'Carpet Bombing' vs CARPET BOMBING!

Etymological Observations: A Safari into the Semantics of the Left

From the back and forth in my last adventure in the threads at Defense Tech here, it was driven home that industrious but small minds had sometime succeeded in perverting the English language (once again) to suit their purposes. In this specific instance I am referring to the use of the term: 'Carpet Bombing'.

From the thread at the referenced link, two individuals identify air strike activity conducted in wars after Vietnam as 'carpet bombing'. I ruminated as to why this must be, since I distinctly remember interviews and briefings with senior DOD civilian and military leaders where they corrected such mis-perceptions...repeatedly. I specifically remembered the 'repeatedly' part because it seemed that the questioners/interviewers seized on the term in Desert Storm and seized upon it again early during Operation Allied Force. It then reappeared again for Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. The term was not originating within DOD and NOWHERE is it spoken of in military community as an acceptable, much less preferred 'technique' in applying force through Airpower.

It did not take much researching to verify my memories of on the topic during the wars from Desert Storm forward were correct. From a 15 March 1991 briefing during Desert Storm (emphasis mine):

This is the 117, you've seen it. It's been operational now for nearly 10 years. It still represents the state of the art as far as operationally fielded technology. As far as we know, it's never been tracked by any Iraqi radar. It has certainly never been touched by bullets or SAMs or anything else. We operated for 43 days with this aircraft completely invulnerable,so far as we know. As it says, never touched by target defenses.
I want to make a little more on this point here, because with the combination of stealth and precision attack capability in the 117, we were able to attack targets very discretely. We did not carpet bomb downtown Baghdad. As a matter of fact, it's obvious to anyone who has been watching on television, the pictures of Baghdad neighborhoods untouched,people driving around, walking around on the sidewalks, and so forth. We took special care to make sure that we attacked only military targets, and we attacked them quite precisely.
Aircrews were informed to bring home the ordnance if they weren't sure they were locked to the right targets. We made very few mistakes. I'm quite proud of the fact that we achieved high levels of destruction against military targets with minimum collateral damage.

The statement reads as if someone was out there claiming that the US was 'carpet bombing' Baghdad doesn't it? Such claims must have happened more than once: From an article in the Spring 1997 Airpower Journal (emphasis mine):

When news from Basra in early February suggested carpet bombing, Pentagon spokesmen seemed increasingly exasperated. “We never said there would be no collateral damage,” Lt Gen Thomas Kelly complained at one of his afternoon briefings:
What we did say is that our pilots scrupulously adhered to good targeting . . .and in fact flew that target profile to the best of their ability. We go to great lengths . . . to avoid collateral damage. But war is a dirty business, and unfortunately, there will be collateral damage. There's no way one can prohibit it.
Iraq wasn't claiming even five hundred civilian casualties, yet military spokesmen were practically admitting hidden damage. One might have thought Dresden or Tokyo had occurred.

Now we skip forward to 1999, and Operation Allied Force. From a May 1, 1999 Pentagon briefing (again, all emphasis mine) where the briefer describes precision attack against area targets, and specifically how sticks of unguided bombs are laid down in very defined target areas:

One of the things that's been talked about a little bit is targets and collateral damage. We've talked about that a lot. There's some discussion about B-52s being used in carpet type bombing. We don't do that with B-52.
I mentioned yesterday that our B-52s have changed over the years dramatically, with increases to their avionics capability, increases to their GPS capability, increasing in their overall avionics.

[Chart - Prahovo Petroleum Production Storage Facility, Serbia]

This is a target, you've seen many of these before. This is about 1,000 feet long in this area, probably, maybe a couple of hundred feet wide. It's not an atypical target. We have several of those we've seen before.
Next slide.

[Prahovo Petroleum Production Storage Facility, Serbia]

This would be about the lay down pattern of the B-52 today at whatever altitude we want them to fly at. So you can see that, basically, this is not carpet bombing. This would be a perfect target for that type of weapon to hit. There are other targets, assembly areas we could use with the B-52, and it has a very, very capable delivery method with their avionics they have today to attack a target like this with very little collateral damage. As you can see, there wouldn't be much of a problem with anything around here being in the category of collateral damage.
So as we talk about the B-52, it has the capability to attack with standoff weapons or gravity weapons, and these gravity weapons are not dumb bombs anymore because of the avionics we have in the aircraft to make sure that we do, in this case, what would be called precision on that area target.

But it seems there is 'movement' out there who insists on perverting the term 'carpet bombing' for reasons of their own - perhaps as part of a fey attempt to evoke some emotional response among the weaker and more unprepared minds among the masses. I have to conclude as much because the knee-jerk response of crying 'carpet bombing' again emerged in Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. First, from a 31 October 2001 DOD briefing (still my emphasis) on operations in Afghanistan:

Q: Admiral, of all the strikes south of Mazar-e Sharif -- the airstrikes on the Taliban positions, have they all involved precision-guided weapons? Or have the B-52s started to drop strings of 500-pound unguided bombs -- colloquially "carpet bombing" -- now that you have better information on where these divisions are.
Stufflebeem: I'm not sure if it's -- if it's necessary to get into specific mission by mission, but it is -- it is fair to say that we're using both precision and non-precision weapons while attacking Taliban forces -- you know, while they're deployed.
Q: Could use [sic] deterrent carpet bombing and the strings of the unguided bombs against those positions around Mazar-e Sharif?
Stufflebeem: I'm familiar with the term "carpet bombing." I think it's an inaccurate term. It's an old -- an old expression. Heavy bombers have the capacity to carry large loads of weapons, and oftentimes if a target presents itself either in an engagement zone, or when directed, it's possible to release an entire load of bombs at once, in which case -- the real formal term for that is called a "long stick," which has also been called carpet bombing.

So now 'carpet bombing is a 'colloquialism' versus a highly defined term? It is a slippery slope that we seem to be riding.
Now, from an interview that Paul Wolfowitz gave to the BBC in November the same year (more of my emphasis) we see further refutation of the the term 'carpet bombing':

BBC: Can I just ask you first of all about the latest developments in the war in Afghanistan which is that positions north of Kabul are being now carpet bombed,we hear. Is that a change of strategy?

Wolfowitz: I don't think it's a change of strategy. That's a journalistic term, I believe. We are certainly putting very heavy effort against Taliban positions. The strategy from the beginning has been to empower the opposition forces inside Afghanistan to be able to undermine and eventually hopefully overthrow the Taliban.

BBC: But moving from a position where clearly the strikes were one off from surgical to B-52s going in and it looks like carpet bombing to anyone who saw the pictures.

Wolfowitz: Again, I find it -- this is not carpet bombing a la Dresden and World War II. It is one of the reasons, by the way, we did not send (inaudible) from the beginning is, it is twice the size, it covers a significant area, but it's areas that are chosen quite precisely to be front line units. When you're going after front line units you don't take out one soldier at a time.

So even the civilian leadership gets the difference between bombing a city and bombing 'front line' units in the field. A fine point as to why Dresden doesn't meet my high standard for the term 'carpet bombing' is one I will put aside as 1) irrelevant for this argument and 2) a more complex issue than can be tackled in a blog post - Heck, I have read books that have fallen short on the issue.

Finally, we note that the 'carpet bombing' meme survived to OIF, and that the press refuses to make/see the distinction between precision use of unguided weapons and 'carpet bombing' as a convenient scare term. From a March 3, 2003 briefing at the Pentagon we find the now-retired General McChrystal jumping in to correct a questioner on the topic:

Q: Torie, on the use of the heavy bombers -- and I address this to the general primarily -- the B-1s, B-2s and B-52s, can you tell what kind of ordnance they're dropping? The B-52 is dropping dumb bombs, what we used to call carpet bombing, on the Republican Guard troops?

