Bombing mission to Libya flew from western Missouri

In a dramatic use of U.S. air power, a pair of B-2 stealth bombers flew from Whiteman Air Force Base on Wednesday and dropped dozens of bombs on two camps in the Libyan desert, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The overnight bombing killed more than 80 suspected Islamic State militants in an unusual mission that may have marked the final demonstration of military force of President Barack Obama’s global counterterrorism campaign.

The Air Force said it used 15 aerial refueling tankers to enable the B-2s to make the 10,000-mile, 34-hour nonstop trip from Whiteman, about 60 miles east of Kansas City, to Libya and back.

The radar-avoiding stealth bombers dropped about 100 munitions of a type known as a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, which is equipped with GPS guidance control to help it find its target with precision. Each B-2 is capable of carrying up to 80 JDAMs.

Armed drones also participated in the strikes, using Hellfire missiles to hit targets that remained after the initial bombardment, Col. Patrick Ryder, an Air Force spokesman, told reporters.

It is unusual for the U.S. to send the high-tech bomber on a counterterrorism mission, particularly against such a modest number of targets such as the camps in Libya. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said it was the first time the B-2s were used in combat since the 2011 air campaign that forced Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from power and led to his killing.

Analysts said the B-2, the most expensive plane ever built, may have been used as a way to flex American military muscle — demonstrating once again that a plane leaving a Midwestern runway can strike anywhere in the world.

The choice of the B-2s also might have come because the planes carry radar designed to track mobile ground targets. That capability was built into the aircraft decades ago to find mobile ground-based Soviet nuclear missiles.

“You know generally where they are when you take off, but you still need to find particularly where they are when you get over your target,” said John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org.

The Islamic State militants targeted in Libya move in small vehicles and dispersed groups. So, Pike said, the B-2’s radar might have been best suited to spot them.

“If you want to blow people up,” he said, “it’s a good plane to blow people up with.”

Cook said the attacks were made in conjunction with the Libyan government of national accord.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter told reporters Thursday that the camps contained militants “actively plotting” attacks in Europe and that the strikes were “critically important.”

The Pentagon believes no civilians were killed in the strikes, a defense official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the attacks and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Libya fell into chaos following Gadhafi’s ouster and killing. The country remains divided between east and west, with no effective government and a multitude of rival factions and militias.

Only 20 B-2 stealth bombers exist in the world — one, the Spirit of Kansas, was lost in an accident in Guam in 2008 — but they’ve played key roles in high-profile American bombing missions throughout the 21st century.

The planes, which originally cost $2.2 billion each to design and build and have had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of upgrades, made their first combat sorties in 1999 in the NATO campaign to protect Kosovo from Serbian oppression. Those flights came from Whiteman.

When the United States moved on Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, B-2s flew more than a day to strike central Asia. When American forces invaded Iraq in 2003, B-2s stationed on the remote, British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, and from Whiteman, flew in at the start of the invasion.

More recently, planes that took off from Whiteman in March 2011 dropped bombs on Libya in a United Nations-authorized attack that toppled the Gadhafi regime.

This story was originally published January 19, 2017 at 12:08 PM with the headline "Bombing mission to Libya flew from western Missouri."