of the B-52's biggest contractors. If production is delayed, he warned, "thousands of people would be laid off all over the country...and the cost would go right through the roof."

Delays do drive up costs. But if the B-2 is an employment project, there are many more productive ways to put people to work. A single Stealth costs more than building six Manhattan skyscrapers. The same amount of money could repair hundreds of bridges (one collapses every other day in America). It could fix hundreds of miles of federal highway that are becoming riddled with cracks and potholes.

The B-2, like the turkey fleet of 100 B-1s, is a monument to past glories. Manned bombers did great things for the United States in World War II. They are outmoded in a time of missiles: not just the intercontinental monsters, but also the cruise models that can hug the terrain and sneak in past radars to hit targets with nuclear warheads. Just as Stealth is supposed to do, and for only $1.2 million per cruise.

Rep. Dicks put his finger on a key difficulty. Following time-honored strategy, the Air Force made sure that contracts for the B-2 were parceled out to virtually every state in the Union. That makes it politically difficult to curtail the program.

At some altitude, however, the price of an aircraft should overcome even pork-barrel considerations. It seems that $530 million wasn't quite enough. But the cost now may be disappearing off Congress' radar screens.