Comments by "Spring Bloom" (@springbloom5940) on "US B-2 stealth bombers strike Houthi weapons facilities in Yemen | DW News" video.
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@downix
Fictitious numbers.
For some context, my background is former 513th MI-BDE/297th MI-BN (BDA; ISR/RSTA; Combat Assessment)
Operations: Desert Storm, Southern Watch, Gothic Serpent (SIGINT), Noble Anvil.
Special Projects: Backstage (Desert Storm/Southern Watch); Roundhammer (Noble Anvil)
I performed RSTA for F117 and B2 mission planning in Iraq and Yugoslavia(air defense and terrain mapping). Mission packages have crazy flight plans, not just for the wild snakey vector changes, but with aerobatic type maneuvers such as wing tipping and dives/climbs at preplanned waypoints, to present the plane's lowest aspect to enemy RADAR. Your perceptions of 'stealth' are a fantasy, as is DoD's public facing threat assessments; all I should need to say to make that particular point is 'mobile anthrax labs' and 'yellowcake'. But if thats not enough, just remember Iraq's 'largest armor force in the world' and 'densest, most modern air defense in the hemisphere', etc. Which was all broken down, shot up junk, out of fuel, crews and ammo from them and Iran tuning each other up for a decade.
Yemen's air defenses are routinely penetrated by conventional aircraft, because their arsenal consists of scattered, non-integrated short and midrange assets with coverage gaps like swiss cheese. The B2 was chosen for this operation for two reasons: 1) mission duration, altitude and standoff range; so it wouldn't come within range of ADS 2) optics. We're still trying to scare everyone with 'stealth' like its the 80s. Stealth is a magic trick and everytime you do it, exponentially increases the risk youll blow it and get caught. Just like happened in Yugoslavia. That wasn't luck, someone figured out the trick and burned us. What we believe happened is they had moved a number of short range ADS into the RADAR gaps we had been exploiting and used forward observers to report attack aircraft sorties. Then estimated flight time and started strobing all their RADARs on and off until they made contact.
Why we dont fly stealth missions, rather fly in observable mode with the RADAR reflectors deployed, whenever adversary RADAR is operating, is to prevent adversaries from compiling a RADAR profile. Remember when Turkey got booted from the F35 program for operating Russian ADS?
TL;DR
there is exactly zero chance they flew a solo stealth mission against Yemen's bad joke of an air defense network, in an area where it would be exposed to adversary search RADAR from multiple directions. It was a publicity stunt.
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