Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

13 THE SHIP THAT NEVER WAS

In the spring of 1978, while we were developing our model for the first stealth airplane, our project photographer stopped me in the hall to complain about defects in a new Polaroid camera we had recently purchased. “I’ve been taking instant view shots of the stealth model, and I’m getting very fuzzy pictures. I think I’ve got a defective lens,” he remarked. I slapped my head, knowing we had accidentally stumbled onto an exciting development. “Time out! There isn’t a damn thing wrong with your new camera,” I insisted. “Polaroid uses a sound echo device like sonar to focus, and you are getting fuzzy pictures because our stealthy coatings and shaping on that model are interfering with the sound echo.”

I was always on the prowl, looking for new ideas to expand or exploit technologies we were developing. A stealth airplane was our goal. But how about a stealthy submarine that would be undetectable on sonar? If we had avoided the sonar device built into a Polaroid camera, why couldn’t we avoid sonar returns against submarines or even surface ships specially treated and shaped to escape detection? I had a couple of our engineers buy a small model submarine, put faceted fairings on it, and test it in a sonic chamber. Even with such a crude test setup, we discovered that we had reduced the sonar return from that model sub by three orders of magnitude. In the engineering game, improving anything by a single order of magnitude — ten times better — is a very big deal, usually worth a nice bonus or at least a bottle of champagne. Three orders of magnitude is one thousand times better. That’s worth a fortune, a medal, or both, but is as rare an occurrence as an astronomer discovering a new constellation.

So we decided to design a stealthy sub; the cigar-shaped hull was shielded by an outer wall of flat, angular surfaces that would bounce sonar signals away and also muffle the engine sounds and the internal noises of crewmen inside the vessel. We ran numerous acoustical tests in special sound-measuring facilities and obtained dramatic improvements. If nothing else we had rendered null and void the favorite cliché of a lot of World War II naval action movies about a submariner sneezing or dropping a monkey wrench at the critical moment when the enemy destroyer’s sonar search pings ever closer. The flat outer wall effectively eliminated any noises. Armed with high hopes, I took our design and test results to the Pentagon office of a Navy captain in charge of submarine R & D. By the time I left his office, I was grimly reciting Kelly’s Skunk Works Rule Number Fifteen. Fourteen of his basic rules for operating a Skunk Works had been written out, but the fifteenth was known only by word of mouth, verbal wisdom passed on from one generation of employees to the next: “Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don’t know what in hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.” I’d been a fool to ignore Kelly’s wise words of warning.

That submarine captain epitomized the hidebound Navy at its worst. He frowned at my drawing and backhanded my concept. “We don’t build submarines that look like that.” He admitted that our test results were “interesting” but added, “Your design would probably cost us two or three knots in speed.” I countered, “But why care about losing three knots, when you are invisible to your enemy?”

He ignored me. “This looks more like the Monitor or the Merrimac from the Civil War,” he said. “We’d never build a modern submarine that looked like that.”

I returned to Burbank with a renewed healthy disdain for the anchors aweigh crowd, but one of our engineers, just back from a Pearl Harbor business trip, mentioned to me that he had seen a catamaran-type ship that the Navy had built experimentally on the q.t. out of unauthorized funds. This was a prototype SWATH (Small Water Area Twin Hull) ship that was proving to be amazingly stable in heavy seas and was considerably faster than a conventional ship. It seemed to me that a catamaran SWATH ship held real promise as a model for a stealthy ship. And on my next trip to Washington for a meeting on our stealth airplane design with Defense Undersecretary Bill Perry, who was the Carter administration’s czar of stealth, I mentioned the idea of a model stealth ship. I told Dr. Perry that the catamaran would provide a perfect test of the effects of stealth shaping and coatings for surface vessels. We also wanted to test the effects of seawater on radar-absorbing iron ferrite coatings. Dr. Perry agreed and ordered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to authorize a study contract with us.

