
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 4, 1990                   TAG: 9004040343
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From The New York Times and Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

STEALTH COMBAT MISSION LESS THAN PERFECT

As the Defense Department disclosed on Tuesday new information about its Stealth fighter plane, senior Pentagon officials said the aircraft's first combat mission in Panama was marred by pilot error and a critical target was missed by hundreds of yards.

The Lockheed F-117A, designed to elude air defense systems, was deployed during the 1980s and has been shrouded in secrecy.

It is an aeronautical cousin of the Stealth, or B-2, bomber, a larger, more expensive plane made by Northrop that was first shown in public last year and is still being tested.

Total cost for the F-117A, first in a generation of radar-elusive planes the Air Force wants, is $6.26 billion, the Pentagon said - or approximately $106.2 million each for 59 planes.

The Pentagon's disclosure may have been an attempt to weigh some good news with some bad.

The Congressional Budget Office is expected to release a report this week saying it would not be cost effective to build anything less than all 132 of the B-2 strategic Stealth bombers the Air Force is requesting.

At $530 million a copy, the B-2 program has encountered deep opposition in Congress and appears certain to be cut.

After the December invasion of Panama, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said each of two F-117A fighters used in the attack delivered a 2,000-pound bomb with "pinpoint accuracy," based on information provided to him by the military.

And other Pentagon officials initially described the operation as a picture-perfect attack.

The less-than-perfect performance is embarrassing for the Pentagon, which touted the radar-eluding fighter as a surgically precise weapon for Third-World conflicts that many planners believe will supplant the Soviet threat as the future focus of U.S. military operations.

The plane's mission in Panama was to drop the bombs close enough to two barracks at a military base at Rio Hato to stun Panamanian soldiers without killing them.

A senior official asserted that the F-117 navigation and bombing system "worked exactly as designed" during the bombing raid and said that the the planes achieved their mission of surprising the enemy.

Lt. Gen. Carl W. Stiner of the Army, a top commander of the Panama invasion, has said that he ordered each of the fighters to drop its 2,000 pound bomb approximately 165 yards away from a military barracks so as not to "blast or collapse the targets."

But another Pentagon official said Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that each of the bombs was to be dropped 275 yards from a barracks.

by CNB