Don’t bail out on the B-2

BY: Frank J. Gaffney
USA Today , September 20, 1991

Nine months ago, an improbable-looking aircraft — the F-117A Stealth fighter-bomber — ruined Saddam Hussein’s day. Overnight, it became the technological hero of the gulf war.

Interestingly, had the program not been developed, produced and operated for years in total secrecy, there might have been no F-117 to deploy to the gulf. If the U.S. public had known of the crashes, lower-than-expected stealthiness and other design problems that afflicted this aircraft early on, Congress might well have prematurely terminated its production. Had it done so, the story of Desert Storm could have been a far less satisfactory one.

Today, critics of the F-117’s cousin, the B-2 Stealth bomber, are seizing upon publicly available information about its relatively minor developmental problems to redouble their calls for immediate cessation of B-2 production. For two basic reasons, that would be an even bigger mistake than termination of the F-117 a decade ago would have been:

The B-2 does work: Air Force Secretary Don Rice has described the B-2 bomber as ”already the most survivable aircraft in the world today.” Even if its performance does not improve any further — and certainly it will — this plane will be more capable than any other of penetrating enemy air defenses, precisely delivering its ordnance and returning its crew safely to base.

The B-2 is needed: Uncertainty concerning the future behavior of nuclear successors to the former USSR; the rapid, global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the likely need to conduct timely, surgical strikes against distant places like Iraq; and our incipient loss of key overseas staging bases — all argue for a large fleet of inherently flexible, long-range and survivable B-2 bombers.