Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

The F-117A was the nation’s best-kept secret. Only a very small number of Air Force brass even knew that we existed. The Pentagon located us in one of the most desolate spots in North America, on a remote high-desert airstrip originally used by the Sandia National Laboratories for nuclear warhead testing. It was part of the Nellis Air Force Base test range, about 140 miles from Las Vegas, an uninhabited area of undulating plains and scrub with looming High Sierra foothills in the far distance. The nearest town, about twenty miles away, was called Tonopah. Only the Lord knows how many other secret government projects were tucked away in remote corners of that huge test range, the size of Switzerland, but we figured we were far from alone out there. Wild mustangs roamed freely through the desert scrub and galloped across our runways. Big scorpions scuttled around the dayrooms and inside the new hangars we built to hide our airplanes from Soviet satellites. Colonel “Burner Bob” Jackson saw an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal by Chevron, out of Canada, offering to sell its temporary cold weather trailer units from a discontinued oil patch for $10 million. Jackson flew up there and bought the whole thing for a million bucks and had it shipped down to Tonopah. And that became our first temporary housing. But over the years the Air Force poured $300 million into the base, building three runways, and transformed it into a very major facility, complete with gym and indoor pool.

Before that base was ready and before we had enough fighters ready to fly, our newly formed squadron took over a remote corner of Nellis Air Force Base and spent our time flying A-7 attack fighters. The A-7s became our cover. In early 1984, we deployed in A-7s to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, to test our deployment procedures to the Far East ahead of the F-117A squadron that would be sent there. The word was purposely leaked that our A-7 fighters were carrying supersecret atomic antiradar devices that would render the airplane invisible to enemy defenses. To maintain the deception we outfitted each plane with old napalm canisters painted black and flashing a red danger light in the rear. It carried a radiation warning tag over an ominous-looking slot on which was printed: “Reactor Cooling Fill Port.” When we deployed carrying these bogus devices, Air Police closed down the base and ringed the field with machine gun — toting jeeps. They forced all the runway crews to turn their backs on our airplanes as they taxied past and actually had them spread-eagled on the deck with their eyes closed until our squadron took off. Real crazy stuff. But the deception actually worked.

When we finally moved into Tonopah in 1984, we kept A-7s parked on the ramp so that Soviet satellites would think we were an A-7 base. But if their photo analysis experts were really on the ball, they would have picked up the double fencing around the perimeter, the powerful searchlights, television cameras, and sensing devices, all signs of unusually tight security. And I think they may have picked this up because satellite overpasses increased to as many as three or four a day for weeks on end. They were looking for something special, but we did all our real work well after sundown.

We called ourselves “The Nighthawks,” which became the official nickname of our 37th Tactical Fighter Wing. For years on end we were forced to live like vampire bats in a dark cave. We slept all day behind thick blackout curtains and began to stir only when the sun went down. The F-117A is a night attack plane using no radio, no radar, and no lights. The Skunk Works stripped the fighter of every electronic device that could be picked up by ground-to-air defenses. The engines were muffled to eliminate noise. We flew below thirty thousand feet to avoid contrails on moonlit nights. We carried no guns or air-to-air missiles because the airplane wasn’t designed for high-performance maneuvering, but to slip inside hostile territory, drop its two bombs, and get the hell out of there. So nights were meant for stealth, and we spent five nights a week practicing bombing runs and air-to-air refueling above the remote test range. We started work two hours after sunset and finished two hours before sunrise. Whenever the airplane left the hangar, the hangar lights had to be turned off. No landing field lights were allowed.

Our families had no idea about where we took off to every Monday or where we returned from every Friday evening. Most of us were family men who lived on base housing at Nellis, just outside Las Vegas. Going home on weekends by charter flights into Nellis was rough because we led normal lives for two days with our wives and kids before reverting to night-stalking vampires again. Marriages were really put to a severe test. In cases of emergency, wives would call a special number at Nellis and ask us to call home.

