Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^TEN THE BIG GLIDER AND THE JAGGED BOOMERANG ^{WITH AIR FORCE PREDATOR AND B-2 PILOTS} Las Vegas and Guam, Spring 2006

To embed on some of the most critical air missions over Iraq and Afghanistan, I had to fly to Las Vegas. I drove out of town past Caesars Palace, the Bellagio, and the MGM Grand, and checked into a low-end hotel-casino complex in North Las Vegas for $59 per night. It was crowded with obese people in sweat suits and seniors driving motorized wheelchairs, desperately yanking one-arm bandits, and smelling of whiskey, cigarettes, and popcorn. Ten minutes away, within Nellis Air Force Base, I found a cluster of camouflaged trailers. “Inside that trailer is Iraq; inside the other, Afghanistan,” explained Air Force Lt. Col. Christopher Plamp of Louisville, Kentucky. “Either way, you go in there and you enter the CENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility].”

That is, inside those trailers you left North America, which fell under Northern Command, and entered the Middle East, the domain of Central Command. So much for the tyranny of geography.

The MQ-1B Predator drone, or the “Pred” as its pilots called it, was flown from here. Underground and underwater fiber optic cables linked these trailers (ground control stations really) to Europe, where a satellite dish made the connection directly to every Predator in the air over Baghdad, the Afghan-Pakistan border, and wherever else they were needed. Local airfields in places like Iraq and Afghanistan handled only the ascents and descents, otherwise the controls were handled from Las Vegas.

The Predator was the most famous of several dozen unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that the military operated. It first saw action in the 1990s in the Balkans, but made its bones in November 2002 in Yemen, when a Predator fired an AGM-114P armor-piercing Hellfire missile that incinerated a car in which an al-Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was traveling along with five others through the desert. The Predator also helped track the terrorist supremo of Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in the final days of his life in early June 2006.

When people hear of an unmanned drone, a model airplane comes to mind. Actually, the Predator looked like a big glider. At twenty-seven feet in length and with an almost fifty-foot wingspan, it was comparable in size to a Cessna Skyhawk. Because the Predator’s outer skin was made of composites that contained almost no metal, it weighed only 1,130 pounds without fuel or bombs, and could stay aloft for twenty-four hours on a four-cylinder engine. It was so light that I lifted the end of a training model off the ground with one arm. With no life support for a pilot required, and without redundant safety systems, it cost only $4.2 million: for the price of one F-22 you could build over forty Predators. A third of that $4.2 million was spent on “the ball,” a rotating sphere on the bottom of the plane where the optics, lasers, and video cameras were located.

But the most impressive thing about the Predator was that it flew slowly. That’s right, in a world of counterinsurgency, where you hunt and kill individuals or small groups of fighters rather than attack mass infantry formations, the slower a plane flew the better. Also, the slower it flew, the less wear and tear on it, which is why the Predator required almost no maintenance. Making them was quick and easy; it was the trained pilots who were in short supply.

Slow-flying planes like the A-10 and the AC-130 were particularly useful in the crowded cities of Iraq. Able to hover over complex urban battlespaces, their pilots had situational awareness, and were therefore trusted by Marine platoon commanders and Special Forces team sergeants on the ground. But while those planes still had to fly at 180 knots, a Predator could travel at only 75 knots and remain airborne. Though other UAVs had to fly low, making their trademark lawn mower or snowmobile sound, a Predator flew at 15,000 feet, so no one from the ground could hear, see, or hit it. Think of a satellite that did not need to remain in a fixed orbit, armed with Hellfire missiles.

I had been traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan for a quarter century, yet some of my most revealing moments in those countries were in Las Vegas. Each day began with a pilots’ brief, no different from those I experienced with the A-10 pilots in Thailand, with a similar nervous edge to it. To wit, the brief began with “Motherhood”—that is, the idiot-proof basics. Then came an intelligence backgrounder, followed by a detailed weather report (for Iraq and Afghanistan, not Nevada), and concluded with the “brevity” (code words) for the day. The wall clocks focused on three time zones: Iraq, Afghanistan, and ZULU. ZULU was Greenwich mean time not adjusted to daylight savings, the time the U.S. Air Force used worldwide for deconfliction purposes.

Those who flew Predators were pilots, not operators. They wore flight suits. Each was a veteran of an A-10, F-15, B-1 bomber, B-52, or a host of other aerial platforms. Thus, they came from different tribes within the Air Force that were suspicious of one another. They were still in the process of forming their own bureaucratic—that is, Predator—culture. Lt. Col. Plamp was a former Hog pilot. Indeed, the scrappy, lumbering, low-tech A-10 Warthog constituted a perfect preparation for the high-tech “Pred.” Both planes were about closing in on small targets and gunning down individuals in dirt alleys.

