The Kansas City Star December 1, 2002
Advances make B-2 deadlier, but plane still awaits it biggest test
By SCOTT CANON
The Missouri-based stealth bomber has flown to the other side of the world and back -- sailing through combat without touching ground or taking so much as a scratch from enemy fire.
Its endless range and ability to stuff its belly with smart bombs has allowed a single B-2 Spirit to complete tasks that would have occupied whole squadrons of its predecessors.
Next year smaller bombs manufactured since the war in Afghanistan could multiply by fivefold the number of targets the bomber could hit in a single sortie. And now, with a perch on an Indian Ocean atoll, the plane can reach Asia in a fraction of the time of its earlier missions.
Yet like a heavyweight who has boxed only washed-up club fighters, the B-2 has struck only second- and third-rate militaries, leaving unanswered questions about how stealthy this bombing champ truly is.
Should President Bush order B-2 pilots to attack Iraq, the bat-shaped craft's ability to fly undetected and untouched would be tested like never before.
"An awful lot is riding on the fact that these things are invulnerable," said Robert Hewson, the editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons, referring primarily to America's ability to reach any target on the planet.
Baghdad's Persian Gulf War experience, the decade since that Saddam Hussein has had to bolster his air defenses, and lessons drawn from watching the B-2 cruise over other regions mean Iraq could post better defenses than the plane has yet had to foil.
"When it flew over Serbia and Kosovo, it was going against systems from the 1970s and early 1980s and that the Serbs were afraid to use. In Afghanistan there was zero opposition," he said. "The Iraqis will have far better hardware and much better know-how."
While he is betting on U.S. technology to see the B-2 safely through any Iraq bombing runs, Hewson said: "No one really knows how this one will go."
An elegant weapon
In a way, everything accomplished by the B-2 is gravy. It was never meant for workaday war.
The analysts who talk about instruments of destruction in calmly clinical tones speak of the B-2's starting out as a disposable aircraft for doomsday. The plane was designed to sneak over targets deep inside a heavily defended Soviet Union, its bomb bay loaded with 16 nuclear weapons.
By the time the sleek bomber was ready to fly, the Cold War was over. So the Pentagon jury-rigged the $2 billion-a-copy jet to double as a weapon of conventional warfare.
Its first action came in 1999, voyaging from Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Noster, Mo., to the former Yugoslavia -- flights lasting more than a day and marked by pilots napping between midair refuelings.
Although one F-117 fighter-bomber -- employing a previous generation of stealth technology -- crashed in the Balkans, the B-2 flew unscathed. Its precision weapons were testimony to America's high-tech military. The angular designs of the B-2 were celebrated in children's drawings in Albanian refugee camps.
And while the bomb that struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade came from a B-2, the mishap was blamed on outdated maps rather than a failure of technology.
Against the Taliban, a foe with practically no air defenses, the B-2 fired the first shots of the war and then retreated to allow less precious and more durable bombers to pound Afghanistan.
Throughout those two conflicts, the B-2's guided bombs gave it the most accurate strike record in America's flying armada.
Yet doubts persisted. Had the bomber's stealth qualities -- a complex combination of its shape, radar-absorbing skin and style of flight -- tricked the enemy? Or had other measures -- radar-jamming planes for instance -- simply cleared the way for the B-2?
What the plane did establish was that the United States could mount an air attack from its own soil and drop bombs anywhere on Earth. That meant access to foreign bases was not mandatory for a military operation.
Throughout these winning combat missions, though, limitations showed through. With flights from western Missouri lasting as long as 44 hours, the fleet of 21 bombers (with an undisclosed number still reserved for nuclear duty) could make only a finite number of bombing runs.
At the same time, the aircraft's coating proved vulnerable to nicks and dents. "It's essentially getting sandblasted on those flights" said one analyst. Those blemishes make the plane easier to spot with radar.
Patching the jet demands climate-controlled shelters -- meaning until recently that it could be based only at Whiteman. But the recent purchase of $2 million semiportable shelters allows for the plane to fly from Fairford, England, or the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
New challenges
Officials at Whiteman will not talk about the timing of any overseas deployment, but Col. Doug Raaburg, commander of the 509th Bomb Wing, told the Los Angeles Times this month that the fleet would be ready to fly from Diego Garcia "in case we get the call."
So instead of upward of 20 hours one way from Missouri, a flight to Baghdad would run just five hours.
Yet if the planes venture over Iraq, for reasons technological and political, their chances of being spotted run higher than ever before.
Iraq spent more than a decade burying fiberoptic cables that stitched together its air defense network. Experts say that the combination of data from multiple locations might be able to "paint," or identify, the B-2's presence on radar screens.
Hussein's forces could also benefit from lessons that the Serbs might have learned about what radar frequencies stood the best chance of piercing the veil of stealth technology.
"Stealth doesn't mean invisible; it means harder to find," said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information. "In certain environments the thing is going to be findable."
For starters the Iraqis might know where to look.
With Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Iran unlikely to overtly approve of U.S. military action in Iraq, their airspace would be off-limits. That would leave only those routes over Turkey, Kuwait and a small part of the Persian Gulf for American planes to use.
"They can concentrate all their attention there," said Thomas Keaney, a former B-52 pilot now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It simplifies their job dramatically."
For all the plane's glory, analysts peg the B-2's success as much to its payload as its cutting-edge stealth.
Principally the bomber has been a high-flying delivery wagon for dumb bombs fitted with smart tail fins: guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The key to leading those explosives to their targets, with accuracy unseen just a few years before, is the satellite Global Positioning System.
But GPS signals are weak, prompting speculation that they could be jammed. That would put the B-2's bombs -- and scores of other systems crucial to the U.S. military -- in the dark.
"It adds another layer" to the constant cat-and-mouse of military countermeasures, said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. He is convinced that jamming would not pose a significant problem for American forces. A station transmitting a jamming signal, for instance, would quickly become a target.
Still, tests with munitions carried most often by the B-2 show the bombs could find their marks even without constant instructions from satellites.
An umbilical cord plugged to the bomb until its release orients it. Once the bomb begins to glide to Earth, a so-called internal navigation system keeps it on course. GPS fine-tunes that flight path. So, experts say, the loss of GPS steering might mean a loss of accuracy by a few yards -- not wild misses.
Assuming the B-2 can get beyond Iraqi defenses, its effect would be devastating.
Testing has begun with a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile -- a jet-powered device capable of weaving for 200 miles after release from a plane.
In past missions the B-2 carried as many as 16 guided, 2,000-pound bombs. Soon the bomber will test 500-pound smart bombs. Once they are ready, the plane could carry 80 of them on one flight.
Compare that with the Persian Gulf War. Even with just the bomber's battle-tested capacity of 16 smart bombs, it would take more than 40 aircraft -- fighter-bombers, tankers, radar jammers -- to deliver the same damage as one B-2.
Which only makes the stakes of knocking it from the sky that much higher.
"We only have a few of them, and they represent our ability to do what we want, whenever we want," said Keaney. "Losing one of them would have a tremendous effect, because it is the front line. It would be like a big Navy ship going down. A really big ship."
© 2002 The Kansas City Star