McChrystal: Sir, they are not. They are dropping a combination of munitions, a large number of precision munitions. So there's really not carpet bombing occurring.

I would have loved to know who asked that question. The phrasing dismisses the distinction that exists between carpet bombing and techniques into a simple change or terms for the same thing.

You don't have to look hard for where the MSM gets their ideas on 'carpet bombing'. Just enter the terms "carpet bombing" with the name of the war you are interested in in your search engine and you get such lovely link suggestions:

"Operation Desert Slaughter": http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Oper_Desert_Slaughter_1991

PBS Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/weapons/b52.html

Rabid Montclair State University faculty (A Stalinist-English Teacher?-ROFLMAO!):
http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/gulf-war-fingrut.html

Project on Defense Alternatives:
http://www.comw.org/pda/0201oef.html

...you get the drift. All the usual 'Blame America First' scumb...er...suspects.

Debunking B-2 Myths and Myth Making

Holding back the horde over at Defense Tech

There's a guy named Byron Skinner that shows up in the threads on Defense Tech that likes to make assertions on Airpower - a topic about which he pretty much knows absolutely nothing. Usually I can stand back and marvel at the innanity without getting involved, and usually somebody else points it out for me. But on this thread he pretty much went off the deep end on a topic and threw in a rather lame pre-emptive attack against "right wing ideologists" who might take umbrage with his 'points'. DT has started really limiting comment space and has made it practically impossible to adequately fisk monumentally erroneous arguments, so I left an excerpt with a reference to this site in case anyone wants to bother to read the whole debunking with references.

Oh...and yes, my contemporaries often wonder why I 'bother'. Sometimes so do I. [;-)

My response to 'Byron' follows:

RE: "SMSgt. Mac. The US did in fact carpet bomb in the 1991 Gulf war and most embarrassing of all Tora Bora was carpet bombed bombed by B-1B's and bin Laden walked out."

You are playing fast and loose with the term 'Carpet Bombing'. Carpet Bombing in modern usage describes attacking a large area, such as a city, in pursuit of total destruction or terror and without an explicit target of military value (like a patch of jungle with unknown inhabitants). It is often used (inaccurately) to describe 'Bomber' Harris’ campaigns including the bombing of Dresden or (just as inaccurately) LeMay’s fire-bombing of Japan in WWII. After Vietnam there have been AREA TARGETS (ex runways/airfields, military installations, army formations in defilade, CAVE COMPLEXES, etc) where sticks of unguided bombs have been laid down, but these areas are comparably small and compact compared to ‘carpet bombing’ a city.

More on the topic of 'Carpet Bombing' here.

RE: “The B-2 even according to the Air Force it had no unique conventional mission and on four of the 21 airframes were modified for the conventional mission, three are left.”

That doesn’t square with the fact that in 1999’s OAF war then-Major Matt Kmon stated that he “had six jets at anytime to execute the flying schedule” and the performance of 5 of the aircraft by tail numbers (1088, 0329, 1071, 0331, 1067) in Operation Allied Force were all explicitly mentioned on just one page in “The B-2 Goes to War” (Rebecca Grant, IRIS, 2001, p. 92).

RE: “The Air Force has completely withdrawn the B-2 from the conventional role. To correct you SMSgt Mac the B-2 was never designed nor intended for the conventional mission, to preform [sic] the conventional mission four airframes were, at a high cost, modified and a suite of weapons, since the four B-2's modified for the conventional operations never received the electronic package they never dropped the JADAM had to be developed just for those four bombers.”

You. Correct ME on Airpower in general and specifically Long Range Strike? Every one of Byron's fairy tales is demonstrably false. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone if they did not know that the B-2 was the first bomber since the advent of the atomic bomb to be developed from the beginning to have both a conventional and nuclear capability (I’ve heard senior DoD leadership make the same error), but the absolutely ludicrous story accompanying this assertion at this time simply BEGS for a thorough smackdown from an authoritative source.

From the ‘B-2 Stealth Bomber Fact Book’, Rev 3. dated November 1992, citing the B-2 Weapon System Specification dated November 21, 1981 we read:

• From its inception, the B-2 statement of requirement has included conventional capability.“…provide the capability to conduct missions across the spectrum of conflict, including general nuclear war,…nuclear engagements less than general war, conventional conflict, and peacetime crisis situations.”

We also find in the same document a nice overview up front of the conventional and nuclear armament and carriage capability circa 1992. I've posted photos below if anyone is interested verifying the facts.

RE: ”The conventional role the Air Force envisioned for the B-2 was as a stand off attack weapon that could remain outside air defense missile systems. The problem of course was that the terrorists never bothers to buy any ADM systems.”

The first conventional missile planned for the B-2 was the TSSAM, since superceded by the JASSM. It was an all aspect LO missile capable of striking high value targets deep inside a peer opponent after being launched discretely from within the contested airspace.

RE: “Your #6 statement is so absurd and just plain nonsense that it doesn't even rate a response. Your personal attacks and lack of knowledge of the subject only reflects the desperation or the right wing to make any kind of argument or this issue.”

Well, which is it? Ad Hominem attack. Decry retaliation. Make an Ad Hominem attack. Don’t take swings if you can’t stand getting smacked.

And, once again! I’ve shown that YOU Byron... you lead the way in 'lack of knowledge**'.

**at least when it comes to Airpower and its role in National Defense.

Photos from B-2 Stealth Bomber Fact Book (Circa 1992) follow. This was a real find for me - I picked it up at the San Diego Air And Space Museum a year or so ago on the bookstore's used book rack.

First Photo: Cover shot. this was put out for Gov't consumption as a backgrounder right after the B-2 buy had been cut to 20.


Here we have just a couple of pages into the document, the the kinds of weapons and weapon carriage schemes that the B-2 was initially to carry. That's an awful lot of conventional weapons listed for a bomber that doesn't carry them. By 1994/5 the GATS/GAM and less- accurate (but cheaper) JDAMs were looming on the horizon.

Outside of a briefing NG gives VIPs (and some pilots in the early days) I've never seen this excerpt of the statement of requirements in an unclassified document anywhere else. Note the second major bullet.
More reinforcement as to the point about the B-2's conventional capability.

An Arsenal We Can All Live With? NOT!

Gary Schaub Jr. and James Wood Forsyth Jr. miss the target: using ‘Nukes’.

“The Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal: 5,113. That is exactly
4,802 more than we need.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But you sure couldn’t rationally arrive at such a conclusion based upon their OpEd (see link in header) or the original scholarship the OpEd is based upon. The OpEd is a necessarily light on facts due to column space. There is no excuse for the same of its source document, and to my thinking, it damns the OpEd's assertions on the face of it. I find much of the original paper... ahh.., let's just say 'problematic'. What follows are the most serious faults I find with the authors’ writings.

