Dr. Schund, what is Stealth technology?
Due to our liberal policy of giving foreign economic aid to underdeveloped countries like Botswana and Japan, every country on earth short of the Vatican City now has a sophisticated suite of homing anti-aircraft missiles and radar that can absolutely vaporize anything the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines or 4-H Clubs can send into the air during times of international crisis. Darn, we thought they were buying food! One look at a world map will show that we are now surrounded by foreign nations! The only possible way to save ourselves was to design a plane that could not be seen, detected, believed, or afforded, hence Stealth technology.
Intensive analysis of the Navier-Stokes equations, like having a bunch of 14 year old hackers in 1948 take the first derivative and set it to zero to find the maxima and minima of possible aircraft performance, determined that a tailless plane was an extreme solution to the performance parameters. The fact that in 1976 the second derivative was shown to be positive at positive increments and negative at negative increments about the solution, indicating the worst possible minimum performance, resulted in the project being given the ultimate Top Secret/Lotus Eater classification and secret government funding to the tune of one hundred forty thousand million dollars. The people involved in the latter mathematical analysis are now government consultants, ambassadors, congressional lobbyists, and very well fed and quiet.
It is our good luck that a local toy manufacturer had already perfected such a design, and was in full production supplying He-Men of the Universe with working models. Thus the paradox that this increased the cost of the Stealth program threefold. The General Accounting Office sites the need for computerized design optimization studies that, since the design was already optimized, kept outputting what was input. Eventually more than 98% of all the US Computer Aided Design capability and 99.7% of all American design engineers were secretly appropriated to find the programming bug that had the garbage in appearing identical to the garbage out. One side effect of this crass abuse of Federal power was the creation of the Pinto, since the only people left in Detroit capable of recognizing car blueprints were managers and MBAs.
The actual construction of the Stealth planes was another congressional bottleneck. The states that would be building the planes were also the states that fabricated aluminum, titanium, carbon composite, and stainless steel. There was no way that the representatives of Wisconsin and Iowa were going to vote for a project edging toward one trillion dollars in porkbarreling if their citizens were only going to supply $1500 dehydrated potato au gratin lunches for flight crews. Scientists assured Congress that the actual composition of the plane was irrelevant as long as the pilots flew with the wings vertical instead of horizontal - even if some misaligned radar antenna caught the thing, no Russian radar operator would believe it anyway. The immensely expensive psychological profile simulation backing this assertion was proven in real time when a Cessna carrying an eighteen year old German recruited by the CIA and a simulated backpack nuclear device landed in Red Square. The Russian peasant just can't handle microwave imaging like our homeboys do.
The Stealth plane owes its unique appearance to radiation crosslinked, fiber-reinforced Velveeta and cornstarch-containing epoxy cement (for biodegradability, to win the support of the Sierra Club). The skin of the plane is Mil-Spec duct tape. The awesome success of this unconventional material science triumph was proven when the first Stealth vehicle crash landed during an evaluation flight over the desert: Less than one week after impact, no sign of the plane existed and three desert tortoises had dug burrows at the site. A healthy and thriving community of ecologists, professors, Enviro-whiner activists, and government grant recipients still exists there, their numbers increasing monthly. Everybody is waiting for snail darters to arrive.
The most super-secret Stealth secret of them all is that when the plane is fully fueled to fly its 600 miles into Russia (one way; sacrifices msut be made) it has no payload capability left to carry weapons. Imagine the bullets that will fly in the Kremlin when the Russians find out that, after years of espionage and trillions of rubles to duplicate Stealth technology, they have produced hundreds of planes that could not carry even a single .44 Magnum into combat! Not only that, but we will always have thousands more Stealth planes than they ever will build, no matter how many that is. Our Congressmen and the cows mooing in Wisconsin guarantee it.
Stealth: Now you see it, now you don't.