More Rough Weather for the B-2

Washington’s General Accounting Office argues that further production of the B-2 Stealth bomber should be put on hold until the Pentagon knows whether the airplane will work. Congress should do just that.

Last week’s GAO report will of course ignite a debate of the chicken-or-egg variety. Supporters of the B-2 will argue that stalling production for the three years it will take to complete testing will make the plane more expensive than it already is (something over $70 billion for a fleet of 132 planes). But the GAO report says that costs are already over that estimate, and the only question is how much higher they would go if production were stretched out. The GAO says, for example, that in less than 31 hours of testing, problems have already been found in the plane’s electronic system.

The argument of backers of the B-2 is valid only if one assumes that the plane will perform exactly as the Air Force wants it to--an assumption that is hard to swallow when one considers the problem-plagued performance of the last fleet of bombers the Pentagon bought, the B-1b. This plane simply cannot fly some of the missions it was designed for. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says that it never will.

That’s an arguable point, but even if the B-2 bomber turned out perfectly, it would not answer the many questions about whether the United States needs a fleet of bombers that have been designed to swoop down on targets without warning because they are invisible to radar. After all, the Pentagon has yet to describe, at least publicly, any target for the B-2 that could not be reached by other weapons systems already in service. And with Washington and Moscow pressing forward to new arms-control agreements, the number of potential targets presumably will be going down, not up. All this means that the rationale for the B-2 is decreasing, not increasing.