Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, I called General Michael Loh, Air Force vice chief of staff, and told him that I could have three Blackbirds ready and operational in ninety days to overfly the region. I also could supply qualified pilots. The last three Blackbirds were being used by NASA for high-altitude flight tests. My idea was to provide the blue-suiters with a total package—airplanes, pilots, and ground crews—for a cost of about $100 million. The airplanes would be indispensable providing surveillance over Iraq, and I had another idea, too. “General,” I said, “We could fly over the rooftops of Baghdad at Mach 3 plus at prayer time and sonic-boom the bastards. Just think how demoralizing that would be for Saddam.” General Loh said he would get back to me. About a week later I received a call saying that Dick Cheney had vetoed the idea. The secretary felt that there

training course at Harvard’s Business School in the summer of 1969. It was an advanced management institute for about one hundred

need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll both go home early to boot. You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight A’s from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you’ll need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems—kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddam place. Now, go on home and pour yourself

accommodate him, I wrote out an equation: ⅔ of HBS = BS.

airplane and the secretary of the Air Force agreed,” the general observed, “we had four key congressional committee chairmen