Build More B-2 Bombers

(Washington, D.C.): For years, the B-2 bomber has been decried as a wasteful boondoggle
with
no mission and questionable capabilities. Last August, it was denounced by the New York
Times
as “a fair-weather bomber” because of problems with the stealth coating of the early
configurations. Just 2 months ago, Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) blasted the B-2 on a
PBS “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” program about the defense budget. According to Rep. Frank,
the B-2 bomber was “a waste of money…which has never been used, is almost certain never to be
used, and at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.”

The B-2: Combat-Proven

Events in recent weeks have given lie to many of the B-2’s opponents’
arguments. Its first
combat operations during the air campaign against Serbia demonstrated that the B-2 will
be used
when the Nation requires its remarkable military capabilities. Specifically, in the course of the
bombing campaign against Serbia, the B-2 was used for its all-weather capability, disproving
critics who claim that its coating melts in the rain 1, and
because of its capability to penetrate
modern, networked air-defense systems. In its missions to date, the B-2 has destroying up to 16
separate targets while putting only two American pilots in harm’s way.

This use in combat is all the more extraordinary in light of President Clinton’s long history of
opposition to the Nation’s most modern bomber. In the course of the 1992 presidential
campaign, he pandered to his constituency in the Democratic Party’s left-wing by repeatedly
pledging to terminate this program — unfortunately, one of the few pledges he made concerning
foreign and defense policy in the course of that campaign that he has actually kept! Mr. Clinton’s
ideologically based antipathy to this program heretofore precluded use of the B-2 in the attacks
on Iraq where it could have been equally useful. 2

In Serbia, however, the Clinton Administration was obliged to abandon this stance in light of
the
need to exploit the enormous utility of a bomber that can deploy, if necessary, from the United
States and precisely deliver the latest 2,000 pound satellite-guided bombs to attack highly
defended targets with minimal collateral damage. Indeed, the chronic bad weather over Serbia
during the spring has underscored the value of the B-2 and its Joint Direct Attack Munition
(JDAM). This weapon system uses the space-based Global Positioning System (GPS) to zero-in
on its target, unlike other U.S. precision-guided weapons that employ lasers to hone in on their
targets but that cannot reliably do so in the presence of rain and cloud cover. For this reason,
B-2s have been called upon to drop as many as 300 JDAMs in the course of the conflict in
Yugoslavia.

It is regrettable that, as a result of foolish decisions to cut back on the number of B-2s
produced,
the substantial development cost associated with this revolutionary weapon system has had to be
distributed over a small number of aircraft, making the per-unit price tag very high. Wartime
cost-benefit analysis in settings like Serbia, however, demonstrate that the B-2 is a highly
cost-effective option. In particular, the limitations of the alternatives often suggested to the B-2
—
refitting older bombers with long-range cruise missiles, or utilize sea-launched cruise missiles such
as the Tomahawk which carry a $1 million per copy price tag — simply do not offer comparable
mission flexibility and lethality provided by a penetrating aircraft in attacking heavily defended,
hardened, mobile or concealed targets. These are, of course, the sort of critical targets that the
United States is not only concerned with in the present campaign but that it will likely have to
address in future conflicts.

In particular, as the dangers associated with attacking these targets increases in a world awash
with ever-more advanced anti-aircraft systems, the cost of assigning those missions to
non-stealthy manned aircraft may become prohibitive for the United States. This is especially true
given the premium we attach to the lives of our military personnel; roughly 132 crewmen
on 75
standard non-stealthy aircraft must be exposed to enemy fire to undertake what two B-2s
with a total of four crewmen can accomplish far more efficiently and probably more
effectively.

The Bottom Line

The first combat performance of the B-2 has underscored the enormous contribution this
flexible
aircraft will make to future U.S. conventional military operations and to the Nation’s nuclear
deterrent posture. The Center for Security Policy, which has long argued the case for the B-2, 3
is gratified by this strategic bombers’ performance in its baptism of fire. It calls upon the plane’s
many critics to acknowledge that their latest, confident predictions that yet another expensive
military system would be ineffective, if not useless, have been proven wrong.

More importantly, the manifest utility of the B-2 in the war against Serbia reinforces the case
that
the Nation requires significantly more than 21 of these aircraft.
This is especially evident
insofar as the present campaign is powerfully illuminating the United States’ difficulties in
contending with more than one major military contingency at a time. As trouble
looms on the
Korean Peninsula, in Iraq, with China and Russia and perhaps elsewhere, the imperative of having
a large and flexible B-2 force capable of bringing enormous firepower to bear during the critical
“halting phase” of a second operation — a period during which U.S. tactical forces may not be
available in quantity — should be as obvious to American defense planners and congressional
leaders as it probably is to our prospective enemies. If the United States is serious about
maximizing its power projection capabilities in a manner that is both cost-effective and that
provides for the safety of its valuable pilots, it must undertake the investments needed to
maintain and expand its B-2 fleet.

1See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Bureaucratic Foul Play Is A Threat To the B-2
Bomber, Not Foul Weather (No. 97-D
116, 25 August 1997).

2See What’s Wrong With This Picture? Clinton
Doesn’t Get The Need For Strategic Air
Strikes — Or The Right Tool For Conducting Them ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_26″>No. 98-D 26, 9 February 1998).

3 See The Nation Needs More B-2
Bombers (No. 97-D 85, 23 June 1997);
The B-2: A Key
Component Of The Cost-Effective Defenses Needed For The 21^st
Century (No. 97-D 01, 2
January 1997); and Center Releases Summary of High-Level Roundtable That
Affirms The
Case For The B-2, Debunks Critical Studies (No.
95-P 61, 9 June 1995).