The issue is whether to purchase more than the 20 long-range stealth bombers already in service or being completed. The argument against steady low-level production to bring the B-2 force to 40 is that the B-2 is too expensive, particularly because the mission for which it was designed-penetrating Soviet air defenses to attack mobile or hardened targets–is no longer relevant.
The case for continuing the B-2 program is more complex, but more compelling. It rests on three facts. The B-2 is not as expensive as critics contend. The B-2 economizes other material assets, and economizes lives, too. And given the age of the B-52s (the youngest is 88 years old) and the time and cost required to design another bomber (at least 15 years and scores of billions from design to deployment), the B-2 force is going to be the only U.S. bomber force for many decades. Who wants to wager that in, say, the year 2080 the nation will not need a bomber better than a 70-year-old B-52?
Critics bandy the figure $1.3 billion for each B-2. Actually, given the research and development already paid for. the life cycle cost of additional B-2s, including 20 years of spare parts, is about 1.1 billion 1995 dollars. Buying 20 more B-2s would consume only i percent of the defense budget and 5 percent of the combat aircraft budget for a few years. And doing so would prevent the irreparable dispersal of the industrial base that has produced the most sophisticated weapon ever, a weapon suited to the changed world.
In 1960 there were 81 major U.S. air bases overseas, Today there are 15. The B-2’s long range responds to the dwindling of forward-based U.S. forces. Rs high payload and stealthiness (the difficulty of detecting its approach) enable it to do extraordinary damage to an adversary’s warmaking capacity, at minimum risk to just two crew members per aircraft. This gives a president a powerful instrument of credible deterrence for an era in which Americans are increasingly reluctant to risk casualties. The importance of a military technology tailored to this political fact is argued by Edward Luttwak in his essay “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare” in Foreign Affairs.
Luttwak, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the end of the Cold War has brought a “new season of war,” in which wars are “easily started and then fought without perceptible restraint.” A war such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait can menace the material interests of the United States. And a war such as that in the former Yugoslavia can, Luttwak argues, injure the nation’s “moral economy” if the nation “remains the attentive yet passive witness of aggressions replete with atrocities on the largest scale?'
Perhaps Americans find their “moral economy” too taxing to maintain in today’s turbulent word. The debacle of American policy regarding Bosnia strongly suggests that is so. If so, America faces a future in which only one thing is certain: it will never again be what it has been, the principal force for good in the world. But if America wants to be intolerant both of evil and of casualties, it needs to arm itself appropriately, as with the B-2.
It is the only aircraft that can on short notice go anywhere on the planet with a single refueling, penetrate the most sophisticated air defenses and deliver high payloads of conventional weapons with devastating precision. Five B-2s can deliver as many weapons as the entire force of F-117s (America’s only other stealth aircraft) deployed in Desert Storm. Four U.S.-based B-2s with eight crew members could have achieved the same results as were achieved by the more than 100 aircraft sent against Libya in 1986. Military personnel are not only precious as a matter of morality, they are expensive. True, many targets can be attacked with “stand-off weapons.” such as cruise missiles, but such weapons are 20 to 40 times more expensive than direct attack precision weapons. Calculating the real costs of weapons is more complicated than reading restaurant bills.
And as Luttwak argues, cost-effectiveness criteria for weapons often do not factor in the value of casualty avoidance, which is a function of casualty exposure and is often the decisive restraint on political leadership when it is considering whether to project U.S. power. “When judged very expensive, stealth planes are implicitly compared to non-stealth aircraft of equivalent range and payload, not always including the escorts that the latter also require, which increase greatly the number of fliers at risk. Missing from such calculations is any measure of the overall foreign policy value of acquiring a means of casualty-free warfare by unescorted bomber.”
Will the nation need a substantial B-2 force? That depends on developments in the world, and on what America wants to be in the world. On a wall at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena there reportedly used to be a sign: WE DO PRECISION GUESSWORK. So do the people who must anticipate crises relevant to America’s material interests and moral economy, and the means of meeting them. Twenty more B-2s would be a responsible guess.
