LOTTMAN: One thing that struck me about your article is this idea that the contractor might not be able to afford the F-22 program. Now, since we're talking about a program acquisition Unit Cost of about $200 million per plane, I guess my first question is: how can a contractor possibly lose on a deal like that?

STEVENSON: Well, it depends on what it costs them to build it. If it costs them more than $200 million, they'd lose on every one that they built.

LOTTMAN: This is a fixed-price contract then?

STEVENSON: The answer is, it's a fixed-price contract once you go into production. The problem is that on the first few airplanes, they're going on a fixed price, when the airplane is essentially still in development. So when it's in development, there are still a lot of unknowns. And they're going to be building this airplane probably for a couple years before they've got all of the testing done. So they don't really know. So then, the testing starts over into production again, you've got concurrent production, and what happens is, you've got an airplane that isn't fully developed, and the taxpayer has to pay more money for the production airplanes because it hasn't had all the bugs wrung out of it.

LOTTMAN: I know it's an odd point to start from, but what's the down side of our situation from the contractor's point of view?

STEVENSON: He has a fixed-price contract, and theoretically, if he doesn't build it, if he isn't able to build it for the fixed price, then theoretically he would eat it. But if you remember the A-12 case, that was the specific issue. The other contractor came in and said, "We can't build it for this." Now once they've been building a few and they know what the prices are, they say, "OK, this is the price for which we can build this airplane." But they haven't built enough of them to be able to reliably know that at this point.

And, by the way, that's not my opinion. That's the opinion of Ben Rich, who is the former president of Skunk Works. He said, in his book, when he was planning on getting a production order of 442, he said, "We're gonna lose money. Our stockholders would make more money if we had taken the original investment of $690 million and put it into a certificate of deposit." Well now, it's gone from 442 to 339. So if they can't make money at 442, how are they gonna do it at 339?

LOTTMAN: Since we are talking about such a small production run, especially compared to the 750 originally proposed, that has an impact on the contractors. What sort of impact will that have on the Air Force?

STEVENSON: Well, the Air Force of course feels that its mission is to defend America and be able to make sure that, as they say in their literature, that no US soldier is ever attacked from a foreign Air Force from the sky. So form their point of view, they want as many airplanes as they can have, both from a logical point of view and then from the emotional point of view that they wanna have a lot of airplanes.

The problem is that when you have unit costs that go up, you can't have as many airplanes. So what they do to compensate for that, is they increase the average age of the airplanes. Between 1990 and now, and the next couple of years, the average age of the airplanes that are in the tactical Air Force are gonna go from about 11 years to 20-plus.

LOTTMAN: And where does that fit in historically?

STEVENSON: Well, if you go back far enough, if you go back in the fifties, you'd have an average age in the 3 to 8 year range.

LOTTMAN: What's the Air Force's goal as far as the average age of the fleet?

STEVENSON: Well, their goal is a moving target. Their goal is to accommodate whatever they have to do to make sure they get the F-22.

LOTTMAN: Even if it causes the fleets to age, the airwings to shrink?

STEVENSON: Gotta have the airplane. Gotta have it. That's their position.

LOTTMAN: Is that a possibility, that the airwing will have to be restructured?

STEVENSON: The airwing has been restructured. Their airwing is now smaller than it used to be, they've made a lot of changes in the past few years to accommodate the fact that the unit costs have gone up so high, that to get what they want, they just make changes and, even though at one time those changes were not valid, now they are valid.

LOTTMAN: With that in mind, what do you think of this concept in Air Force Doctrine of the Air Expeditionary Unit, in other words that tac-air will break out of the tac-air mold, sometime in the context of a future force, and essentially fight battles almost autonomously and not be limited to the traditional tac-air role.

STEVENSON: Well, I think that is nothing more than a continuation of the Air Force's mindset which goes back to right after WWI. If you go back to the early founding fathers of tactical air in the Air Force, they have always wanted to be autonomous. Of course it became very noticeable in the bomber force. They said, what we can do is, we can use bombers, quoting Julio Doue, who was an Italian, we can destroy the warmaking capability of the enemy, and their will to wage war, simply by bombing them into submission. And we won't need to commit land troops. In that way, the Air Force said, we can be autonomous and win wars by ourselves. And that's been their mindset ever since. And they've been trying to prove that ever since. And you saw that same verbiage coming out of post-Gulf War experiences when the Air Force said, you know, "Global reach, global power." You know, that they did it, you know, by themselves.

