HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:
Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in the NY Times about B-52's and why the Air Force’s largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until 2040, are
not retiring anytime soon [nytimes.com]. “Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," said Ronald Reagan in 1980. Today, there is a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather flew the plane. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, the B.U.F.F. — a colorful acronym that
the Air Force euphemistically paraphrases as Big Ugly Fat Fellow [airspacemag.com] - continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement. And its replacement’s replacement’s replacement. The unexpectedly long career is due in part to a rugged design that has allowed the B-52 to go nearly anywhere and drop nearly anything the Pentagon desires, including both atomic bombs and leaflets. But it is also due to the decidedly underwhelming jets put forth to take its place. The
$283 million B-1B Lancer [wikipedia.org] first rolled off the assembly line in 1988 with a state-of-the-art radar-jamming system that jammed its own radar. The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later,
had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain [wikipedia.org]. “There have been a series of attempts to build a better intercontinental bomber, and they have consistently failed,” says Owen Coté. “Turns out whenever we try to improve on the B-52, we run into problems, so we still have the B-52.”
The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like “flee and live, or stay and die,” then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls “assurance and deterrence” missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers
recently flew defiantly near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea [theguardian.com] and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. “The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game,” says Maj. Mark Burleys. “Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary.”
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