William Langewiesche, The Atlantic: An Extraordinarily Expensive Way to Fight ISIS
The tale of a bombing raid in the Libyan desert, pitting stealth bombers and 500-pound bombs against 70 ragtag fighters
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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.
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WNU Editor: An expensive way to kill 70 ISIS fighters ... if they were killed at all.
2 comments:
Practice, practice, practice, one day these types of missions may be critical.
One day we'll all be dead.
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