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WASHINGTON (September 17, 1999 6:58 p.m. EDT ) - Yugoslavia may have sold the wreckage of the U.S. Air Force F-117A stealth fighter that its air defense forces shot down near Belgrade early in the Kosovo war, Air Force chief of staff Gen. Michael Ryan said Friday. Russia or China are considered the most likely buyers.
The downing of the F-117A on March 27 was the first loss of a stealth aircraft in combat and confirmed that although stealthiness is an asset it does not make an airplane invisible to enemy radar.
The Air Force has long worried about the spread of stealth technologies to potential enemies, but a senior aide to Ryan said there has been "no wringing of hands" over the F-117A wreckage because it represents an older generation of stealth technology that current radar-evading technology surpassed years ago.
"This is really a kind of antique stealth technology," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute think tank.
The F-117A was developed in great secrecy in the 1970s. It entered the fleet in 1983 but was not revealed officially until 1988. It saw its first combat in the 1989 invasion of Panama and was a star of the 1991 Gulf War.
The B-2 bomber, which saw its first combat in the war against Yugoslavia, uses stealth technologies that are more advanced than the F-117A's. An even newer version of stealth is used in the F-22 fighter now in development. No other country has stealth aircraft in active use, although Russia and others have researched it.
At the least, acquiring substantial pieces of the wrecked F-117A might help a country develop a more effective means of detecting and tracking the plane on radar, said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor.
But in terms of reproducing the aircraft, "It's of absolutely no value," Trainor said in an interview.
Ryan, in an exchange with reporters on this and other topics, said he is not certain what became of the F-117A wreckage, but he said "anecdotal hearsay said they probably sent it to somebody who would pay for it because (the Serbs) are cash-strapped." He said he did not know who may have bought it.
Trainor said likely purchasers range from Iran or Iraq to Libya, North Korea, Russia or China.
The Pentagon came under criticism from some for deciding not to bomb the F-117A wreckage to destroy it immediately after the plane went down about 25 miles from Belgrade. It was shown on Serb TV even before a team of Air Force helicopters swooped in and rescued the pilot, who has never been publicly identified.
"It would have been inhumane, I think, to go in and bomb the airplane at that point," Ryan said. "There were a lot of civilians around it."
Ryan refused to discuss how the Serbs may have succeeded in downing the F-117A. He said such details could make it easier for a future enemy to defeat the stealth plane. Other Air Force officials have said it probably was hit by an SA-3 surface-to-air missile.
In a ceremony Thursday honoring his troops for their role in the war against Yugoslavia, Ryan praised three winners of the Silver Star award, including Capt. James L. Cardoso, who commanded the helicopter team that rescued the F-117A pilot. It was the first time the rescuers had been publicly identified.
The official citation accompanying Cardoso's Silver Star said the successful rescue was a "critical and essential victory" for NATO because it denied Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic "the political, military and media exploitation of parading a downed American `stealth fighter' pilot in front of news cameras."
The F-117A was one of only two allied aircraft shot down in the war. The other was an F-16 fighter, which the Air Force said Thursday was hit by an SA-3 surface-to-air missile.