B-2 Drops Its Bad PR in Air War

Two years ago, an Air Force ground crew rolled a B-2 Stealth bomber from a hangar here and hosed it down before a skeptical civilian audience to settle a question: Would an afternoon cloudburst melt the bomber’s delicate skin and knock the plane out of the sky?

These days when the B-2 emerges from its shelter at Whiteman Air Force Base, onlookers ponder a far different question: Is a plane once mocked by critics as the Pentagon’s ultimate gold-plated boondoggle about to become America’s weapon of choice in the early 21st century?

The most expensive and controversial warplane ever built, the B-2 has undergone a stunning reversal of fortune with its combat debut in the air war against Yugoslavia. With its radar-evading capacity and huge payload, the bat-winged bomber is suddenly looking like the answer to the kind of military emergencies that the United States has encountered in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and the terrorist training camps of Afghanistan.

With only 24 hours’ notice and apparently minimal risk to its crew, the B-2 can accurately drop up to 16 2,000-pound bombs on heavily guarded targets in any corner of the world. The B-1 bomber is faster and the 37-year-old B-52 can carry more bombs, but the B-2’s stealth qualities give the Air Force, for the first time, the ability to strike anywhere before the enemy knows an attack is under way.

Though some technical questions remain, the B-2 in many circumstances can strike with more speed and punch than the cruise missiles that have become the hallmark of the Clinton administration’s approach to warfare.

Some military officials, including Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short, U.S. air commander in the Kosovo campaign, have called the B-2 and its all-weather, satellite-guided bombing system the greatest technology success story of Operation Allied Force. They are predicting that America’s regional military commanders, who are cautious about using unproved systems and who delayed the B-2’s debut for months, now will turn to it regularly.

Such recognition is considered long overdue by the thousands of people who built the B-2, including Southern California employees at Northrop Grumman, the lead contractor, in Palmdale and Pico Rivera. “I feel vindicated,” said Ralph Crosby Jr., a senior Northrop executive who formerly headed the company’s B-2 program.

At its peak, about 40,000 people in 38 states worked on a program that cost $44 billion. (That compares with $25 billion, in current dollars, spent on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.)

About 16,500 people worked on the B-2 in California, including 13,000 at Northrop, making it the largest California defense program of the era.

At one point, the Defense Department had planned to procure 132 of the aircraft, which could have driven down the cost per plane considerably. But even with the success in Yugoslavia, there appears to be almost no chance the Pentagon will expand the existing fleet of 21 planes. The Air Force leadership, dominated by fighter jocks instead of bomber pilots, wants to focus its buying power on the next-generation stealth aircraft, the F-22 fighter plane. The $70-billion F-22 program, as envisioned, would produce 339 planes that can fly faster and stealthier than existing fighters, making it possible to destroy enemy planes at a greater range.

Built to Bomb Soviet Mobile Missiles

Development of the B-2 began in 1981 in the early days of President Reagan’s arms buildup. The Pentagon’s objective was to acquire a heavy nuclear bomber that, barely visible to radar, could penetrate Soviet air defenses to destroy elusive mobile nuclear missiles.

The sleek plane, shaped like a boomerang, has a wingspan of 172 feet and a length of only 69 feet. Its tailless, horizontal design, radar-absorbing plastic composite skin and other features make it very hard to track with radar. It is also tough to find with sensors that pick up heat, sound or electromagnetic impulses. And it often is difficult even to see in the sky.

The B-2 was used from the first night in the Kosovo war to smash well-protected fixed targets, including air defenses that put other North Atlantic Treaty Organization planes at risk.

Flying in pairs on a 30-hour round-trip mission from Whiteman Air Force Base in farm country 60 miles southeast of Kansas City, the B-2s smashed Yugoslav command bunkers, radar installations, communications sites, bridges, arms factories and other heavily defended targets. The aircraft is refueled in the air twice on the way there, and twice on the return leg.

The B-2’s mission was to “go in after the highest threat and the hardest targets,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Leroy Barnidge Jr., commander of the 509th Bomber Wing, which includes all the B-2s. “We kick the door in and make it so others can follow.”

A major ingredient in the B-2’s successful combat debut is a new technology that uses satellite guidance to direct old-fashioned dumb bombs to their targets. Unlike laser munitions, which are disabled by clouds, these Joint Direct Attack Munitions can be dropped under any weather conditions.

As a result, the B-2s were sometimes the only bombers on the attack during frequent bouts of bad weather that crippled the air campaign through much of April.

Overall, the six B-2s used in the war flew about 50 missions, less than 1% of the total. But they dropped about 11% of the bombs used in Yugoslavia, or nearly 700.

Defense officials have declined to release a full list of the plane’s targets. But they have disclosed that it was a B-2 that dropped three bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three persons, including two Chinese intelligence officers.

The blunder was not a mistake by the air crew but rather by NATO strike planners, who mistakenly thought they were striking a military supply center several hundred yards away.

The mission illustrates that the airplane was considered stealthy enough and accurate enough to be sent against sites in congested downtown Belgrade, where air defenses were formidable and the risk of unintended damage was high.

Yet the B-2’s accomplishments in the Kosovo air war have not resolved all of the questions about its capabilities.

It is not clear, for example, how much the B-2’s radar-evading capacity was tested in the war, since NATO was disabling Serb radar with swarms of jamming planes, such as the Navy’s EA-6B Prowlers.

And the B-2’s critics have by no means been silenced.

Only days after the war ended, auditors at the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency, issued their sixth critical report on the plane in five years.

It questioned the durability of the B-2’s special radar-deflecting skin and argued that the plane needs so much regular attention that in wartime it cannot be easily moved to forward locations where it would be of greatest use.

