STEALTH BOMBER --- STILL VULNERABLE 

We have all heard, read and seen stories on the vaunted stealth bomber, that half-billion dollar bat-like superplane developed for the U.S. military. Here was the greatest vehicle that any warlord could put on his Christmas list. With this new-found invisibility he would be invincible. Guess who has just ruined his day?

A team from the Radar Division of Australia's Defense Science & Technology Organization (DSTO). And they made obsolete another military "toy" that cost American taxpayers a reported US $11 billion in development funds, by just thinking creatively and perhaps watching TV.

We have all seen the late night TV Westerns where Indians are racing across the desert stirring up dust clouds. You couldn't always see the Indians but you could clearly see their dust cloud. These Australians decided if you couldn't track the stealth bomber by conventional radar then track that what you could not also see, by weather radar -- the turbulence that follows any moving vehicle. The Indian dust.

Using a modified weather over-the-horizon radar, named Jindalee (an aboriginal term for "bare bones"), they knew that although the stealth bomber did indeed absorb standard aircraft tracking radar (which detect solid objects) with its micro-wave absorbing foam cover, such protection did not extend to the "wake" created as the bomber ploughed through the air. Even at high altitudes where the air is much thinner, there is sufficient turbulence to register on weather radar. After all that is why it was designed -- to check turbulent weather ahead so modern airliners could divert and avoid danger and inconvenience to passengers.

The developed system, with one unit already based at Alice Springs in Central Australia, will monitor some three million square kilometres of land and open ocean north of Australia, when it ties in with two similar units to be installed at other Australian locations by the mid-1990s. The technique uses the "bounce" capability of the ionosphere (that gave Marconi the basis for his "wireless radio" signal sent from Cornwall, England to Signal Hill, Newfoundland in 1901).

Makes you stop and think doesn't it? How could a government allow such monumental military developments to spend so much money, to allow the stealth bomber design to advance to its final stages, only to be reduced to aluminum foil by another group thinking differently? Admittedly, there was one angle the U.S. claimed still gave the Stealth limited use. Jindalee radar, at the moment, works best when it is pointing towards the equator. Intended use of the Stealth by the U.S. was to be over the North Pole against Russia. The Russians are experimenting with satellite-borne systems that look down, not up, to track Stealth, to cover anything that might get missed by Jindalee.

With Glasnost working with Jindalee it looks like it doesn't matter which way they fly. It isn't needed.

Governments today are not in control. Once a program gets rolling it takes on a life of its own, free from government or public observation but strongly supported by those who have a vested interest in the program and who profit along the way.

Governments are unable to keep up with the vast and rapid changes occuring all around the world ... changes that can make their most studied plans obsolete between sunset and sunrise.

Governments no longer can do what governments set up during the industrial age did in the past. Most of us remember when if a British citizen was bruised in Cairo, the Royal Navy would steam into the Mediterranean and when if a U.S. citizen got bumped off, the marines would effectively invade the offending country. That has changed. Can any government in the world protect its citizens at home or abroad from terrorists? Can any government protect currency from fluctuations? Or the jobs of citizens, not only from job loss due to better quality imports, but now from electronically imported labor? What country can control its borders against illegal and unwanted immigrants? None. Can any country throw up a protective shield against the environmental and cultural degradation sweeping across its borders? Not likely. Laws effective in a slower-moving environment cannot hold up when communications move at the speed of light and are available to almost anyone who troubles to look.

If you can't see the demise of North American automobile manufacturing, clean your windshield. Asian car manufacturers have already taken more than one-third of the car market in this hemisphere. They are just starting. Even after five years of continual strong Asian auto developments, Oshawa and Detroit refuse to acknowledge this as something they can't handle.

Up to 25 percent of those highly-paid North American auto workers are not manufacturing automobiles -- they are repairing defects! A January 1990 report, by Editor Mortimer B. Zuckerman, of U.S. News & World Report, points out -- from a recent Harvard Business School study -- "that, on average, 70 defects show up in American assemblyline products for every one from a Japanese assembly line". Quite an "improvement". My last figures on this subject showed only 20 American defects for everyone made by the Japanese! I haven't purchased a North American-made car for 25 years. My present Japanese car is 13 years old and is just getting broken in. A North American car would probably just be broken.

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