The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Pete Williams, spoke of "this problem" with the B-2 Stealth bomber, an aircraft that costs nearly $1 billion apiece and a program on which $30.8 billion has already been spent.
The problem? Sort of a big one. The Stealth isn't stealthy. The $30.8 billion taken so far from American taxpayers to buy an airplane that was supposed to evade enemy radar bought an airplane that can't actually evade enemy radar.Now, after years of Air Force bragging about the new generation bomber that would fly undetected to enemy targets and blow them to smithereens, after years of tests that supposedly certified the plane's capability, after three of the planes were built on that promise and assembly lines were readied to turn out more, only now we're told there's "this problem."
Flight testing so far has shown, as Williams told reporters in a fine example of bureaucratic obfuscation, "The plane does not meet the desired level of performance at this point in time."
So the "problem" is that the B-2 Stealth bomber won't perform the way its military and civilian backers promised it would.
And what's more, there are no guarantees from those military and civilian backers the B-2 will ever perform that way.
There was ritual optimism from government officials who can always put the best face on any disaster in which they're involved. The question is, what's to be done now that the Stealth bomber isn't a stealth bomber?
Williams' estimate of the Stealth's future traveled in something of a circle, with the assistant secretary of defense explaining that "if the B-2 continues to have this problem, then it's a major problem."
The facts as they now stand - that the Stealth bomber is not actually a stealth bomber - Williams said, make it a "problem" but not yet a "major problem." For sure, though, Williams said, it's "a cause for concern."
Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, came out of a closed door Air Force briefing doing his best to speak happily about $30.8 billion thrown down a bottomless pit and more money to follow.
"I think this can be fixed over a period of time," said Warner, without specifying how an $865 million Stealth bomber that doesn't evade radar can be "fixed."
Another senator, James Exon, D-Neb., was pained at his own embarrassment over news the B-2 was actually a non-stealth bomber. Exon had just pushed a new $3.2 billion Stealth appropriation through his Senate subcommittee.
Suggesting he'd been lied to about the airplane's capabilities - that "the Air Force credibility is at a new all-time low" - Exon declared that if the aircraft can't be "fixed" quickly, it'll be abandoned.
But there's something else about the Stealth bomber, even a non-performing Stealth bomber, as a Pentagon official explained in a quieter moment.
Whatever unknown hundreds of millions of dollars might be spent in efforts to "fix" the B-2, the official suggested, it would cost American taxpayers far more in financial penalties to shut the program down, even temporarily.
That's the usual sweetheart deal to assure profits to defense contractors whether or not their products - like the non-stealth Stealth bomber - fall short of their promises.
Back when the Stealth bomber was still in the talking stage, before the billions of dollars had been poured into the project, a couple of opposing arguments were raised that make better sense now.
It was said then that whatever new radar-evasion features were built into the airplane, radar designers would respond. It was said that design in defense weaponry has always kept pace with offensive design.
It was also said the Stealth bomber - designed to overcome Soviet defenses - would be obsolete, a strategic bomber with no conceivable mission to fly against a collapsed Soviet empire.
American taxpayers are here:
They've spent $30.2 billion and they'll pay more billions for a radar-evading airplane that doesn't evade radar. And they've got an $865 million airplane to fly against enemies that can only be imagined.