I put our best special projects engineer, Ugo Coty, in charge. DARPA had come up with $100,000, and I kicked in an additional $150,000 to begin developing a workable model catamaran. One of the biggest threats against our surface vessels was the Soviet RORS satellite, using powerful X-band radar. Shape was the key to defeating Soviet radar. Coatings accounted for only 10 percent effectiveness in deflecting radar. The rest was quietness of a vessel’s engines and minimizing its wake.

Ugo picked four other engineers for his team and set to work developing a SWATH ship model that sat on the water like a catamaran with a pair of underwater pontoon-type hulls that propelled the ship with twin screws. The underwater pontoons provided most of its buoyancy and good stability in rolling seas and also produced very little wake. A ship’s wake is as easy to spot from the sky as a fighter’s contrail.

Our ship was the most unconventional seagoing vessel ever to come off a drawing board. There was a definite family resemblance to our stealth fighter. Only the floating version had no wings. It was a series of severe flat planes at 45-degree angles that sat above the water on struts connected to a pair of submerged pontoons. The ship would be powered by the diesel-electric propulsion that drives electric generators. Cables carried the current to a pair of powerful electric motors in each submerged pontoon that spun counter-rotating propellers. Careful shaping of the pontoons and the propellers cut down sharply on noise and wake.

This wasn’t exactly a ship of classic design, but my hunch was that we could really fill an important niche in the Navy’s defensive needs. NATO war games played out by computer had triggered alarm among the Navy brass about the vulnerability of our carrier task forces to enemy air attack. The premise of the game was that the Soviet Union had attacked Western Europe and that the U.S. Navy had quickly reacted by steaming a backup carrier task force into the North Atlantic.

Unfortunately, Soviet long-range fighter-bombers using new look-down, shoot-down radar-guided missiles caused worrisome losses to our carriers and escorts in the computerized warfare exercise. To counter this threat, the Navy was crashing production of a billion-dollar missile frigate that would fire the new Aegis ground-to-air missiles designed to destroy incoming cruise missiles. I thought, Why go after the arrows? Go after the shooter. To the chagrin of the billion-buck Aegis frigate backers, our SWATH boat would cost only $200 million. We could arm it with sixty-four Patriot-type missiles and send it out three hundred miles ahead of the carrier task force as an invisible, amphibious SAM missile site. We’d shoot down the Soviet attack aircraft before they got in missile range of the fleet. And because they couldn’t see the stealth ship electronically, they’d literally never know what hit them. We did an analysis and determined that the entire U.S. Navy carrier fleet could be protected by only eighteen of our stealth defenders armed with SAMs. Since our ship would knock out most of the incoming air armada trying to attack our carriers, we would make the Aegis more effective by dramatically decreasing the number of incoming missiles it would be called upon to try to destroy at one time.

And we had compelling test data to prove our contentions. To accurately measure the low radar cross section of a model ship under realistic ocean conditions, Ugo Coty went to one of the most remote areas of the western desert. There, within hailing distance of Death Valley, he built himself a miniature ocean. The place was about two days from Edwards Air Force Base by mule pack or by jeep crawling through deeply rutted roads. It was an ancient lake bed sitting at the foot of an 8,500-foot mountain, on top of which Ugo planned to mount a radar system that would duplicate the Soviet radar satellite’s. Ugo’s ocean was a hundred-foot-by-eighty-foot plastic swimming pool eight inches deep. The model sat atop a thirty-foot table that rocked and rolled to approximate a realistic ocean. The Soviet’s X-band radar was hauled up the steep side of the mountain in a secondhand refrigerated meat truck that kept both the electronics and the operators from frying in the broiling sun. To get up the steep dirt incline, the truck had to be pushed by a bulldozer. The biggest problem we encountered was with the region’s wild horses and mules, whose ancestors were the pack animals used by borax miners who dug in those mountains during the last century. The smell of water drew the wild herds to our make-believe ocean and interfered with our testing until one of our guys solved the problem by adding buckets of salt to our bogus ocean. Soviet spy satellites overflew once a day because the Navy used that desert range for missile testing, and the Russians must have wondered what in hell we were up to out there, stocking a pool near Death Valley for thirsty mules and horses.