I know it sounds corny, but our morale stayed high because our task was to keep twelve airplanes on standby alert to go to war on the instant command of the president of the United States. Only the president or his secretary of defense could unleash us. And the second reason our morale stayed high was the airplane itself. All of us who flew it got to fall in love. We all agreed that if we flew within the assigned mission and stayed within the flight envelope, the stealth fighter was a sweetheart. Absolutely superb. And we all became proficient using smart and precise laser-guided bombs. We carried a pair of two-thousand-pounders that would follow our laser guide beam right into the heart of a target as we lined it up on crosshairs on our cabin video screen. We could find Mrs. Smith’s rooming house and take out the northeast corner guest room above the garage. That kind of precision was awesome to behold.

I was made colonel in early 1990 and by mid-summer became the wing commander, just in time for our early August deployment to Saudi Arabia. And a few months after that we struck the first blow in Operation Desert Storm.

As Air Force Chief of Staff, what I had in mind for the F-117A was a specific set of extremely high-value targets that would neutralize the enemy defenses for a full-scale attack. For example, we had pondered endlessly about how we could cope with the Soviet SA-5 and SA-10 ground-to-air missiles — that is, by what means could we take them out and allow our air armada to proceed safely to their targets inside the Soviet heartland? We finally determined that the stealth airplane was our ticket. If we had a squadron of these revolutionary airplanes that no one knew about, and if they could take out those damned SA-5s, that gave us a tremendous strategic advantage over the Russians. As it turned out, we had a rather limited and myopic vision of what the airplane was really capable of. The conflict with Iraq proved it was far more versatile in undertaking all sorts of attack missions than any of us had ever imagined. Before the F-117A flew on the first night of combat in Operation Desert Storm, we had been forced to ponder how many days and sorties it would require before we could grind down enemy air defenses to the point where we could conduct a full-scale air campaign. The combination of stealth with its high-precision munitions provided an almost total assurance that we could destroy enemy defenses from day one and the air campaign could be swift and almost devoid of any losses. In the past, you would have been betting your hat, ass, and spats on a lot of wishful thinking to conceive a battle plan that would eliminate most of the highest-value enemy targets over the most heavily defended city on earth on the opening night of the war. But that’s exactly what Ben Rich’s airplane did on the first night of Desert Storm. For me, the shining moment came on live television when that F-117A placed a bomb right down the airshaft of the Iraqi defense ministry with the whole world watching. Think about the impact that hit had on the entire Iraqi leadership. And I’m certain that in every defense ministry around the world there was an instant recognition that something astonishing had taken place with implications for future air warfare that were impossible to imagine.

I was at the Pentagon the night that Operation Desert Storm kicked off. H-hour was scheduled to begin precisely at three a.m. Baghdad time with precision raids staged by the F-117As. The timing had to be exact and we had planned this opening raid for weeks, so we were all disconcerted to suddenly see CNN going live to Baghdad at twenty minutes to three to report that the city was under attack. There were three CNN reporters in a hotel room — Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett — delivering excited accounts of cruise missiles streaking past and sounds of attack airplanes overhead. The sky was alive with tracers. This went on for twenty minutes, during which not a thing was actually happening in the skies over Baghdad — absolutely nothing.

With the exception of the F-117s, which had been sent ahead and were already past the Iraqi border on their way to attack Baghdad, the remainder of the allied air armada was purposely being held back and out of range of a string of three early-warning radar stations inside Iraq, near the Saudi border. We sent in Apache attack helicopters to take them out, and that attack was launched at twenty-one minutes to three. Apparently someone radioed back to Baghdad, “We’re being attacked!” In Baghdad, they reacted by immediately firing everything they owned into the night skies. Finally, at one minute past three, one of the three CNN reporters said, “Whoops, the phone in our room just went dead.” A minute later, at two minutes after three, the lights in that hotel room went out. That told us that the real attack had actually begun. We had preplanned that, at two minutes after three, the first F-117s would take out the telephone center and central power station in downtown Baghdad. And that’s how we learned back in Washington that the leading elements of the F-117 attack force had dropped their precision bombs exactly on time.

