Saturday, June 12, 2004


B-1 Lancer. Some reporter got the name mixed up and called it the Bone and the name stuck with the aircrews. It can carry up to 84 dumb Mk 82 five hundred pound bombs or 24 smart JDAM bombs, each with GPS to guide it to its target. That means that instead of sending a strike package of thirty jets to drop dozens of dumb bombs on a target to take it out, one Bone can drop a smart bomb right on target and still strike a dozen more on the same sortie. It has flipped the kill ratio from needing many jets to destroy one target to needing one jet to destroy many targets. But I still read journalists talk about how we "carpet-bombed" Afghanistan and Iraq as if we were mounting thousand plane raids like WWII.

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