Bombing Run on Congress

The U.S. Air Force's supersecret $50 million F-117A Stealth fighter is designed to avoid detection by sophisticated radar as it homes in on enemy targets. The Panama Defense Forces had no effective radar, antiaircraft guns or interceptor planes. So why were two F-117As dashing over Panama at the start of the American invasion and dropping bombs on an open field near a P.D.F. barracks? To wage a public relations assault on the U.S. Congress.

Dropping its usual secrecy, the Pentagon quickly leaked word of the operation, boasting that the planes had accomplished their mission to "stun, disorient and confuse" the enemy and that they had done so with pinpoint accuracy. But some Air Force pilots consider the plane so unstable in flight that they call it the Wobbly Goblin. A congressional defense expert dismissed the public exposure of the F-117A as "pure pap -- a gimmick." This mission, he scoffed, "could have been flown with an Aero Commander, or let Mathias Rust ((the West German teenager who landed his Cessna in Red Square)) do it."

The real objective was to save Stealth technology from the congressional budget ax. At a time of diminishing Pentagon budgets, both the B-2 Stealth bomber and the proposed Advance Tactical Fighter, which will also incorporate Stealth technology, are catching heavy flak in Congress. The Air Force unleashed its F-117As not to scare Manuel Noriega but to build a case that high-tech aircraft have a role even in a low-tech war.