An Extraordinarily Expensive Way to Fight ISIS
I.
Target
The B-2 stealth bomber is the world’s most exotic strategic aircraft, a subsonic flying wing meant to be difficult for air defenses to detect—whether by radar or other means—yet capable of carrying nearly the same payload as the massive B-52. It came into service in the late 1990s primarily for use in a potential nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and clearly as a first-strike weapon rather than a retaliatory one. First-strike weapons have destabilizing, not deterrent, effects. It is probably just as well that the stealth bomber was not quite as stealthy as it was meant to be, and was so expensive—at $2.1 billion each—that only 21 were built before Congress refused to pay for more. Nineteen of them are now stationed close to the geographic center of the contiguous United States, in the desolate farmland of central Missouri, at Whiteman Air Force Base. They are part of the 509th Bomb Wing, and until recently were commanded by Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets IV, whose grandfather dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. B-2 bombers are still primarily regarded as a nuclear-delivery system, meaning that their crews are by selection the sort of men and women capable of defining success as a precisely flown sortie at the outset of mass annihilation. No one should doubt that, if given the order to launch a nuclear attack, these crews would carry it out. In the meantime, they have occasionally flown missions of a different sort—make-work projects such as saber rattling over the Korean peninsula, and the opening salvos in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq—to tactical advantage without American discomfort.
Such was the state of affairs in the small hours of the morning at Whiteman on January 17, 2017, during the last days of the Obama administration. Six years had passed since any B-2 had flown in combat. But now, in the privacy of their bespoke, climate-controlled, single-occupancy hangars, several of them had been loaded with 80 GPS-guided bombs for use against enemies who had been spotted on the ground in a faraway country. The preparations had been hushed: Relatively few people on the base, even among those assembling and loading the bombs, knew that this was something other than a training run.
In the B-2, the only inhabitable space is the cockpit, and the flight crew consists of merely two people. Though they are cross-trained to perform any role in flight, the one in the right seat is the mission commander, who handles the weapons and military communications, and the one in the left seat is considered the pilot, who performs the lesser tasks of flying the airplane and dealing with air traffic control. On that January morning, all of the crew members were mid-ranking men and graduates of advanced B-2 training at the United States Air Force Weapons School, in Nevada. The airplanes had been fawned over for days by ground crews, but in fine aeronautical tradition the responsibility for their condition lay ultimately with the pilots. They loaded their gear into the cockpits, gaining access by climbing a short ladder and pulling themselves up through a hatch in the floor. They then performed a traditional walk-around, followed by extensive system checks and flight-plan entries. This took about 90 minutes. No problems were discovered. They closed the cockpit hatches,
