during a Senate hearing last year, Sen. John McCain pushed back hard on Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James’s description of the B-1 as an effective airplane for “close air support,” or the delivery of precision-guided bombs in support of embattled ground troops. “That’s a remarkable statement,” McCain scoffed. “That doesn’t comport with any experience I’ve ever had, nor anyone I know has ever had.”
What McCain didn’t seem to be aware of, and what the Times report failed to note, is the long third act of the B-1’s life. Converted in the 1990s from a Soviet-airspace-penetrating nuclear strike plane to a conventional bomber meant to pound the infrastructure and massed formations of an enemy army, the “Bone” converted again in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, into exactly what the Arizona senator found so hard to believe: not just a close air support plane, but, by all accounts, a hugely successful one.
One need only watch this video below of a B-1 strike in Afghanistan’s ultra-violent Pech valley, and listen to the profanity-laden commentary of the ground troops doing the filming, to get a sense of the role the big bomber played supporting troops in contact in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the video, originally uploaded to YouTube by a military spokesperson, troops at a remote firebase watch as three satellite-guided bombs from a B-1 strike mountainside targets almost simultaneously, followed seconds later by a fourth. The soldiers express their elation in not-safe-for-civilian-work terms.
By the time of the airstrike depicted in the video, Bone-drivers had been flying their dark gray planes 20,000 feet over Afghanistan for years — since the opening night of the U.S.-led air war in October 2001, when five B-1s flying out of the Indian Ocean outpost of Diego Garcia joined ten B-52s and two B-2 stealth bombers in pummeling the Taliban regime’s few fixed-site targets.
In the years that followed, the B-1 became a mainstay of close air support and other strike missions over both Afghanistan and Iraq, where a B-1 kicked off the air war in 2003 with a string of bombs meant to kill Saddam Hussein in one of his Baghdad palaces (he wasn’t there). “We are using it in ways never conceived of previously,” secretary of the Air Force James Roche said of the B-1 later that year.
Capable of flying in rougher weather than the B-52, cheaper to operate, and capable of carrying more bombs, in 2006 the B-1 displaced the B-52 and became the standard bomber deployed to support ground troops in the two wars, while the older aircraft played the traditional nuclear deterrent role.
One unit whose veterans sing the B-1’s praises is the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, which, during 15 months in the Pech and adjoining Afghan valleys in 2007-8, became the most heavily decorated Army battalion of the post-September 11 wars. “Our favorite asset at the company level was the B-1,” said one of the unit’s company commanders, Lou Frketic. “They had more ordnance and longer loiter times, and they delivered ordnance to the desired location without trying to second-guess us with their own optics.”
“What I loved about the B-1 was that it had such incredible payload capacity and such incredible time on station,” the battalion’s fire support officer, Jeffrey Pickler, agreed. “We dropped over a million pounds of Air Force bombs, and a lot of that was B-1s.” When insurgents attacked from rock formations high in the mountains, artillery and mortars would respond first, trying to get the enemy to take cover; then bombs from a B-1 or another airplane would smash the militants’ natural bunkers before attack helicopters arrived to pick off survivors.
On one of the worst of many bad nights in the battalion’s deployment — Oct. 25, 2007, when a sharp firefight in the Korengal valley left two paratroopers dead and earned one wounded soldier the first Medal of Honor awarded to living recipient since Vietnam — it was a B-1 whose bombs shook the battle-scarred ridge, pounding the escaping insurgents.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/12/30/the-under-appreciated-workhorse-of-americas-air-wars-the-b-1-bomber/
Some other good links:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/us/politics/at-27000-feet-an-air-force-plea-to-preserve-its-bomber-fleet.html
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/05/sen-mccain-b-1s-really-do-cas/
http://defensetech.org/2014/02/21/air-force-begins-massive-b-1b-overhaul/
Close air support via precision munitions dropped from heavy bombers with long loiter time are the future and the Air Force has been investing in this for a long time.
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2012/April%202012/0412lancer.aspx
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