Sam Iacobellis, father of the B-1 bomber, the plane that won the Cold War, is dead. Well, that’s what NYT obit dude Sam Roberts tells us, in a stunning outburst of chest-beating Reaganite nonsense.
Sam is dead (I guess), so that part of the obit is true, but the rest of it, I strongly suggest, is unadulterated bullshit. According to Roberts, Russian generals and astronauts credited the B-1 as being the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” “We didn’t have the resources to match it,” they said.
Or at least one of them said. Or at least one Rockwell engineer, Robert Cattoi, said one of them said it. Or at least the Los Angeles Times said Bob said one of them said it. Nothing like getting your facts straight from the camel’s mouth, eh, NYT?
But wait, there’s more. According to Roberts, “The B-1, with its adjustable sweptwing design, has been what the Air Force calls ‘the backbone of America’s long-range bomber force.’”
Huh. Another NYT reporter, James Dao, writing back in 2001, had this to say about the B-1:
“For most of its relatively short and often bumbling life, the B-1 has been the strategic bomber even the Pentagon has loved to hate.
“Even before the last B-1 rolled off the assembly line in 1988, the Air Force had determined that the plane was vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. A 1991 study found it could not fly in snow because it had no effective de-icing equipment. Engine problems sidelined it during the Persian Gulf war. And in 1999, the Pentagon delayed using B-1’s over Yugoslavia until enemy defenses had been suppressed by aging B-52’s and other aircraft.”
The reason why the Pentagon “delayed” using the B-1 is because its computer systems could not operate the plane’s offensive and defensive weapons systems at the same time, something that was of course known, not when the last B-1 rolled off the assembly line, but when the first did.
The “aging” B-52, designed 30 years prior to the B-1, has always been the “backbone of America’s long-range bomber force.” Back in 2001, according to Wikipedia, the “B-52 had the highest mission capable rate of the three types of heavy bombers operated by the USAF in the 2000–2001 period. The B-1 averaged a 53.7% ready rate, the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit achieved 30.3%, while the B-52 averaged 80.5%”.1 Even today, the Air Force has 77 B-52s, as compared to 62 B-1s, and plans to retire the B-1s in the late 2030s, while holding onto the B-52s until the mid 2040s.
So, to recapitulate: Sam Roberts, you’re full of shit! And so is the B-1!
Afterwords
Ronald Reagan’s fabled Star Wars, which only he took seriously, was (in my opinion) one of the many straws that broke the USSR’s back, along with the massive drop in oil prices, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, which deeply discredited the USSR throughout Europe, and the ever-growing drain on Soviet resources required to prop up the Soviet’s “Empire”, the only empire ever to bankrupt its “owner”. The Soviets spent hundreds of billions of rubles every year propping up the disastrously inefficient communist economies in Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Vietnam. These economies were really “counter-efficient”, since they got worse every year.
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Wikipedia cite is here, citing in turn a June 2001 article in Airman magazine, which appears to be no longer retrievable. ↩︎