LOTTMAN: How current is that in overall defense doctrine, and do you see that gaining more currency in defense doctrine? The thing that jumped out at me was, they're trying to establish doctrine for all the services based on this concept of their own role. It has a lot to do with trying to get this new technology, et cetera.

STEVENSON: I once had a two-star Air Force general tell me, he said, "don't think that the Pentagon is about setting strategy. It's about everybody fighting for budget share. And whenever you see the Air Force take a position, it's always to justify an increased share of the military budget.

LOTTMAN: The "Three Pillars" of the F-22 program, those being stealth, speed, and user-friendly technology: if those are the pillars the program is standing on, let's talk about each one and how strong each pillar really is.

STEVENSON: The Air Force and the Contractor says that the F-22 has three pillars: Stealth, Avionics, and Supercruise. So, we'll start with stealth.

LOTTMAN: Does stealth technology work?

STEVENSON: How could we know? I mean, how could we possibly know? What we have to do is we have to rely on a military service that makes an assertion and offers no proof. This is the same military service that told us before WWII that we would not have to commit land troops and that we would not need fighter escorts because the bomber was so heavily armored, and so heavily armed, that it would create this ball of fire, a big circular hail of bullets around the bomber force, so that any foreign fighter that came in would be eviscerated. And of course we know after the first few raids into Germany, we lost so much of our bomber force that we had to go and make a quick reevaluation of having fighter escort, in which case we did have fighter escort from then on out.

So, that's the military that assured us we wouldn't need it. Now we have the same military service that assures us that stealth works. And we've heard stories about how the B-2 has run into problems, we have--whenever you hear people attack the B-2, they say, "well, we're upgrading it now, so that they'll all--you know, the third evolution--so that they'll all be up to snuff. Well, if they're not up to snuff, then what are we paying for?

I'm not saying that stealth isn't a great concept, and I'm not saying it doesn't work, what I'm saying is, that we don't know if it works and we have to rely on people who have a bias towards telling us that it works, who have a history of telling us things are the way they are, when in fact they aren't.

And I'll give you a classic example. I once interviewed a general about a missile program. It was the upgrade of the AIM-7E, called the AIM-7F Sparrow missile. And I said, "General, how is that program going?" What he didn't know was that I had just read a report he had signed the day before I interviewed him. And he said, "Oh Jim, it's going fantastic, it's really going great." Well, in fact, there were 31 shots, and I think only 7 of them hit. So I asked him, I said, "well, what was the percentage of hits that you had?" "Oh, it was like 90%, 90%." So I confronted him, I said, "Well, the only question I have is, are you lying now or were you lying when you wrote the report?" And he said, "what are you talking about?" And I told him I had read his report, and he said, "OK, OK, let me tell you, we have to lie." I said, "why is that?" And he said, "Well, we have to lie because if we tell Congress the truth they won't give us the money, and once they give us the money, then we can fix it."

So what we have is a procurement policy that's really based on deceit. Now I'm not saying that it's not true about the F-22. I'm just saying how could I possibly know that kind of background? And how can I rely on it?

LOTTMAN: Based on the way this concept is hyped and described by those responsible for it, is stealth technology necessary and appropriate in today's environment or for the foreseeable future?

STEVENSON: Well, if you go back to the '73 war in which Israel on the Northern front, had lots of its airplanes shot down by surface-to-air missiles, thay would tell you that it is necessary. On the other hand, if you talk to John Lehman, who's a former Secretary of the Navy, he said stealth is absolutely not necessary. That it's overrated, over-hyped, and that there's other ways around it. One of them is the SEAD mission, where you go in and take out their surface-to-air systems with other airplanes, and then you can march in with impunity.

To put everything into one airplane, and make it do all jobs for all missions, and have all kinds of capability, is a very expensive proposition, and may not be the right way to go. But again, I wanna repeat, I'm not trying to equivocate, I'm just saying because they make it black, you can never challenge them. And that's the problem with this whole program is that it's so black, you can't get your arms around the truth. And since they have a history of lying about it, I can't say that it is necessary.

LOTTMAN: Is there that "lying out of necessity" going on in the F-22 program, any concrete examples of that?

