War knocks shine off airshow star

By Roger Franklin

Herald correspondent

NEW YORK - What does the end of innocence look like?

Yesterday, on millions of American television screens, it looked a lot like news footage of Serb soldiers standing over the wreckage of an F-117 Stealth fighter.

For 10 years, the plane has been the Pentagon's bat-winged poster child for the invincibility of American arms. Yet there it was, smashed and smoking on a snowy hillside north-west of Belgrade.

On the networks' Sunday morning political shows, talking heads were all asking the same question: could it be that this business in Kosovo was going to be a quite a bit harder - and a whole messier - than President Clinton's resolute words had led the nation to believe?

Ever since the prototype emerged from Northrup's secret "Skunk Works" laboratory in 1981, the F-117 has been sold to Congress as one of the miracle weapons that would protect America from being caught in another Vietnam. Give us the money to buy enough of these black beauties, a succession of Air Force generals told Congress, and foot soldiers will become largely irrelevant to the outcome of any future war.

With an F-117 - or a stealth-technology Spirit bomber - to put a laser- guided blockbuster down the chimney of any dictator the President might care to nominate, there would be no further need to send in the Marines.

At least not very often, anyway.

No dead GIs. No flag-draped coffins on the evening news. No casualties to put public opinion at odds with official policy. Clean, simple and largely painless, America's future victories would be technology's triumphs.

Thanks to a succession of weak and well-chosen enemies, the theory has never been subjected to the acid test of actual combat.

In Grenada, Panama and Haiti, the foe folded with the first shots. In Afghanistan and Sudan, the targets of Clinton's cruise missiles were tents, caves and an unprotected aspirin factory.

And in the Gulf War, although six weeks of aerial bombardment proved insufficient to drive Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards from Kuwait, nobody paid too much heed.

Now comes Kosovo - and the destruction of that F-117. On the NBC network's Meet the Press yesterday, Defence Secretary William Cohen seemed at a loss to explain how the angular Nighthawk fighter had come to punch a hole in the forest.

"That is something we are still trying to determine," he began. "It may be that it was a mechanical failure, or maybe a lucky shot. Or it could be that the Serbs have acquired radar equipment sophisticated enough to defeat stealth technology."

Cynics within the defence community, the so-called cheap hawks, could not help but smile at Cohen's persistent innocence.

"The F-117 makes a great performer at airshows," the Centre for Defence Information argued some two years ago in a one of its many critical reports on high-tech weaponry.

"When America has no active enemies, each branch of the armed forces regards the other branches as it enemies. The goal of the bureaucratic game is not to take territory but to withhold budget dollars from rival services. A plane like the F-117 does that. If the country buys F-117s for the Air Force, it cannot buy as many helicopters for the Army.

Therefore, the Air Force wins.

"The plane's fitness for service, like it's ability to survive in a combat environment, is not as important as its ability to attract and keep congressional funding."

The F-117's most gee-whiz feature, and the one that has repeatedly impressed congressional funders, is the claim that it is "invisible" to enemy radar installations. One Pentagon pamphlet even goes so far as to assert that a bee - a tiny little bee! - has a larger radar profile than the 45ft wide, twin-tailed war machine.

Pierre Sprey, the maverick aeronautical engineer who designed the F-16 fighter, finds such claims ludicrous. In testimony before a congressional committee five years ago, he pointed out that while the F-117's "radar-absorbing" materials and design features can minimise the plane's profile, they can never make it entirely invisible.

"Coming straight at a radar beam, the profile is very, very narrow - that much is certainly true," Sprey conceded. "But if the plane banks, ascends or dives, it presents it's widest profile to the radar beam. In other words, it can - and will - be seen.

"If there is more than one radar operating, which is what we can expect in a combat situation, the plane will be pinpointed by triangulation. `Invisibility' is an expensive, dangerous and delusional fantasy."

Both Sprey and groups like the Centre for Defence Information, which is staffed by disenchanted military retirees and led by a retired admiral and two former generals, fear that a misplaced faith in weapons like the F-117 can lead to disastrous foreign policy decisions.

Indeed, in Kosovo, it may already have done so since President Clinton promised when the air strikes began that ground troops would not be deployed under any circumstances. The assumption underlying Clinton's words was that there would be no need since high-tech air power could bring the Serbs to heel by itself.

"War is never easy," said Paul Hovan, a former Vietnam helicopter pilot in Vietnam who now works with the CFDI. "But if politicians think technology can make it easy, they will be tempted to take dangerous gambles.

"If these weapons don't work the way the manufacturers promise, what is the next step? Do we lose face, back off, apologise to whoever we bombed and say, `Sorry, you win. Keep on slaughtering civilians?'

"Or do we send in the ground forces to do the job the old-fashioned way and risk the heavy casualties?"