“If you want to pull the trigger and take out bad guys, you fly a Predator, not an F-15,” one pilot told me. Air Force pilots usually worked in twenty-month cycles, sixteen months of training followed by four months on deployment; here it was twenty months of combat. The savings on training were enormous to the taxpayer, but it made for a grueling, truly expeditionary cycle that built up high levels of visual area expertise. Predator pilots knew the telltale signs of an improvised explosive device, the wadis and other egresses, the entrances to the mud-walled compounds, the look of an Afghan “jingle” truck, and so on. Throughout the day they could offer advice to troops on the ground who were deployed for only four to twelve months overseas.

Yet, these pilots faced absolutely no danger. Inside the trailers, there was not even the sensation of flying that one experienced in flight simulators. As one pilot told me, the Predator raised the moral issue of being able to kill someone without you yourself being at risk. True, bombing from 10,000 feet in Kosovo was similar. But as the military saying goes, attrition of the same adds up to big change.

The real tension for these pilots came from the clash with everything outside the trailers. Nellis Air Force Base was full of the same stuffy regulations on driving, dress codes, inspections, saluting, etc., that were common to other bases far removed from war zones. In war zones, informality reigned because the mission was everything. Moreover, beyond Nellis was the world of wives, kids, homework, soccer games, not to mention the absurd banality of a city where even the gas stations had slot machines. To say that entering or leaving one of these trailers was disorienting was an understatement.

The pilots did not identify the trailers by “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” so much as by “OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom]” or “OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom].” The words indicated more than just an instinctual use of acronyms by the military. They carried meaning—the belief in the original mission of making these countries free and stable. These pilots were warriors, like the best Marine and Army infantry commanders I had met. They were not jaded, not discouraged.

To embed with Predator pilots I had obtained “secret” clearance, but not “top secret” clearance. Thus, I was barred from the best (“high-side”) missions, and had to settle for the “low-side” ones. The first trailer I went into was OEF. I felt as if I was back in a submarine: grim, mealy-colored computer bays in freezing, pulsing darkness; a three-dimensional math world of flashing, LED digits. Like sub drivers, Pred pilots flew blind—by math only. The camera in the rotating ball focused on the object under surveillance. Thus, the crew’s situational awareness was restricted to the enemy on the ground, though much of the time the Pred flew a pre-programmed hexagon, racetrack, bow-tie, or other circular-type holding pattern.

It was a two-man crew inside the trailer: a pilot (an officer) and a sensor (usually a noncom). The sensor operated the ball. There were half a dozen computer screens, including map displays and close-up shots of the object under observation. As in any plane, there was a flight stick with various buttons that the pilot kept using. It was nighttime in Afghanistan, and two small mud-walled compounds near Kandahar were under observation thanks to infrared rays, which appeared like the darker and lighter tones of a photo negative.

Still, the screens swept me back into a familiar world: of knife-carved hillsides terraced with fields of rice, alfalfa, and cannabis, and sectioned by poplar trees on raised banks; and of compounds with inner courtyards where, in the intense heat and dust of late spring in southern Afghanistan, people slept on roofs under magnificent starscapes. The alley between the two compounds, as I knew from experience, was just wide enough for a pickup truck.

The pilot and sensor were waiting for a vehicle to emerge, which they would follow. At least, that’s what the “customer” had told them. The customer in this case was a Canadian ground unit. Because the Predator was in such demand, it was taken for granted that every mission tasked was important. Often the more high value the target, the duller the aerial stake-out, since the top echelons of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Iraqi insurgents were the most likely to practice good operations security (OPSEC), and thus go to extreme lengths not to be observed. Predators could go days in shifts observing one compound where nothing seemed to be happening. It was like going on a reconnaissance mission with a sniper unit, except that the boredom was not made worse by heat or cold, or by the need to hide behind a rock.

Whereas a satellite was a disembodied object in space that could take only a snapshot, a Predator was part of the tactical battle element. If a vehicle had appeared, it would have been followed by the UAV, which might then establish who and what the vehicle was linking up with, and consequently follow it, leading perhaps to another stakeout and an eventual raid that the pilot and sensor in Las Vegas could arrange. The Predator dramatically increased the military’s ability to “pattern.”

Of the two keyboards in front of the pilot, the one he used most was the chat keyboard. He was writing messages to others involved in the mission, while talking into his mouthpiece to the joint terminal attack controller (JTAC), usually a Marine or Army staff sergeant on the ground, who was with the infantry unit near the site under surveillance.

The Pred that was now watching the two compounds had, in fact, only one of its two Hellfire missiles left. The other had been fired some hours earlier, taking out a vehicle in the vicinity that, it turned out, was filled with explosives, causing an immense blast that filled the screen.

