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B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s
WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."
Naturally the stealth bomber's software has to be rewritten for the new platform, in particular the operational flight program (OFP) - the app which lets the ungainly plane fly, rather than lurching out of control as it would without constant computer assistance. (A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture. The duff data fooled the OFP app into wrecking the $2bn bomber - while the pilots were unable to do anything to stop it.)
Brilliant!
The Mothership
I've worked on military CPU replacement in the past for a subcontractor. We were upgrading an early 60s avionics set built from, get this, AND, OR and NOR gates. The most complex part was a 4 bit shift register - pretty wild. So I know a bit about this.
The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays. Its prohibitively expensive to rad-harden (radiation harden) sub-100nm chips and when that is achieved the yields are so low that the cost balloons even more. Radiation hits my cause the rare BSOD for you, on a nuclear armed aircraft its may show up as a MCOD - mushroom cloud of destruction.
...From the classic B-52 onwards, they do useful things like haul large quantities of high explosives other systems cannot match. Improvements in tactical control mean the folks on the ground can call in tremendous force when needed.
As a dirt-eating infantry guy, this is a pet peeve of mine. I feel a rant coming on...
The trouble is, the contemporary battlefield doesn't need the "tremendous force" of 38 tons of bombs, from 35K feet, that'll be here in 14 hours (B-52 from Diego) or worse, 40 hours (B-2 from freakin' Missouri!). There isn't a bunch of factories with static GPS coordinates that can be preloaded by ground crews into GPS guided weapons. It's largely just guys like me, calling on a radio, asking for a couple 500 pounders on the ridgeline 3 klicks away, to get two dozen guys with RPGs and machine guns, NOW!. The B-52, B-1, and B-2 just don't fit into that equation.
Modern air-to-ground warfare doesn't need "big" strategic bombers like that. For the last 50+ years, the US Air Force has been living in a fantasy world, a sepia-toned universe where it's perpetually 1950, where bombers were the strategic "big stick" that brought down the Nazis, and were the Alpha-to-Omega of nuclear weapons delivery. The trouble is, the former is a self-delusional lie, and the latter keeled over with the ICBM and finally died with the USSR in 1990. The Air Force mythology of strategic bombing is based on the largely pointless high-altitude mass bombing of Europe in WW2. The Key West Agreement of 1948 which separated the Air Force as its own service, separate from the Army and forbidding the Army to operate aircraft, centered heavily on the "success" of the strategic bombing of Germany, particularly the crippling of the German ball bearing manufacturing. Funny thing is, decades later when Albert Speer was asked about this, his reply was (paraphrased) "They were trying to bomb our ball bearing factories? If so, we had no idea."
The practical upshot of all this is that the Air Force was founded on a fantasy which continues to hamper its effectiveness to this day. Granted, my view on the subject is heavily colored by my 16 years as a lowly grunt in the Army, hiding in holes trying to get effective close air support from those guys; but I think my view is pretty accurate. There aren't any more superpowers to mount a credible air defense, to put up a serious opposition. The one thing that we really need from the Air Force is the one thing that they've consistently tried to get out of providing: Close Air Support. Air Force brass had the unmitigated gall to try to retire the A-10 in the 90's and "replace" it with the F-16! They constantly push for more air-superiority and high altitude bombing assets when the cold hard reality is that we don't need that. Contemporary warfare is non-linear, against small bands of irregulars operating in primitive conditions. As infantrymen, what we need from the Air Force is all-weather, low-altitude, precision ordinance delivery, but we hardly ever get it!. If I had a nickel for every time I saw the Air Force drop in the wrong place, or worse, "call in sick" because of bad weather, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickels. The military has always been a hotbed of backstabbing, featherbedding, and general power politics, and the Air Force continuing live in its glory days of WW2 is a prime example (don't even get me started on the Navy, they're even worse). The Army has managed to fill some of its air needs via helicopters--- and getting the Air Force to let us have those was a fight--- but helicopters are lightweight, short range assets. We need fixed wing air support, particularly in Afghanistan where altitude and weather make helicopter operations near impossible. Personally, I think the Air Force should turn over the A-10 and AC-130 assets to the Army and let us do our own close air support, and they can go sit around in their giant strato-bombe
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.