First problem: they carefully cherry-picked their sources. They cite some former military authorities without providing evidence that these source’s opinions are common much less in the majority. They cite “Alian [sic] Enthoven” of all people on this subject. Alain Enthoven played a critical role in the rise of modeling and simulation in defense policy development and is also a once-renowned economist, DoD budgeteer and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Unfortunately for Dr. Enthoven, he is also a man who had his “Analytical A**” handed to him at least once on nuclear force structure issues by Glenn A Kent. One cannot discern with certainty if our subject scholars were aware of this, but one would think that if they were, they would also have known that the reason the Nuclear Triad survived to present day is based upon sound logic. Hint: It has nothing to do with their simplistic discounting of the Triad which was expressed as follows in the source paper:

“ The second criticism has to do with the future of the triad, which was the fulcrum of deterrence throughout the Cold War. Some might argue that the triad was effective and its redundancy and flexibility shored up international stability and helped keep the Cold War cold. It is, however, important to recall that the Soviets had no such operational concept. They relied heavily, almost exclusively, on missiles and still managed to deter the United States. If one accepts the basic idea that it is the political value of nuclear weapons that matters, the method of delivery is immaterial.”

Ahhh,,,the infamous 'some' who 'say'. It was on the very issue of a determining whether future defense would be based upon a Triad or a Diad (doing away with the manned bomber), that Kent’s analyses washed away Enthoven’s:

“In preference to Dr. Enthoven’s highly simplified approach, which was built entirely around [our] cost, I proposed a more-sophisticated approach. I proposed that we analyze how many targets of the 1,200 would be destroyed under different strategies on both sides, still assuming that SRAMs were 1.5 times as expensive as RVs and further assuming that the Soviets would have to pay the same cost in defenses to defend a target either against an RV or a SRAM.
However, the Soviet Union would have to decide whether to deploy interceptors designed to defeat RVs or interceptors to defeat SRAMs; the same interceptor could not do both jobs.
This more-sophisticated approach turned the tables on the analysis by Dr. Enthoven. He had introduced the concept of a nationwide Soviet defense, thinking it would make his argument more persuasive. But he had not reflected that the Soviets would have to build very different systems to defend against ballistic missiles (RVs) as opposed to rockets (SRAMs) delivered by bombers. Neither had he considered the effects of different strategic choices on both sides. In other words, he had opened the issue of Soviet defenses without thinking it through.”
-text in brackets[] mine.

In the same manner as Dr. Enthoven, the authors of the paper and OpEd have opened an issue ‘without thinking it through’.
The above anecdote is also an excellent vehicle for illustrating my next point: Nowhere in the paper do the authors deal with the ‘and then the enemy does what?‘ question. They talk superficially of force, counter-force, etc in economic terms. But I see no evidence they have addressed the possible overt and clandestine moves potential adversaries could make to defeat a piddling 300 or so warheads. As Gen. Kent described Dr Enthoven’s analysis:

"While, in general, I preach that simplicity in analysis is preferred over complexity, in this case, my more-complex approach won. The lesson here is that one must not pursue simple approaches to the point that violence is done to the phenomena under examination. In particular, it is important not to treat the adversary as static. In military affairs, as in most fields of human endeavor, opponents react to each other’s moves. Although this seems obvious, it is surprisingly common for advocates of certain policies or programs to assume that the adversary does not react to our initiative. In the case of Dr. Enthoven’s comparison of Polaris and SRAM, this assumption was a fatal flaw."

I see no cold calculations in the author’s analysis where a country with a lot of empty space could attempt to shepherd, grow and move their forces or defenses ‘out of sight and out of mind’. I get no indication of estimations as to how opponents (or allies) will calculate how social constructs might survive or how fast they could be reconstituted, or how such a calculation might encourage a foe to believe they could ride out a ‘minimal’ nuclear exchange. There is no allusion to any analysis as how future potential enemies forming nuclear alliances might have to be be dealt with. So it appears the authors also have rather naively committed Dr. Enthoven’s fatal flaw.
Finally, I really take issue with this most happily-conveyed conclusion of the authors’:

"So long as war remains a finite possibility, we have to be concerned with outcomes, and while some would be bad, others would be worse. In the age of minimum deterrence, the world will have to stand for a few more nuclear states; the majority of them will not pursue nuclear weapons."

IMHO, there are many serious problems with this worldview. It strikes me that in their willingness to live in a world with more nuclear powers they are in reality more willing to live with the idea that nuclear strikes or exchanges will become more likely. They would probably be ‘little’ exchanges on the “Acme Armageddon Scale”, but how do you prepare and account for the effect of even one ‘little’ exchange? How do you contain them? Think of nuclear weapons like ‘secrets’: the fewer entities that have them the less likely they will ‘get out’.
The conclusion clearly demonstrates the authors have a skewed view of risk, the definition of which is: probability times the consequences. If we reduce the nuclear arsenals with so little care as that which has been used in the author’s analyses, we potentially increase the as yet unknown probability of a nuclear exchange to result in a nuclear war of some indeterminable (but hopefully less than “world-killer”) scope. How do the authors know that they are not increasing the net risk in their approach? Answer: We can’t find it in the writings so we don’t know. I am particularly wondering if the authors have considered the results if after a 'small' exchange, some not-yet-post-modern society's 'leaders' conclude: "Hey, that wasn't so bad".

It is because of thinking such as that expressed by Doctors Schaub and Forsyth that I say the following prayer almost every day:

"Lord, please protect us from Academics and all other ‘Hybris’-ridden 'Annointed', Amen."

I kid you not.

Note: In the original paper there was another co-author. One presumes that as an Air Force Officer and an honest-to-gosh Strategic Planner (vs, a schoolyard one), he had the good sense and experience to distance himself from the political ho-hah in the OpEd. People shouldn’t read too much into the authors’ teaching at AF institutions. You will find broader ranges of viewpoints and backgrounds in the halls of the Air University than you will ever find in so-called ‘name’ universities.

Updated 5/25 to clarify points and improve readability.

Think Nuclear-ly Act Globally

Air Force Global Strike Command activated

"Air Force Global Strike Command will provide combat ready forces to conduct strategic nuclear deterrence and global strike operations in support of combatant commanders."

I am now more optimistic about Long Range Strike than I have been for a long, long time.

B-2's First Flight: Another Aerospace Anniversary

While the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's mission to the Moon is being widely (and rightfully) commemorated this week, another important event in aerospace is being remembered, perhaps not as widely as it should be.
Tomorrow, July 17th, is the 20th anniversary of the first flight of the B-2.
Now, if this was just another airplane of the type that been built for decades, and in the same manner as those before it, with the same capabilities, the anniversary would logically be only of interest perhaps to those who helped make it happen, or those who witnessed it, or the aficionados of all things aerospace. But the B-2 WAS different, it's birth and design was brought about differently that any airplane before it, and the path to its first flight was different than all of those that came before it as well - and computing tools made it all possible . I want to note on just two of the ways the B-2 changed the game.
Design and Build Process
It was the first major aircraft that was created using Computer Aided Design as the primary means of design and rendering. At about the time the B-2 was being conceived, I was visiting a British Aerospace plant in Hatfield, England where one could view the engineering building from the Motorway and see through several floors of nothing but rows of drafting tables and vellum. B-2 airframe parts were designed and built in different regions of the United States by different companies-- and when the parts were brought together for the first time, they had to mate with exacting (compared to predecessors) tolerances. What is now a design and build process that is routinely practiced around the world was first applied on such a major scale on the design of the B-2.
Giant Steps: Building Without Prototyping
The very first B-2 built had to possess the most important design feature of the B-2: STEALTH. This meant the tolerances, materials, and design of the first plane had to be representative of the final product. This in turn meant that the standard process of mocking up a prototype on temporary tooling and testing how the design flew wouldn't answer the most important questions that needed answering. Thus, the first B-2 was built with production tooling from the start. This is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, reason the unit cost of the limited number of B-2s built is usually cited so high (typically $1-2B a copy). Note: For perspective, I always ask people who point out the B-2's unit cost what do they think the price of their car would be if the company that made it put everything into place to build it and then only built ONE car.