STEVENSON: Well, I don't know of any lying that's going on in the F-22 program. And a lie is a very specific statement. A lie implies a person made a false statement, knows it's false, and told you that with intent to deceive. I think there are a lot of statements made about the F-22 program that are made, where the person who makes them believes them, but their source is not true.

LOTTMAN: Let's move on to the second "Pillar". I have here, supercruise.

STEVENSON: Well, supercruise is a concept that the Germans demonstrated quite effectively during WWII. When we had P-51's, that while they have a top speed approaching 500 miles an hour, they would cruise in the high 200's. And cruise means the ability to go from point A to point B somewhat efficiently in terms of your gas. If you go to top speed, you burn all your gas up. Now historically, planes have used afterburner to go at high speeds, but when they do that, the fuel's gone very quickly. Supercruise gives you the ability to cruise supersonically without using afterburner. So it's more efficient.

The person who did the seminal work on supercruise was a fellow by the name of Colonel Edward Striccione. He did this work when he worked for Northrop. And he concluded based on all of his analysis that a fuel fraction of 0.38 was the ideal, and absolute minimum was 0.35. Fuel fraction means the weight of the fuel divided by the weight of the airplane with the fuel. So if you have 10,000 pounds of fuel and you have a 40,000 pound plane, you have a fuel fraction of 0.25.

What we have on the F-22 is a fuel fraction which is approaching 0.29, which puts it down--there's a lot of other airplanes that have that fuel fraction today. So it's no big deal. And the reason that's classified is because they're embarrassed about it. Because one of the premises of supercruise is that you have enough fuel, which is reflected in your fuel fraction times the specific fuel consumption. So that you can go this long distance at high speed. Well, they're not making their specific fuel consumption figures either. And that's also classified. So the classification around this program is not to keep our enemy from knowing what's happening; it's designed to keep the critics from knowing what's happening, so they can't attack it.

LOTTMAN: So does that mean the plane is too heavy for the amount of fuel, or is it the other way around?

STEVENSON: Well, you can have a poor fuel fraction in one of two ways: you can have not enough volume to put the fuel into, or if you hold the fuel constant and the plane gets heavy, then the fuel fraction will go down as well. And in fact the airplane is growing in weight; I saw a briefing that was given--I saw the results of the briefing, I wasn't at the briefing--that was given by the program office in May of this year, and they have a chart which just shows the weight of the airplane just going up and up and up, approaching the limit where they don't want it to go any further. So, it's a very young program, and I would be very hesitant to say that it won't go overweight.

LOTTMAN: But with Supercruise, can't you theoretically have less fuel--won't your fuel fraction go down, or does that limit your ability to have that capability.

STEVENSON: If you have a given amount of fuel, and let's take the example where I said you have 10,000 pounds of fuel on a 40,000 pound airplane. You've got a fuel fraction of 0.25. What happens if the airplane goes to 50,000 pounds. Now you have a fuel fraction of 0.20. Take the fuel fraction, and multiply that by the specific fuel consumption. In other words, what kind of mileage does this engine get? And you get an idea how far the airplane can go. There are some other variables in there but those are the two big ones.

So as the airplane gains weight and the amount of fuel remains constant, because the volume is given, you have a problem. And of course if you add more fuel, your fuel fraction can change, but it sounds to me like, on the F-22, where they put the fuel, it's locked in. They can add some more fuel, but that's gonna make the airplane heavier as well.

LOTTMAN: So that affects the range of the aircraft?

STEVENSON: Right.

LOTTMAN: Avionics. Third pillar.

STEVENSON: The idea of the avionics is to so automate this airplane, that the pilot's workload is reduced. And, indeed, if you see the flight demonstrator, with all the avionics in it, it's a marvel. I mean, it's an arcade that's incredible. But all the F-22 is promising is nothing more than the fulfillment of a promise that has not been kept for the last 40 years. And that is the ability to shoot down an airplane beyond visual range, reliably, without seeing the airplane. We've had that promise made from the time the first beyond-visual-range missiles were launched. And we have never been able to implement it satisfactorily in any war. We get an occaisional situation that'll come up where we'll say OK, you're cleared to fire this missile. But if you look at the total number of missile shots that have been fired beyond visual range in the history of air-to-air warfare, they are a handful.