Air Force officials described these issues as the kind of “teething problems” that are routine with new planes. They said that the B-2’s maintenance needs have fallen sharply--from more than 200 hours per hour of flight time to about 40 hours.

Andrew Krepinevitch, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense think tank, praises the B-2’s performance in the Balkans, yet says that the “jury is still out” on some key technical issues.

Also, some senior military officials contended that the Pentagon’s regional commanders will be cautious in calling the B-2 into service because the cost of the plane is so high it is considered a “national asset.”

“No one wants to be the first to lose a B-2,” said one Pentagon planner.

Nevertheless, even some longtime critics acknowledged that the B-2’s debut proved the plane has a combination of assets that will make it highly attractive to military leaders.

Can Strike From U.S. Heartland

It can be flown from the U.S. heartland, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find forward bases for U.S. aircraft.

With a turnaround time of 24 hours, it often can reach faraway targets faster than Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are carried on ships that sometimes take days to steam into position.

And its radar-evading capacity, while not conclusively proved in the Kosovo air war, is doubted by few. Experts predict that the B-2’s stealthiness will be valued more and more as politicians’ tolerance for casualties declines.

The advent of the B-2, said William H. Arkin, an air power expert, has now “really eclipsed the era of the cruise missile.”

Intelligence From Spy Satellites

The plane’s capabilities reflect not only its design but the efforts of a team of people who plan details of each combat mission long before takeoff, then update and refine them while the aircraft is en route.

In the Kosovo war, this team included nearly a dozen full-time members who worked around the clock at Whiteman and NATO Air Operations Center in Vincenza, Italy, picking targets and bombs, planning routes and monitoring the planes’ readiness.

The planners used intelligence information from spy satellites and other sources to select targets. They plotted a course that allowed the B-2 to weave its way through surface-to-air missile sites and other hazards.

A key ingredient is the B-2’s sophisticated radar targeting system, considered the best of its kind, that gives the pilots nearly photo-quality pictures of the targets they are about to hit. The pilots compare this information to spy satellite images and correct the targeting data loaded into their bombs.

“The real capability is the fliers, and all the people who plan the mission,” said Gen. Ronald Marcotte, the 8th Air Force commander who oversees all U.S. heavy bombers.

The pilots work in a tiny cockpit that is considerably quieter and more comfortable than the interior of the 35-year-old B-52 bombers. Yet it is spartan all the same: There is none of the molded plastic and padding found on commercial planes, because that would hinder the crew if it needed to quickly disassemble panels to get to the plane’s inner workings.

The cockpit is about six feet high at its highest point. Behind the two rigid seats is a narrow space, where some pilots have taken catnaps on an aluminum chaise lounge bought at the local Wal-Mart store. The plane has no lavatory, only a portable toilet placed at one end of the cockpit.

The 51 B-2 pilots are picked in a competitive selection process somewhat like the one used to choose astronauts. The Air Force does not want hot-dog fighter jocks piloting its B-2s. It is looking instead for sober fliers in their 30s.

Their most important skill is not what they can do with the joystick--there is little need to manually steer the highly automated B-2, even in combat, pilots said.

Rather, the Air Force wants analytical problem-solvers who can manage and repair the navigation and targeting systems. And they need good judgment to carry out bombing missions with extraordinary diplomatic sensitivities.

In Yugoslavia, the pilots often used their judgment to calibrate bomb fuses to destroy the intended targets without causing excessive collateral damage. Instead of setting the fuse to detonate the bomb several feet above ground, which would cause maximum destruction, pilots often delayed detonation for several milliseconds, to put off the explosion until the bomb’s nose was buried in the ground.

In post-war interviews at Whiteman, several B-2 pilots confessed to experiencing great anxiety on their first combat sorties. But more than one said that the missions went so smoothly that they soon seemed easy--even boring.

One pilot said that his wife worried not about a potential lucky shot by enemy air defenses--what pilots call a “golden BB”--but about how tired he would be at the end of the mission.

The pilots--who declined to be identified by name for fear Serbs or their sympathizers would harass or hurt them--said that they did not feel at risk after their first encounters.

“I never felt vulnerable,” one said.

But from their seats far above the conflict, they witnessed the fearsome intensity of the air war.

One pilot, a major with 11 years of flight experience, said that he will always remember a deafening one-hour bombardment near the end of the war. He and his co-pilot counted their own bombs exploding, one after another, in brilliant white flashes that came 50 to 80 seconds after the munitions were dropped.

Not far way, B-52 bombers dropped long strings of 500-pound bombs that illuminated the nighttime sky to near-daylight brightness.

The B-2’s capabilities send a clear and powerful message to adversaries, he said: “If the United States is angry enough, they can go anywhere in the world--you won’t even know they’re coming--to strike you.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Flying Wing

The B-2, long denounced by critics as a Pentagon boondoggle, vindicated itself during its maiden combat deployment in the Kosovo air war, according to military officials and outside experts.

THE MISSION IN YUGOSLAVIA

B-2 missions flown: About 50

Cost per mission: $440,000

Number of B-2s used: 6

Number of bombs dropped: 700

Targets: The most highly protected stationary targets, such as command and control centers in Belgrade, air defense installations, military headquarters, interior police installations.

Flight path: Flights originated from and returned to Whiteman AFB in Missouri.

Time of round trip: 30 hours

ABOUT THE PLANE

Crew: Pilot and mission commander

Speed: 550 mph

Maximum altitude: 50,000 feet

Cost per plane: $2.2 billion

Total program cost: $44 billion

Flight range: 6,000 miles with no refuelings

Prime contractor: Northrop Grumman

Armaments: 16 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) bombs

Sources: Raytheon, Defense Department