Fewer than 100 pilots climb the ladder to the B-2 cockpit. “Undetected inbound, unscathed outbound.” That’s how one pilot summarized his mission to bomb targets in Baghdad with the $2.2 billion Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit on the first night of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. His words capture the reasons the Air Force built such an expensive bomber to launch global-strike missions, which B-2 pilots fly from Whiteman Air Force Base in central Missouri. Twenty years after the first mysterious bomber arrived at Whiteman, the B-2 still stands ready to deter bad behavior, hearten allies, and destroy targets “anytime, anywhere,” as Whiteman’s 509th Bomb Wing puts it. “Unless a nation has the technological prowess and the wealth to build stealth aircraft, hitting targets in well-defended lands takes a lot of air power. America’s last big air action without stealth was Linebacker II, late in the Vietnam War, which sought to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the peace table. Daily attacks to protect a 70-mile-long column of B-52s required up to four dozen support aircraft at a time to jam, blind, and destroy surface-to-air-directing radars. Even so, over the 11-day operation, waves of Soviet-built missiles shot down 27 aircraft.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 20:36:49 +0000
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