March 14, 2003	Friday	Muharram 10, 1424

WASHINGTON, March 13: The United States has begun deploying radar-avoiding B-2 stealth bombers, which pack one of the biggest punches in the US arsenal, for use in a possible attack on Iraq, the military said on Thursday.

The bat-wing bombers flew out of Whiteman Air Force base, in Missouri, on Wednesday night, a spokesman said.

They will join a massive potential attack force of more than 250,000 American and British troops, hundreds of warplanes and dozens of ships already gathered in the Gulf region.

The spokesman would not say how many B-2s had been sent or where they would be based.

But the high-tech bombers, and each capable of carrying 16 satellite-guided 900-kg bombs, were believed headed for the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

The US air force has built special hangars on an air base at Diego Garcia as well as at the Royal Air Force Base at Fairford, 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,” said Air Force Lt. Matt Hasson, a spokesman for the bomb wing at Whiteman. “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 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 the base in Missouri, attacked targets in Yugoslavia and returned to the base with the aid of aerial refuelling.

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 provides 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 defences 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. —Reuters