The pilot beside me remarked, “Sometimes you get spun up, you fly to a site, you wait for the A-10s to arrive on scene, ready for a kill. Then the whole thing gets called off, and you wind up watching a house for hours and all you see is a guy walk into the courtyard at night to take a crap, registered by the heat signature picked up on the ground after he gets up from his squat.”

The pilots and sensors included nineteen Britons attached to the Predator squadron for three years, as well as reservists and national guardsmen along with the active-duty airmen. In the next trailer I entered Iraq (OIF), where an African-American woman, an Army brat from Texas, was operating the ball over a big oil complex west of Kirkuk. Insurgents were thought to be laying IEDs or larger bombs inside it during the night. She saw three suspicious trucks and zoomed in. But there was no heat signature, indicating that the vehicles had been there for many hours without using their engines, so she rotated the ball elsewhere. As she explained, the heat signature allowed you a view back in time several hours, which a good sensor could use to establish a narrative.

It wasn’t only what the Predator could do on its own that was significant, but how it could be integrated with existing technologies to magnify their role. For instance, the Predator’s camera couldn’t quite see the face of an individual. But merged with satellite communications it could listen to him speak, and then by watching him walk, establish an identity for him that could then be tracked.

Yet the real value of UAVs was something that was still developing, and which few outside the military noticed: how these new assets would merge with (and thus expand) the tactics of bread-and-butter elements like Marine infantry platoons and A-10 attack planes. With more and smaller UAVs, platoons would be able to see behind enemy lines and, consequently, find safer ways to defeat an ambush rather than charge directly into it. Because the Predator could “sparkle” a target at night—mark it in infrared so that A-10 pilots and grunts on the ground could see it with their night-vision goggles—it opened up a range of options that fixed-wing and helicopter pilots, as well as infantry, had never had before.

A video of a Hellfire attack that had occurred several days before I arrived demonstrated this. Some Army helicopters had been brought in to attack a building in eastern Afghanistan—nothing fancy. About a dozen Taliban escaped into a field, but that was the intention. The helicopter attack was a feint: to flush them out into the open where the missile from the Predator killed them without the civilian casualties that would have ensued had the building been fired upon.

Future Predators would be able to deliver bigger and heavier ordnance than the Hellfire, as well as fly at 50,000 feet, above the weather. But because it could provide more and more “stuff,” as another pilot told me, the Predator carried the danger of being able to immobilize decision-making. “No general will want to attack something without visual confirmation from a Predator. It’s the old story: by the time you have all the evidence it’s too late to affect the outcome.” Rather than expand the opportunities for operations, ironically the Predator could restrict them, even as we fought enemies who had no compulsion about waging total war.

In fact, the more I sat in on missions, the more I realized what the Predator could not do. The Pred’s ability to track individuals could fill only a small part of the gap resulting from our abysmal shortage of human intelligence. One nighttime mission (it was morning in Las Vegas) said it all.

We were flying (virtually, that is) over Sangin, northwest of Kandahar. The pilot was given the grids for the town hall, supposedly besieged by 450 Taliban. A B-1B Lancer, the heaviest and most high-tech bomber in the Air Force arsenal save for the B-2 Spirit, was about to do a flyover as a show of force. But the Pred pilot saw nothing “except a few guys on the roof chilling out” in what we knew from the instruments was almost 100-degree heat, though it was near midnight there. “We’re seeing life, just not seeing anything unusual,” the sensor reported. “You sure you got the right grids?” He then moved the camera over to observe the police station nearby: still nothing.

The pilot spoke through his headphone: “This is crazy—450 Taliban! Are you high or something? And they’re sending in a B-1. To impress whom? These dudes chilling on the roof?”

Watching the three moving figures in robes on the roof, I could imagine the scene: the heat, the tea they were likely brewing. Including the JTAC, the pilot and sensor in the trailer, the image specialists in Qatar and at Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia, there were about half a dozen people talking to one another using the latest and greatest technology, yet no one seemed to know what was going on. It was likely that the very number of people with electronic access to the mission further confused things. Circles were being run around them by men in turbans and AK-47s who could melt into the landscape.

Scanning the area, the Pred still found nothing. Then we were ordered to another detail: provide force protection for a convoy of trucks delivering food and supplies. We did that for a bit, inspecting the wadi egresses where an ambush might be laid, and ruts in the road ahead that might be IEDs. Finally we were told to search for a specific “g-truck.” That led the Predator to a line of trees where it seemed a number of trucks were being concealed. This was just to the west of Kandahar. But it was impossible to know what or who was inside them, or what their intentions were.

