US Military Speeds Preparations for Iraq War

The bat-wing, radar-avoiding B-2s, packing one of the biggest punches in America's military arsenal, began flying out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on Wednesday night, a base spokesman said.

Other defense officials told Reuters the Navy planned to move about a dozen missile-firing cruisers and destroyers from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf region in coming days to join more than 60 other U.S. ships arrayed there against Iraq.

The officials said the cruisers and destroyers, many carrying more than 100 long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, would soon move through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea.

"All are (missile) shooters," said one of the defense officials, who asked not to be identified.

The ships and bombers, believed flying to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, would be part of a massive "shock and awe" attack at the outset of any war against Iraq, using thousands of satellite-guided bombs and cruise missiles.

Officials said there were no current plans to move the aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt or USS Harry Truman from the Mediterranean into the Gulf to join the carriers USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Kitty Hawk and USS Constellation.

The bombers from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman and the warships will join a massive potential attack force of more than 250,000 U.S. and British troops, hundreds of warplanes and dozens of ships already gathered in the Gulf region.

HIGH-FLYING FIREPOWER

Air Force Lt. Matt Hasson, the Whiteman spokesman, would not say how many B-2s had been sent or where they were would be based. But the high-tech bombers, each capable of carrying 16 satellite-guided 2,000-pound (900 kg) bombs, were believed headed for the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

The Air Force has built special hangars on an air base at Diego Garcia as well as at the Royal Air Force Base at Fairford in the United Kingdom. Support crews for bombers began leaving Whiteman, where 21 B-2s are based, earlier this week.

"We have deployed B-2s to the Central Command area of responsibility," Hasson said. "Last night we launched them."

The B-2, originally developed for long-range missions in the Cold War, was not available in the 1991 Gulf War. Whiteman is the bombers' only base, where the first of the aircraft was delivered in 1993.

The aircraft made its debut in combat operations in the Kosovo campaign in 1999. It flew nonstop all the way from its base in Missouri, attacked targets in Yugoslavia and returned to the base with the aid of aerial refueling.

The B-2 also saw action in the opening three days of the war in Afghanistan launched weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The Air Force says the B-2 has four key characteristics: stealth, precision weapons, large payload and long range, making the warplane a real revolution in air warfare.

It's low-observable, or "stealth," characteristics give it the ability to penetrate an enemy's most sophisticated defenses and threaten its most valued and heavily defended targets.

The B-2s join a long list of Navy and Air Force warplanes already mobilized for possible war with Baghdad.

The Pentagon on Feb. 3 sent F-117A "Nighthawk" stealth fighters to the region from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The angular Nighthawk was the only western aircraft used to strike targets in heavily defended downtown Baghdad during the Gulf War.