Kelly (25 page)

But Maryellen spent the last year of her life almost totally bedridden. Her loyal visitors until the end were Faye Rich, Ben’s wife, and Nancy.

Because of what I, myself, have been through with hospitals, doctors, and the medical world, I have determined to make it easier for others who have their loved ones in intensive care, or under treatment for serious operations, incurable illness, or whatever problem that requires continuing and recurring presence in a hospital. I am funding at St. Joseph’s Medical
Center in Burbank the building of a hospice with about 20 simply-appointed rooms where family members can sleep comfortably or just rest, bathe, have telephone and other facilities, and be nearby for comfort and reassurance. It should be operating by the mid-’80s.

Knowing that she was dying, Maryellen told me she felt as Althea had that I should not remain alone. “Sweetheart” died in Encino on October 13, 1980.

We buried her in a beautiful setting on the side of a grassy hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Many friends and my colleagues from the Skunk Works came to express their sorrow. As they left one by one and in small groups, I found myself standing alone by the gravesite. Nancy noticed this and came up to join me. We walked back down the hill together. She had been a solid support to me as well as Maryellen for the last seven or eight years. She is a beautiful brunette whom I had come to know as an intelligent and admirable person. I realized that I still needed her with me. A scant month after Maryellen’s death, I asked her to marry me. Nancy worried that it might seem too sudden. My answer was that while I would be sorry if anyone felt that way, I was not concerned with impressing other people. Life was too short. I had done my mourning for Maryellen through the last years of suffering with her.

“Let’s put the past away,” was my persuasion. “I don’t have time to wait as a mere matter of form. Let’s get on with life.” Nancy agreed and we were married in November of that year.

T
HE DANGER IN PLANNING OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE
is that we prepare to fight World War II all over again. The victor in any future war will have learned that lesson. If there is a third world war it will be a great deal different.

Is the defense currently being programmed for this country really effective? Does it look far enough ahead? Does it risk more than necessary? Are we getting the most for our money? Is it costing too much? Is a “prohibitively expensive” defense really so? Do we want to go down in history as the richest nation in the history of mankind—but be destroyed?

Or is it possible that the realization that no country can afford the defense necessary against new technology might so affect diplomacy that war really does become unthinkable?

The history of the human race does not offer much encouragement. Civilizations have been devastated before with an “ultimate” weapon.

The invention of the longbow and then the crossbow were as important to warfare in their time as the atom bomb or laser and particle weapons today and tomorrow.

When a man fought astride his horse bareback, with only knee pressure and a pull on the mane for control, any peasant could pull him off, stab him, or knock him out with a stone ax. But when the horseman developed a flight control system—a bridle, then saddle, and stirrups—war became darned dangerous for someone on foot.

The invention of the English longbow that could kill a
French knight in armor from a distance of 1,300 feet so shattered the mores of the time that the Pope declared in effect, “Cursed, ye who use the longbow.” It was unthinkable that an unworthy peasant could overcome a noble knight. The longbow had a rapid-fire capability, too. In their first use of the longbow on the European continent, the English decimated the French at the Battle of Cressy in 1346, when their marksmen could launch arrows in waves, each shot requiring only a few seconds.

The Turkish crossbow, though slower, had more power—being cranked back mechanically—and could send an arrow slightly farther.

It wasn’t until 1803—although the rifle dates from the 15th century—that the Kentucky long rifle, invented by a Pennsylvania Dutchman, could deliver a greater impact with higher accuracy than the English longbow. But the real reason the rifle then became important on the battlefield was not that it was so efficient at killing people but because it made so much smoke and noise that it frightened the horses!

The use of mustard gas in World War I was viewed as so terrible a weapon that all nations agreed to outlaw its use. This restraint was observed in World War II. But then, the gas would have been difficult to control in dispersion and not effective enough militarily for the user to face the inevitable international opobrium. Since Korea, however, use of nerve gas has been reported on more than one side. The morality of man on record does not, I fear, hold out much hope for an end to deadly human conflict.

The technological battles of today will determine the outcome of any future world war. It will be won with new weapons—lasers and charged particle weapons for defense, “stealth” technology to make attacking aircraft invisible, and space satellites for navigation and missile firing. Computer capability may be the most important element of all to winning the conflict, being the controlling technology, insuring the accuracy of weapons firing.

We must not sell our technology. We must not sell, for
example, our best electronic gear—the silicon chips and galium arsenide chips that give computers a memory of millions of bits of information for guidance of missiles, aircraft, submarines, and satellites.

Computer technology is a field in which this country has led for some time. It will be fundamental to our defense against the intercontinental ballistic missile. With enough power, beams can be directed to destroy incoming targets from space bases or from earth bases. These targets—as many as 12 warheads on each missile—must be detected and destroyed with near-100 percent reliability while they still are above the earth’s air blanket, well over 100 miles up.

They must not be allowed to get low enough so that the blast to destroy them creates fallout. Even a low-level blast could destroy our own missile bases and cities. A direct hit on earth, with the resultant dispersion of polluted dirt and debris, would be devastating.

Our navigation satellites are fundamental to guiding our submarine-launched missiles with the same accuracy as missiles launched from fixed-ground locations. If we cannot protect our satellites, we cannot insure the accuracy of our missile firings.

In the battle for technology, it is not only what we do but what we do not do that will be important. Our defense can be endangered by actions we fail to take. Failure to develop supplies of critical material. Failure to exploit the resources we have. Failure to think innovatively. Inadequate basic research and development. Insufficient attention to training of technicians, engineers, and physicists. Failure to stop technology transfer.