Oh, Those Nattering Nabobs of Negativity
Since the B-2 has flown for 20 years, it is easy to forget now how controversial the decision to NOT build a prototype was, and how much fear there was in some quarters (usually by people who had no idea of the advances in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) that had occurred) that building such an unconventional design without prototyping was madness!

Some examples of nay saying, from a May 1989 Philadelphia Inquirer article (scroll down at link to find) published before the B-2's first flight serve this point well. I've interspersed some of my observations on how off-target and off-the-wall program outsiders can be in [brackets], for a reason to be revealed at the end. You might notice one or two of the names are still around making doom and gloom commentary:

"I think the B-2 will crash the first time it flies," said Kosta Tsipis, director of the Program in Science and Technology for International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." I wouldn't be a passenger aboard it for anything in the world."

[ I SERIOUSLY doubt Dr Tsipis was applying any of his mathematics or physics education in that statement. I think we can chalk his faux fear up to what I like to identify as 'Intellect held captive byIdeology' ]

"A $70 billion program with no prototypes?" asked an incredulous Thomas S. Amlie, an Air Force engineer at the Pentagon, who said computers and models could not replicate the rigors of flight. "Of course we should prototype. We ought to fly one, and wring the hell out of it, with zero-zero ejection seats so the pilots can eject at zero altitude and zero air speed and live through it."

[Amlie was pretty long in the tooth at the time of the article and I question whether or not he really understood how far computing in general and CFD specifically had come in the very short time leading up to the conception of the B-2. Call this an example of an out-of-the-loop 'expert'. Oh and the B-2 WAS designed with zero-zero seats, BTW- as pilots unfortunately had to recently demonstrate in Guam.]

Amlie dismissed Air Force arguments that there were classified reasons why prototyping the B-2 makes no sense. "They always say there are classified things that we can't know about because we don't have the clearance," Amlie said. "Well, I've been in the business for 37 years, and every time someone has told me that it turns out they were lying."

[I'm sure Amlie was/is pleased to know no one was lying to him THIS time. Amlie, BTW is best known for stinking up the Pentagon with rants against so-called "revolving-door" Contractor-Government relationships back in the late 70s-early 80's. POGO and their ilk loved him.]

"Given all the aerodynamic and performance compromises they've had to make to reduce the radar cross-section of the B-2, you're just flying much closer to the margin," said [John] Pike of the Federation of American Scientists. "That's precisely why you need to do prototyping."

[Pike is 'interesting' here. This quote is from before I knew anything about him at FAS and way long before he left them and started Global Security. These days, he's usually very careful to not go too far out on a limb when it comes to defense technology claims. Here he makes assertions unsupported by fact. Aerodynamics are always an area of compromise, but no more closer to the 'margins' because of stealth in the B-2's case. Performance? The B-2 is S***Hot in its flight regime, so WTFO? Mr Pike, you were talking through your hat.]

"It's very strange that they're not being required to prototype," added Joseph V. Foa, an aeronautical engineer at George Washington University who first studied flying wings 40 years ago. "When you have an aircraft that's going to cost a half-billion dollars apiece, it's a good idea to prototype.

[Dr. Foa's history with Northrop and flying wing design reads like a melodrama. I think he picked a bone with Theodore Von Karmann about 1946 and kept picking until the day he died. The reasons why are fascinating and I think worthy of a peer-reviewed history paper. At the time he was quoted here, he had been getting his words of woe about the flying wing out via an underachieving EE-cum-Pulitzer journalist (now-GASP-teaching at JHU) named Wayne Biddle, and by publishing in a Canadian aerospace journal. Foa, though quite learned and I think worthy even of study in areas related to jet propulsion, was IMHO very much a non-sequitur in the field of aircraft conceptual design. He was the personification of that equal and opposite PhD my friend Dr Paul regularly warns me about]

Pike said recurring delays -- the plane's first flight originally was set for 1987 -- showed that Northrop's computers had not eliminated the B-2's problems. "That tells me this thing is no different from anything else," he said. "Just because it looks right on the computer screen doesn't mean that it's going to work in the real world."

[Mr Pike is NOW hopefully aware that the two year delay was caused by a redesign driven by the AF radically changing the requirements when the initial design was half-way done. This may be about the time Mr Pike started thinking like a Defense POLICY Expert instead of 'Defense Expert'. ].
Why Revisit Old Criticisms?
The biggest lesson to take from this review of history is not that the naysayers were wrong. It is that they could have been right, but it would have been purely by accident. The naysayers of today's weapons procurements are no different than those who were sounding the (what turned out to be) false alarms then. They are almost certainly wrong. But if they're right, it only proves the old adage that "even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then" is a truism.
Outside pundits don't KNOW diddly. Never have. Never will.
Happy Anniversary B-2!

2018 Bomber May Have Been Delayed for Right Reasons

For a Change.
H/T Dewline
Well actually, I find THIS is pretty heart-warming:

It was clear the Secretary was not comfortable … with how we define what attributes this aircraft will have," Schwartz said. He added, "There is no question in my mind that there is a need for long-range strike in our portfolio," but that Gates wants to be further "persuaded" on what the "essential characteristics" of the next bomber should be. He said, "Certainly that’s what we intend to do, here in this upcoming cycle." The characteristics will be some mix of stealth, speed, payload, persistence, and whether the aircraft should be manned or unmanned.

Read the rest at the link.

Heck, if they want to know what they really need in a long-range strike capability, all they have to do is ask. I'll be standing by, but not holding my breath.

Sigh~The Bomber Flies Back Into the Wilderness

Punting Long Range StrikeThere's a lot of decisions in the FY2010 defense budget, announced today, that are problematic, but one thing in SecDef Gate's announcement leaps out as farce:

We will not pursue a development program for a follow-on Air Force bomber until we have a better understanding of the need, the requirement, and the technology (emphasis mine).

This statement is pure political Bulls***. It is a statement that provides cover for an organizational blindspot whereby unpopular answers to tough questions can be avoided.


As I illustrated only a short while ago, the long-range strike question is one of the most thoroughly examined and best understood issues in defense. Let me provide a translation of the above; one that I assure you is FAR more accurate than the drivel shoved into the SecDef's announcement:

We will not pursue a development program for a follow-on Air Force bomber until we have an answer that will NOT threaten the Fighter Establishment and its aquisition strategies. We have grand hopes that we can develop promising technologies that will greatly improve the small and fast-mover capabilities while magically be of no benefit to long-range subsonic platforms.
With these magic technologies, our Fighter Mafiosi expect to be able to FINALLY get rid of all pesky non-fighter strike aircraft.

There. Much better.

The most staggering thing in all this (to me) is that so many in the Fighter Establishment really and truly believe in their steeds and the nobility of their Crusade.

Looks like Return of the Bomber is set back, once again, by the Long-Range Blind Spot.

One Bright Spot
The recent creation of the Global Strike Command should re-establish a virile constituency for the LRS mission and mission needs. Its first 'provisional' Commander, BGen James M. Kowalski, is both an airpower theorist (see my earlier post where he is cited) AND a veteran practitioner of LRS. I only hope his selection is part of a process to groom him to take over the permanent job (or ACC) someday (It is at this time a three-star position). A competent advocacy for LRS could do much to turn the DoD's officially stated position against the entrenched parochial interests.

