The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.) October 13, 2001
AIR FORCE'S B-2S GO TO WAR. SOME ASK: OVERKILL?
BY DALE EISMAN
With more than 100 other aircraft positioned thousands of miles closer to their targets, the Pentagon called on its most valued, high-tech bomber, the B-2 Spirit this week to fly halfway around the world and join in attacks on radar sites, military command centers and other outposts of Afghanistan's Taliban militia.
For each of the first three days of the nation's new war on terrorism, a pair of the $2.1 billion, radar-evading B-2s made the long run from their home base near Kansas City, Mo., to strike Afghan targets, then flew on to a British outpost in the Indian Ocean to pick up replacement crews. All six planes were back in Missouri by Thursday, welcomed home by Air Force leaders who invited the press inside for a rare close-up look at the bat-winged bombers.
"As far as we know, they didn't even see us," a spokesman at Whiteman Air Force Base, the B-2's home, said when asked whether the Taliban had attempted to engage the bombers. To its admirers, the B-2's performance in the 44-hour round trip - the longest combat sortie in history - is a case study in why the United States bought the bombers in the first place. "Four simple words describe our mission: 'global strike, precision engagement,' " Brig Gen. Anthony F. Przybyslawski told reporters at Whiteman.
But in some other quarters, the B-2's use this week against the Taliban, which began the war with air defenses that were limited at best and apparently lost most of those on the first night of allied strikes, is sparking suggestions that the Pentagon has pulled out a shotgun to attack a gnat.
The B-2's use "is simply a demonstration of unique American technological capabilities," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org and a veteran military analyst. "It's essentially unrelated to the actual operational requirement."
On the record, neither the Air Force nor the Defense Department would detail their reasons for employing the B-2s - each of which costs roughly twice as much as an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer such as the Cole - or say whether they'll be used again. Those are "operational matters" that the services refuse to discuss as a matter of policy, an Air Force spokeswoman said.
The decision really belongs to the regional commander overseeing the war - in this case Army Gen. Tommy Franks - and depends on the targets he wants to strike and the munitions needed to hit them on a particular day, Marine Maj. Gen. Henry Osmon, a senior officer on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, told reporters.
Franks, whose U.S. Central Command headquarters is in Tampa , Fla., has been out of public view since the U.S. strikes began Sunday. "I cannot explain to you why one aircraft would be used one day and then not another," Osmon said.
Other spokesmen were no more forthcoming, even in private. "That's a question for the Air Force," one official said Thursday when asked why the B-2s had been used when other, less expensive Air Force and Navy strike aircraft were positioned much closer to Afghanistan. Still another official, again speaking on condition of anonymity, said the B-2s were used "because we can. . . . There's no good reason."
The Pentagon also won't say how many or what kind of bombs the B-2s dropped. Each of the planes can carry 16 of the U.S. military's new Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), 2,000 pound bombs that are satellite-guided to a precise target. The precision means each plane can hit 16 targets during a single sortie; carrier-launched Navy fighters typically would be expected to hit one or two targets, and with smaller bombs, in a single sortie.
But while the B-2's 32,000-pound payload is far more substantial than can be borne by a fighter, the Air Force's own B-1B and B-52 bombers top the B-2, at a fraction of the cost. And since the 1999 air war in Kosovo, both those bombers have been retooled to accommodate the JDAM.
Each B-1B, for example, can deliver 24 of the 2,000-pound JDAMs or a mix of other bombs. The aged fleet of B-52s also can carry JDAMs, though the service's publicly released fact sheet on the bomber doesn't specify how many can be accommodated in the total payload of 70,000 pounds.
Both B-1Bs and B-52s have taken part in the Afghan attacks, though the Pentagon has again refused to say how many planes have been used or to detail the ordnance employed on each. They are believed to be operating from a British base on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.
"There probably are some politics involved" in the decision to include the B-2 in the new war, said retired Rear Adm. David Baker, a former naval aviator who now tracks aircraft programs at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. "Hopefully, they're miniscule."
The B-2 has had a politically checkered history. Its stealth was supposed to permit it to venture into Soviet airspace to hunt and destroy mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launchers that other U.S. aircraft - visible on radar - could never have reached. But the Soviet Union crumbled four years before the first B-2 was declared operational. And because the B-2 was designed originally for nuclear weapons, it had to be refitted for conventional armaments in the 1990s as the threat of a nuclear confrontation ebbed.
The plane also has had maintenance issues. Air Force leaders still bristle at the memory of reports in the mid-1990s suggesting that the plane's radar-resistant coatings would lose their effectiveness if the B-2 was parked in or flew through a rainstorm. The service deployed two B-2s to Guam in 1998 to counter those arguments, parking one of them outdoors between training sorties; the planes completed all their assigned missions during their 10-day stay.
Still, Pike suggests that the Air Force's decision to continue basing all 21 B-2s at Whiteman probably means that they remain a challenge for maintainers. The special care required to preserve the stealth coatings places "operational constraints on where you can base them," he said.
Pike added that he has no real gripe with putting the B-2s into the new campaign over Afghanistan. "We spent $40 billion on them. We better use them for something," he said. "If they want to get into the fight and do their part for the war effort, I'm not going to complain."
Copyright 2001 Landmark Communications, Inc.
