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The exotic B-2 is essentially a “hand-made” bomber. Immense amounts of highly skilled labor went into every inch of this remarkable airplane. I’m sure there are other folks here who can detail the B-2’s construction and cost.
[Yes! Thierry Etienne Joseph Rotty below, is that man.]
One of the reasons the plane cost so much is that half way through its design, its mission changed radically: from a high altitude mission “profile” to a low-level one. This added about US$2 billion to the program’s cost and two years to its development.
And that brings us to the last part of your question: “For what exactly is it used?”
You are asking exactly the right question. The B-2 was designed during The Cold War. Its mission was to attack the Soviet Union. But here is where things get, well, a little ridiculous—not a rare condition in military matters.
[Again, see Rotty for fine detail]
The B-2’s job was to penetrate Soviet air defense using its stealth technology. Fine. I’m sure it could do that with flying colors. Once inside the USSR it was supposed to go hunting for mobile missile launchers and other “high value” targets, whatever those might be.
Track down mobile missile launchers? C’mon! We couldn’t find Saddam Hussein’s Scud mobile launchers in the wide open Iraqi desert. Night after night he launched them against Israel with impunity. Yet now the B-2 was expected to prowl the dense Russian taiga and uncover Soviet launchers?
The mission made little sense. What about fuel? Jet aircraft flying at low altitude burn immense amounts of fuel and yet the B-2 was expected to fly about un-re-fueled. I guess the crew was essentially on a high tech kamikaze mission. They had to know they were expendable.
If the B-2 was going in, nuclear war had started. Our land-based and sea-abased ICBMs would be raining megatonnage down on the USSR. And the B-2 was supposed to fly around at low level under all this? “Oh, say, Bob, there’s a mushroom cloud over there. I think we should hang a hard right.”
The Air Force desperately wanted this “revolutionary” new bomber and they wanted 132 of them to be exact. But faced with the controversial program’s stratospheric costs, congress whittled the procurement down to just 21—of which 19 are still flying.
[See photo below for the fate of one. Hank Richards informs me the other is a US$2 billion exhibit at the Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton OH]
The B-2 took its first flight just as the Cold War was ending. The USSR was kaputski. Gone. And the B-2 was out of a job. But the Air Force did not want their $2 billion Boondoggles to become hangar queens—each bomber has its very own, luxurious, climate controlled hangar—so they started flying “stunt” missions.
These stunt missions—my term—consisted of taking off from home base, Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and flying non-stop with re-fueling to drop a load of bombs on Iraq, their contribution to the Iraq War. These missions took 24 hours with the bomber airborne all the way.
Very long mission, right? What provisions were made for the two pilots? None. None? That’s right. There’s no bunk in the Boondoggle, not even a cot. So the pilots have to haul a lawn chair along so they can take a nap. US$2 billion a copy and not a dollar spent of crew comfort. It’s preposterous! I would so love to have a chat with one of the Boondoggle’s designers.
It gets worse, much worse. The B-2’s extremely stealthy skin is extremely sensitive. It gets sunburnt easily, which is why the bomber cannot sit out on the ramp like a “normal” Air Force plane. And after a mission? For each hour this bomber flies, it needs 129 hours of highly skilled skin maintenance. [See Rotty] So, you do the math for a 24 hour stunt mission. The plane comes home with its skin in tatters—figuratively speaking. And then its flight surfaces are essentially hand-made all over again.
All for a bomber without a mission.
To compound all this wasteful stupidity, after “Shock & Awe” in which Iraqi air defense was efficiently eliminated by the B-2, there was no further need for its expensive services. The durable B-52, in USAF service for an astounding 61 years, could have done the job at far less cost. Yet the Air Force kept flying its stunt missions.
I must end with this question: what kind of society spends two billion dollars on a useless bomber when that society has so many other pressing non-military needs? What society indeed…
My own suspicion is that Air Force knew the B-2’s mission was something out of Alice in Wonderland. A complete fiction. A fraud. It was never going on that ludicrous hunt for launchers. But oh, Air Force brass had a hard-on for this baby and they had to sell it to congress. Congress, ever fearful of being seen was soft on the Soviets, bought the launcher hunt nonsense. And who got stuck with this disgusting bill…?
.
Photo: US$2 billion of wrecked B-2. Attempting to take off from Guam, the bomber’s computers got, well, a little confused. The crew ejected safely.
.
Graphic: Doesn’t something look a little out of whack? Our defense budget is cancerous! Think of what we could do with that obscene blot of blue. Next time someone starts, “We don’t spend enough on defense,” show them this.
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