Key point: No longer an anti-Soviet nuclear bomber, the B-1 now helps against insurgencies like ISIS.
Huge yet surprisingly sleek and agile, the U.S. Air Force’s B-1 Lancer strategic bombers—popularly dubbed “Bones” for B-ONE—circles over battlefields in Syria and Afghanistan like angels of death dispensing GPS-guided bombs from on high. Yet the B-1 started out as an over-priced nuclear bomber that was arguably obsolete by the time it entered service. Thus, a bomber designed to dodge Soviet surface-to-air missiles and interceptors found its niche battling Taliban and ISIS insurgents.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. military sought to push its bombers to ever higher altitudes and faster speeds to protect them from flak guns and fighter planes—pushing new performance envelopes with the pressurized B-29, and later the B-47 and B-52 Stratofortress strategic jet bombers.
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But by the early 1960s, the shootdown of high-flying U-2 spy planes over China and Russia by surface-to-air missiles made it clear that altitude no longer offered dependable protection. The Air Force tried developing the huge XB-70 Valkyrie bomber to sustain speeds over three times the speed of sound, but the Soviets countered with the Mach 3-capable MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor. The Pentagon gave up on the Valkyrie in 1962 and began investing more in ground and submarine-launched ballistic missiles to provide nuclear deterrence.
This didn’t sit well with the Air Force, which proposed a new low-altitude penetration doctrine in which supersonic bombers skimmed close to the ground at high speed using new-fangled Terrain Following Systems, making them very difficult to track with radar due to intervening terrain faced by ground-based radars, and the ‘ground clutter’ experienced by airborne radars scanning low-flying aircraft.
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