  | Book Details Title: Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft |
Book DescriptionReview “A lucid and lively account of the achievement of what many thought impossible and resisted – sizable attack aircraft essentially invisible to radar. Westwick writes the story of the Stealth bombers on the expansive canvas of southern California, drawing in the security-veiled iconoclasm of the region’s aerospace enterprise, the strategic thinking of its post-Vietnam military patrons, the innovations enabled by both computing and technical intuition, the passionate obsession of the physicists and engineers who envisioned the aircraft, and the differences in the technological cultures between Lockheed and Northrop, the ferociously competitive corporations where they turned their ideas into two divergent flight-ready realities. A rich, compelling, and eye-opening book.” –Daniel J. Kevles, Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University, author of The Physicists “As Peter Westwick notes in his elegant Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft, U.S. wartime radar research was bigger than the Manhattan Project. Westwick’s stated goal is to write the story of the engineers and midlevel military officers who champion new military technologies history from the middle (a term he borrows from the historian Paul Kennedy ). Mr. Westwick pulls it off by balancing a modest level of technical detail with a keen eye for the people involved, drawing on extensive interviews and oral histories. The vividness Mr. Westwick achieves is all the more impressive given the secrecy of the stealth world.” –Konstantin Kakaes, The Wall Street Journal “In his excellent new book, Stealth, Peter Westwick argues that the solution was the product of a host of special circumstances, fortuitous geography, and the aggregation of thousands of innovative and highly skilled individuals in Southern California. This concise, highly readable history of the creation, development, and application of one of the most important technologies of the Cold War brings clarity and a thorough understanding to this complex subject.” –F. Robert van der Linden, Science Magazine Read more About the Author Peter Westwick is a research professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author or editor of several books, including Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004, which won book prizes from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronautical Society. Read more Customers Review: The author did a pretty nice job on chronicling the origin and creation of the first purely stealthy American warplanes, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. Allow me to offer a breakdown of the chapters of this book.Peter Westwick kicks off with a discussion of the impetus for development of stealth for future combat aircraft in Chapter 1, “Roots of the Revolution”, with emphasis on how the Vietnam War foreshadowed the use of stealth for American warplanes. The next two chapters are devoted to explaining how Southern California’s role as an aircraft manufacturing hub was destined to make it the birth of America’s stealth aircraft, but also DARPA’s role in fostering early research into stealth aircraft technology. In retrospect, the short-term catalyst for the Pentagon to sanction the development of pure stealth aircraft in the 1970s was a paper by Soviet/Russian physicist Pyotr Ufimtsev titled “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction”.Chapters 4 and 5 of this book detail the history of the two US aerospace companies responsible for building the first pure stealthy US warplanes, Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) and Northrop (Northrop Grumman). Lockheed had tinkered with stealth when developing the SR-71 Blackbird, although that aircraft wasn’t entirely designed to be pure stealth. In Chapter 6, titled “Showdown at RATSCAT”, Westwick describes the DARPA-sponsored contest between Lockheed and Northrop to secure a development contract to make a stealthy technology demonstrator, which was eventually won by the Lockheed Skunk Works.Westwick eventually goes on to describe and illuminate the design, early development, testing, and eventually operational deployment of the F-117 Nighthawk and B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. (Most people may not know that an Armenian American, Hal Markarian, conceived the early designs for the B-2.) Before discussing the early development of the B-2, he devotes Chapter 9 to a discussion of the Northrop Tacit Blue technology demonstrator for a stealthy battlefield surveillance aircraft which flew in 1981 but wasn’t revealed to the public until 1996. The final chapter of this book describes in-depth how the F-117 and B-2 emerged from the black world to make a difference to the outcomes of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Allied Force in 1999 (actually, the F-117 was first used in combat in December 1989 when it attacked the Rio Hato barracks in Panama as American forces ousted dictator Manuel Noriega for drug trafficking), but also discusses how the builders of the F-117 and B-2 came to (and still continue) to apply the lessons of stealth to development of the F-22 Raptor and YF-23 stealthy air superiority fighters, RQ-170 Sentinel and RQ-180 reconnaissance drones, F-35 Lightning II lightweight stealth fighter, and now the B-21 Raider stealth bomber (which will replace the veteran B-52 Stratofortress and also the B-1B Lancer).If anyone has a chance to read this book by Westwick, it will be clear to them that the F-117 and B-2 weren’t just built and flown, their development grew out of US air combat experience in the Vietnam War and the fact that Lockheed and Northrop were acquainted with futuristic, unorthodox shapes in order to reduce radar return, as in the case of the SR-71. | |
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