The Opponents of Long Range Strike

I posted a slightly abbreviated version of this in a comment at Strategy Page a couple of months ago. I wanted to make sure I had a copy of it at my place as a kind of quick reference for me to refer to in the future. Whenever I run into the typical 'anti' long range strike weapon systems type I can now just point them here.

Enjoy.

"Enemies" of Long Range StrikeThere are several entrenched interests that have played tag-team in working continuously against the development of a new Future Long Range Strike heavy bomber. In order of effectiveness, they are: the Speed Fetishists, the Nostalgia Air Force, the Cruise Missile Cultists, and the Airliners Alliance. At the current time, the Speed Fetishists and Nostalgia Air Force are the strongest insurgents.
Speed Fetishists
The Speed Fetishists invoke the 'Faster! Faster!' battle cry for two interrelated reasons. First, faster means smaller which means more fighter-like, which is what fighters-can-do-everything pilots believe in.
Unfortunately it also means shorter range and lower payloads. 'Faster' has also meant 'more survivable' in the past, and the Speed Fetishists can't seem to wrap their heads around the possibility that 'faster' just means 'die sooner' on the modern battlefield against a sophisticated near-peer foe.
Speed Fetishists cling to the heartfelt belief that faster is better, yet cannot explain what a Mach 2 speed will do for you against a Mach 10 double-digit SAM, except decrease your turn rate and ability to get out of the way for any given bank angle.

The Nostalgia Air ForceThe Nostalgia Air Force is fully vested in the near-religious belief that the venerable B-52 should fly on forever, and that the B-52 is the most dependable of all the LRS assets. The first is a romantic notion, and the second is a false truth. The fact that the BUFF has changed missions from direct attack to standoff in high threat areas gets glossed over in discussion of its long operational life on the one hand, while if a new bomber design came down the pipe tomorrow and had a forecast operational life equivalent to the BUFF's - it would be pilloried for having 'too high' forecasted life cycle costs on the other hand.
The vaunted reliability and O&S costs of the BUFF are the result of gaming the maintenance reporting burdens, due to the availability of co-located attrition reserve aircraft, essentially 'flying spares', that allow work to be performed off an organization's O&S books. 'Hard break' on a B-52? Just rotate it into the Attrition Reserve pool and bring on a full-MC bird, and voila!... little reported downtime. Trouble is, when they forward deployed in OEF/OIF, they had the worst MC rate in-theater.

The Airliners Alliance & Cruise Missile CultistsThe Airliners Alliance guys come and go, as it seems each generation of defense planners has one or two bean-counters get what they think is an epiphany, and the idea gains traction until somebody actually does the cost tradeoffs between standoff and direct attack...and realizes that the system cost including weaponization is many times higher using commercial airframes to carry standoff weapons (caveat: only IF it is ever actually used however).
And in anything but a highly permissive environment, a commercial airframe would need to carry standoff weapons such as one of the various cruise missile types. This makes every aimpoint an expensive proposition to attack, even if cruise missiles were a) suitable for the aimpoint and b) had a high success rate. The cost differential between direct attack and standoff attack is dramatic.
For example, even assuming 100% success rate for each weapon type, the cost differential of employing JDAMs instead of certain cruise missiles saves about the equivalent of an Aegis cruiser for every 1000 aimpoints serviced.

I may clean this up later and perhaps add some graphics, but for now I just wanted to get it on the site.

Chasing Long Range Strike 1990-2009

Edit 27 Mar 11: Changed font size of post for readability in the new blog format.

Here's a little summary of the United States' steps and missteps in defining, developing and fielding a modern Long Range Strike capability since 1990. I offer it as a way to save future researchers a bit of work. I have selfish motives as well: hopefully this will let me keep a long story short in some future discussions. Enjoy.

Chasing Long Range Strike 1990-2009

This is an overview of the existing national security environment as it relates to Long Range Strike (LRS), how the LRS mission is perceived, and how the current LRS force structure and strategic direction came into being. Understanding the different factors that shape total weapon system performance, expressed in terms of effectiveness and efficiency are built on an awareness of how the LRS systems are likely to be employed and this understanding can be gained through thorough review of LRS literature.

Long-Range Strike from 1990-2007

The current LRS force structure and operational concepts are evolved constructs with roots reaching back to the late 1980's. This section highlights the pertinent events and relevant thoughts that shape current thinking on Long-Range Strike forces. These sources provide important rationale for selecting the conditions and assumptions for modeling that take place within this study.

Sole Superpower: Strength and Responsibilities

Indications that the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact might rapidly crumble, thus changing the balance of military power, were recognized by individuals responsible for strategic planning in the late 1980s (Jaffe, 1993). After considerable internal review and consensus building at the highest levels of the Executive Branch, a new view of national defense planning emerged, colloquially known as the Base Force. The Base Force was conceived by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, as the absolute lowest force structure and manning strength that the Department of Defense could retain and still carry out its superpower responsibilities in an uncertain, post-Cold War world (Jaffe, 1993).

The major impact of the Base Force on long-range strike capabilities was that it capped the bomber force end strength, and drastically cut planned acquisition of the only bomber in development, the B-2A, to only 20 aircraft. At the time of the Base Force, consideration of the bomber force end strength was framed in terms of the bomber's contribution to the Strategic Triad: the nuclear forces of the United States that also include sea-launched and land-based ballistic missiles. There was no emphasis placed on the long-range bomber's role in conventional conflict and conventional capability needs were framed in terms of fighter wing needs and reductions (Jaffe, 1993). This blindness to the long-range bomber’s conventional capability should not have been a surprise. The ‘fighter’ community’s rise in the Air Force hierarchy had eclipsed the ‘bomber’ community years before, and the Strategic Air Command’s single-minded focus on the nuclear mission was effectively an abdication of the conventional role to the Tactical Air Command (Builder, 1994, p. 186).

While the Base Force was still in formulation, some in Congress were calling for even more drastic reductions in the armed forces. By the time the Base Force was publicly announced on August 2, 1990, the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait and set in motion what would become Operation Desert Storm, the effect of Congressional defense budgets that were already forecast through fiscal year 1994 would convert General Powell's envisioned force strength floor into a defense planning ceiling (Correll, 1992). Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm would temporarily alleviate the pressure to reduce the armed forces below Base Force levels, but after Desert Storm the pressure would return.

Desert Storm and Conventional Bomber Roles

While Operation Desert Storm was not a showcase for new bomber capabilities and roles, it served clear notice that precision-guided weapons and stealth technology would be of prime importance in future conflicts. It was seen that combining these advancements with the advantages of a heavy bomber's large payload and long-range could make future bomber conventional capabilities more important to the conduct of future wars (U.S. Air Force, 1992; Kowalski, 1993).

With this realization, the Air Combat Command and the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition directed the establishment of a "roadmap" to guide the Air Force in investing long-range modernization funds. The result was The Bomber Roadmap (U.S. Air Force, 1992). The roadmap's stated objective was to define the conventional bomber concept of operations, the right force structure mix of B-52, B-1B, and B-2A bombers, and the investment plan for 1994-1999 and beyond (p. 2). This roadmap, while useful in the sense that for the first time it identified the role of bombers in a post-Cold War conventional war, and quantified that capability in terms of effectiveness over the course of a Desert Storm-similar air campaign, was also severely limited in scope. The roadmap did not examine alternative force structures to determine what would be the most cost-effective strategies. Instead, it examined only how the existing force structure could be maintained and still satisfy near-term requirements within a shrinking defense budget.