I had had days like this, embedded with Green Berets in the same area near Kandahar. Such days always ended with sergeants barking that “nobody knows the fuck about what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” said Lt. Col. Plamp. “We’re in the thick of these ground missions, and as a result we’re just as confused as anyone sometimes. It’s the typical fog of war.”

The Predator and the A-10 represented the two extremities of the Air Force’s tactical arsenal: the super-high-tech, anti-heroic remote-controlled UAV and the romantic, lumbering attack plane. I next went to Guam to experience the top of the line of the Air Force’s strategic arsenal: the flying-wing-designed B-2 Spirit, which looked like a jagged boomerang and, at a price tag of $1.157 billion per plane, made the F-22 look cheap.

It would be my third visit to Guam in two years. Given the island’s growing significance in deployment scenarios, this was not coincidental. The occasion was Valiant Shield, in which the B-2s would be participating. An annual exercise, this year it had grown to immense proportions, providing the largest array of U.S. military power in the Pacific since the Vietnam War. Valiant Shield 2006 featured nothing less than three aircraft carrier strike groups: those of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS Ronald Reagan, and the USS Kitty Hawk, with all of their attendant destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and submarines; plus 295 aircraft including B-2s, Marine F-18Cs, Navy F-18Es, and Air Force F-15Es. Never mind the official rhetoric, the point of such a show of force was to impress such adversaries as North Korea and competitors like China. At the same time, PACOM was going out of its way to engage China diplomatically. On a recent visit to Beijing, the PACOM combatant commander, Adm. William Fallon, had invited the Chinese to send a military delegation to Guam for Valiant Shield. The day before I embedded with the B-2 squadron, Chinese officials themselves had been inspecting the bombers from the outside.

Andersen Air Force Base in Guam always had a squadron of heavy bombers on hand, forward-deployed close to Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula. When I had visited Andersen in the autumn of 2004, I had spent some time with B-52 pilots from Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana. They were young, happy-go-lucky, uncomplicated. But I was profoundly curious about the B-2 pilots. For a gamut of reasons, they had to be different.

At over a billion dollars per plane, the B-2 Spirit cost as much as a nuclear submarine and a guided-missile destroyer. But whereas a Los Angeles–class submarine required a crew of 150 and an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer a crew of 330, the B-2 had a crew of just two: one pilot and one mission commander. And there were only twenty-one B-2s in the entire Air Force, flown by two squadrons both located at Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City, Missouri. Nobody in the U.S. military—in terms of sheer dollars—was entrusted with as much responsibility as these bomber pilots. If a single B-2 went down, even in training, it would be a banner headline story. So far, none had.

So who were these guys?

The pilots with whom I embedded were from the 393rd Bomb Squadron, out of Whiteman, currently on a four-month deployment rotation in Guam, less than four hours’ flying time to the Taiwan Strait. This was the same 393rd Bomb Squadron whose B-29 Superfortresses had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the current commander of the 393rd was the grandson of Army Air Forces Col. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the pilot who had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. His namesake was Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets IV of Montgomery, Alabama. Nearly forty years old and a graduate of the Air Force Academy, “Nuke” Tibbets was one of several B-2 pilots with whom I shared quarters on Guam. Another was also an Air Force Academy graduate, Capt. Jim “Genghis” Price of Mesquite, Nevada. Lt. Col. Tibbets got his call sign because of his grandfather; Capt. Price earned his after destroying a line of suspect buildings in Afghanistan with a “stick” of twenty-eight separate MK-82 500-pound gravity bombs, which he followed up by dropping cluster bombs on nearby cave entrances during Operation Anaconda in early 2002. This was when he was flying a B-52 Stratofortress, or BUFF (“Big Ugly Fat Fucker”), as pilots preferred to call that hall-of-fame bomber, which had gotten its debut in Vietnam.

Nuke Tibbets and Genghis Price were both inspired to join the Air Force because of their Army dads. That’s right, it was less Tibbets’s famous grandfather than his unfamous father who was the real influence on his life.

“My grandfather was the ultimate warrior,” Tibbets began in a mild southern accent that had been disappearing over the years away from Alabama. “He was a gruff man of few words, whose real historic accomplishment was the B-29 unit he had organized and trained, which ended World War II. The fact that he personally flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb reflected his belief that the ultimate warrior is always in the front line. But it was a detail compared to his organizational accomplishment. For my grandfather,” Nuke went on, “the mission was everything, which meant his family suffered. He divorced my grandmother and so wasn’t around a lot when my dad was growing up. My dad had terrible eyesight and so couldn’t be a pilot. He became a pharmacist in civilian life and rose to become a colonel in the Army Reserve, commanding a deployable MASH-like hospital unit. But my father gently encouraged me toward the Air Force. Good on him that he never forced it on me.