LOTTMAN: Is that something that is irrelevant to air-to-air combat? Is it only a promise which will remain just that?

STEVENSON: Well, in an ideal world, you would wanna be able to shoot down airplanes before you ever saw them. I mean, that's, that's ideal. But that's like saying in a football game if everybody makes their block, and does what they're supposed to do, every time we hike the ball, we're gonna make a touchdown. And that's not the way it works. There are too many variables. The problem with this kind of analysis is that we're looking at air-to-air combat like it's some kind of a joust. We have one knight fighting the other knight and that's how they did the analysis. Well, if this knight has a longer lance, and they're running along, then this knight is going to knock the guy off his horse before this guy's lance hits him.

Well, that's great, but you know, this guy can do other things. He can have other people come in behind you. There's a lot of other variables. In fact, when I was at Topgun, we used to have these, what we called Battle of Britain, where we'd go out and send, you know, 20, 30, 40 airplanes out, or as many as we could get, and it was always the largest airplane that died first. And, guess what, the F-22 is the largest plane in the inventory. So it'll be the first airplane to die.

LOTTMAN: Is that because of the ease of the visual contact?

STEVENSON: First sight wins the fight. Well, the bigger the airplane, well, you know... You're gonna attack, you're going to attract everyone else first.

LOTTMAN: Can any radar replace human visual contact in a combat environment?

STEVENSON: The radar is going to be working when you're far away. Now what the Air Force says is that we have the ability to see this guy out here before he sees us for two reasons. One, we have long-range radar on our F-22; and two, we're stealthy. So even if he has the same range, he won't see us. Again, that's an assertion without proof. So I can't even deal with that. They say it, doesn't mean it's true. And they have a track record of not being forthcoming on the truth in many cases. So that's an assertion.

Secondly, it presupposes that every dogfight, every air battle, is a joust. And third, it doesn't take into consideration what I think is one of the most important issues, and that is that this guy has an anti-radiation missile which means that the minute this guy turns on his radar, he's going to be able to launch his missile, to home in on the radar.

Now, the Air Force rebuts that by saying, "well, you don't understand, we have this nifty new radar and we don't send out one big lobe like we used to. We send out all these incremental frequencies and hop all over the place, and therefore he really can't get his arms around it." I call that the "twinkle-twinkle, little star" response. It's like looking at the sun, versus looking at stars. But that presupposes that the Russians can't adapt to that. And the electrical engineers that I've talked to have said, "that's not a problem, we can deal with that."

LOTTMAN: What about this idea that the newer, smarter components will make the F-22 easier to maintain in addition to making it easier for pilots to train on, leading to less cost, less man-hours of maintenance put in than previous generations of aircraft? Do you have any sense of whether that's a valid assertion in terms of where the program stands today.

STEVENSON: Well, again this is an assertion. If you look at how the F-15 was sold, the F-15 was sold along this same premise. That we had made this so efficient that it'll be much easier to maintain. Well, if you go and look at what they promised versus what they delivered, it was a big difference. I mean, a phenomenal difference between the promise and the reality. They would say things like, "the F-4 takes, you know, this many men and we take a much fewer number," and all of those promises were missed by a large margin.

Then you look at the C-5A, one of the highest-maintenance things on the C-5A was the built in test. The built in test was sold on the premise that they could tell what needed to be fixed on the way back to land so that it would be much more efficient. But it caused one of the biggest problems. You've got an airplane out there with, on the F-22, that's gonna have 1.7 million lines of code in the avionics. I mean, that is just an invitation to a problem.

LOTTMAN: Historically, aren't bumps-in-the-road seem more or less normal. So I wonder, what's the point. It doesn't make it any more acceptible to be lied to about it.

STEVENSON: It's human nature to dislike being lied to. If the military would come up and say, "Hey, we've got this great airplane, but it costs a lot of money. And by the way, it has stealth, but it's not invisible to radar." And by the way, they're not saying it's invisible. In fact, I once researched that issue. They've never really said it's invisible. What they did was they permitted the press to call it invisible and never corrected the press, as they are so wont to do on many other occasions where they say the press is incorrect. As long as the press is doing something that's gonna help them in their cause, they'll let 'em go ahead and make a false statement. However, former Secretary of Defense Perry did say that the F-22 was virtually invisible. So he is on record as saying that this plane is virtually invisible.

