And so the USAF releases a press statement lauding the ability of ONE aircraft being able to take off and fly ONE (training) mission over the Gulf of Mexico fully loaded with 24 missiles by ONE crew at ONE base?
Now, a press release for a 1000 plane mission over Europe, each plane being fully fueled, fully armed with several rounds of machine gun ammo, and fully loaded with 20 bombs and taking off without collisions or explosions from 15 different airbases on a single morning ....
But we can’t do that any more.
[I fully grant that the many thousand “dumb” bombs dropped with heroic efforts near north Vietnamese bridges were less effective than one or two smart weapons dropped from one stealth plane flying only one mission; but still, consider what this press release really means.)
The AF is a fine alternative to Military Service.
Thousand ship WWII style raids are as useless today as
thousands of men in line with muskets Civil War style.
Masses of airplanes cannot live in todays skies against modern weapons. This Bone can now take down any target
that needs taking down and get home alive. Lots of engineers and techs worked hard to get the platform qualed
for this load, its no small achievement.
I see they still haven’t figured out how to use the forward weapons bay on the B-1. The picture shows the JSSAM coming out of the mid weapons bay. When the B-1B was first nuke certified the forward weapons bay was problematic for the CSRL’s to release the gravity weapons. Almost all of the time the forward weapons bay contained an extra fuel tank instead of weapons.
Back in 1987 one of those sprang a catastrophic leak while it was sitting on the tarmac at Dyess. JP-4 was running ankle deep. Leaked into a stream that my BEE guys had to monitor.