We learned that night, and for many nights after that, that stealth combined with precision weapons constituted a quantum advance in air warfare. Ever since World War II, when radar systems first came into play, air warfare planners thought that surprise attacks were rendered null and void and thought in terms of large armadas to overwhelm the enemy and get a few attack aircraft through to do damage. Now we again think in small numbers and in staging surprise, surgically precise raids. Looking ahead, I’d predict that by the first couple of decades of the next century every military aircraft flying would be stealth. I might be wrong about the date but not about the dominance of stealth.

Bats. Bats were the first visual proof I had that stealth really worked. We had deployed thirty-seven F-117As to the King Khalid Air Base, in a remote corner of Saudi Arabia, out of the range of Saddam’s Scuds, about 900 miles from downtown Baghdad. The Saudis provided us with a first-class fighter base with reinforced hangars, and at night the bats would come out and feed off insects. In the mornings we’d find bat corpses littered around our airplanes inside the open hangars. Bats used a form of sonar to “see” at night, and they were crashing blindly into our low-radar-cross-section tails.

After all those years of training, we certainly believed in the product, but it was nice having that kind of visual confirmation, nevertheless. On the night of D-day in Desert Storm, it fell on us to hit first. Most of us felt like firefighters about to test a flame-retardant shield by walking into a wall of fire. The so-called experts assured us that the suit worked, but we really wouldn’t know for sure until we made that fateful walk. As we suited up to fly into combat for the first time, one of the other pilots whispered to me, “Well, I sure hope to God that stealth shit really works.”

He spoke for us all.

H-hour for Desert Storm was three a.m. Baghdad time, January 17, 1991. I climbed into my airplane shortly after midnight. Frankly, I don’t think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer. From all our briefings we knew that we would be running up against the greatest concentration of triple A and missile ground fire since the Vietnam War, or maybe even in history. Saddam Hussein had sixteen thousand missiles and three thousand antiaircraft emplacements in and around Baghdad, more than the Russians had protecting Moscow. The F-117A was the only coalition airplane that would be used to hit Baghdad in this war. We got the missions most hazardous to a pilot’s health. Otherwise the plan was to hit Saddam’s capital with Navy Tomahawk missiles, fired from ships at sea.

Each of us carried two hardened laser-guided two-thousand-pounders designed to penetrate deep into enemy bunkers before exploding. They were called GBU-27s, and only the F-117As carried them. The mission took us five hours with three air-to-air refuelings. We came at Baghdad in two waves. Ten F-117As in the first wave, to knock out key communications centers, and then the second wave of twelve airplanes an hour or so later. The skies over Baghdad looked like three dozen Fourth of July celebrations rolled into one. Only it was a curtain of steel that represented blind firing. They could detect us, but they couldn’t track us. We were like mosquitoes buzzing around their ears and they furiously swatted at us blindly. They just hoped for a golden BB — a lucky blind shot that would hit home, and I couldn’t see how they could possibly miss. The only analogy I could think of was being on a ramp above an exploding popcorn factory and not having one kernel hit you. The law of averages alone would have made that impossible — and so I prayed.

That first night we saw French-built F-1s and Soviet MiG-29s flying around on our sensor displays. But they gave no sign of ever seeing us.

There were five communications sectors in the country, so we didn’t have to destroy all their missiles or airplanes, but knock out their brains and claw out their eyes. So we hit their missile and communications centers, their operational commands, and their air defense center. In only three bombing raids that lasted a total of about twenty minutes, combined with attacks from Tomahawk missiles, we absolutely knocked Iraq out of the war. From that first night, they were incapable of launching retaliatory air strikes or sustaining any real defenses against our airpower. All they had left were mobile Scud missiles — a primitive revenge weapon — and vulnerable ground troops who had to fight in the open without air cover or hope. To put it in domestic terms, if Baghdad had been Washington, that first night we knocked out their White House, their Capitol building, their Pentagon, their CIA and FBI, took out their telephone and telegraph facilities, damaged Andrews, Langley, and Bolling air bases, and punched big holes in all their key Potomac River bridges. And that was just the first night. We went back night after night over the next month.