LOTTMAN: Have the delays, cost overruns, etc. actually put this program in any sort of jeopardy, or do you foresee clear sailing all the way through? I guess it's a political question.

STEVENSON: Politically, I think the program has some very rough seas. I'm not so concerned with Lockheed's ability to build the airplane, or with the Air Force's ability to keep Congress excited about the airplane. They're both very good at that. What I'm concerned with is that there's not enough money in the budget. The Air Force is in denial in terms of how much money it has. So eventually, it's going to have to say, "give us more money." It's not a fully-funded program. They might tell you that it is, but it's not. And all you have to do is look at the numbers, and you just can't get there for here.

So, that, combined with the fact that you've got the former president of Lockheed Skunk Works saying, we can't make money on this program, so if they can't make money on this program, the only way they plan on making any money is what's called "Engineering Change Proposals" and that is, as the airplane's being developed, they say, "Oooh, how would you like this, or how would you like that?" And if they do that, they get healthy on the individual airplanes that they're building, but they start drawing down the total amount of money that's being dedicated to the airplane. So either way, I don't think you'll ever see more than a number of F-22s that kind of approximates what you have on the F-117. You might have somewhere between 50 and 70 airplanes. Sort of special-purpose. And that'll be the end of it.

LOTTMAN: Even with the political protection it's garnered from subcontracting and the incredible coverage they have? There's two major aerospace contractors in the country, and they're both building this plane. But you don't see the run going indefinitely?

STEVENSON: I don't. I don't think there's the money to cover it. They're going to have to make some major shifts in... They're going to have to give up something. I mean, remember we started with 75 B-2s, and now we have 20. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that you may see a similar reduction in force on the F-22.

LOTTMAN: Where can you ascribe fundamental responsibility for that? Is the concept flawed, has Congressional management or, say, the Secretary of Defense continuing to draw down the order for F-22s, or is it the contractor--garnering political protection adds to the cost of the plane in the long. Is there one factor over and above the rest which is problematic?

STEVENSON: I think it's a money issue. I mean I don't think there's enough money for the Air Force to get what it wants. It just can't get there from here.

LOTTMAN: What sort of alternative options are out there, and is there one that you would embrace?

STEVENSON: Well, this gets back to a fundamental issue of what used to be called quantity vs. quality. I don't like that term, but that's the way it was known. And it had to do with, "do you want fewer, high-quality airplanes, versus more, higher numbers, of less-sophisticated airplanes?" This was the argument that was going on during the height of the Cold War, when Congress and the OSD said, "hey guys, we can't afford all these F-14s, we can't afford all these F-15s, so we've gotta come up with a low-cost complement." And that was the genesis of the lightweight fighter program--which turned into the YF-16, which became the F-16, and the YF-17, which the Navy chose to rename as the F-18.

So the same arguments that were valid then are even more valid today, because we had even more money then. So if we have less money now--to go back to Ben Rich's comment, we couldn't afford to build them when we were only getting 442 and now we've got 339--how are we gonna be aable to afford tactical air as the Air Force sees it? As the money is running out?

History shows that numbers have always played a role in tactical warfare. There's two things that stand out. One is the first sighting. Air Force tries to do that through radar, but historically, visual IDs have always been the dominant player in air-to-air warfare. The second one is the ability to get the first kill. Excuse me. I don't mean that. I mean the number one thing is to get the first sighting. Two is to have numbers, the largest number of airplanes.

So, you have to ask yourself, if for the same money I could go to war in one F-22 or ten F-16s, let's say--let's turn it around. Not turn it around, increase it. Let's say I could have four F-22s or forty F-16s, which group would you rather go to war with? Now if you look at from a purely individual point of view, the guy in the F-22 may feel more secure. But if you look at it historically, the F-16s are gonna prevail in that fight. You cannot tell me that four F-22s can take care of forty F-16s. It's just not gonna happen.

LOTTMAN: So you'd support continued production of currently used models?

STEVENSON: Absolutely. Schwartzkopf said after the last war, after the Gulf War, he said we could've traded equipment with the Iraqis and still beat 'em. Well, they were the fourth largest Air Force in the world. We're not likely to go to war against the 2nd or the 3rd. So the question is, why do we need all of this? Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be developing very sophisticated research and development programs. We could be developing F-22s or the next generation after that, keep building them and keep working on them. But we don't need to put them into production until such time as we see that as an inevitability.

