Experts predict that the B-2's stealthiness will be valued more and more as politicians' tolerance for casualties declines. With a turnaround time of 24 hours, it often can reach faraway targets faster than Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are carried on ships that sometimes take days to steam into position.Īnd its radar-evading capacity, while not conclusively proved in the Kosovo air war, is doubted by few. heartland, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find forward bases for U.S. Nevertheless, even some longtime critics acknowledged that the B-2's debut proved the plane has a combination of assets that will make it highly attractive to military leaders. The mission illustrates that the airplane was considered stealthy enough and accurate enough to be sent against sites in congested downtown Belgrade, where air defenses were formidable and the risk of unintended damage was high.Īndrew Krepinevitch, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense think tank, praises the B-2's performance in the Balkans, but says that the "jury is still out" on some key technical issues.Īlso, some senior military officials contended that the Pentagon's regional commanders will be cautious in calling the B-2 into service because the cost of the plane is so high it is considered a "national asset." The blunder was not a mistake by the air crew but rather by NATO strike planners, who mistakenly thought they were striking a military supply center several hundred yards away. But they have disclosed that it was a B-2 that dropped three bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three persons, including two Chinese intelligence officers.
#Cloudburst bomber skin#
But they dropped about 11 percent of the bombs used in Yugoslavia, or nearly 700.ĭefense officials have declined to release a full list of the plane's targets. Everything about the Fortnite Britestorm Bomber Skin Outfit, find out about the skins cost, rarity, availability. Overall, the six B-2s used in the war flew about 50 missions, less than 1 percent of the total. It can also cause confusion due to direct conflict with well-established terms for the same phenomena or with terms that use the same syntax, such as ‘weather bomb’, but which are used for entirely different phenomena.As a result, the B-2s were sometimes the only bombers on the attack during frequent bouts of bad weather that crippled the air campaign through much of April.
The establishment of the term is interesting, and it shows how terminology can be introduced by the media, without regard for existing terms that are already appropriate. The term became well established during the stormy and damaging summer of 2014 in Italy, being used 54 times across 64 Italian newspapers over the period of analysis (13 July–16 August 2014). That is, the cloud bursts to produce heavy rain over a populated area within the newspaper catchment to cause localised damage. The term has, today, become established in Italy to describe a cloudburst (‘nubifragio’ in Italian) that is newsworthy. For the past four years, we have been tracking the British, French and Italian press to examine the genesis and establishment of a new weather term: the ‘water bomb’ or ‘bomba d'acqua’ in Italian.