Risk Assumption: Seeking the Peace Dividend

In 1992, Representative Les Aspin, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, proposed cuts to the military force structure and capability that were even more draconian than those planned under the Base Force concept. Representative Aspin and other leading Democrats wrongly asserted (Correll, 1992) that the Base Force concept was still mired in the Cold War mentality and that further cuts in the military could be made without increased risk. When a Democratic Administration took office in 1993, Rep. Aspin became the new Secretary of Defense, and by September of that year he had codified his views and rationale in his Report on the Bottom-Up Review (Aspin, 1993).

This review impacted the future of the long-range strike force in two ways. First, it established a force structure that was still too large for forecasted budgets (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment [CSBA], 1993), thus wreaking havoc across the entire Department of Defense modernization and acquisition system by increasing competition among programs for the shrunken defense budget. Second and more directly, it used near-term and familiar, instead of most likely threats (CSBA, 1993) as a planning basis to arrive at the conclusion that no more than 184 heavy bombers (Aspin, 1993) would be required. It also described the composition of the bomber fleet that largely reflected the then-current mix, conveniently reducing the numbers of B-52s, while holding the existing fleets of B-1Bs and B-2As constant. This finding was consistent with the 1992 Bomber Roadmap, but the basic approach used in both cases drew heavy criticism (Builder, 1993).

While the review was consistent with the 1992 Bomber Roadmap, it was entirely contrary to authoritative information that Aspin had in his possession at that time. In 1992, while he was still Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Aspin had commissioned Major General Jasper Welch to conduct a study and author a paper titled Conventional Long-Range Bombers. General Welch is a Director Emeritus of the National Academy of Engineering and expert on many topics, including nuclear physics, advanced technology research and development, and strategic policy (U.S. Air Force, 1991). General Welch found during his research that contrary to Aspin’s assertions, the outcome of the 1991 study’s scenarios did not support then-Representative Aspin's proposed number and composition of the bomber forces, but instead supported the acquisition of 20 to 30 more B-2 bombers. The findings of the Conventional Long-Range Bombers study were not made public by Rep. Aspin at that time, but the findings were re-validated when, in 1994, General Welch updated the findings within the 1991 study for the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Sam Nunn. A summary of both studies, with scenario descriptions, was later published (Welch, 1994) which highlighted the very real need for more Long-Range Strike platforms than planned, and exposed Rep. Aspin’s attempt to squelch the findings of the 1992 study.

Congressional Concern and Executive Avoidance

In 1994, a concerned Congress tasked the DOD to determine the contribution of additional B-2 aircraft in future conventional conflicts (Tirpak, 1995) and the Heavy Bomber Force Study (HBFS) ostensibly was conducted to accomplish that task. The Heavy Bomber Force Study's assumptions were skewed so favorably to the United States’ advantage regarding warning time, basing availability, and tactical fighter pre-deployment posture, that model outputs indicated the use of additional bombers made little impact on the outcomes compared to the impact of the large force that was optimistically modeled as being already deployed and available in the theater of operations. This approach overtly diluted the effect of long-range bomber capability (Guthe, 1996). The Heavy Bomber Force Study's assumptions altered the results to the point that they indicated an additional 60-80 B-2s would have to be acquired to make a positive impact on the modeled scenarios. These assumptions enabled the study to avoid dealing with more plausible scenarios using more real-world assumptions that would have yielded different radically outcomes that would have indicated that only 10 to 20 B-2s would have made a significant positive impact on the outcomes. The conclusion of the Heavy Bomber Force Study did not address the issue of finding or excluding any benefit from acquiring new LRS capabilities but instead as several subsequent studies (CSBA, 1993) also recommended, asserted that improving the capability of the existing bomber fleet as the most cost-effective way to use the planned budget.

It should be noted at this point in the review that the forecasted weapons carriage capabilities included in the modeling for the Heavy Bomber Force Study did not include the B-2's eighty (80) 500lb, 'near-precision' Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) weapons carriage option. This capability is now fielded and it had been proposed at the time of the HBFS. This development effectively gives each B-2 up to five times the lethality, in terms of aimpoints that can be struck on a single mission, compared to the baseline 2000 lb JDAM payload carriage method. That this configuration was not modeled as part of the HBFS was remarkable given that the study did advocate and cite other specific advanced weapons development proposals underway at the time that would enhance bomber lethality (Tirpak, 1995) and that indeed, the 80 500 lb JDAM effort was one of the more widely anticipated improvements for the B-2A. In addition to deficiencies in model inputs, the constructs of the HBFS’ core model itself have been found woefully deficient (Guthe, 1996).

The findings of the HBFS were largely and immediately discredited by a bipartisan group of Members of Congress (Tirpak, 1995) as well as leading military analysts. A RAND Corporation analyst, Dr. Glen Buchan, testified before a House of Representatives subcommittee in 1996 and summed up the methods of the HBFS as "Whoever framed the study, cooked the books" (Buchan, 1996, p. 208).

Not long after the release of the HBFS, the Commission on Roles and Missions (CORM) released their report. In their official report, the CORM also asserted that producing more B-2s would not be as cost-effective as buying additional precision weapons and improving existing bombers and short-range strike aircraft (CSBA, 1993). Unlike HBFS however, the Commission recommended no final decisions should be made until another study, the Heavy Bomber Industrial Base (HBIB) study, was completed.
The CORM report, like the HBFS Study before it, did not address the task it had been given by Congress. It had been chartered to examine the economic impact of losing and having to reconstitute the industrial base. Instead the commission merely iterated the industrial base could be reconstituted (Barefield, 1997) without answering the core question being asked: at what possible cost?

Shortly after the CORM released their report, it became public knowledge that it was as deficient as earlier studies, when it was revealed the CORM commission had rejected the recommendations and findings of its technical staff and instead reported findings that were unsupported by the facts in hand (Commission on Roles and Missions Staff, 1995). The CORM technical staff had conducted more than 20 different studies and found

 "the studies generally conclude that long-range bombers and the B-2 in particular, are cost-effective, and in some cases the only means of rapidly projecting survivable power" (p. 2). 

The CORM staff paper strongly advocated acquiring significant numbers of more B-2s. The staff paper was widely circulated in Congress, and was eventually made public, but the differences between the CORM report and the findings with recommendations of their technical staff were never publicly explained. This disconnect may very well have contributed to Congress’ continuing determination to keep revisiting the issue. It may have also influenced the decision of Congress to repeal budget cap limitations and to authorize additional B-2 acquisition activities as part of the 1996 Defense Authorization Act. Early in the 1996 election year, instead of applying funds for long-lead items needed to build more B-2s as intended, the President directed the acquisition funds authorized by Congress be used to only upgrade the one remaining dedicated flight-test aircraft to operational standards, bringing the total number of operational B-2s to 21 (GAO, 1996).

Approximately nine months after the CORM released its report, the Deep Attack Weapons Mix Study, Part II (DAWMS II) was released. This study examined the relative merits of weapons that could strike deep into an enemy's rear area in stopping an advancing force. The analysis included diverse weapons options including long-range artillery and missiles. The initial findings of DAWMS II supported buying more B-2s, but the scenarios were run again with changes to get different outcomes (Independent Bomber Force Review Commission [IBFRC], 1997). The second sequence of scenarios still indicated that the B-2 was an extraordinarily valuable asset (IBFRC, p. 20) during the halt-phase of an attack. But the DAWMS II findings asserted the tradeoffs required from buying more B-2s created what DAWMS II called capability gaps in other areas which were never fully described (p. 22). The primary model used to determine he DAWMS II outcome was called TACWAR. A critique (Courter & Thompson, 1996) of the DAWMS II findings noted that TACWAR seriously discounts the effects of airpower and de-emphasizes its value during the Halt Phase of a battle. This criticism was repeated in a later study (Ochmanek, Harshberger, Thaler, & Kent, 1998), which also demonstrated how future modeling could avoid the same deficiencies.