In the early fall of 1978, I took our test results to Bill Perry at the Pentagon. I reviewed with him all our tests and the low radar returns we had managed to achieve so far. He was enthusiastic and ordered the Navy to provide research and development funding for the creation of our prototype stealth ship. The ship would be called Sea Shadow. But I returned to Burbank with some anxieties about the mixed blessings of launching another stealth project while we were still struggling to build the first stealth airplane, were currently updating our fleet of U-2s, and producing SR-71 Blackbirds. I was thriving while our shipbuilding people in Northern California were laying off workers. That situation was not lost on the Ocean Division executives, who heard rumors about our secret stealth ship project and complained to the Lockheed top management that they needed this project one hell of a lot more than did the Skunk Works. I found myself suddenly under pressure to let go of the ship and send it northward.

God, I hated to do it, but company politics and basic management considerations prompted me to go along and give up the ship project. I had a full plate without it, while my shipbuilding colleagues were scrambling to find business. I surrendered to the inevitable and turned over the project to the Ocean Division, but only after I convinced our CEO, Roy Anderson, to allow Ugo Coty and his team, who had done all the work on the ship in the test phase, to stay on as overseers of the actual construction. “We need Ugo to keep those damned shipbuilders from going off on a tangent,” I told Roy Anderson. “This is one project where the method of shipbuilding is much less important than the stealth technology,” I told Roy. “They’ll want to sacrifice the stealth if it gets in the way of the ship’s performance, but Ugo will force them to stay focused. All Dr. Perry wants to prove out is the stealth. That’s key to this test. If the ship merely floats that’s good enough.” As it happened, my fears about the conflicting agendas between professional shipbuilders and experts on stealth technology, like Dr. Perry, were realized almost from the first day that the Ocean Division took over the project.

Ugo Coty did his best, but he ran into heavy weather. His original six-man operation quickly was shunted aside by eighty-five bureaucrats and paper-pushers running the program for the division. Then the Navy marched in, adding its supervision and bureaucracy into the mix with a fifty-man team of overseers, who stood around or sat around creating reams of unread paperwork. No ship ever went to sea — not even a top-secret prototype — without intensive naval supervision to ensure that all ironclad naval rules and regulations were strictly enforced before the keel was ever laid.

“Where is the paint locker?” a Navy commander demanded of Ugo, rattling the blueprint plans. Since the days of John Paul Jones, every naval ship afloat has a damned paint locker on board. Sea Shadow would definitely not be the only exception since the Revolutionary War, and before she started her sea trials, a paint locker was located just below the bridge. Maintaining secrecy was another big headache. How do you build a 160-foot ship, whose strange, exotic appearance and shape are the keys to its secrecy, and keep that shape and appearance from the eyes of a small army of shipyard workers building it? The only logical answer was to build the ship in pieces, doling out six or eight sections per shipyard, then assembling the pieces as a gigantic jigsaw puzzle inside a huge submergible barge located in Redwood City, California.

Sea Shadow was made of very strong welded steel, displaced 560 tons, and was 70 feet wide. During early sea trials in 1981, we suffered unexpectedly large wakes that were easy to spot on radar and from the air, which completely baffled us until we discovered that the motor propellers had been installed backward! Our ship had a four-man crew — commander, helmsman, navigator, and engineer. By contrast, a frigate doing a similar job had more than three hundred crewmen.

