Q: General, could I ask, number one, have you determined whether or not the F-117 was shot down? Number two, there was some talk about Yugoslavia shipping parts from the F-117 back to Russia to study. Are you worried about losing what amounts to 20-year-old technology there? And if so, why didn't you bomb the wreckage to pieces so they couldn't use it?
A: I think you had four questions there. I'll try to answer them in order. First, we have lost about seven F-117s over the course of the program, which is about 18 years. We consider this essentially the seventh loss. We have an investigation. We have completed the first phase of that investigation. The second phase is ongoing. We have not determined the cause of that loss. We have eliminated an act of God and loss of consciousness by the pilot, but we haven't determined the cause of that loss. So we are fairly confident that in this case, we do know what happened, but because of the fact that this is an ongoing operation and we do have these young men flying into harm's way each night, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to talk about the results of that investigation any further.
Now, I think your second question was if they shipped the parts to Russia, would that concern us. Sure, it concerns us. We don't like to give anything away. I think we're just as protective of our technological advances as anyone is. However, if you go back to that first slide, that was what we called second generation stealth. And we've put a lot of distance between second generation and the airplanes that we're building now. We think that the result of that material, should it have gone to Russian hands -- and you'll have to ask Gen. Wald about that. I'm not sure what operations went on over there at that time. But if it went over there, we think that the loss is minimal.
And then third, why didn't we bomb it. This was one of the last sorties of the evening for the F-117s. It fell in a -- the airplane was lost and crashed in a rather remote location. It takes time to find those things. And I'm not sure that the commander in the field felt it was worth the risk to go in there and try to bomb it. But again, that's probably a question for Gen. Wald.
The Serbian military proved absolutely impervious to our most ferocious raids. After many weeks of bombing we took out 6 (SIX) Serbian military vehicles. The military frustration proved too great in Kosovo, so we turned to easy, civilian targets within Serbia.
It was one of the great war crimes of the century. We comitted it.