Long-Range Strike from 1997-Present

Rethinking Long-Range Strike

In 1997, the National Defense Panel (NDP) published its report Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century. The purpose of the panel was to provide Congress with an alternate view (Haffa & Patton, 1998) of defense for comparison with the DOD's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review. Haffa and Patton noted the NDP report was widely criticized for not proposing alternative force structures, but the NDP did point out that as the United States reduced its overseas presence, it would become increasingly reliant on long-range strike systems. The NDP expressed deep concern regarding the emphasis on tactical airpower modernization at the expense of long-range systems.

Also in 1997, the findings of another blue-ribbon panel, led by Chairman and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, were released. This panel, known as the Independent Bomber Force Review Commission (IBFRC), had examined the planned future of long-range strike aircraft, the importance of long-range strike to the national security, and the potential benefit of acquiring more bombers, specifically more B-2s (IBFRC, 1997). As part of their review, they dissected and critiqued many of the studies that had been conducted up to that time.

The IBFRC reached two major conclusions that were stated in the Chairman’s cover letter delivered with the IBFRC report, the first conclusion was that “long-range air power will be more important than ever in the decades ahead” and the second, “Pentagon opposition to further B-2 production is shortsighted and parochial.” The commission’s Chairman further noted in the cover letter that evidence indicated "there is a consensus across the services that long-range airpower can be abandoned in the long run” and added that it was “a view with which we strongly disagree.” The report expanded on the IBFRC’s primary conclusions, and recommended force structure changes, including acquiring "a minimum of one additional B-2 squadron" (IBFRC, 1997, p. 2) and keeping open the possibility of accelerated procurement of even more aircraft afterwards.

In October 1997, via the Defense Appropriations Act of 1998, Congress chartered one more commission to review some very specific issues related to long-range airpower and its operational employment. Within six months, The Panel to Review Long-Range Airpower released its report. In testimony before the House of Representatives’ Military Procurement Subcommittee, the panel’s Chairman stated that while the panel stopped short of recommending additional B-2s, it did recommend upgrades to existing aircraft as most 'cost-effective', as well as repeated earlier studies' recommendations to develop more advanced weapons for long-range strike aircraft. The Chairman further testified that the panel recommended the DOD create a plan to replace the existing force, stating in testimony that there was not at that time an “adequate basis” for choosing between upgraded versions of the B-2 or developing a follow-on or direct replacement, built with more advanced technologies (Panel to Review Long-Range Airpower, 1998).

Future Long-Range Strike Solution Remains Out of Reach

The Panel to Review Long-Range Airpower's call to develop a plan caused Congress in late 1998 to direct the DOD and Air Force to provide such a plan (U.S. Air Force, 1999). The product was called the U.S. Air Force White Paper on Long-Range Bombers, released in March of 1999. It was very similar to the Air Force's 1992 effort, The Bomber Roadmap, but incorporated modernization and weaponization plans that had been defined in the interim. What the new white paper did not include was a plan to replace existing systems as they became obsolete, but instead the white paper asserted that the issue did not need to be addressed until the year 2019. The assumptions made within the study, such as a viable B-52 bomber force at even the end of a proposed 80-year service life, drew heavy criticism (Thompson & Davis, 2000). Congress then directed the Air Force to update the roadmap "to include a new long-range bomber development program" (ASC, 1999, p. 2). Several studies were undertaken, including the Future Strike Aircraft (FSA) study, and even today aerospace contractors are conducting follow-on studies to the FSA effort (DOD, 2000).

In 1999, the Air Force began what appeared to be another round of studies to determine the future of long-range strike programs. The Air Force's Aeronautical Systems Center gave limited release to its in-house study, System And Operational Implications For Choosing Best Speed For Global Missions. It was designed for use by the Air Force in preparing their own personnel to "understand and evaluate the results of the contracted studies" (ASC, 1999, p. 2). The 1999 ASC study was an important first step towards ultimately establishing realistic requirements for future systems. The 1999 ASC study possessed serious deficiencies in its assumptions, internal constructs and scope, such as modeling a clearly sub-optimal subsonic planform in its analyses, but it was an important common starting point for interested parties to conduct further analyses and develop a better understanding of Long-Range Strike needs.

A lack of clear direction for fielding the next-generation LRS capability is not caused by a lack of effort. It was estimated that by 2006 that more than 20 studies had been “conducted in recent years” (Hebert, 2006, p. 26) in search of finding the best way forward for acquiring a future Long-Range Strike capability. Hebert also noted that in 2004, the Air Force Air Staff Requirements Director had stated that there had been so many Long-Range Strike studies, that “enough studying had probably been done” (p. 26) and it was time to proceed with fielding a solution. By February 2008, it was estimated that on average, one study of long-range strike requirements had been conducted every “fiscal quarter since the Cold War ended over 20 years ago” (Murch, 2008, p. 7).

While there is a dearth of publicly available and official information giving insight into the inner workings of all the later studies, there have been some official indications as to what directions these studies point towards, such as that found in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (DOD, 2006):

The Air Force has set a goal of increasing its long-range strike capabilities by 50% and the penetrating component of long-range strike by a factor of five by 2025. Approximately 45% of the future long-range strike force will be unmanned. The capacity for joint air forces to conduct global conventional strikes against time-sensitive targets will also be increased. (p. 56)

This 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) planning extract indicates that the LRS capability being sought at that time represented the force projection capability equivalent to 80 combat-coded B-2A bombers. The extract further indicates the capability sought was to be split nearly equal between manned and unmanned systems. The extract also indicates that time-critical targeting is a high priority mission for defense planners. The 2006 QDR provided additional information as to future LRS capability goals including developing “a new land-based, penetrating long-range strike capability to be fielded by 2018 while modernizing the current bomber force” (DOD, 2006, p. 46).

Also in 2006, the National Research Council Committee on Future Air Force Needs for Survivability examined the full spectrum of design and speed options. Their report acknowledged that for the near future, a subsonic strike platform is the most desirable, but also made the assertion that higher speeds should be pursued as a hedge against potential future threat environments. The 2006 Committee also recognized a need for a better basis for decision-making and thus strongly endorsed the pursuit of more capable modeling and analytical tools and techniques for future analyses. These tools and techniques were seen as needed to better understand the factors affecting survivability, and in particular the speed factor and its influences on survivability. The 2006 Committee made these recommendations based upon a consensus among panel members that determining an optimum design that adequately evaluates the speed factor and its contributions to survivability was too large and complex an issue to resolve without a significant effort beyond either the panel’s charter or ability.

Summary

Perceptions of Long-Range Strike mission requirements, including the nature of the mission itself, have evolved significantly in the last two decades: changing as the lessons learned from modern LRS implementation have taken root. The analyses used have also matured, reshaped by real-world experiences and the practical and recurring application of long-range airpower. No longer is the need for a modern LRS capability in doubt. Careful examination of the missions that LRS performs now and is expected to perform in the future has eliminated all but two concepts from consideration until well after the year 2035. Of the two remaining concepts, a subsonic platform of uncertain size is foreseen as the preferred concept for the next LRS platform to be fielded in the 2018 timeframe.