Viewed from head-on the ship looked like Darth Vader’s helmet. Some Navy brass who saw her clenched their teeth in disgust at the sight of the most futuristic ship ever to ply the seas. A future commander resented having only a four-man crew to boss around on a ship that was so secret that the Navy could not even admit it existed. Our stealth ship might be able to blast out of the sky a sizable Soviet attack force, but in terms of an officer’s future status and promotion prospects, it was about as glamorous as commanding a tugboat. At the highest levels, the Navy brass was equally unenthusiastic about the small number of stealth ships they would need to defend carrier task forces. Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige. The carrier task force people didn’t like the stealth ship because it reminded everyone how vulnerable their hulking ships really were.

But by the fall of 1982, when Britain and Argentina began hostilities around the Falkland Islands, the Sea Shadow won renewed attention at the Pentagon. The British reported success using primitive ferrite-coated nets hung over the masts and radar antennas of their warships to lower their radar cross section against air attack. Even the QE 2, which was drafted as a troop transport, used these antiradar nets. The Brits claimed to have lowered their radar cross section by an order of magnitude. But their results weren’t one quarter as impressive as ours. A typical warship was a very high reflector of radar — a radar profile equal to about fifty barns. Our frigate would show up a hell of a lot smaller than a dinghy.

By the time we were ready for full-scale testing in the early summer of 1985, the Navy was eager to subject our prototype to the most rigorous radar testing imaginable. Several of their radar experts claimed that there was no way we could duplicate the low radar cross section achieved by a thirty-foot model in a pool with a full-size prototype on the real ocean. We had heard those same skeptical predictions before from the Air Force over our stealth airplane, but in the wonderful world of stealth, once we had acquired the right shape, the size of an object really didn’t matter. The military had a tough time understanding that basic fact.

The barge, with Sea Shadow cocooned inside for secrecy, was towed from Sunnyvale in Northern California down to Long Beach to begin its tests in the dead of night, off Santa Cruz Island, where we had constructed a radar installation. We sailed our ship against the most advanced Navy hunter planes. To make certain that their radar detectors were functioning by the book, we placed submarine periscopes in the ocean at the nautical mile range where the plane’s onboard radar would first be expected to detect them. The radar worked predictably, picking up the radar signature of the periscope at the expected range. Then the airplanes flew on, seeking our ship. On one typical night of testing, the Navy sub-hunter airplanes made fifty-seven passes at us and detected the ship only twice — both times at a mile-and-a-half distance, so that we would have shot them down easily long before they spotted us. Several times, we actually provided the exact location to the pilots and they still could not pick us up on their radar.

These kinds of tests went on for nearly a year and often were conducted under the scrutiny of Soviet trawlers snooping in the open seas off the Channel Islands, about sixty miles southwest of Santa Barbara. To keep local fishing boats and any curious yachtsmen away, the Coast Guard leaked the word that they were escalating stop-and-search procedures against potential drug smugglers in the ship lanes we were using. Boat traffic miraculously vanished.

The tests began an hour after sunset and lasted until an hour before sunrise. Then Sea Shadow was docked inside the barge and tugged back to Long Beach. But the long, strenuous months of testing confirmed most of our original stealth predictions. One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was our own extreme invisibility! The ocean waves showed up on radar like a string of tracer bullets. And if the ship was totally invisible, it looked like a blank spot — like a hole in the doughnut — that was a dead giveaway. In the stealth business, you tried like the devil not to be quieter than the background noise, because that was like a trumpet-blast warning to the enemy.

By the time we solved this problem, however, the admirals who ran the surface fleet were displaying little enthusiasm for going any speed ahead. “Too radical a design,” they told me. “If the shape is so revolutionary and secret, how could we ever use it without hundreds of sailors seeing it? It’s just too far out.” There were sexier ways of spending naval appropriations than on a small secret ship that would win few political brownie points for any admiral who pushed for it. Although the Navy did apply our technology to lower the cross section of submarine periscopes and reduce the radar cross section of their new class of destroyers, we were drydocked before we had really got launched. So I held back: I had a design for a stealthy aircraft carrier that would show up on radar no bigger than a life raft, but I had already proven Kelly’s unwritten Rule Fifteen about dealing with the Navy. Why ignore it twice?