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The mission is easy to describe, but hard to execute. Two B-2 Spirit bombers, each with two people in the cockpit, will take off, fly to the target, drop enough bombs to eradicate the ISIS camps, and immediately fly back home to Missouri. Things get more complex as planners weigh in on everything from the pilot's diets to the size of the bombs loaded in the airplane.

"It takes a symphony of people," says Major General Scott Vander Hamm, assistant deputy chief of staff of operations at the Air Force headquarters and a former B-2 pilot.

Two B-2 Spirit bombers await orders for takeoff.

U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Joel Pfiester

While working out the finer diplomatic details, the military continues planning. "There are times when the President says, 'This is what we want. This is the objective, tell us how you could do it,'" Vander Hamm says during an interview with PM days after the strike. "That was the case for last week's flights."

Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, AFRICOM commander, chooses the B-2an odd choice. The stealth bombers are built for a Cold War mission: to evade radar and drop bombs (even atomic) and get out undetected. No one in Libya has sophisticated anti-aircraft to threaten U.S. aircraft, so the stealth is not necessary.

But a bomber is an absolutely essential part of the equation. Nothing else can drop thousands of pounds of explosives on targets at the same time quite like a bomber. The U.S. bomber fleet includes non-stealth B-1s and B-52s, but it's the B-2s that can loiter for long stretches. Just because the B-2 can stay over a target doesn't mean the pilots want to. "We are versatile," Scorch says. "But it's always in the back of all of our minds to get in and get out."

The targets define what aircraft flies the mission, and 500-pound bombs are all that is needed to take out a collection of mud-walled buildings and unarmored vehicles.

80 GBU-38 guided ammunitions inside one bay door of a B-2 before Libya mission.

U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Joel Pfiester

The weapon loaders can mix and match smaller and heavier bombs, but Vander Hamm says the Libya mission B-2s carry a "homogenous loadout" of 500-pound bombs. The B-2 can carry 80 of these 500-pound bombs, each guided to detonation with GPS coordinates. Each of the bombs can be programmed to hit a specific target, at a specific altitude, from a specific angle, at a specific time. "These were pretty tight shot groups, and the B-2s could attack them on a single pass," Vander Hamm says.

Although the targets are pre-programmed, B-2 pilots also program coordinates from the cockpit. Nearly every training sortie includes some on-the-fly retasking of weapons. Vander Hamm, who served as a B-2 pilot, says he once received a last-second orders to spare a target in Iraq that was providing the coalition with signals intelligence.

Each of the bombs can be programmed to hit a specific target, at a specific altitude, from a specific angle, at a specific time

Originally posted here:
To Libya and Back: Inside a Stealth Bomber Strike Against ISIS - Popular Mechanics