Just as we expected, B-2 Spirits have entered the air campaign against Iran last night. Flying global airpower missions from their home base in Whiteman, Missouri, America’s stealth bombers arrived over Iranian airspace in the early morning hours and targeted Iran’s missile caves. These facilities are built deep under mountains and are primarily used for storage, but some of them actually have the ability to launch ballistic missiles through fissures in their ceilings.
Yesterday, I wrote on X what was to come for the B-2 and the air war, stating:
B-2s will likely show up tonight, making direct attacks on key targets in a way no other platform can. Yes this could include MOPs, but also lots of JDAMs against less fortified targets. They can achieve massive effects in a single sortie. One B-2 can carry 80 500lb JDAMs. Entire airfield’s infrastructure gone on a single pass. They would not be employed until the night and they now have the benefit of highly degraded air defenses and disrupted command and control. This is when the air campaign will change.
There were some indications that B-2 movements were underway, including tanker sorties from the Azores that didn’t have a visible ‘customer.’
Prioritizing missile cave complexes as a target for America’s ‘silver bullet’ stealth bomber force is an obvious decision. As we have stated for years, destroying these complexes is challenging. They are made up of different chambers that can be sealed off from one another. So very complex weaponeering and a large quantity of specialized munitions would be needed to even attempt destroying them completely.
On the other hand, these facilities have a massive vulnerability. You don’t need to destroy them to put the missiles and launchers stored inside totally out of action. You just need to seal them off and keep them sealed off during a conflict. This can be done by striking near the entrances to the fortified caverns. By keeping an eye on these openings using remote sensing after initial strikes, deciding if and when further strikes are needed can be done with high confidence, as efforts to open the entrances back up can be seen and responded to.
So, just by bottling these facilities up, you make the arsenals held within them useless. In addition, some of the entrances have rock formations that climb more gradually above them, meaning penetrators can actually burrow to a depth where the tunnels themselves exist, not just entrance areas. Striking here makes reopening the caverns even more challenging.
There is one complicating factor when trying to put these facilities out of action — some of them have apertures in their ceilings that allows ballistic missiles to be launched without them leaving the facility. Some even have automated rapid-loading systems to fire the missiles off quickly. This means that missiles can still be fired from them even if the entrances are temporarily sealed. The good news is that the overhead doors that protect the launch bays can be penetrated, and the bays themselves destroyed. This would specifically be a good job for the B-2.