When we were fighting on the same side with the Russians in World War II, there was a considerable open exchange of technology, of course. They had as good or better equipment than ours in some cases. Our tanks were not comparable to theirs in winter. Their aircraft were better winterized than ours and were operating in freezing weather when we could not even start ours. Winter was a familiar friend for them. On the
other hand, our tanks were desertized to operate in Africa, whereas the Russian tanks in the desert would grind to a halt in no time at all.

There also was some inadvertent exchange. We found that when one of our aircraft would have to make a forced landing in Russian territory it would be very difficult to get it back. We tried hard to avoid that. They did copy from two B-29s forced down and retained there.

The United States has been slow to tighten security on access by Russia, especially to some seemingly simple but strategically important basic technology.

Concrete hardness testers, for example, would not seem at first thought to be strategically important. They are used in this country to determine strength in a bridge or roadway—or a missile installation. The tester tells us what kind of weapon it would take to knock out an installation. Several were sold to Russia before supply was cut off.

Gear-shaping equipment that has made our submarines more quiet for years than the Russians’ has been sold to them. So has ball-bearing grinding equipment that could improve their missile-firing accuracy by a factor of eight or ten.

Our own Air Force some years ago received an award for size of a load carried in a single airplane—40,000 pounds of switching gear flown to Russia in a C-5 cargo plane. And how would that gear be used? It was capable of switching tremendous amounts of power in nanoseconds, a necessity in magnetohydrodynamics—generating high-powered rays electrically or from nuclear sources. The Russians needed the American equipment to generate the very short time pulse that is the basis of what we believe to be one of their new weapon systems.

It was no secret that they were undertaking four to five times more work than this country in the field of lasers and charged particles—commonly called “death rays”—the next major weapons. Should the Russians develop the capability first to make our missiles impotent, there won’t be a war, just a surrender. They may be ahead of us in charged particles. I think we may be ahead in lasers. I’m quite sure we are ahead in
infrared use. But I do not think we should make it any easier for them by transferring technology in any of these areas.

There was interest by the Russians during the early ’70s in buying Lockheed’s L-1011 transport. It was the latest in advanced passenger airliners. The Russians wanted to buy three planes only. This would have provided them with three complete sets of drawings and all manuals, including details on the world’s only advanced automatic blind landing system. That would have been very useful for all-weather bombers. It would have been a very inexpensive way to acquire the technology without a long research and development program. And the Rolls-Royce engine on the airplane is much better than anything the Russians have. I was one who protested that sale, and I must not have been alone. Somewhere along the line the deal was dropped. The English are reported to be considering sale of the engine still.

Future military aircraft will be very expensive. An entire new fleet—fighters, bombers, ground-attack airplanes, cargo carriers—designed with the latest “stealth” radar avoidance techniques—would cost more than this country could afford realistically.

We will have fewer types of advanced new models and fewer of them in number. Because of the high cost, it becomes critical to deploy them only on key missions. Vulnerability of the new systems can be lessened and effectiveness increased by mixing them in service with the large number of old and obsolete models—manned on support missions, or unmanned as bombers, missile carriers, or drone decoys.

In new design, we must not look backward and try to put maneuverability in the airplane over all else, but rather put it in the missile. We may not need to endanger a man in the vehicle at all on the most hazardous missions.

It will be a very selective process, deciding how to fight a future war. Superior performance will be required of the new systems. And toward that end, work needs to be done in several basic fields. It should not be forgotten that the major aeronautical advances of World War II were not ours but German—the
swept wing, the delta wing, and the jet engine, for example.

Work needs to be done to give our fighter aircraft more range in supersonic flight than they now have flying subsonically, and without afterburner and its extravagant use of fuel. The range of the F-15 in supersonic flight at sea level is about 57 miles. The F-14 doesn’t fly much farther. The extra range will come with improvement to the type of engine built by Bristol and used now in the Concorde transport. This engine shifts cycles, using a slight amount of afterburner to boost speed to supersonic, then cuts off the afterburner to cruise at Mach 2 with very economical fuel consumption.

Another area requiring more research in the transonic range—speeds from Mach .9 to Mach 1.1. In this speed range today, aerodynamic drag goes up by a factor of 300 to 1,000 percent, with tremendous compressibility effects. We still rely on primitive forms of dealing with this phenomenon. We have learned how to deflect it, but not yet to conquer it.

There are ways of minimizing it. In the F-104, we did it with a razor-thin wing. It can be accomplished also with highly swept-back wings. In the YF-12A, the brute power of the engines just pushes the plane through the transonic range. But these are not efficient methods of solving the basic problem.

Fundamental research is needed. The logical agency for this is NASA with its excellent research facilities, representing the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, and which it would be a waste for private industry to duplicate even if funds were available.

It is a waste of our resources, too, when research is repeated. Yet this occurs. Two specific examples: development contracts for aircraft radomes able to withstand 500°F temperatures; a contract for development of titanium landing gear. The Blackbirds have been operating with titanium gear for 22 years! Their radomes give fine performance at 650°F!

There also is not enough use of what we already have accomplished. Sometimes the attraction for something new is irresistible over adapting proven equipment for a lot less money.
We should not be repeating costly development work. Lockheed’s Lancer and universal trainer proposals, discussed earlier, come to mind. Rather than improve the proven for readily-available, low-cost vehicles, the military opted for new aircraft with comparable capability to be developed over a considerably longer period of time and at much greater cost.

We must study our areas of potential vulnerability. Are we relying for defense on a team of dinosaurs? If it is necessary to penetrate an enemy country, what will be the best way to do it?

Many mappings from U-2 overflights and space satellites provide us with information on the location of Russian radar and missile stations, sites of factories, and other strategic targets, for example.