A FLYING BOONDOGGLE

By MARK THOMPSON WASHINGTON

The Pentagon once said it needed only 20 B-2s. ``With 20, I can sustain bomber operations over an extended period of time,'' General John Loh, head of the Air Combat Command, told Congress three years ago. Legislators were skeptical, threatening to pay for only 15, but they were eventually convinced. Today, however, B-2 advocates in the defense industry, on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon are lobbying for 20 more of the Stealth bombers. Seven former Defense Secretaries have urged President Clinton to buy more B- 2s because, they wrote in a Jan. 4 letter, ``the end of the cold war was neither the end of history nor the end of danger.'' Furthermore, B-2 builder Northrop Grumman has quite a deal for the Pentagon: the new batch of radar- eluding, batwinged planes will cost just a fraction of what the first 20 did.

Northrop claims that it can build the next 20 planes for $11.4 billion, or $570 million each. That is well below the $2.2 billion that each of the first 20 B-2s cost. Even minus their hefty development cost, the first batch cost more than $1 billion a plane. But Northrop's new price tag is dubious, and the bargain questionable. Defense experts expect the final price to balloon. More important, U.S. taxpayers could be buying a flying white elephant with scant strategic value because the key weapons it requires to justify the investment don't exist.

Wary U.S. taxpayers need to know that the $570 million buys only a stripped-down version of the plane. Spare parts and additional engineering would tack on about $2 billion to the total bill. And some government bean counters regard even that proposed $13.5 billion price tag as too low an estimate. The Pentagon believes the final price for another 20 planes would approach $20 billion. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concludes that each new B-2 could cost $1.3 billion, for a total of $26 billion. ``I don't know where Northrop is coming up with their numbers,'' says William Myers, who spent 20 years in the Air Force charting weapons costs and has been doing the same at CBO for 13 years.

During his cost review of the still largely classified B-2, Myers found something else mystifying: the first planes off Northrop's assembly line were the cheapest, and the price per plane grew over the life of the program. ``The more you buy,'' he says, ``the more expensive each plane gets.'' It's the reverse of the ``learning curve,'' which anticipates lower costs as production skills are honed.

Ralph Crosby, Northrop vice president for the B-2, says CBO's historical analysis can't predict the cost of the next planes because ``we now have a firm, fixed-price offer'' pending at the Pentagon. ``It's based on lean production techniques,'' Crosby says. The 11,000 people working on the first B-2s, for example, would be trimmed to about 3,600 for the second 20.

Yet all the conflict about the plane's cost shouldn't obscure one question: What would these new planes brandish in battle? With atomic Armageddon receding, the ideal new-world-order weapon should be a precision-guided, nonnuclear bomb, similar to those used with devastating effect in the Gulf War. One such ``smart'' bomb can do the work of 100 ``dumb'' bombs, puts fewer pilots at risk and dramatically reduces the tonnage of fuel and weapons that has to be shipped to a war zone. Indeed, the Pentagon was working on the top-secret Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile (dubbed Tee-Sam), which would allow the B-2 to destroy targets from 100 miles away with stiletto precision. Starting in 1996, the military declared in 1992, the B-2, armed with Tee- Sams, would be ready to strike anywhere, anytime.

Well, not quite. The missile, also built by Northrop, was racked with skyrocketing costs. Last month the Pentagon killed the $13 billion program. ``Tee-Sam is a silver bullet,'' Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch said. ``The problem is that it's become too expensive a silver bullet.'' Northrop has since come up with a plan for 128 interim, kind-of-precision-guided weapons for the B-2 starting next year--about enough for a one-day bombing mission. Northrop is confident that a follow-on program will design a true pinpoint bomb for the B-2 in three years. That weapon's 10-mile range, however, will force the B-2 to fly much closer to enemy defenses than the Tee-Sam's reach would have required.

Similar optimism flourished after the Air Force decided in 1991 to make the B-1 the ``backbone'' of the U.S. nonnuclear bomber force. But four years later, only half the 95 B-1s can drop nonnuclear bombs, and they're limited to a single type of dumb bomb whose primary guidance system is gravity. Thus, after some $65 billion invested in B-1s and B-2s over the past 15 years, the lone U.S. bomber capable of striking with pinpoint weapons is the Eisenhower-era B-52.