We flew in twos, but you don’t see your partner, so the guys that first night saw the skies over Baghdad and just figured we’d lost airplanes and pilots. Then, once safely back across the border, we joined up and saw that everyone was okay and we were amazed, overjoyed, and deeply moved. No one had suffered as much as a hit or even a near miss. That stealth shit had really worked.

It took only about two or three missions before most of us didn’t even bother to glance out at the flak bursting all around us. We took advantage of their blind firing. We’d delay an attack five minutes knowing they’d have to stop firing to cool down their guns — then we’d come in and hit them. We drew all the demanding high-precision bombing of the most heavily defended, highest-priority targets. The powers that be decided to use B-52s to pour down bombs on the big North Taji military industrial complex. But it was protected by surface-to-air missiles that could knock down our bombing armada. So we went in the night before and took out all fifteen missile sites using ten stealth airplanes. They never saw us coming. That mission won us a standing ovation from General Schwarzkopf and the other brass monitoring us back in the coalition war room.

Given our precision bombs we could locate the one communications node in a city block and take it out without inflicting collateral damage. We used to brag, “Just tell us whether you want to hit the men’s room or the ladies’ room and we’ll oblige.” Because of stealth we could arrive at target unseen and focus entirely on making a precision hit. Our GBU-27 laser-guided bomb could penetrate the most hardened bunker. We hit Saddam’s Simarra chemical bunkers with these bombs. They were eight feet of reinforced concrete, and we used the first bomb to pierce through the dense construction, then a second bomb followed down the same drilled hole made by the first and exploded with tremendous impact. About halfway through the war we began running low on bomb supplies and reverted to using a lighter bomb. Those GBU-10s bounced right off the roof of some hardened hangars at a forward Iraqi airbase called H-2. Intelligence reported the Iraqis were gleeful, felt they had finally defeated us at something, so they crammed these hangars with as many of their remaining jet fighters as they could. We waited for a couple of days, then went in with our heavier GBU-27s and blew that damned air base off the map.

Three other missions I remember with a lot of relish: we did some high-precision bombing and took out a Republican Guard barracks at a prison camp housing Kuwaiti prisoners, allowing them to escape. On another night, we took out Peter Arnett of CNN! I was at the base watching him broadcast — that guy was not wildly popular with many of us because we felt Saddam was just using him for propaganda — and we knew that in exactly six seconds our guys were going to hit the telecommunications center in downtown Baghdad and knock Arnett off the air. So we began counting out: “Five… Four… Three… Two… One.” The screen went blank. Right on cue, too. We cheered like nuts at a football game.

But the raid against Saddam’s nuclear research facility, which also had capability for chemical and biological weapons production, probably proved stealth at its best. The Air Force went after that place in daylight, using an armada of seventy-two airplanes, including fourteen attack F-16s, and the rest escorts, jammers, and tankers needed to support such an operation with conventional aircraft. Those pilots saw more SAMs and triple As coming up at them than they cared ever to remember. The Iraqis covered the target with smoke generators so that our guys had no choice but to drop bombs into the smoke and scoot for their lives. They scored no hits.

We came in at three in the morning using only eight airplanes and needing only two tankers to get us there and back, and took out three of the four nuclear reactors and heavily damaged the fourth. Once that first bomb hit all hell broke loose. I dropped my bombs, but I couldn’t get my bomb-bay door closed. That was as bad as it could get because a right angle is like a spotlight to ground radar and a bomb-bay door is a perfect right angle. And out of the corner of my eye I saw a missile firing up at me. I had one hand on the eject lever and the other trying to manually close that stalled bomb bay. As the missile closed on me, the door finally did, too, and I watched that missile curve harmlessly by me as it lost me in its homing. About an hour later I began breathing again.