2 B-2 bombers kill 80 ISIS militants (talk about overkill)

[edpop]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/19/politics/ ... index.html

What is that................about 2 million dollars per militant? Reminds me of Vietnam when we would call in airstrikes for ground support. 4 Phantoms would show up with clusters and nape and that would take care of individuals who were harassing us.

[popcorn]

Aren't etended flights a part of the training curriculum to maintain proficiency? Might as well put them to actual use and drop ordnance for realism.

[wolfpak]

It was reported they used 50 GBU-38's. Never thought I'd see that capability used as I imaged the B-2 would be reserved for strategic targets that need serviced by 2000 lb. weapons. Good operational test none-the-less.

[popcorn]

How many SDBs can you dump out of a B-2? That would be impressive to see.

[delta9991]

How many SDBs can you dump out of a B-2? That would be impressive to see.

From what I've seen online, the B-2 has quite a few attachment points (something like 60+ from what I recall) for BRU-61 racks so the connection points aren't the issue. If you go by the typically cited payload capacity (40k lbs) then you come up 26 racks for 106 SDB or SDB II's. Impressive loadout, but thats obviously just speculation.

[smsgtmac]

How many SDBs can you dump out of a B-2? That would be impressive to see.

80.
see: http://news.northropgrumman.com/news/re ... rt-weapons.

It's a rather mature capability.

Ooops. Misread the question. The answer to the question you actually asked is more nebulous. They had many options for carrying SDBs (SDB Is, the SDB IIs weren't around) but they ended up putting them on four-pack racks on the RLAs instead of using the SBRAs, IIRC, the preferred approach was going to allow about ~200 (216?) SDBIs per plane, but theoretically they could pack them more densely to carry over 300. The low end number is more for practical considerations than constraint by capability.

[smsgtmac]

Thanks for posting this!
It's interesting that CNN focuses on the body count. How SEA circa 1965.
Why use B-2s? ....So ISIS never saw us coming.
Why 2 B-2s to drop 38 weapons when 1 can carry 80 500lb JDAMs?.... To bomb both locations at the same time, like probably down to the last second unless they wanted to cause a response in one first by bombing the other. And more than 38-40 would have probably been overkill.
Was this cost effective? Aside from killing the terrorists who would have carried out attacks in Europe and probably elswhere now and later (CNN and their 'militants'....F' both.) it probably flattened their training facilities, weapons building capability and stockpiles, & the trainers of future terrorists, it will also make the survivors look up in the sky at night and loose their beauty sleep. The immediate and later costs of letting any attacks happen probably far outweighed the cost of flying 2 B-2s.

Expect some slacker in the media to use the 'kitchen sink' definition of $/fh to rail against the strike as wasteful in 5...4...3...

I had a very small role in fielding the Smart Bomb Rack Assembly (Smart BRA ). I suppose since they dropped only 38 they could have used the Rotary Launchers (RLAs) but that's OK too, since I also played a small role developing and testing the smart weapons interface that allowed GATS/GAM then JDAMs etc to be dropped as well.

I feel pretty good about all that right now.

[popcorn]

You called it...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/colossal- ... 23999.html

The colossal price to fly a pair of B-2 bombers to hit two ISIS camps in Libya

...The price tag of Wednesday's mission was colossal.

The pair of B-2s flew for 34 hours at an operating cost of approximately $130,000 per flight hour. That comes out to roughly $4.4 million a piece or $8.8 million for the duo. Additionally, there were roughly 15 aerial refueling aircraft involved in the mission, not to mention the cost of 100 JDAMs.

[smsgtmac]

You called it...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/colossal- ... 23999.html

The colossal price to fly a pair of B-2 bombers to hit two ISIS camps in Libya

...The price tag of Wednesday's mission was colossal.

The pair of B-2s flew for 34 hours at an operating cost of approximately $130,000 per flight hour. That comes out to roughly $4.4 million a piece or $8.8 million for the duo. Additionally, there were roughly 15 aerial refueling aircraft involved in the mission, not to mention the cost of 100 JDAMs.

Thanks for this too! I decided to repackage my comment over at my place, so was able to use an excerpt there to highlight the accounting hijinks:

slacker-accounting-tweet.jpg (73.29 KiB) Viewed 20203 times

Now stop encouraging my bad behavior. I have to get some sleep.

[hornetfinn]

I wonder what the possible alternatives to achieve this would be:

A. Send in a battallion of marines from crapload of ships, helicopters and thousands of people (overall). Doesn't sound like very cheap or safe
B. Send in a CVN Strike Group with crapload of ships. Doesn't sound very cheap either and also less safe
C. Use F-15Es or similar small ground based fighters from Italy. Would need a lot of airfrarmes and a lot more aerial refueling. Doesn't sound that cheap or safe either, especially since the aircraft and personnel would first have to be sent there.
D. Use cruise missiles from ships or bombers. That doesn't sound exactly like cheap either.

[popcorn]

I think the question is why not use Lancers or BUFFs? That's where the "undetectable" advantage factors in I guess. There are countries who are less than friendly who have the ability to detect those old platforms who could spoil the surprise.

[popcorn]

Talk about overkill. The Reapers got into the action as well with Hellfires to finish off what the B-2s started. Now I really want to see the strike video.


http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017 ... tagon.html

The B-2s together dropped about a hundred 500-pound precision-guided bombs, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). The B-2 strikes were followed up by an MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle firing Hellfire missiles, said Col. Pat Ryder, an Air Force spokesman.

[popcorn]

And the hits just keep on coming. This time it's Al Quaeda on the receiving end from a B-52 with Reapers doing mop up.


http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017 ... syria.html

US Airstrike Said to Kill 100-Plus Al-Qaida in Syria

WASHINGTON — U.S. warplanes bombed an al-Qaida training camp in Syria, killing more than 100 militants, marking the second major U.S. counterterrorism strike in the final hours of Barack Obama's presidency, a defense official said Friday.

The Syria strike was carried out by one B-52 bomber and an undisclosed number of U.S. aerial drones, the official said. The official, who was not authorized to publicly announce the operation and so spoke on condition of anonymity, said it happened at about noon Washington time on Thursday, less than 24 hours after a combination of B-2 stealth bombers and drones struck two military camps in a remote part of Libya, killing 80 to 90 Islamic State militants.

[lamashtu]

I would also add that in order to carry out that operation with F-16s from, say, Aviano AB in Italy you would need at minimum ten Vipers (if we presumed that they carried external fuel tanks, and thus only four GBU-38s could be carried), so the cost disparity would not be so yawning as some would suggest. I also have no doubt there were other tactical considerations as well; some reports suggest this wasn't a straight bombing sortie and the B-2s had to loiter for some time before striking the targets, which an F-16 can't really do for a target as distant as that. Plus, if the operation was spread out over 10 different aircraft it is absolutely not guaranteed those JDAMs would be going off roughly simultaneously (within five minutes at most).

[hythelday]

A little bit of conspiracy spiced with some stronkism on my part...

Kuznetsov battle group would have been in the general area at the same time. Might have been a good opportunity to check out what would B-2 see from up high in operationally significant environment