“Once I was in the Air Force, my grandfather rolled into my life and influenced me to be a bomber pilot. In his day, my grandfather wanted to fly bombers as they were taking the fight to the enemy, while pursuit aircraft were supporting that effort.”

For Capt. Genghis Price it was simpler. His dad was an Army sergeant at Fort Carson, Colorado, close to the Air Force Academy, and all Genghis ever wanted to do was fly jets in combat. “It’s a sappy story but it’s true,” he told me in a permanently eager voice.

Genghis was a practicing Mormon who had served on religious missions to Latin America and spoke fluent Spanish. “Macho” was never a word you would associate with either him or Nuke. Instead, what they exuded was a humble, introspective star quality. They had been handpicked to safeguard a plane so expensive that it qualified as a national asset, not to mention that they were also trained to drop nuclear weapons from the B-2’s launcher assembly. When I asked Nuke what attributes he and others looked for when selecting members of his squadron, he told me: “People who are team players to such an extent that they are self-starters, who never want to be noticed or recognized.”

Nuke and Genghis were of average size, with taut bodies and tensely ratcheted expressions. Genghis weighed only 126 pounds. In other words, their physiques matched the clarity of their quiet and technical personalities. They were different from both the A-10 and BUFF pilots whom I had befriended. The Warthog and B-52 guys were boisterous and hard-charging. Except for the squadron commander who was a lieutenant colonel, they tended to be captains, with the odd major or first lieutenant. But the B-2 pilots were older and calmer, with more majors than captains. Unlike attack and fighter jet pilots who specialized in very busy, short-duration flights, B-2 pilots had their patient personalities molded by fourteen-hour hauls from Whiteman direct to Kosovo, to use one example, with three aerial refuelings en route. This was before they could even enter the war zone. Nuke and Genghis did not have 9 gs available to them in order to avoid enemy fire like the pilots of fighter jets. They expected to get into a battlespace without being seen. Meticulous mission planning was what the B-2 was about.

I saw no nude pin-ups on their walls or on their computer screens; rather, what I saw were photos of wives and kids, even as I heard many references to community service and going to church. They rarely cursed, unlike almost everyone else I had met in frontline units throughout the military. And they were less transient: a B-2 pilot could spend five years deployed at Whiteman, whereas other combat Air Force pilots bounced around the country and the world every two years. It was a lifestyle that kept families together.

While the Air Force was run by aggressive, F-series fighter jocks (witness who the top generals were), B-2 guys were, in a deeper sense, the ultimate Air Force pilots. This Air Force mentality can be explained through a comparison with naval aviation. Whereas Marine pilots were primarily about CAS (close air support), and Navy aviators had the reputation of being screaming-off-the-carrier-deck daredevils, Air Force pilots had the reputation of being more operationally conservative. Navy aviators, alone in the ocean without having to bother about issues like noise restrictions, had fewer rules. Naval aviation was about what you could do with an airframe, the Air Force about what you couldn’t. Begotten by the Big Army in 1947, the Air Force had its character molded by the Cold War SAC (Strategic Air Command), the core of our nuclear delivery system in the event of Armageddon. Because of its awesome strategic responsibilities, Air Force pilots were simply more by the book than their Navy brethren.

In fact, B-2 pilots had deeply internalized the characteristics of the Cold War that carried over into the twenty-first century. Being with them provided a palpable sense of the more terrifying, frighteningly complex conventional struggles that might lie ahead—beyond the dirty, low-tech counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Col. Robert Wheeler of Chicago, the commander of the operations group overseeing the 393rd, I learned about consequences of execution (COE). As he explained: “How do you take out a chemical-biological site of a rogue nation with surety, without inadvertently killing thousands of innocent civilians downwind? Well, the only certain way of avoiding collateral damage might be to obliterate the site in place.”

If we had learned anything since the Berlin Wall fell, it was that nothing could be ruled out. The B-2 was developed in the 1980s “to combine the dime,” as Col. Wheeler, or “Wheels,” put it. It asymmetrically combined our technological and economic strengths to lure the Soviets into further wrecking their economy, by trying to counteract this stealthy nuclear bomber. But few back then thought that such an asset would be anything more than theoretical, especially after the Cold War ended. Then came three wars in which the B-2 was employed: Operation Allied Force (Kosovo), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In particular, Kosovo in 1999 was a breakthrough war for the Air Force. Rather than multi-plane carpet bombing, you also had a few heavy bombers hitting multiple targets with the super-accuracy of fighter jets. No longer was air war about how many planes you needed in order to hit a big target, but about how many targets you could hit with a single plane. Kosovo also demonstrated how technology could enable limited wars. An asset like the B-2 had helped allow a president, Bill Clinton, with little appetite for casualties in a humanitarian intervention, to launch aircraft carrying eighty bombs each, with minimal risk to the pilots and without having to forward-deploy them to the war zone.

