The Washington Post
WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. – Donning an olive-drab bomber jacket, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came Friday to this base 60 miles southeast of Kansas City to praise the pilots and crews who have flown B-2 bombers from here to Afghanistan in the longest combat sorties in history.
“It’s an amazing accomplishment, what you folks here do,” said Rumsfeld, speaking in front of the Spirit of America, which flew one of the six B-2 missions launched from Whiteman since U.S. bombing began Oct. 7.
On that mission, the stealth plane flew for 44 hours and refueled in midair six times before landing on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It stopped for only an hour for fuel, oil and a fresh crew, never shutting down its engines, before a 30-hour flight back to Missouri.
Rumsfeld said the bat-winged aircraft “crosses oceans, crosses continents, undetected to deliver justice from the skies.” But the $2.2 billion bomber, the most expensive aircraft in history, was once derided as a classic Pentagon boondoggle. During NATO’s air bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, however, the B-2 came into its own, flying 30-hour missions over Serbia and back.
During that conflict, the B-2 began using new high-tech retrofit kits that turned “dumb” gravity bombs into precision-guided munitions directed to targets by signals from the military’s Global Positioning System satellites.
While laser-guided munitions do not work when clouds obscure targets, GPS-guided bombs, called the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), can be fired in all types of weather and are precise enough to strike within 33 feet of their intended targets. Typically flying at night, a B-2 can carry 16 GPS-guided bombs, each of which can be directed at a different target.
“The B-2 is renowned for using the JDAM,” said Col. Ned Schoeck, the 509th Bomb Wing’s vice commander. “That’s what this aircraft was built for – to use the newest weaponry that we have. The aircraft offers so many capabilities – it’s just amazing what it can provide you with in terms of information.”
With a 172-foot wingspan, the plane is massive. But it is not, Schoeck said, invisible. “It can be seen, but by the design and the tactics we use, we shrink the enemy’s ability to find us on radar.”
Crew members were not available for interviews Friday, but Schoeck offered some details of what the long flights entail. “Fatigue plays a major factor in the employment of the weapon and how long you go for,” he said. “We’ve done 50-hour missions in the simulator just to study this.”
The crews carefully script who sleeps when during the long and tedious journey for a few electrifying moments over Afghanistan, Schoeck said. Some of the pilots on the Spirit of America played video games to pass the time, while others pursuing graduate degrees did their homework.
Air Force strategists no longer dwell on the plane’s staggering production costs, focusing instead on how much it costs them to strike individual targets. From that perspective, they maintain, the B-2 could well be the nation’s most cost-effective combat aircraft, given its ability to fly without extensive fighter escort and hit 16 different targets per sortie – a capability that would require multiple fighter bombers to match.
The B-2s flew only 1 percent of the sorties over Yugoslavia – about 50 missions in all – but dropped 700 bombs, 11 percent of the total used against the forces of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.
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