Bureaucratic Foul Play is a Threat to the B-2 Bomber Not Foul Weather

(Washington, D.C.): The late August
news vacuum was temporarily filled last
week with astounding reports that the
United States’ most advanced aircraft,
the B-2, is — in the words of critics
like the New York Times —
“a fair-weather bomber.” If
such reports are to be believed, this
frightfully expensive aircraft behaves
like the Wicked Witch of the West if
exposed to water.

The timing of these news reports was,
as the Soviets used to say, “no
accident, comrade.” They were
prompted by a General Accounting Office
(GAO) analysis released last week, just
in time to influence final congressional
decisions about whether to purchase nine
more of these bombers over the opposition
of the Clinton Administration. For good
measure, the report was released while
Members of Congress were home with
constituents who can be expected, in the
absence of countervailing information, to
decry use of their tax-dollars for an
aircraft that can’t go out in the rain.

Just the Facts

The only trouble is that the
B-2 is getting a bum-rap. To be
sure, the bomber relies in part for its
“stealthiness” on coatings,
tiles and sealants that were optimized to
reduce the plane’s signature to radar,
heat and other sensors — in some cases
at the expense of higher maintenance
costs due to the ablative or corrosive
effects of the elements. Such a trade-off
was judged acceptable in order to meet
the bomber’s design requirement of
penetrating the sophisticated air
defenses of the former Soviet Union.

Improvements in these and other
aspects of the airplane’s design have
been incorporated into the current
production configuration (known as Block
30 aircraft) — a standard the older B-2s
will be upgraded to meet. Such upgrades
have significantly reduced the time and
outlays involved in keeping the bombers
on-line. And this has been accomplished
without compromising the plane’s stealth
properties which are proving to be no
less necessary in the post-Cold War era
as Russian and other advanced
anti-aircraft systems proliferate around
the world. Contrary to published
reports, the Block 30 B-2s will
be fully capable of deploying, when
needed, to forward locations in Guam and
Diego Garcia, so as to maximize their
power-projection capabilities.

The beauty of the B-2,
however, is that it does not have to be
forward deployed in order to
attack targets anywhere in the world
within hours of the launch order, with
precision-guided conventional or nuclear
weapons and with a minimal exposure of
U.S. personnel to enemy fire. The last is
particularly important in light of
present political realities; the risk of
loss of aircrews is becoming an ever more
decisive consideration in determining the
willingness to use force.

The B-2 is, in short, an extraordinary
asset, especially given the sort of
turbulent international environment that
is emerging and the American military’s
accelerating withdrawal to the homeland
from its bases overseas. The
Nation will, if anything, need far more
of these aircraft than the 21 currently
planned.

What’s Going On Here?

Which brings us back to the bizarre
anomaly of a Pentagon actively trying to
prevent Congress from procuring more of
these valuable weapon systems. The new
Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen, was a
vocal opponent of the B-2 during his last
years in the Senate and is no less
adamant today. The Joint Chiefs of Staff
say they would like to have more Stealth
bombers, but cannot afford them — even
if Congress gives them additional
resources for that purpose. For its part,
the Air Force is preoccupied with the
challenge of purchasing large numbers of
advanced short-range fighter aircraft
like the F-22; the fighter pilots who run
the service and set its spending
priorities view the B-2 as a threat to
their top procurement program.

Whether the Pentagon was complicit in
the GAO’s latest run at the B-2 is a
matter of speculation. It has
indisputably abetted a number of previous
studies whose assumptions, analyses and
conclusions were preordained for the
purpose of justifying termination of B-2
production — and undermining
congressional initiatives to perpetuate
it.

In any event, the Defense Department
in general and the Air Force in
particular have not done much to limit
the damage such adverse publicity can
cause to an important military program.
Contrast this behavior with the spirited
defense the services have offered in the
past in the face of attacks on the
performance or cost-effectiveness of the
F-22, the Army’s M-1 and Bradley armored
vehicles and the Navy’s aircraft
carriers. Bureaucratic foul play is a
bigger threat to the B-2 than foul
weather ever will be.

The Bottom Line

What the latest drama over the B-2
really highlights is not the inadequacy
of its design or capabilities but the
inadequacy of the resources available to
the Defense Department for investment in
new equipment. The military
needs more money not only to buy
additional B-2s but also to ensure the
orderly and timely replacement of an
entire generation of tanks, ships,
fighter planes, missile systems,
submarines, trucks, helicopters,
satellites and communications equipment.
The Clinton-Cohen budget defers such
modernization unacceptably and risks
bequeathing to its successor a
“hollow military” as inadequate
to the Nation’s requirements as that
inherited by Ronald Reagan. The costly
build-up he was obliged to make in
response produced the inventory now
beginning to reach the end of its service
life. Who will pay for the next
build-up — and will it come in time?

The present crisis in defense
spending, of which the B-2 controversy is
a microcosm, calls to mind Rudyard
Kipling’s famous poem about a military
scorned in peacetime: “For it’s
Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck
‘im out, the brute!’ But it’s ‘Savior of
‘is country’ when the guns begin to
shoot.” It is high time to ensure
the future Saviors of our country have
all the equipment they need to do the job
before the guns begin to shoot
again.