As for the present, Col. Wheeler noted, “The B-2 makes a statement. And that statement is, ‘We Mean Business!’” he emphasized, banging on the table. Wheels was your classic, intense Air Force intellectual, with degrees in both engineering and strategic studies, experience in three wars, and a veteran of diplomatic postings in Europe. His insights came in hyperactive bursts while sipping from a quart-sized plastic coffee mug. “The deterrence piece of this airplane is bigger than the killing piece,” he went on. “Any adversary knows that the B-2 can enter relatively unseen and prevent a WMD from being launched. Merely by having it, we affect decision-making in regional states, and encourage peer competitors to perhaps go another route in their national defense. It is a diplomatic and military instrument.” For “regional states,” read Iran and North Korea. For “peer competitors,” read China and a resurgent, nationalistic Russia.

No plane was invisible to radar. Rather, it was a matter of reducing an airframe’s signature so that you could “get iron past” a screen of overlapping, Soviet-designed double-digit surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and single-digit legacy ones: the protective wall that, with variations, defined the aerial combat borders of Iran, North Korea, and the Chinese coast near Taiwan. A single B-2 had the ability to break down the doors of these countries through a severely reduced radar signature, and then drop the ordnance equivalent of an entire squadron of fighter jets. As the first plane to carry a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) into combat (in Kosovo), the B-2 could load up with several 5,000-pound-class bunker busters directed to targets by GPS tail kits.

Such a scenario was certainly within the realm of probability, as countries like Iran and North Korea put more and more of their critical facilities deep underground—in places that cruise missiles launched from offshore platforms like submarines lacked the kinetic energy to penetrate. If the United States ever had to attack Iran, you should expect to be reading a lot about the B-2. And if we never had to attack Iran, an asset like the B-2 would have been a hidden hand behind the muscular diplomacy that made it unnecessary.

North Korea hated the plane. The B-2, along with the F-22, was a large part of what would keep China from locking the U.S. out of the Taiwan Strait.

But the problem with such platforms, whose unit costs were staggering to contemplate, especially when measured against what $1.1 billion per plane—or $200 million per plane—could do if spent in other military spheres, was that if even one of these scenarios transpired, there might not be enough of them. As I’ve said, there were only twenty-one B-2s. And when you considered the odd malfunction, the scheduled maintenance checks (“phases”), and the planes needed regularly for training purposes, you really had about fifteen.

What had originally intrigued me about the B-2 was that, like the F-22, it was a fashionable plane to hate, because of the ugly fact of its price tag, combined with how unnecessary it seemed in current news cycles about Iraq and Afghanistan. One flaw of journalism is that because it is so consumed by the present, it cannot see the future, whose challenges may be entirely different. Spending time with B-2 pilots and their enlisted maintainers gave me an insight into what lay beyond such tasks as the need to secure Greater Baghdad.

Take Mike “Bo” Baumeister of Thousand Oaks, California, who retired as a chief master sergeant after twenty-six years in the Air Force and now worked as a civilian for “DOD [Department of Defense],” as he habitually called it. Bo was your typical good old boy, with a ball cap and generic country accent, who chewed Skoal and hunted deer and pigs beyond the base perimeter here at Andersen. “Why did you go to work for the government rather than for a private contractor and make real money?” I asked him. “I couldn’t see leaving her,” Bo replied, referring to the B-2. “And DOD offered me the chance to stay with the plane.”

He explained further: “It’s a pride thing. We’re the B-2. We not only kick down your door, but we go in and out of your country without you even knowing it. We take out your head of state, your nuke and chembio plants, your SAM sites…. Follow us. We clear the path, we say to the other aerial platforms…”

The trend in technology was inexorable: the growing ability over the decades to hit ever smaller, more specific targets with less and less collateral damage. One could make a comparison with the aircraft carrier, whose gradual emergence as a strategic instrument of war was helped by the increasing capacity of jets to fly greater distances and refuel in the air. So, too, with heavy bombers, whose usefulness was being amplified by the electronic revolution in munitions. Taking out a specific individual, such as the head of a rogue state, would become increasingly possible as the years and decades rolled on. Of course, future generations of the Predator might trump heavy bombers such as the B-2. And yet, another trend in warfare was the exponential increase in operational complexity: of using a greater variety of related assets in one symphonic offensive.

I understood Bo’s poignant infatuation with the plane. Indeed, it was endlessly fascinating merely to look at. Among soldiers and marines, there was a brotherhood of warriors. But with sailors and airmen, the relationship was triangulated by technology. An emotional bond existed with this class of ship or that type of airframe. The phenomenon was particularly noticeable with the B-2.

