The Kansas City Star October 8, 2001
B-2s based in Missouri join assault
BY SCOTT CANON
Part of Sunday's bombardment in Afghanistan traces nonstop to west-central Missouri. Two bat-winged B-2 stealth bombers cruised over three continents, an ocean and a sea on the way from Knob Noster, Mo., to empty their bellies of satellite-guided smart bombs over the Central Asian country.
Then, according to anonymous Pentagon sources, the bombers headed to the tiny British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for the pilots to rest before returning to Missouri.
"These guys have proven they can fly very long missions," said Maj. Jennifer Stebbins, an Air Force spokeswoman. "But crew rest is important." First put into combat over Yugoslavia in spring and summer 1999, the B-2s flew regular missions that took them from Whiteman Air Force Base to Belgrade and back without stopping. Those flights covered roughly 10,750 miles and lasted 30 hours.
A flight from Knob Noster to Kabul, the Afghan capital, is about 7,300 miles, and going to Diego Garcia adds 2,900 more miles. So the B-2s would have flown about the same distance on their one-way flights Sunday as they did on the round trips to and from the Balkans.
"What we're running into now is practicalities," said Tim Brown, a analyst for defense consulting firm Globalsecurity.org. "Flying from Missouri and back was really great for a one-time thing to show what you can do. But you can't really fight a war that way. You can't get enough flights in."
'Systems manager'
Each subsonic jet is flown by two pilots, men who spend far more of their time pushing buttons in the cockpit's sprawling control panel than wrestling its throttle or wing flap controls. Except for the takeoff, landing and refueling, a B-2 mostly flies itself.
Built for secrecy rather than speed, the plane has none of the yank-and-bank qualities that challenge the athletes steering fighter jets or even other bombers. Instead, pilots must coordinate a range of electronics flashed before them on the behemoths' many video screens.
One pilot has likened the job to that of a "systems manager."
If they followed the pattern set when flying missions from Missouri to Yugoslavia in 1999, the pilots took turns napping in a cheap chaise lounge purchased at a discount store and parked between their seats and the jet's toilet.
Some pilots fill idle time working crossword puzzles. Others like magazines. Often they talk sports.
Meantime, a pilot's children are unlikely to be aware that daddy has gone to war. One pilot spoke of taking his son to football practice shortly before leaving for the Balkans and mowing his lawn not long after his return little more than a day later. Another pilot bookended his mission between a round of golf and a board game with the family.
The world's most expensive aircraft at about $2.1 billion a copy, the B-2 holds essentially two advantages.
First, its unlimited range means it can strike from anywhere. That spares the United States the trouble of bargaining for permission to launch from foreign countries.
Second, its stealthy design - a special skin and shape designed to avoid radar, engines that don't give off much heat, quiet by jet standards - aims to sneak the plane past enemy defenses undetected with a robust payload.
Alterations made
Although the B-2 can strike any place on the planet without landing, to do so it needs to team up with a tanker in the air to refuel. On trips during the Kosovo conflict - closer by more than 1,000 miles - they topped off the planes' fuel tanks twice each direction.
This is not the sort of mission imagined for the B-2 during its design and construction. Then it was purely a doomsday weapon designed to make a nuclear bomb drop on the former Soviet Union.
But with the end of the Cold War, the plane was outfitted to carry conventional weapons. Still, even after it was operational, it was left out of a handful of small-scale missions that would have seemed ideal for a bomber.
That raised questions about whether the stealth technology - first proven effective with the F-117 stealth fighter in the Persian Gulf War - had translated well to the bomber.
Then reports began to trickle out that the iron-on skin of the airplane was too easily damaged, that hitting a goose would cut a rip in the surface making the plane far too visible to enemy radar. One government report even suggested the plane was too vulnerable to rain.
But when President Bill Clinton called the bomber into service in 1999, it dropped about 3 percent of Allied bombs and accounted for 30 percent of the damage. And although it's unclear what sort of air defenses it fooled, no B-2 was damaged.
That prompted the plane's manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, to offer to build copies of the plane designed for conventional weapons at only $500 million a jet.
One key to the stealth bomber's success over Yugoslavia came from its ability to drop so-called JDAM smart bombs. The JDAM (for joint direct attack munition) is a sophisticated tail section easily attached to a conventional bomb. It uses satellite guidance to glide as much as seven miles and strike with an accuracy measured in meters. A stealth bomber can carry 16 at a time and expects to hit 16 targets.
It was a B-2, in fact, that blasted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade - a failure not with the bomber or the bomb, but with the information gathered for picking targets.
Now virtually every bomber in the U.S. arsenal can pack JDAMs, which cost about $20,000 each. Newer JSOWs (joint standoff weapons) cost $350,000 each but can glide to a target up to 40 miles from where they leave a bomb bay.
The Air Force has 21 battle-ready B-2s. At any given time, 17 are in working order, while four undergo maintenance and overhauls. Of that 17, a classified number remain reserved for nuclear missions.
Maj. Ron Jobo, the director of B-2 and F-117 stealth programs for the Air Force's Program Executive Office, said in a September interview that the service had decided to buy five portable shelters for the stealth bomber. One would be kept at a Fairford Air Force Base in England and the four others in Diego Garcia.
But the first of the shelters, which take more than a month to erect, wasn't scheduled to be available until November or December. That means the B-2s probably will be routed back to Whiteman or Guam, the only places with the climate-controlled hangars needed to repair the plane's sensitive skin.
In Knob Noster on Sunday, the bombing runs formed a new connection to America's latest war on terrorism. "Everyone knew it was coming. It was just one step forward," said Patty Shelton, owner of Hometown Cafe. "They did their job and I'm sure there's a lot more necessary action ahead."
Copyright 2001 The Kansas City Star