Emerging technology and its advantages are not yet well understood enough to determine if the 2035 follow-on LRS system should be a subsonic or supersonic system, with the survivability seen as the dominant unknown factor preventing a decision between the two. To close the open issues left by the previous studies and analyses surveyed in this review, a better analytical approach is needed to support decision-makers both in how well they understand LRS requirements and in how well competing LRS weapon system alternatives are able to fill those requirements.

REFERENCES

Aspin, L. (1993). Report on the bottom-up review. Retrieved January 15, 2001, from http://www.fas.org/man/docs/bur

B-2 bomber acquisition: Hearings before the Military Procurement Subcommittee of the House Committee on National Security, 104th Cong., 1 (1996) (testimony of Glenn Buchan)

Barefield, J.L. (1997). The heavy bomber industrial base: A study of present and future capabilities. Retrieved January 23, 2001, from http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/97-0070.htm

Builder, C.H. (1993). Military planning today: Calculus or charade. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Builder, C.H. (1994). The Icarus syndrome: The role of air power theory in the evolution and fate of the U.S. Air Force. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. (1993). Strategy and policy. Retrieved January 16, 2001, from http://www.csbaonline.org/2Strategic_Studies/6DoD_Strategy_and_Policy/Strategy_and_Policy.htm

Commission on Roles and Missions Staff. (1995). Future bomber force draft issue paper. Arlington, VA: Aerospace Education Foundation.

Correll, J.T. (1992). The base force meets option c. Retrieved January 23, 2001, from http://www.afa.org/magazine/0692watch.html

Courter, J.A., & Thompson, L.B. (1996). Deep attack weapons mix study: Bias may produce flawed B-2 analysis. Arlington, VA: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

Department of Defense. (2000). RDT&E budget item justification sheet (R-2 Exhibit): B-2 advanced technology bomber (Program Element No. 0604240).

Department of Defense. (2006). Quadrennial defense review. Arlington, VA: Author

Final report of the Independent Bomber Force Review Commission: Hearings before the Military Procurement Subcommittee of the House Committee on National Security, 105th Cong., 1 (1997) (testimony of Brent Scowcroft)

GAO (1996, October 22). B-2 bomber: Status of efforts to acquire 21 operational aircraft. (Report No. GAO/NSIAD-97-11).

Guthe, K. (1996). A precisely guided analytical bomb: The Defense Department's heavy bomber force. Fairfax, VA: National Institute for Public Policy.

Haffa, R.P., & Patton, J.A. (1998). Gaming the "system of systems". Parameters: Quarterly Journal of the Army War College, Spring 1998, 110-121.

Hebert, A.J. (2006, October). The 2018 bomber and its friends. Air Force, 89, 24-29.

Jaffe, L.S. (1993). The base force. Retrieved January 23, 2001, from http://www.afa.org/magazine/Dec2000/1200base.html

Kowalski, J.M. (1993). Theater applications of the future bomber force. Unpublished master’s thesis, Naval War College, Newport, RI.

Murch, A. (2008). The next generation bomber: Background, oversight issues, and options for Congress. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.

National Defense Panel. (1997). Transforming defense: National defense in the 21st century. Arlington, VA: Author

Committee on Future Air Force Needs for Survivability, National Research Council. (2006). Future Air Force needs for survivability. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Ochmanek, D.A., Harshberger, E.R., Thaler, D.E., & Kent, G.A. (1998). To find, and not to yield. Santa Monica, CA: RAND

Report of the Panel to Review Long-Range Airpower: Hearings before the Military Procurement Subcommittee of the House Committee on National Security, 105th Cong., 1 (1998) (testimony of Larry D. Welch).

Thompson, L.B., & Davis, C. (2000). Flying blind: the Air Force's unbelievable bomber roadmap. Retrieved January 30, 2001 from http://www.defensedailynetwork.com/reports/flying_blind.htm

Tirpak, J.A. (1995). The Pentagon declines more B-2s. Retrieved February 19, 2002, from http://www.afa.org/magazine/watch/0795watch.html

U.S. Air Force. (1991). Biography on Jasper A. Welch. Retrieved Feb 16, 2001, from http://www.af.mil/news/biographies/welch_ja.html

U.S. Air Force. (1992). The bomber roadmap. Department of the Air Force. Washington, DC: Author.

U.S. Air Force. (1999). U.S. Air Force white paper on long range bombers. Retrieved January 13, 2002, from http://www.af.mil/lib/bmap99.pdf

U.S. Air Force (2001). U.S. Air Force Long-Range Strike Aircraft White Paper. Retrieved November 28, 2008, http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-060726-020.pdf

U.S. Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center. (1999). System and operational implications for choosing best speed for global missions (ASC Publication ASC-TR-2000-5006). Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Author.

Welch, J.A. (1994). Bomber forces for "cold start" conflict. Retrieved January 15, 2001, from http://www.afa.org/magazine/perspectives/b2/1294bomb.html

FURTHER READING

Arena, M.V., Younossi, O., Brancato, K., Blickstein, I., & Grammich, C.A. (2008). Why has the cost of fixed-wing aircraft risen? : A macroscopic examination of the trends in U.S. military aircraft costs over the past several decades. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Ball, R.E. (2003). The fundamentals of aircraft combat survivability analysis and design (2nd ed.). Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Boren, H.E. (1976). A computer model for estimating development and procurement costs of aircraft (DAPCA-III). Santa Monica, CA: RAND.\

Bowie, C.J. (1998). Untying the bloody scarf: Casualties, stealth, and the revolution in aerial combat. Arlington, VA: IRIS Independent Research Institute.

Boyne, W.J. (2003). The influence of air power upon history. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company Inc.

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Bombers over Baghdad

Hat Tip: IPBTHL (Instapundit, Praise Be To His Linkness)

Note: After proofing this, I decided it may come over as gloating. Be advised it is actually just glee!

 

Omar Fadhil (Iraq the Model) posted a photo and story at Pajamas Media of a B-1 orbiting the city of Baghdad [PJM link broken: original here]:

“Meanwhile a new bird appeared in the sky. Not exactly new but one that’s been absent since the end of major operations in 2003. In fact this is the first time I’ve ever seen the B-1 flying over Baghdad. Since Tuesday, the long-range huge bomber appeared several times over — the city spending as long as 75 minutes in some cases.”

While the article is probably not completely accurate, I can’t describe how gratifying this development is to me. It is now one of several (three I can think of off the top of my head anyway) instances where a major analysis I performed was vindicated after initially receiving resistance from decision makers in the AF and DoD.

Sometime around 2000 I was doing concept and employment analyses on one of the Air Force’s iterative ‘Next Generation Bomber Studies’ contracts. I developed scenarios whereby a high-subsonic aircraft would loiter in orbit near or over a battle area in order to service time-critical targets of various stripes, including Close Air Support. When this was briefed to the AF’s program office responsible as part of a package of different concepts, a senior AF representative was heard to say:

(Sniff)…we don’t loiter bombers.

A short while later in the same meeting, in a discussion on time-critical target model scenario assumptions, another senior representative was heard to say:

(Sniff)….we don’t use bombers for close air support.

When Operation Enduring Freedom hit, one of the big news items (in the trade anyway) was the use of Long-Range Strike assets as direct fire support of Special Forces operators working with Northern Alliance ‘warlords’. At the time, it was a single instance of modern bombers being used in this manner, and it could always be claimed to be an exception.
Until now.
So I guess (Sniff)….the AF DOES loiter bombers.