The B-2 was less a traditional aircraft than, as its official description declared, a flying wing: a jagged gray-black boomerang with a small bubble rising out of its center, where the pilot and mission commander sat. Seen head-on, the bubble with its dark windshields looked like nothing so much as the mask of Darth Vader, made more sinister by the ever-so-slightly turned down beak design of the B-2’s front tip. Then, as you walked around the nose, the swept-backward angle of the wings made them disappear on you, and the plane shrank in size so that it looked like a small bat. That was deliberate: the very design helped reduce its radar signature. But as you continued walking around the back of the plane, where the 172-foot wingspan became visually obvious, it looked massive. It was at this rear angle where you most accurately saw the plane, with its wingspan equal to that of a B-52, but with a fuselage only the length of an F-15. The B-2’s wings were longer than the distance covered by Orville Wright in his first flight at Kitty Hawk.

After another moment of observation, something else became obvious: the whole airframe had only two angles, one wing and the other. Every object that normally protruded vertically from an airplane’s wings—the fuselage, the jet engines, the tail, and the various small screws, rivets, tubes, and antennae—were embedded within the wings themselves. The four engines were snugly implanted over the wings, in a way that made the B-2 loud only when it was past you, but made it quiet when the plane approached you on attack. The doors for the undercarriage and the bomb bays had razor-sharp edges that were sucked shut by pressure, making the exterior of the B-2 a seamlessly smooth surface. The point was no bends, bumps, or ridges, however tiny; no angles from which radar could bounce off. The layers of composite were filled with wire mesh so there was an electric current running from one end of the plane to the other. Thus, when radar hit the airframe, it flew across the wingspan rather than bounced off to send a signal. A whole section of maintenance was dedicated to the plane’s “skin care.”

I was Spirit number 374, the 374th person to fly in the B-2 Spirit since Northrop Grumman had rolled the plane out of the hangar in 1989. More people had been in space.[111] The twenty-one B-2s were almost all named after states. The plane I flew in was the Spirit of Georgia. Inside the cockpit was the mean, definable, violent smell of metal. The pilot was Maj. Justin “Mulligan” Amann, a graduate of Purdue University’s Air Force ROTC program. The mission commander was not on board, in order to make room for me. When the door closed, there was just enough room for a fold-out army cot on which the crew could take turns resting while on long flights to places like Kosovo and Afghanistan.

I attached the five buckles of my life-support harness to the ejection seat, and then connected the oxygen and communications gear to my helmet and face mask. Maj. Amann was already busy with the two laptops he had brought on board to supplement the dozen other liquid crystal displays. The laptops represented updates to the plane’s computer system. As futuristic as the B-2 seemed, it really represented 1980s technology, just as most of the other planes and ships in the U.S. military arsenal represented technology from the 1960s and 1970s. This was a result of an acquisition and production process measured in years and decades. The upgrades were mainly in software and munitions, which had allowed for gee-whiz advances in targeting like GPS-and laser-guided “smart” bombs. Nevertheless, the two laptops, which brought a real-time battlespace and satellite e-mail to the cockpit, also meant an additional workload for the pilot.

The B-2, as I was to learn, was not about flying so much as about weapons programming, and coordination with other air and sea platforms. The rudders and elevons, as well as the “beaver” (the flap that functioned as a tail), all had their “trim” adjusted every second and minute by computers. The pilot no longer had this task. The B-2 truly did occupy the opposite end of the Air Force from the A-10.

As for coordination with other combat platforms, the naval ones were somewhat of a challenge. The more complex the communications and other technological protocols became, the more work was involved to achieve jointness, since the Navy and Air Force had different systems. It was like merging Apple and Microsoft, as one pilot told me.

The B-2 was an intellectual environment driven by multi-tasking. On each of Maj. Amann’s knees was a strap-on flight board to hold the heavy manuals with their checklists to which he had to refer constantly.

Our flight call sign was Death 62. The other B-2 that would be flying alongside us was Death 72. While our plane’s name was the Spirit of Georgia, the maintainers had nicknamed it “The Dark Angel.” Violence was something for which nobody in the combat Air Force apologized. Like the A-10 pilots, the crews of fast-attack subs, and top Army and Marine platoons—to say nothing of the Special Operations community—the elite units of the military were about going to war, or “being able to play,” as the troops put it. As obvious as this sounds, it needs to be emphasized, because it signifies an emotion that ran deep. One of the maintainers, Master Sgt. Kelly Costo of Fremont, California, told me that the most exhilarating moments of his professional life were helping to load bombs aboard B-2s at Whiteman before the “heavies” left for Kosovo and at Diego Garcia before they left for Afghanistan.