And by the way, all the F-22 advocates fail to acknowledge that when you look at the grand strategy as it's being produced in the Pentagon, they don't look at the Gulf War as being the next scenario. They look at it as being urban warfare. Where we got Marines on the ground and the type of airplanes that we need are airplanes that can fly low, and take a lot of hits from small arms fire, and be the policement of the world-type airplane. That's the kind of airplane that seems to be consistent with these plans. Now maybe the planners are wrong. But if they're wrong, they're still in control. So we're, the Air Force is out of step with what the planners in the building are doing.

LOTTMAN: That concept of the future threat environment--how does that jibe with the F-22 program?

STEVENSON: I don't see the F-22 fitting into that scenario. They're not related. They might argue that we need that to clean the air so that opposing Air Forces can't come in and attack our troops, but they haven't been able to do that with previous generations of airplanes anyway, so we could take care of it with those.

LOTTMAN: Could you retell the anecdote about exchange ratios and the program managers for the F-15?

STEVENSON: Well, during the early days of the F-15, it started being criticized for being overpriced, very similar to what we see going on in the F-22. So this is what the Air Force did: it went to what they call systems analysis, which is a group within the Air Force, to do some analysis of what would happen if you took an F-15 and put an AIM-82 missile on it--how would it do against a MiG-21 with a heat-seeking missile? The analysis, interestingly enough, was done by a Colonel named Larry Welch, who went on to become Chief of Staff of the Air Force. And Col. Welch's analysis showed that with an AIM-82 heat-seeking missile, with a large off-bore sight capability, meaning it almost could look around corners, that the exchange ratio between the F-15 and the MiG-21 would be 955 to 1.

Now you have to put that figure in context. In the Vietnam War, the Aior Force and the Navy, up to the bombing halt, had an exchange ratio of about 2-1/2 to 1. During the bombing halt the Navy instituted Top Gun and the echange ratio when the Navy went back to war, because it had practiced its air-to-air combat, jumped up, some say to 8, 9, 10, 12-1/2 to 1. Some question about the precise number, but the point is it was a quantum leap. The Air Force stayed at 2-1/2 to 1.

The Air Force, in claiming 955-to-1, strained the credulity of many of the officers waiting to hear this presentation. In fact one of them, a Col. John Boyd, prior to the briefing, asked one of the staffers, "What's Gen. Bellis going to brief Gen. Ferguson about?" And he said, "He's going to brief him on our presentation to Congress about the F-15 and the AIM-82 missile." By the way, the AIM-82 was a paper missile. It had never been built, it was just a concept missile. So, Bellis came in and he briefed Gen. Ferguson. This was the last stop before they went over to Congress. They were gonna convince the Congress that they needed the F-15, almost no matter how much it cost, because it was such a phenomenal combination.

So Ge. Bellis went in, and he said that the F-15 with the AIM-82 missile, could get an exchange ratio of 955-to-1. And Gen. Ferguson said, "If I believed your analysis, which I don't, but if I did, then we'd only need three airplanes. One in the US, one in Europe, excuse me. One in the Pacific, one in Europe, and one in the US to train with. Take that brief and burn it." I questioned whether that was atrue story when I first heard it. I went and interviewed, and I found four people who were in the room when that was said, and all four of them said the exact same thing.

So here's a case where the Air Force was willing to go to ridiculous lengths in order to sell the airplane, and come up with a figure that has never been demonstrated in the history of warfare. I mean, during WWII the Navy was getting 11, 19-to1 exchange ratios against the Japanese, when they were on the ropes. So 955-to1 is absolutely absurd. And yet I interviewed Gen. Welch one time and told him I thought it was absurd, and he still defended it.

So the Air Force will say just about anything in order to get an airplane into production. Because once it's in production, they know that they've got the commitments locked in, you've got a constituency that's gonna be coming back to Congress and saying, "No, no, don't stop the airplane", you know, "We're making money off this airplane." It's as Chuck Spinney says, it's welfare for the technologists. And that;s the insidiousness with which the Air Force will go in order to get something produced. So that's why I take what they say with a grain of salt, because you never know what's true and what isn't. And 955-to1 was definitely not true.