The flight itself, as I had expected, was not a thrill like a ride in a fighter jet. We rose and turned at degrees no more dramatic than a commercial airliner. There was no g-force to speak of. After we reached 10,000 feet, Maj. Amann put the plane on autopilot, at a point at which it rose to its cruising altitude of 32,000 feet with a ground speed of 450 miles per hour. We took our oxygen masks off, and he immediately got busy programming two missiles and sixty-four separate 500-pound JDAMs, which we later dropped over Saipan—virtually, of course. I saw exactly what I would have had those bombs actually been released: hexagons representing individual JDAMs disappearing in twos from the computer screen. The more widespread and devastating the carnage, the more bloodless the operation. Had any of them been nuclear warheads, the screen display would have been the same.

It was a near perfect sky. Looking down on isolated bands of cumulous clouds from 32,000 feet, I saw them as odd imperfections in the stretched, glazed surface of the Philippine Sea. Sunlight so penetrated the water that Saipan and Tinian looked backlit by the ocean. These islands were beautiful even as their historical resonances were ugly. Several times we flew over the old B-29 runways on Tinian, from where Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr., in 1945 had flown the Enola Gay to bomb Hiroshima. At one point we unlocked the autopilot and I flew the plane for ten minutes. It was similar to sailing on instruments, making constant adjustments so that a vertical line stayed on, or close to, a dot on the screen. Truly, the art of flying was being lost.

What made this so easy was the world behind the plane: the maintainers. Deploying just four B-2s from Whiteman to Andersen required a maintenance crew of 155, in addition to 130 pieces of rolling stock—jammers, light carts, generators—anything on wheels and large enough so it had to be towed by a Ford truck. Then there were the massive pallets of equipment, including the 170 different chemicals used by the B-2, each of which required customized climate-controlled conditions and certified waste removal. The maintainers worked twelve-hour shifts, and filled up several buildings and hangars. To get the crew and equipment for the four B-2s to Guam had taken one C-17 Globemaster and four C-5 Galaxies, transport planes so monstrous in size that the C-130 Hercules seemed to disappear beside them.

The maintenance element for the B-2 dwarfed that of the A-10 by leaps and bounds. And that led me to a realization: forward-deploying such national assets was counterproductive. The only reason Guam made sense was that it was a U.S. territory, courtesy of the Spanish-American War and the blood of World War II marines. But in other cases, there was no point basing B-2s abroad if in the midst of a crisis we were denied permission by a host country to use them. Indeed, the continental United States was the place for the B-2, as well as for other top-of-the-line aircraft, in a future that would put a premium on airpower as a way to reduce our footprints on the ground—with all the unattractive political and cultural tensions they caused. And that meant the key task for the Air Force was to increase its capacity for air-to-air refueling.

Col. Wheeler made the point that conventional assets like the B-2 and fast-attack submarines were of a piece with the Predator, Special Forces A-teams, and Marine platoons. Forget the debate about having needed a larger footprint in Iraq after the initial invasion. As true as that might be, it was not what the next few decades would primarily be about; they would be about hitting specific targets with commando-style ground units that could, in turn, call in air and sea strikes from platforms that were either untouchable or unseen. For example, a war with a powerful rogue Middle Eastern state might see less of an emphasis on close air support with down-and-dirty platforms like the A-10 and the AC-130, and more emphasis on high-altitude “heavies” such as the B-2, as Special Operations teams were inserted for limited periods on the ground to identify targets for bunker buster and other high-impact bombs.

“We won’t be able to mass troops like we used to,” Col. Wheeler observed. “It’s not just a matter of negative publicity from a global media, but of a profusion of competitors that will increasingly have the ability to hit such large formations with weapons of mass destruction. And that will be a chance we won’t want to take. Think of bees,” he continued. “Think of bees swarming together in a hive and then flying off again. That’s the military formation of the twenty-first century. Lots of small, joint air-land-sea configurations that combine instantaneously for a big attack and then separate out just as fast.”

Thus, many of the debates we were having were false—over conventional versus unconventional, and over money for Special Forces versus money for F-22s. The real issue was about mastering complexity: how to combine all or many of these assets in a single operation. It was not about what an A-team, or a submarine, or a Predator, or a B-2 bomber could do for you, but about how any one of these assets could leverage others.

But that raises another nagging issue. If the B-2 is necessary for both our force structure and our negotiating credibility, as Col. Wheeler believed, even though it cost over a billion dollars per plane, what a truly depressing fact that was about the price of empire!

As one former civilian defense official put it to me: “Look at the rate of return al-Qaeda got on 9/11. For an investment of just a few hundred thousand dollars, they forced us to spend billions. As necessary as the B-2 or F-22 might be, what’s their rate of return? Twenty percent, perhaps? I’m not saying that we require a rate of return like al-Qaeda gets, but we’ll need to narrow the difference if we’re going to remain a great power.”